There is precious little I could add here that Elf Punk hasn't already said for me, but I think it might help us to understand the current fucked-up society with its bullshit rules if we look at the history behind it:
Going back to medieval times and even prior, 15 was considered the age of maturity for girls to marry, and for boys to become soldiers. It was the age of the rite of passage, celebrated in Latin cultures today with a party called "Quincinera" ("sweet 15"), and in Anglo cultures with a "debutante ball" (where girls who have turned 15 make their social "debut", which in older times signified that they had become eligible to marry).
The reason for 15 being the age of maturity was simple: girls' bodies in those earlier times did not mature as quickly as they do today, and it typically wasn't until 15 that they achieved menarche (while the age of menarche tends to more closer to 12 or 13 these days).
15 was not a "hard and fast" rule though, and in the circumstances of certain royals needing to marry quickly and produce heirs quickly, they would dip the age to lower than 15, to secure the marriage and then consumate it just as soon as menarche does occur, to let the heir-producing begin.
In the Old American West, where cowboys roamed and visited brothels, typically the youngest girls in the whorehouse were 15, but some girls who were the daughters of the older prostitutes started to get involved in "the business" at earlier ages, but here, too, the measure of when they were ready to begin, was MENARCHE. If they started to bleed at 14, voila, they would begin to follow in mama's high-heeled footsteps at 14. 15 was the most common; 14 wasn't unheard-of; but 13 was extremely rare for those times, and there is no record of any girls under 13 having been pimped out as "painted ladies".
As the rest of the western world continued to consider 15 to be an age of maturity as tradition would have it, a change started to take place in the eastern industrialized portions of the United States: the proliferation of factories had expanded to a point where they also included female factory workers, which introduced a new phenomenon of girls of 15 (and sometimes young_er) leaving their rural homes to go into the cities and work at the factories. The working conditions at these factories were horrible, and the male factory bosses almost regularly considered the factory to be their own private whorehouse, demanding that these young female workers put out or lose their job. Married women had somewhat better protection against these depradations because there was always the threat that a protective husband would show up to the factory and KILL the rat bastard, as he deserved, but if a girl was single, living alone in a boarding house as she typically did, she was in a very unique position in history that she was left without any male kin or husband to defend her "honor" or just defend her wishes not to have to take it up the ass just to keep her job.
When the movement came along for women's suffrage, or to allow women to vote, one of the major issues they brought immediately into the political system was the situational **** of these factory girls and how best to protect them when there was no male kin nor husband to keep the factory boss' hands off of them. The result of this legal issue was a raising of the traditional age of maturity from 15 to 18, to give a three year buffer so that while a girl initially arrived in the city to work at a factory, she could have three years to look for a husband and a protector, and during those initial three years if the boss put the moves on her, she could call the police and the boss would be thrown in jail.
Without ever considering the origins and reasoning for having elevated the age of consent from the traditional age up to 18, American society adjusted itself to consider all women young_er than the artificial age of 18 to be "jail-bait". American puritannical tyrants unleashed immense zeal, as well, to repress the sexual psyche of its men against even so much as feeling ATTRACTION to girls under the artificial age, and the law became something entirely different from what it was originally intended to be.
Add to all of this, the fact that the physical age of menarche which was originally used to set the traditional age of maturity to 15, has actually lowered in recent decades (with most girls having their first period at about 12), and the gap, as you see, has widened even further between what Nature intended as an age of maturity, and what American society has tried to force the world into following, in a bullying and domineering fashion.
Quite simply, the U.S. is to blame for this problem, and most particularly, U.S. feminists for having good intentions but not restraining the fundamentalists from taking their law and running with it.
I join Elf Punk in apologizing for the current U.S. President, partially, but in a way I'm glad it's him and not Kerry because they are both of the same group of elitists trying to dominate and oppress the world, and at least with Bush you know exactly what he is and what he is doing. What I really apologize for, beyond mere personalities in the White House, is a government run out of control, and trying to dominate and/or destroy everything which doesn't bow down to it, and to its master, the WTO.
I long for a world where global corporations aren't trying to oppress us, and most particularly, a world where we get back to what NATURE intended, not what some bureaucracy artificially created and en****.
Sorry for the extremely long rant.
I shall post a few pictures as pennance: