Originally Posted by jayeff

The point perhaps people are missing is that laws don't exist in a vacuum, but reflect society. The law wouldn't change unless the social climate changed first, so if 16-year-olds were allowed to make porn, the prevailing view of the age question would be quite different from what it is now.

Which is something else people forget: moral standards are not cast in stone. Our views related to age are less than 150 years old and we were driven to try to keep children as children for longer primarily by political and economic issues: the moral considerations got tacked on later. Nowadays we are attempting to outguess nature by around 50% and a lot of people argue that this presumption is the cause of many of the problems that assail teenagers.

Although people can fight vigorously to defend their moral standards, the fact remains that by and large we simply adopt the morality of our times, or more accurately, whatever we were exposed to between birth and around 25 years of age. But while our individual views tend to stop changing, those of society at large don't, so it isn't surprising that many people find themselves out of step at some point.