Dealing with Minors

DISCLAIMER: This article is not intended for titillation purposes. This article holds no sexually explicit content, no eroticism, and does not involve any specific characters, fictional or real, of any age. This should be treated as an informative and largely clinical descriptor of a fictional setting. It is not intended as a sexual story involving minors. Quite the opposite: this article is about avoiding that very scenario as much as possible within the setting.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN

You’re not supposed to talk about it. You’re not suppose to even think about it. There are works of fiction that deal with minors in sexual situations, certain sites are allowed to talk about such things strictly in educational or legal/criminal information contexts, and countries have varying laws on what is considered the age of consent. With porn stories and erotica, however, here on the “mainstream” end of internet, you’re not allowed to talk about anyone under the age of 18, sometimes even 21, being engaged in any sort of sexual activity. In fact, on some websites, you’re not even allowed to hint that people younger than 18 even exist in your setting, or your story will be deleted/rejected and you yourself might be banned. It doesn’t matter that it’s completely fictional, you just don’t talk about it.

This can be something as innocent as a story where a mother is saying she’s dropped the young kids off at grandma’s so she and her husband can have a romantic weekend of love making, and that’s all that’s even mentioned. Even that isn’t allowed on many sites. Sites that manage to post sexual stories where minors exist (much less get involved) either do so at their own peril, or manage to host them on servers that are largely off the radar or based in regions where such things are ignored or not considered illegal (as long as its purely fictional). So, all in all, kids just aren’t supposed to exist in erotic story worlds. Like pooping, periods, and taxes, we’re just supposed to hand wave the fact that they aren’t around in these stories.

That’s fine by me. I have no interest in doing stories about minors.

Let’s be real, though. If there are human beings in your mostly mundane Earth-based setting, they have to be coming from somewhere. Maybe if it’s a fantasy story, humans just get made from animated clay. Maybe if it’s a science fiction story, they’re born fully grown from cloning vats. If this was Dellissa’s Sex Mage World, well, the only real humans are young adults stolen from Earth or Civero, and every other person on her island is either a magical construct or an alien fairy creature in human disguise.

The normal Sex Mage World isn’t that type of setting. It’s Earth, an Earth just like ours until Sex Magic changed everything. That means kids get made the old fashioned way and they have had to be raised in a world of Sex Magic. Girls remain immune to the Magic, while boys remain vulnerable to it. And the very nature of Sex Magic means that yes, they are going to be affected by it, even if indirectly through how it effects society and people’s own sense of morality and societal duty.

So, I’m sure no one was asking for this article, but my world builder sensibilities make me curious to address this rather glaring detail. So, in a Sex Mage World, what happens to the children and how does the setting mitigate their presence?

AGES OF EMPOWERMENT

I set the age of 19 as the standard age of empowerment for a reason. For one, yes, it’s an easy way to avoid the issue of under aged Sex Mages. Even natural Archmages, by official canon, cannot become empowered any younger than 18.

Thematically, however, this also suits my tastes in that I’m not into incest. It’s therefore a lot handier to my sensibilities to give women Sex Magic at an age when they are off at college, moving out of the house, or otherwise entering the age of true adult independence in most societies. Therefore, you shouldn’t really have any issues of young women suddenly having to deal with the sexuality of their brothers and fathers. Instead they can get used to Sex Magic with their boyfriends and husbands or new adult neighbors.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean an eighteen year old girl is going to immediately move out of the home once she’s 18 (especially not in this economy), but its not unreasonable to say that in a world of Sex Mages, young women are incentivized to move out of their parents homes before their Magic manifests. Between all this, you therefore don’t have to worry about under aged girls using magic on their fathers or underaged brothers.

Of course, there is still the mother dealing with her son’s sexuality. However, in a world of Sex Mages, where the side effect of Perfect Birth Control enables a woman to only become pregnant when she specifically wants to, one can easily surmise that a woman who is ready and willing to have children is prepared to deal with the responsibility of handling her powers around her son. The vast majority of women, after a year or two of having the Magic, have no problems tuning out the arousal signals from men and boys, and one can probably assume that a mother’s love for her sons will prevent her from using Sex Magic to abuse him.

Ergo, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the nuclear family or even single-parent family will likely remain intact in most countries, and even most Queendoms, since girls will not even receive the Magic until they are above the age of consent and old enough to have moved out of the house already, while any woman fit and willing to be a mother will be able to keep her powers under control and not use them on her son. This presumably applies to extended family relations as well (grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc.).

Of course, there will always be exceptions, evil sisters and mothers and aunts and nieces and cousins who will abuse their powers on family members. But that’s where the next solution comes in.

CIVILIAN SELF-POLICING

You can’t really hide Sex Magic activities. Women can read boys and men’s sexual thoughts. They can sense arousal. They can sense the Magic being used on men, even if they cannot directly track which woman is doing it. Shielding other women’s senses, hiding thoughts and memories, takes considerable effort and skill, especially the more women who are looking in. Ergo, should a woman, be it a family member or a stranger, attempt to sexually abuse a young boy, any woman in range will sense it happening, and most can and will interfere to stop it. Women caught in the act may be punished harshly, but even those never caught are unlikely to be able to actually carry out the crime if they attempt it, due to other women interfering. You better believe most mothers are going to protect their sons from any sort of sexual abuse, and even Sex Mages who feel little pity for grown men might find themselves compelled to protect male children.

Likewise, men attempting to abuse young girls will find it essentially impossible. Given many men in the Sex Mage World are locked down with conditions that prevent them from initiating sex, male-on-female rape or molestation essentially disappears once Sex Magic has fully spread across the world. Even men who don’t have such restrictions will be easily sensed, stopped, and severely punished by women before they even get the chance to commit the crime. This assumes such desires are not caught and erased from a man’s head well before he ever gets the chance to act, or even be tempted to act, on such impulses.

CHILD SAFE ZONES and CHILD FREE ZONES

Because of frequent interference issues, Sex Magic encouraged people to migrate and congregate in towns where other women were like-minded about how to use their Magic. Women who wanted to freely toss spells around and tease men to insanity without other women stopping them moved to towns where all the other women wanted the same thing. Women who wanted to treat men as close to equals as they could, and who wanted other women to respect their men’s privacy and rights also moved to towns where other women wanted the same thing. And of course, the Queendoms are often themed after such ideologies.

This naturally could be applied to women who want families, creating Child Safe Zone towns specifically designed for those who wish to raise a family in a safe, magically responsible environment. Other women won’t even be allowed in such towns unless they are vetted, and children are confined to their hometown until they come of adult age (18), and are then allowed to leave to find employment and a new life in other towns or in the big city.

Even the most vicious and abusive Queendoms may very likely have such towns in secluded, protected zones just to ensure they can maintain their populations. Alternatively, it may even be the case that in such Queendoms, children are taken from their families to be raised in state-sponsored boarding homes and schools.

Of course, such Queendoms may also eschew anyone having children at all, and instead replenish their populations by allowing a controlled number of Free Roamers to enter, or just conquer and subsume their border villages. Likewise, there may be women who don’t even want to think about dealing with children being around at all. These women hence form towns where no one under 18 is allowed to enter, making for the Child Free Zones, in the case where children may still be allowed outside of Child Safe Zones.

LOW BIRTHRATES

Thanks to the Perfect Birth Control effects of Sex Magic, no woman ever gets pregnant unless she wants to. Ergo, there are no accidental pregnancies, massively reducing the number of births throughout the world. Moreover, as Sex Magic extends women’s youth, it enables them to stall being a mother for years, even decades. With everyone staying young and living greatly extended lives, the need for new generations to replace the old is greatly diminished, so there’s really no rush to have kids. Some believe the Magic may even be suppressing women’s urge to become mothers by keeping them in a youthful mindset, but this is not confirmed.

Just as, if not more likely, is the general unease most women have with the idea of dealing with Sex Magic around children in the first place. Many women are not comfortable with the idea of raising a vulnerable child in a world of Sex Mages, not just from potential abuse they may suffer, but from the more fantastical dangers the Magic may cause. No one wants to deal with the horror of another Cascade Event, much less risk putting their own children through something that terrible.

In any event, most women, particularly ones who spent most or all of their childhood in a post-Sex Magic World, simply don’t want children at all or don’t feel ready for them for a long while. The problem of what to do with children is a lot easier to deal with when there are a whole lot less of them around. Hence why having only a handful of towns in each Queendom designated as Child Safe Zones is a more practical solution than it may at first sound: there’s barely enough families with kids to even populate a full city in the first place, so it’s pretty easy to designate a few safely distant towns for their use.