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Being forced to submit to something your biology and instinct tells you not to has some seriously negative psychological effects.
But, that's not unique to sex. Obviously.
Even getting held captive during a robbery does this to people; so does any shitty authority figure lording over a captive audience- boarding schools, concentration camps, prisons, etc. can all prompt this shift in behavior. Shitty jobs with no other opportunity can prompt this ("sleeping with the boss" is not a meme for no reason).
So then the question becomes "why do we still honor the isolated demand for rigor for sexual causes of those issues?", and that has 2 main answers- evidentiary trail, and female market power.
The evidentiary trail argument is there because it's easy to prosecute. "Look in $orifice and take sample, determine origin of that sample, compare birth certificate. If under $age, the person who made that sample is guilty." Open and shut. And it's not like sex isn't a means of forcing submission (or a prize thereof); it's just the only thing that comes with the territory that you can actually prosecute without having a crack team sort through every text message ever. (Proving gaslighting/sabotage is very difficult; that's why people do it.)
Female market power is a bit more complicated, but it's an instinctive collective bargaining thing. Let's say woman A has nothing else to offer but her submission (her "self") to man X, and let's assume there's woman B who's more attractive (specifically, younger) or more desperate than woman A.
(Just like human biology, we're ignoring the existence of contraceptives and assuming the "self" may only be sold once at full price- each subsequent selling, if at all permitted, devalues the product.)
Woman A has every incentive to render woman B unable to sell her self to man X.
To do that, she will come up with every excuse- usually (and ironically) "too young to know better"- to convince other men to visit death upon man X no matter how low B's price goes. Now, woman A can sell her self to man X, and she gets to set the price of her submission, for man X now has no alternative if he would like a woman. Her "wage", her "worth", has increased relative to man X due to the absence of woman B.
(More generally, this is just how markets work. Collective bargaining is inherently an oligopoly.)
Now, let's assume that a picture of a woman is worth some fraction of her self. Woman A will want to ban woman B from doing that as well, and it'll be done by complaining about how wicked man X would ever be to buy B's pictures. When woman A is pulling the ladder up behind her, she'll go on and on about how the choices were "work or starve", blame society and her family for giving her that impression, complain about workplace conditions and the assigned tasks, claim she had to use drugs to keep up, go on about about how horrible it was to grow up poor, and blame man X for knowing she should have been paid more.
(This is just how unions justify themselves.)
What limits woman A's ability to control the market is how much enforcement power she can muster. She wasn't able to muster very much in the '60s and '70s, but in the '80s her relative power expanded and that of men contracted. So now it's man against man in the white-knighting competition rather than woman against woman in the casual sex competition; just as woman B must undercut woman A when men get richer relative to women, man Y's only option is similar to woman B's would be in a free market: undercutting man X by promising woman A a higher price- less submission, more resources offered, or by publicly swearing an oath to woman A that he will harm man X should he prefer the superior product/better deal that B offers, or if X ultimately fails to pay A what she believes she is worth.
(This is why ground-level anti-union/anti-oligopoly violence is ultimately counterproductive. The more sellers you take out of the market, the more powerful those who remain become.)
Most of the claimed issues that "social conservatives" have- all of the ones you have listed- is just the same kind of justification for why man X and his desire to maximize his own value is evil and must be suppressed. They strategically pretend (and eventually will believe for real) that [the interests of] woman A morally outranks man X. At the same time, and for the same reasons, woman B is strategically denied any notion of agency whatsoever; it will be argued that that she is a "mere child, helpless and confused, and should run along while the adults are talking". This is all to convince Y to support A's suppression of X, which is who A generally wants to sell her self to. (Talk is cheap, after all.)
They must also pretend that men's wage has never decreased relative to women's relative to its peak. If that happened, Y might stop paying to defend A's interests. But if A can successfully deem B to be "a child", then interest in B can be righteously condemned as child rape. But because that is a lie, it creates an externality resulting in more actual child rape. (If the market were working correctly, A would be liable for that externality, not X. It actually helps A when a [future] B is raped: fewer Bs mean less competition for A, damaged Bs mean less competition for A, and it's a kickback to the Y that did it.)
And yes, the reason it's become continually worse over the last 100 years for men is because, outside of 1950-1970, their wages have dropped compared to women. From 1950-1970, the reverse occurred, which you know as the Sexual Revolution (when A's power to prevent X from buying B failed.)
40 years of decline in man's relative wage, though, and as you can see we're way past minimum (w)age now. The current frontier is "he ended up being poorer than he said he was, so the sex was rape" and "the court is not interested in any of the evidence that proves the rape allegations are fabricated" (labor dispute, A vs. X), "boyfriend given the Scarlet Letter for a nude selfie the girlfriend sent unprompted" (legitimacy dispute, A vs. Y [and sometimes B]), and "young men, provided they are not white, are permitted to rape young women" (pollution, A vs. B [and sometimes Y]).
This is examination of revealed preference, nothing more. There are no value claims to be found here; buyers aren't intrinsically evil, sellers aren't intrinsically good. Both are life, and they simply are.
But these two things- market dynamics, and what the enforcers of the power that makes it so tell themselves- are the precise reason why AoC laws (as one of several demonstrations of the market power of woman A) have remained one-way ratchets for the last 40 years, and will continue to be so long as current market conditions remain the same.
(re: @dailydogma)
I broadly agree with this analysis with a small caveat. I tend to think that human behavior can't be reduced directly to economic thinking. Rather, economics impact behavior through evolution, both biological and cultural. So ultimately this is a level or two above the question of the immediate cause. Maybe @gattsuru gives the phenomenology of the cause, you give the far-origins of the cause, but ultimately the shift has to be situated into the modern drift towards feminism in and late marriage more generally. Given feminism and late marriage, ideas about the age of consent needing to be high will win out, in large part because of selfish reasoning on the part of women like you detail. @gattsuru documents what those ideas actually feel like. So the final part of the explanation concerns this more general drift, which as been happening for over 200 years.
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