>>9344>still mentally childrenNo they aren't.
I'm chiming in entirely about this, because this is a stupid lie people repeat all the time. There are really people on the internet now who act like completing puberty is just
nothing because at some point they heard the popsci fact that there's a part of the brain that keeps growing until roughly 25 and it was misrepresented as, like,
the final change which makes the entirety of difference. Yet at roughly 30, testosterone starts dropping in men.
People continue to age, their brains continue to change, and the only change which is actually
radically, visibly noticeable in behavior is the start and completion of puberty. A child, a pre-pubescent child, to clarify,
cannot understand sex. Like, physically, they don't have the same response to stimuli as an adult would, and if they
do then a lot of the time that means they've been abused and developed faster than average as a physiological response to that abuse. An 18-year-old is not "mentally a child," nor is a 16-year-old, and I'm not even commenting on the
ethics of consent laws when I say this (I care very little about consent laws, there are way more important things in the world), it's just a fundamentally wrong statement to equate the mental functioning of someone who has completed puberty with that of someone who hasn't, and the idea that people hit 25 and suddenly start making better choices regardless of whether or not they have the world experience to
understand how their choices affect people from observation is just a complete nonsense. Adulthood, more than anything, is marked by adult responses to sexual stimuli and adult levels of libido; and
this, not rational decision making, is what characterizes an adult brain. It's even more impossible for me to think otherwise personally, because I worked in bars for years and if anything the people who were like 21 were more cautious than the guys who were 40+; the best I could possibly say is that the supposed radical change by way of brain growth that people on Twitter bring up whenever this comes up must have skipped like 5 generations at least. Like, if the 21s, the 20s, and the late teens are "mentally children," there's
no way I could ever justify claiming that the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s aren't also "mentally children."