I apologize. When I wrote that, I was not aware that you were the original author of that essay. Because of the way you presented it, I was under the impression that this was lifted from a post someone else did elsewhere. Had I known you were the one who wrote it, I would've taken an entirely different and more tactful approach.

I believe the essay is simplistic because it ignores many other factors that had a major role in turning the tide against pedophilia. In so doing, the author of the essay (now known to be you), has selectively filtered out all of the aspects of history that don't agree with his conclusion and presented only those that do.

There are many sociological factors and historical events that the author never even touches. There are factors involved here including: A tremendous increase in life expectancy and advances in education causing an ever increasing age at which one is expected to take on adult responsibilities; changing attitudes towards children that led to anti-child labor legislation, the outlawing of the death penalty for children, the creation of the juvenile justice system, and a variety of laws against child abuse (to include "child sexual abuse"); an increase in the value of a child due to factors ranging from industrialization to a decrease in the size of the nuclear family (in the 1800s, it was not uncommon to see a classified ad that says "trading 12 year old boy for two cows; he is strong, healthy, and knows how to plow fields and milk cattle"); changing attitudes towards sex in general, to include the free love movement of the 60s that forced society to reexamine what is acceptable and draw their lines in the sand; the rise of democratic political systems that encourage poorly thought out knee-jerk reaction legislation and generally bad "feel good" legislation; high profile crimes that led to new crack downs; the rise of militant feminism and its view of sex as a weapon of violence; the rise of militant abuse survivors and lobbying against things like child pornography with made up statistics and shady observations; the rise of the media as a tool for sensationalist fear mongering; the rise and rise to power of fundamentalist Christianity and its views on sex; and many other factors.

The article you posted is highly simplistic and ignores an enormous amount of sociological, psychological, and political factors that contributed some in a small part and some in a major way towards the current state of age of consent laws and the current views towards pedophilia in general. The issue is very complex and the article you wrote does not accurately paint the picture it purports to paint.

It is easy to construct a world view based on only the evidence that backs it up. But doing so is dishonest. The world is far more complex than that. The explanations in the essay are far too simplistic and ignore a great number of major factors.

You may indeed have lived through a lot of the movements of which you speak. But in so doing, you observed the world from one of the most biased perspectives possible.