how old is consent?

I hear you, Stacey. I don't think there are any easy answers on this one. On the one hand, Levine makes the argument that we should ask children how they feel, and if any sort of behavior is uncomfortable or bad for them (as opposed to our own anxieties and vantage point that we constantly prescribe to their own subjectivities and motivations). I agree with this approach. On the other hand, in the act of asking, are you therefore creating a problem? After all, children are astute and perceptive. Why would we ask if we didn't already have implicit assumptions that it might be bad? How does that impact their experiences? Shit, as adults we tend to say, "I never thought about that" after someone sheds some insight or poses a question to our experiences, and goodness knows that reflections "in retrospect" impact our initial interpretations and subjectivities as nothing is static. In terms of deciding an age for consent: I think that is a fruitless exercise that really depends on the persons involved. That's one reason I despise a lot of the quantitative measures taken by policy makers that, regardless of intention, cannot be fully standardized across communities, cultures, and case-by-cases. It also doesn't help that there is such shame, hostility, and secrecy surrounding the topic of child exploration, and trying to pinpoint exactly how "sexual" these behaviors are. Normalization of such explorations, I would attest, is key. I really feel it's a matter of not projecting our ("our" meaning cultural, individual, and institutionalized understandings of children and their sexualities, or lack thereof) anxieties onto these younger folks, but that is so much easier said than done.