While your observations are from the '00s, I am about 20 years older and the change is more dramatic from my perspective. I attended university in the mid 1980's, and I had a friend who moved to my university town, she was more a friend of my younger brother, but she looked me up when she moved there...looking for a familiar face I guess. She went to high school close to the U I attended. I was shocked by the number of Uni Men picking up High School Girls after school. But this was normal at that time.

I never dated this girl, last I heard she got pregnant by some guy that was about 24, she was 16 I think.

Even years later I was working part-time gig at a fast food place, late 1990's and several of the Teen girls were picked up after shift by their 20 something BF's, and in many cases the parents were well aware.

Another example of men behaving badly, that was considered normal at the time. My best fiends older brother, was 24 at the time, was dating a classmate of mine, it was 1984, she was only 15 or 16, we found out about this when we accidentally walked in on them having sex. Most of the girls at my high school dated guys that had graduated, had jobs, and money to spend on them, meanwhile we couldn't get dates if our lives depended on it.

Make no doubt about this, it was all about power dynamics, but also at the time was so completely normal that nobody thought anything of it. I had a classmate, girl, get married when I was in grade 8 or 9, her parents consented to the wedding, she had been dating this guy for more than a couple of years at the time, she was older than us as she had been held back at least one year in school but hat still only made her at max 15 years old. He, was a son of a large farming family, and her family were also farmers, so there were going to be big economic payoffs from this in the future. And the laws of the state were we lived were also in alignment with allowing this to happen.

My cousins were all over 10 years older than me and when I was 5- 8 years old I (1970's) went to a lot of weddings, and some of the brides were still teens…some of the grooms also…and some were pregnant. Remarkably, they are all still married to their original spouses.

If you go back to my parents generation, my dad was 6 years older than my mother, but most of my uncles were 10 - 12 years older than their wives so yes we have come a long way. In this same era, my mom’s cousin was a federal police officer, the equivalent of US FBI, he got married when he was 26, his bride was 16 or 17, wouldn’t that be a scandal in a police force today.