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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.
It's more that they're just the motte of the "all sex is rape, all men are predators" argument that women draw a socio-financial salary from repeating. It makes sense for them to do this, just like it makes sense to spam "all young people are subhuman/mentally invalid until 25" for all people whose station in society would be threatened by the presence of younger competition (doubly so for women who #fightfor25).
There's also the fact that, for people who are not you or me, sex is very special (in a way described as spiritual, which makes sense as it's fundamental to human existence); it's core to the way they experience the world and as such has to fall into specific buckets. This is why early '70s academics were all like "well, if you fuck in childhood, maybe you won't grow up to be such a square?", and why that didn't actually end up working.
(Note that said academics generally treat opposition to this as 'closed mindedness' and treat pushing it on those people as 'liberating' them; ignoring the fact that for a lot of people, their instincts are smarter than they are, or they're already at maximum capacity for resisting the instincts that are maladapative to the situation and forcing them to bear even more is not tenable. Compare "hatching eggs" for transgenderism.)
It actually hasn't, though; the word only dates back to the 1930s, and between 1945-1980 the post-WW2 economic boom created space for [older] teenagers to enter the workforce. Before that was peak "children in the mines", of course (and if they were as useless as the average adult thinks they are, they couldn't have been so employed), but the Depression forced most of them out and into the
asylumschool system because there was wasn't enough work for adults at the time. Creating more schools and legally mandating a captive audience attend them was a great way to employ more people, too.Things started getting worse for the under-18 set after that time ended; that was the beginning of the "CPS will come abduct you if you're playing in your own front yard" era.
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