Before I say anything, let me preface all of this with the answer to the very first question you are likely to ask; do you think pedophilia is okay? No. No, I don’t. Don’t for one moment take the following as an endorsement of pedophilia or pedosexuality. Morally, ethically and legally wrong.
However – there would be no point to this post if there was no however – it is understandable (up to a certain point.) 300 years ago it was normal for people to be married by the age of fourteen and have children a year later. Especially in the case of girls it was normal to have them married off to a far older man. An elderly man is more established and financially more secure and was able to provide for her and her children. A young woman was still strong enough to go through childbirth and hopefully have many children before she’d become either barren or too old. Nowadays, through the wonders of modern medicine a woman can have children up to her fifties if she’s inclined to accept the elevated risk of birth defects. Also, in most developed societies the church (and specifically the Catholic church) no longer pushes the idea of having as many children as possible, so a woman doesn’t have to start early and she can decide to provide in her own financial security as to not be dependent on a man. All in all very good developments, I would say. But it doesn’t deny where we came from and who we were not so long ago.
I often see younger girls and appreciate their budding beauty, thinking to myself “Wow, she’s going to a heartbreaker when she grows up.” Immediately following such a thought I realise I shouldn’t speak such appreciation out loud for fear of judgment, even though there was nothing lecherous about my appreciation. And still, I feel like I am biologically driven to take note of a young beauty and show appreciation for her appearance. If she had nothing to offer me on a biological level I’d have little appreciation for her.
I guess there’s a digressively sliding scale, ranging from appreciation to lecherous to predatory the younger a woman becomes. If I appreciate a thirty something it’s because of her beauty, strength and confidence. If I appreciate a twenty year old (having passed the thirty mark myself) it might be considered lecherous and if I appreciate a girl in her teens my feelings could be labeled as predatory. Anything younger than that as sick and deranged.
Nowadays, girls reach physical maturity usually by the time they’re twelve years old, which might have been the age to start looking for a husband 300 years ago, but nowadays it is about the time the put their dolls down. Boys are much the same, physically ready to procreate but nowhere near the emotional and intellectual maturity to raise a child. Over the last few hundred years the moment of emotional graduation to adulthood has been pushed back further and further – myself, I am a 31 year old child – while physical adulthood has stayed virtually the same. We are fortunate enough to live in a time where we can keep our children from being bogged down by responsibilities, unencumbered and unobstructed from getting the best possible education their intellect can handle. A side effect is that we tend to keep our children as ignorant and innocent like children. They don’t mature until they really really have to and when they do they are not eased into it naturally, but it is thrust upon them by things like work. When work is generally a nine-to-five affair and also the first contact we have with responsibilities, we generally choose to remain kids for even longer in our private lives. Years after our first real job we’re often still not emotionally mature enough to deal with the momentous task of raising a child. All in all, our emotional maturity usually trails far behind out physical maturity. So we end up with all these urges but no concept of the possible consequences of those urges.
In the end it isn’t surprising that men, especially, can appreciate the beauty of a young woman due to hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of biology. The cognitive dissonance you experience, between the physical attraction and the ethical repulsion, can be very troublesome for some people. We’ve found an age of consent that is completely arbitrary and it is one of the great examples of law where one size fits no one. It is, however, the common agreement that we live by and those who seek to break that law should lawfully pay the price for that unfortunate decision, because no matter how you look at it, most under aged people are no longer capable of realising the full range and extent of the consequences of having sex.