Why do some activities have different minimum ages?

I Cast Fist@programming.dev to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 62 points –

For instance: age of sexual consent, age for legally drinking alcohol, age for driving, age for voting, age for participating in pornography

Depending on the place, each of those requires a different minimum age. Why is that? Are some activities "more adult" than others? Using USA as an example: legal drinking age is 21, legal driving age is 16, age of consent varies between 16-18.

Not asking about different countries/states having different ages, but any single place having different ages for different adult activities

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Of course the first example would be that. No, you can't screw kids. Internalize that as fact.

They were not questioning the fact that these limits exist though.

Nobody was saying they wanted to screw kids, sounds like you're projecting.

That is a fact. But they can screw each other, if they're old enough. But they'r still classified as kids. "Adolescent kid" is a subjective term, and I would even suggest raising the age higher than 16: until they're legally adults.

I think the question is coming from a "why is it different in different countries" point of view.

I'm not going to Google it and put myself on a watch list, but I think I recall hearing some back-asswards country where the age of "consent" was 14, or some even lower. Culturally that doesn't make any sense to me - but then i agree with you that kids shouldn't be screwer nor screwee.

The other ages are interesting too - in the UK we wait for our teens to grow up a bit before putting them behind the wheel of a car. The driving age is 18 - and forget even getting affordable insurance until you're 25 anyway.