Part of the reason our culture perceives children as being "easily influenced" is because we currently attempt to raise them to be obedient to adults without question, and do not teach them important facets of education, such as sex education, from an early point in their lives, which would enable them to make competent decisions about sexual expression as individuals with support and guidance. Instead, we try to hard to keep them artificially dependent upon adults for as long as possible in order to cater to sentiment, keep them out of the labor market (thus leaving less competition for adults looking for jobs), and to keep them out of societal decision-making so as to justify the continuation of our gerontocentric ideas. We further work hard to keep them as ignorant and inexperienced of sexual matters as possible for as long as possible so as to justify proclaiming them "too immature to be able to handle sexual matters," which is the equivalent of the former belief that black people were largely incapable of learning to read and write--which is an easy illusion to maintain when you have laws making it illegal for people of color to learn these skills in the first place. This proves that adults very often make bad decisions.

The fact that the great majority of genuine situational child molesters operate within the home and turn out to be adults who have the largest and most direct degrees of control over the kids in question--and our media and government try hard to ignore this fact and blame the problem on "pedophilia" despite obviously knowing better--makes it clear once again that adults often make bad decisions, and are more concerned overall with preserving the present gerontocentric status quo then they are with doing the right thing for kids.

Every teenager is going to nod their head and say of course I'm ready, I'm so much more mature than every other kid my age.

And of course, every adult is going to look down at even teenagers saying they are ready for sexual activity by saying, "Well, that may be true, but I prefer to err on the side of caution..." Mmm-hmmm. Preferring to err on the side of control rather than freedom of choice and giving the benefit of the doubt to anyone under the Magic Age when it comes to "adult" matters like sexual activity of any kind involving a second person, is more like it.