Eighteen year olds cognitively understand the implications of their behaviour - they simply have their frontal cortex subdued making them MORE LIKELY to make decisions based on emotive reasoning rather than well thought through. That can be (and is) mediated against by reasoning.
Unless of course you're making the argument we shouldn't ever prosecute 18 year olds for crimes they've committed because they don't 'fully understand the implications of their behaviour'. As a rebuttal, how can you seriously support the prosecution of rape for any 18 year old, when you know full well that they are prone to make poor impulsive choices and not fully understand the implications of their behaviour? Do you think they should just get off with a slap on the wrist, or do you think they should be punished for the crime?
And if they can be punished for the crime and they've got full capacity to understand the implications of this crime at 18 years old, why on earth would we presume a fully adult woman can't make decisions? And more importantly, if she makes a wrong decision why that must instantly be 'a problem with the patriarchy.'
To be clear, I'm not telling women they ought to do better about standing up for themselves. I'm telling them if they make a decision which (in the fullness of time) turns out to be a mistake, then it's a mistake and they should own it as such in the narrative of their lives. You shouldn't retrospectively re-write every error in judgement to make it someone else's fault. That's why we don't allow 'yeah, I raped her.. but in my defence I was only 18 and prone to poor decision making skills and it was pretty much her fault really because I was young and naive and she was 24 and walking along in a dress I liked the look of'.
The power dynamics are where we should be putting the attention. We have that in the workplace. We have that in the education setting. We cannot however legislate for every eventuality that exists between grown ass people based on our subjective interpretation of their relative power statuses. It's unworkable and on a hiding to nowhere.
