Re: Poll for men only please, regarding sex with younger women
When I was in that age range it went something like this.
When in high school - you could date a high school chick, but not a junior high school chick.
A senior guy in high school would never date a freshman girl either.
When in college - you dated a college chick, but not a high school chick.
A college kid dating a high schooler was called "Chester". Chester the molester.
So a 20 year old "man" would never knowingly date or score with a a 16 year old "girl".
However - a 30 year old guy hittin a 23 or 24 year old.......hell, a 40 year old guy hittin a 25 year old.....is that okay or not?
Frankly, I think that's exactly the issue here.
I really don't believe that most of this has to do with the actual "maturity levels" involved, so much as the way our society has "institutionalized" the process of growing up. We've basically got everyone divided into little boxes determined by their age group.
Mid to late teens, everyone's stuck in the "High School" box. As such, the only people they really interact with socially are young adults in their own age range. After that point, they move on to the "college" box, where they mostly interact with people of that age. These two groups each have their own distinct "culture," and any real interaction between them is generally something that a person has to deliberately go out of their way to break social norms to seek out, as it requires finding environments for socialization outside of their age group's usual preference.
The horizons don't really broaden to include the
whole rest of the playing field until a person gets out of school entirely and joins the post-grad labor force.
In the past, this really wouldn't have been the case. Most people would have lived in fairly small and insular communities, where pretty much everyone knew and interacted with everyone else, and a great deal of education wouldn't have been necessary to ensure professional success. As such, there really wouldn't have been much of an artificially enforced distinction between twenty somethings and teens. They all would've simply been considered to be young, post-pubescent unmarried persons.
Under those circumstances, where no real social or cultural distinction between the age groups in question could've been said to exist, having a 16 year old "farmer's daughter" hook up with a 23 year old butcher or baker's son really wouldn't have been that strange at all. It would've even been desirable, as the community would already pretty much know the character of the man in question, and he would generally be a bit more established by that age anyway.
The fear that he was simply some "predator" out looking to score naïve teeny bopper tail wouldn't really have been a factor.
