the Counter-Inquisition
Yes, that's the way it works--the link is to another website--but I suppose you could just keep two windows open.
For me the most important posts are the ones where I make originary grammar do some work, and write directly in terms of ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative articulations. That's ultimately the project, even if I still haven't found a way of completely integrating the spatial vocabulary (center/margin) into the grammar. But it may be that center, as center of shared attention, is the single extra-linguistic term needed to make the grammar work.
I came across an essay on Girard by a really real anthropologist named C.R. Hallpike, who is actually quite interesting in his own right--he treats Girard like some clueless literary theorist who wandered off into areas he has no business dealing with. He thinks Girard just embarrasses himself, and anyone who takes him seriously. I don't think Gans even registers. (I'm actually going to use that essay for the Intro to the new, streamlined TOOL--it provides a good way into a discussion of what it is about the anthropological imagination that makes it impossible to register Gans.)
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We're starting from different places here--you from a liberationist and me from a "centralist" position. You are focused on "consent" because you want to maximize liberation, sexual and, presumably, otherwise. My starting point is that centers are to be preserved. So, regarding matters sexual, I start from the following, it seems to me incontestable, assumptions: one, children will be subject to the authority of adults in some manner until such time, decided within that social order, they become adults, i.e., fully participating members in society; two, every social order will regulate sexual interactions within its members, one way or another--whether through arranged marriage and the law of the father, or constantly morphing sexual assault, harassment and rape law, or anything in between. So, adult responsibility for children's sexuality will be determined by the broader mode of sexual regulation which the children will be subject to as adults. In more traditional orders, things are fairly simple: the only licensed sexual behavior takes place in marriage, which therefore happens early and is tightly embedded in all other social relations. The parents, and adult guardians more generally, are therefore responsible for making sure that young people are pure before they enter marriage, and plenty of social norms and institutions collaborate to ensure this, allowing, of course, for some "remissions" or "hypocrisy" here and there. Modernity overthrows all this and, in matters sexual among all others, introduces "consent" as the "ceremony" or "ritual" that legitimate a sexual encounter. Of course, this first all meant the right to choose a marriage partner, rather than having one chosen by your family--but "consent," like its cousins "freedom" and "equality," is a viral concept--it automatically lends itself to the question, if here, why not there? So, while you want to enter deep into the metaphysics of "consent," I consider it a fabricated and fundamentally incoherent category, and therefore want to take it off the table. We will never be able to agree on what counts as markers of consent, what counts as more or less subtle coercion, etc.--and so such things will be determined by political power and the ingenuity of lawyers. Now, the issue of children in particular lies in the fact that parents are still responsible for children, but without any consensus, much less institutional affirmation, of what this responsibility is for--what does it mean to raise children so as to become "suitable" adults? You will receive a different answer to this question from everyone you ask. Moreover, parents' responsibility had become both more extensive and high stakes (you have to think about drug use, and nutrition, and allergies and self-esteem, and bullying, etc.--all terms that are sharply contested) while also being constrained in unpredictable ways (under what conditions can a child be removed from a home with "unfit" parents? no one really knows for sure). So, the safest thing for a parent is to insulate their children from contact with and knowledge of the world other than that sanctioned by whatever passes as an authority at the moment. Obviously, in this context, it would be insane for a parent to make his or her child "available" for sexual initiation with unrelated adults. If it's insane to do so, there's no point to reason about it--in fact, anyone who wants to reason about it should be treated with the highest degree of suspicion. And this is the case whether none, some or all of what you say is true. As I said, I have my own reasons for not entering this reasoning. You need to imagine a very different social order for your understanding of consent and childhood sexuality to prevail--a non-WEIRD society, presumably. I don't think it will be a possible or, if possible, better society. I think a reconstruction of monogamy in such a way as to both limit choices and enforce the consequences of those choices is the better approach.
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You're not really addressing what I see as the "central" issue here: one, children will be under the authority of adults until such time as they are deemed adults themselves; two, sexuality will be regulated; and, we can add, these two things will be related: children will be raised so as to conform to and flourish within the regime of sexual regulation. This all can be and has been done in lots of different ways (there was an article on Yahoo yesterday about abducting young men for forced marriages to girls as young as 9 in some province in India--it seems to be a diminishing but still fairly "normal" practice there) which means, for one thing, there is no "right" way to do it which we can abstract from all these particular conditions. And you may be right that we WEIRDOS might be closer to your preferred socio-sexual arrangements than to mine--it would not surprise me at all to see open advocacy for adult-child sexual interaction if a certain version of the LGBT-inflected left gets more power. But I think the best, the most "human" social forms result from transparent and predictable exercises of power. A sexual regime based officially on consent will unofficially be based on other things altogether, and will therefore be riven by constant uncertainty and conflict of the most irrational kind (it will be impossible to know what might emerge as an "issue" tomorrow). The "other things" it will unofficially be based on will be (among yet other things) the contrary and complementary sexual natures of men and women--something that "reason," unless unreasonably based on some assumption of a blank slate polymorphous perversity, should be interested in. "Consent" obviously can't go "all the way down"--we can't consent to having been made into the kinds of beings who consent or do not to one act or another. So, consent inevitably becomes a mask for other things. Embedding sexuality in broader social relations via various formal and informal sanctions seems to me to promise a much closer fit between the "official" and the "unofficial." Given that approach, a spectrum of possibilities exist, from Hasidic-style arranged marriages to what I think was the normal 19th-century (and well into the 20th century in many places) approach: small, homogeneous communities, where everyone knows each other, where young people know who they can "bring home" to their parents, where everyone has a fairly well established reputation, where young people tend to pair up fairly early ("high school sweethearts"), where divorce is "frowned upon" and made legally problematic, etc.--that's not exactly arranged marriage, but in effect it's pretty close.
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Sorry, I didn't see this for some reason--I'll send it to you via email.