[...]we're conditioned to ignore the incredibly common heterosexual case of (the entire concept of "jailbait" is literally just pointing out that such attraction is basically normal).
Oh, you'd have (mainly Americans) people shrieking their heads off that such a thing is pedophilia/it's as bad as someone wanting to fuck an eleven year old.
I've had friends in age-gap relationships (one at sixteen was dating a twenty-one year old guy), some of which resulted in marriages and the whole happy two.four kids thing (including my best-friend).
My mother was sixteen when she started dating my father, who was twenty-one. They were happily married for decades until brain cancer stole her from us.
I, myself was chatting up a twenty-three year old Aussie bird at seventeen.
Outside of America? It's pretty much normal. In America? "Take a seat." (Edit: it's not the laws, many of which allow age gap relationships or even sexual activities in various states, but the cultural attitude Americans have as a whole).
If I saw a girl I didn't know walking down the street and who was, well, let's just say "physically developed", of course I'd
notice her. Even if I later learned that she turned out to be like fifteen or sixteen, I wouldn't have been looking at her because she's fifteen or sixteen but because, well,
she has tits the size of fucking watermelons and a non-babyface to match.
There was this girl on Tik Tok going around "pranking" guys (from college students to old men) by going up to them, flirting with them, asking them to rate her, and then asking for their numbers (only to go "only a prank, bro!" after).
She looked like she was at least eighteen/nineteen, wore denim shorts and a tank top, and was
very physically developed. The stereotypical Californian blonde, right down to the bleached hair.
Yeah, the "kicker" at the end of the prank was that she revealed she was sixteen.
All those men who eyed her up because of her physical appearance during the pranks must have been pedos, right? /s smh
Walk down the street and see an attractive girl walking past you, which you notice because of how physically developed she is? If that girl, unbeknownst to you, turns out to be like fifteen or sixteen than the eighteen/nineteen or so you'd have expected from her appearance, does that make you a pedo? Of course it doesn't.
That's why when I hear news of someone being a "predator" or a "pedo" now, I always look at the details first compared to most people, who just jump on the bandwagon (culturally and otherwise): there's a vast difference between someone who wants to fuck an
actual child, and someone else who hooked up with or began dating a sixteen or seventeen year old who appeared as being far older than they were (with dating having an appropriate age gap obviously, not like a thirty year old dating a sixteen year old, et cetera).
The latter above was also a recent thing: a footballer, who was twenty-one or two? had a sixteen or seventeen year old girlfriend. No one had any issue with it.
IIRC, she sent him nudes, and the next thing he knows he's being arrested (basically under a technicality) for the obvious. So, he can sleep with his
consenting girlfriend, they can ogle each other while
they're naked in-person, have a relationship with each other that
everyone is chill with, but the moment this "controversy" happened, he was being slandered as being a pedophile and molester by the public (both out of the blue here and in the States, with the latter to be expected because
Americans).
Pedophile has been thrown around so much as a buzzword at relationships people don't agree with that it has lost its context, really. Save labeling someone a pedophile for when they actually want to fuck
actual kids.