News Flash: Perry de Havilland is not a conservative

Perry de Havilland, of Samizdata proclaims loudly that he is not a conservative:

For T.J. Simers to find the WTA image offensive is perverse and suggests to me that he must have some quaint notions of what 17 year olds are really like and how people should perceive them.

Millions and millions of people are married or in long term sexual relationships by the time they are 17 and many of those are also parents, which suggests that the peculiar notion of infantilising young adults and calling them 'kids' for as long as possible is rather far off the mark.

It's worth noting that the idea of an extended childhood is a very modern, very western thing. As recently as my father's childhood, it was expected that most children would leave school by their very early teens and get jobs in factories, mines, or on the farm. My wife's uncle, who I mentioned here, was serving in the army by age 15 and spent 1941-45 in a Japanese POW camp. While it may boggle our senses now, it was not at all unusual sixty years ago.

The simultaneous attempts to sexualize children and pre-teens (see almost all fashion photography for the last 20 years) and to extend childhood (raising the age of majority in most north american jurisdictions over the same time period) are surely strong indicators that we don't really know what to do with the young!