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> As I understand it, an adult (18 and above in the US) cannot legally have sex with someone under the age of consent. So if the age of consent is 18, and an 18 year old has sex with a 16 year old, that is considered statutory rape or child sexual abuse.

That's a pretty common mistake to make. There's two different sets of rules that kinda blend together when you try to reduce age of consent to a single digit. Wikipedia indeed agrees with me:

> In most states there is not a single age in which a person may consent, but rather consent varies depending upon the minimum age of the younger party, the minimum age of the older party, or the differences in age. Some states have a single age of consent. Thirty U.S. states have age gap laws which make sexual activity legal if the ages of both participants are close to one another, and these laws are often referred to as "Romeo and Juliet laws". Other states have measures which reduce penalties if the two parties are close in age, and others provide an affirmative defense if the two parties are close in age. Even though state laws regarding the general age of consent and age gap laws differ, it is common for people in the United States to assume that sexual activity with someone under 18 is statutory rape.

Paragraph taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_...

In any case, we've deviated from the topic far enough. I'd argue that it's a weird thing to advocate for lowering of the age of consent. At best, I'm willing to agree that RMS uses terms like an edgy teen. Minors sext each other, therefore, we should make child pornography legal (seriously, I'm not making this up: https://stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#15_September...). Age of consent needs to be lowered, therefore paedophilia should become legal. He talks about the edge cases to argue for the whole thing, completely ignoring that those edge cases are not what most people think about when using those terms.