If Her Age Is On The Clock...

... then she's too young for the cock!

Good ol' adage! There are 3 major types of attraction to young people: pedophilia, hebephilia, ephebophilia. Pedophilia is being attracted to prepubescent people, hebephilia to pubescent people and ephebophilia to adolescents. 

I had an argument with a friend a few days ago where we talked about pedophilia and the age of consent, or the age at which a person is considered "legally permitted to engage in sexual activity". His point was that only morality makes it wrong to lust for younger girls (we're both male, so we can only discuss a male point of view) and that as soon as girls start on their periods, their bodies are ready for sex. He went on to give me a history lesson where dozens of cultures in the past centuries used to marry girls aged 9-15 to older males and where nothing had gone wrong. 

Now, my point is not that he is completely wrong. But let's take this step by step. First of all, you gotta notice that people died at age 50 in past centuries, so being married and getting pregnant young made some sense. You also have to understand that people were trying to expand, just drop a bunch of kids in the world to spread the family name, and the world was a vast place. Nowadays, Earth is overpopulated, so again, the situation changes.

With that said, I agree that, biologically speaking, there is nothing wrong with having sex with women that have reached puberty. Puberty, as far as I understand, means that the body is ready for sexual reproduction. However! If sex is had with the goal of reproduction, and not simply pleasure, there are higher risks with teen pregnancies than with regular ones. According to WebMD, teens are more likely to get hypertension or preeclampsia. There is also the issue of discrimination, which can lead to depression or lack of pre-natal care or any other number of problems. Discrimination is something that society, as a whole, could try to erase, but nowadays it is still a sad reality.

So, having established that sex requires the body to mature enough, actual psychological maturity should also come into account.  Pedophilia is inherently wrong because the body isn't still ready for sex, but hebephilia and ephebophilia are not the case.

The desire for sex is something that depends on society and that will be different with different cultures. In my case, when I was 14, I only wanted to play video games and stuff like that. My female friends were aso not interested in marrying and having sex and getting pregnant at that age. We were kids, and we acted as kids. In different cultures, if girls are expected to marry at those ages, they act differently and might indeed want to get married and have kids. In other words, society's expectactions affect our desire for sex from a young age.

However, regardless of desire, the brain is not fully developed at the age of puberty. It also only fully matures at 25, and I expect most people to be mature enough to have sex before then. I'm guessing that maturity should depend on every single individual, and that there can't be a definitive age of consent. The problem is that there isn't also a way to find that value, so an estimate has to be given for the entire population. In Portugal and the USA, for example, a base age of consent is defined in the law, but there is still some room of maneuver for cases with older victims, and I find this a pretty good system; it allows for the victim's maturity to come into play and allows a case to be treated with some flexibility.

I guess my biggest issue with hebephilia and ephebophilia would be that fact that it's not something that will last. Imagine I have a daughter, 14 years old. If I'm in India, for example, I can marry her with the 22 year old living down the road, and they'll be married and have a great life. However, if I'm in Portugal and some 22 year old says he loves her and wants to date her, my immediate thought is that this guy likes little girls, is gonna do things to my daughter, and after a couple of years will move on to someone younger because she doesn't suit his fetishes anymore. Maybe the guy's sexual desires will change and he'll love her forever and they'll get married, but if he is 22 and still likes 14yo girls, than I find it unlikely to happen. I really just want my daughter to be happy and not "just another piece of ass".

What do you guys think? How are things in your country? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks for reading,

David

Vegetables

We've all seen or heard about comas and people being in a coma. It may have been in House M.D. or even someone you have known. Most people wake up in a month or so, and people who have neither died nor woken up after that are considered to be in a "persistent vegetative state".

Now, just like the brain is still a bit of a mystery, so are comas. There is not singular treatment that can awake someone from a coma. You can prevent further body and brain damage, keep the person from dying, but unless the cause of the coma is something that can be treated (like flushing the drugs out of someone who overdosed himself into a coma or removing a brain tumor), there is yet to be found a way to wake up the patient.

Now, while some people argue that the very definition of "coma" will imply that a patient is incapable of responding to external stimuli, like pain, or someone's voice, others will reply that the small twitches and reflex reactions are actually attempts at communicating. Since I have no idea what I'm talking about, I can't really give you a decent opinion on the matter, but I can (and will) state my opinion (otherwise this blog would be just plain boring).

Even if I don't quite believe stories like Geoffrey Lean's, I believe the brain is still capable of receiving external stimuli. I believe we can still hear a voice, just not process it. I believe we can still smell something nasty, just not identify what it is. And most of all, I believe it's possible to communicate with people in a coma. Maybe not have an actual conversation, but induce states of mind, increase the blood pressure by exciting them, shit like that. The method will, however, depend on the patient.

For everyone there is a sense that affects them more than the others. Some people are really visual, love sunsets and looking at stars and all that shit, others have their headphones on their ears all the time. I once met a guy that told me he could spend an hour a day just enjoying the smell of cut grass during the summer. Speaking for myself, my favourite sense is sound and that is why I, in a flash of brilliance, designed a playlist called "COMA" (so original), with around 20 songs that really move me, that get my heart racing, my adrenaline pumping or that soothe me into depression.

(My friends told me something like "I can't tell whether you're a genius or just retarded..." when I told them this, but well... It's worth a shot!)

Anyway, the playlist includes songs such as

• Maggot Brain, by Funkadelic; this has to be Eddie Hazel's best performance, imho. Really touches me
• Injection, by Hans Zimmer; my favourite song from my favourite composer
• Black, by Pearl Jam; it's what I hear in my mind when I imagine myself saving my family from zombies in the apocalypse!
• Arthas, My Son, by Brower and Duke; found this thanks to World of Warcraft and it had the best trailers I've ever seen in a videogame
• Warsaw Theme, by Jukka Rintamäki; the Battlefield 4 theme song ( i prefer the song to the game itself?)
• Mad World, originally by Tears for Fears, covered by Gary Jules ft. Michael Andrews; found this before watching Donnie Darko, but loved it ever since
• House of Cards, by Audiomachine; an epic among epics
• My Body Is A Cage, originally by Arcade Fire, covered by Peter Gabriel; found this in "House MD", in an episode where it seems like House is going to kill himself
• Isolated System, by Muse; brilliant song for the start of World War Z, really puts me in a chaotic state of mind
• Favorite Things, by Incubus; one to listen to just before getting into an argument :P

... and a few others. No need to link all of the songs, I guess, they probably won't mean to you what they mean to me. If anything can wake me up from a coma, I have to believe this would be it! If you had to find a way to bring yourself out of a coma, what would it be? Drop your ideas on the comment section down below =)

Cya around,

David

What's the Soul?

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but I've been busy with college exams and stuff like that. They went surprisingly well, to be honest. My average is probably going up this semester. ^^

Well, anyway, today we will be talking about the definition of the soul (or, if you prefer, the conscience). First of all, my definition of "soul" should be exposed to you all. I figure the conscience of a living creature is made up of 2 things: the memories and experiences of a person and their line of thought. So, if you could remove the conscience of a body and put it into another body, according to my definition, what would happen is that the line of thought of that person would remain completely unchanged, as well as their memories. However, memories are stored within the brain, so this scenario would be impossible; but trading consciences (or souls) is also impossible, so let's not dwell in such hypothesis; it won't lead us anywhere.

So, again, the "soul" or "conscience" of a person is made up of their thoughts and memories. Most people would also assume it would contain a person's personality, but in my opinion, your behaviour depends solely on your memories, experiences, which define who you are (and what you when you get angry), and genetics (which decide whether you get angry easily or not). This implies that I believe people not only may have a predisposition to goor or evil but that they may also be molded by their surrounding environment. But anyway, this is good, we've managed to define what is a soul! Great... But... What are memories and thoughts?

Well, no one knows. While memory can be and is defined as a set of encoded neural connections in the brain, thoughts are merely rumored to be neurons firing. It is interesting to theorize about what is a thought. While you are reading these words, you are imagining your own voice reading them. Almost like you could perfectly listen to yourself saying the words out loud. What do you think constitutes that line of thought? Could it be just like memories, neural patterns being fired in the brain that make you think your own voice is reading these words?

I'm probably just spouting bullshit and some neuro-scientist is ripping his own balls off reading this, but oh well, ignorance is bliss. There's room for imagination when knowledge isn't blocking the way! Anyway, i started thinking about how to define the soul when i was thinking about teleportation. Let's say teleporters existed. If your body was moved from one place to the other, would the conscience travel with you? That would depend whether it was something physical like neurons or something that we can't define, something ethereal that science will never understand.

If, however, your body was destroyed on one side and recreated on the other, you could assume that your conscience would die and one just like that would be created on the other side. Basicly, YOU would die, but someone just like you would appear on the other side and not realize he was someone completely new, just with the memories and thoughts of the old one. Something scary to think about. Maybe every time you fall asleep, the same thing happens, and you will never know. Maybe it is what happens to people that wake up from a coma. Kinda reminds me of The Prestige.

Well, that would be all for today. Hope you enjoyed reading this. Also, if you can, make sure you read all of these posts with the voice of Morgan Freeman, it will sound so much wiser.

Placebo Effect

The Placebo Effect is one of the most interesting phenomena in the world. Basicly, it is related to the relationship of mind and body. If someone gets a placebo (a pill that does nothing) and they're told that the pill is a stimulant, then their bloop pressure and pulse will rise. This may seem impossible, but there have been studies that have proven this!

The strongest theory as to why this happens is related to the person's expectations. If one believes they will be changed by a pill, then the body's chemistry can cause effects similar to the treatment. This is something remarkable, in my honest opinion. This means that the brain has the power, unconsciously, to change the way the body works. The brain is still one of the biggest mysteries in Modern Medicine but maybe someday we will be able to use this ability consciously and maybe heal our own wounds without needing external help.

This future may still be hundreds of years away, probably, so let's get back to the present. Assuming all the theories i've written here are correct (yes, these are all just theories, nothing has yet been proven), then there are a lot of phenomena that the placebo effect could explain. Ever heard of miracle healers? I don't want to step on anyone's religious beliefs or anything, but i find it a lot more believable that "believing you are being cured by god will help you" more than the fact that "you are actually being cured by god". 

As a last note, think of the following. Just like believing can change your body, maybe believing can influence things around you. This is a really far-fetched theory, but hey, i love day dreaming! On topic, if the healers really do believe they are being guided by god and healing people, maybe they are actually influencing the bodies of the people they heal. Just like birds can all fly in synchronization without a leader or any kind of language coordination sign, maybe our minds can connect to each other and achieve something similar.

I leave you with that idea. All the best,

David