...and with sexuality in general. On the one hand, we have accepted that we cannot control the mutually consensual sexual conduct or preferences between two people who both have their full degree of civil rights. This, of course, refers to people 18 and older (21 if you want to be more technical, but typical 18-year-olds have their full sexual rights in most nations). When it comes to the population segment we refer to as "legal adults," we talk about how psychologically healthy a good sex life is, and how normal sexual interests and variations between "consenting adults" happens to be. This is a concession to legal realities in our supposedly democratic society.

However, on the other hand, there is a strong tendency in our culture to view sexuality as an "impurity" in our collective moral constitution as a species; to be filled with emotional "complexities"; and to "taint" the conception of "innocence," which is an extremely sacrosanct paradigm in our culture. We view this idea of innocence not as a form of ignorance that shelters people from knowledge of the world to their possible detriment, but rather as a blissful state of being that deserves to be preserved in those who have it at the cost of anything else, including the enhancement of their knowledge, independence, critical thinking faculties, and conference of experience.

Since children do not have their civil rights, we have developed an entirely separate ideology to rationalize molding them as personifications of our cultural need to preserve "purity" in a certain segment of the population, even as those with most or all of their full civil rights are allowed (sometimes reluctantly) to enjoy the beauty, pleasures, and mysteries that sexuality adds to the fulcrum of human experience. Since children effectively have no rights in the sense of freedom of choice (but only "rights" in the sense of "freedom from" as decided by various adult agencies), they have no choice but to be pigeonholed into fulfilling this Victorianesque psychological need that still pervades human society.

And since adolescents under the age of 16-18 (depending on the national or state jurisdiction in question) share a legal status with pre-pubescent children, they have found themselves sucked into that above mentioned paradigm to a great extent, where they find themselves caught in a position that makes our culture conflicted and uncomfortable: Our culture grudgingly has no choice but to acknowledge the sexuality of adolescents (despite trying to almost fully deny its existence in pre-pubescents), but still tries very hard to support a conception that all but the most innocuous forms of sexual expression in young adolescents is "inappropriate for their age" (an artificial cultural conception); a sign of negative characteristics in the adolescents who express it (e.g., they are just seeking attention because they aren't getting enough adult supervision or affection; they lack self-esteem or self-confidence, and are trying to compensate for that by being sexually active; they "clearly" do not understand what they want or the implications of such, etc.); a sign of parental negligence in controlling the adolescents in question, which is seen as an important parental responsibility within the nuclear family unit; an indication of juvenile delinquency; the trigger of the cliched' protestations of, "where were the parents when she was doing this?!"; common claims that the adolescents in question were acting against their "best interests," etc., et al.