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Notes -
I have four theories myself:
1: People are getting older on average. As the ratio of young people go down, more careful attitudes dominate society. The average age of internet users probably doubled since 2008, and teenagers are much more accepting of sexy 18-year-olds than 30-year-old users are.
2: Womens social value goes down rapidly after the age of 25. They're upset about this, so they hope to change socities standards so that men are forced to choose them over younger women. Your "society hostility towards men" fits in here nicely.
3: Leftist moralizers. Moralizers are ruining society in general, every new law and social attitude is basically "This was okay in the past, but now it's wrong and we need to stop it". The only attitudes I see going in the opposite direction are those related to hedonism (legalization of weed, porn, psychedelics, gay marriage, etc.). While moralizers are ruining society globally, age-gaps are more accepted in Asia (I mean Japan and the surrounding countries, I don't care for other definitions of 'Asia'), which is more traditional.
4: The right hates those in power, calling them pedophiles. The left accuses the right of pedophilia, not because there's signs of it, but because it's the most damaging accusation you can currently use against another person (now that 'nazi' and 'racist' don't cut it anymore). The left attacks anime, saying it sexualizes school girls, and the right attack transsexuals, saying that they're pedophiles and that they want to corrupt children.
The consequences of this is that everyone hates pedophiles and vigilantly looks for signs of it, while also being terrified of associating with anything which might look like pedophilia. And the average person now thinks pedophilia includes sexual attraction to the 13-18 age bracket, even though it does not. So the most neurotic of them think being attracted to 20-year-olds is "almost pedophilia".
Some open-minded(?) leftists tried to get pedophilia to be accepted, with their new "MAP" concept. But due to what I assume is the above reasons, it didn't gain enough traction to sway public opinion. It may still be possible in the future, though. Laws governing porn keep getting stricter as porn is becoming more normalized, so such developments aren't self-contradicting.
What I'm noticing is that these attitudes are almost exclusive to the U.S., and I'd assume the main motivation behind them is to throw ragebait at the Christian Right out of spite, even though I don't think most of the people doing this ever notice that they're about 20 years late because the Christian Right has been a spent force for a long time.
"[Cultural leaders] are always preparing to fight the last [culture] war" sounded funny when I initially considered it, but I think may have a ring of truth to it.
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