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It's the entirely correct conclusion to draw, but you're also forgetting that (and I can't believe I actually have to say this) most men don't want to fuck little girls. Men want huge tits and a nice ass; tweens have neither.
Though of course there are exceptions on the margins, or when the woman initiates; human nature can't grok the concept of women initiating sex because it's massively counterintuitive, biologically-speaking (re: pregnancy risks), and in large part doesn't even attempt to do this (which is also why the concept that women can sexually abuse men is completely foreign- this is why female-dominated professions like teaching is obsessed with teaching 7 year old boys they're secretly girls, among other things). It's actually harmful for women to acknowledge it because their self-interest dictates they pretend sex is a chore, for the same reason your self-interest dictates you seek a high wage even for a job compatible with your interests; men take this at face value sometimes.
And by "little girls" I mean "not women", which per the thread's topic I consider to be <=12; ancient societies, including European societies until the Industrial Revolution, had this anchor point for reasons that have a lot to do with both biology and the fact that economic productivity wasn't yet gated behind a decade of credentialism and manual labor was still economically productive; both things that aren't true in modern times, so you get the 13-23 set acting super weird because their biology demands adult treatment that society pretends is illegitimate (because they simply don't have room for them in the economy, and segregation breeds contempt).
We pay for it in events where one of them runs amok and kills a bunch of their peers and consider this acceptable for some reason.
While the word "teenager" as a marketing term only dates to the 20th century, I don't think the evidence supports this idea that adolescence simply didn't exist before the industrial revolution. The teenage years have always been considered a transitionary between childhood and full adulthood.
Yes, children would start assisting with household and agricultural labor from an early age, but it's not like you turned 12 and your father immediately threw you out to start your own farm. It was a gradual escalation of responsibility. A typical 13th century teenager might be an apprentice, a novice, or a squire, but they wouldn't become a journeyman, priest, or knight until their early twenties, and would spend most or all their teenage years assisting a "real" adult with their work until they were experienced and economically secure enough to start their own household.
Outside of the nobility and rare exceptions, medieval people didn't marry until their late teens or early twenties, and would often stay under their fathers' roofs (and their fathers' authority) for even longer.
Certain coming of age rituals like bar mitzvahs would occur shortly after puberty, usually around 14-15, which might symbolically represent passing from childhood to adulthood. But, again, very few 14-15 year olds were actually treated like full adult members of the community. The age of majority almost everywhere has almost always been betwen 16 and 25. Rome started unusually early at 12 and 14 for girls and boys, respectively, but Roman law was weird in that essentially everyone of any age was considered an adolescent dependent of their pater familias. And the Romans had all sorts of other age-gated requirements for full participation in adult society. For example, you weren't eligible to stand for public office until you were 30 and had spent 10 years in the legions, and you could sue to overturn contracts on the basis that your youth and inexperience were being taken advantage of until the age of 25.
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I'm not forgetting that. But there's a huge amount of societal attention placed on the few men that do want to fuck little girls, which is the whole reason that this is even a topic of discussion in the first place, right? Otherwise it'd be a fringe nothingburger concern.
Good observation.
Well, we've only started truly paying for it in recent decades, whereas the phenomenon of segregated teenagehood has been going on for quite a while, right? But what solution is there? There is even less room for them in the economy now, and even if there were, the general public would be aghast at the idea of reintroducing child labor.
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