In Athenian Greece during one of the universally-acknowledged peaks of achievement in terms of Western Civilization's intellectual and artistic development, a "democracy" consisted of about ten percent of the population's ability to vote: landowning men; the rest of the population was virtually or factually enslaved to that aristocratic sect of men. Formal education was only available to men--who often lived and/or "studied" together in all-male communities, thus promoting same-sex relationships, bonds, and admirations which then encouraged and nurtured homosexual tendencies, curiosities, and relationships as well as biases toward the superiority of the male of the species. In the Greek's systems of education and military training, it was not considered unusual that one's training or education would go on until the age 30, at which time it was considered appropriate for a man to take a wife, start a family, begin running his private empire. On the other hand, the average age of the women taken as wives to these men was around 14 years old.
As a matter of fact, historians consider it factual that the average marrying ages in the Ancient World were 14 to 20 for women (menses and youth being the determiners) while men typically married between the ages of 28 and 35: after completing military service and/or establishing financial security. These statistical numbers seem to be quite consistent across a vast majority of cultures all over the globe and seem to have been applicable throughout the recorded history of our current species of humankind up until only very recently--and are still applicable to many cultures on the planet even in this, the 21st Century. Analyzing this phenomenon from a biological perspective, it could be asserted that in the animal kingdom, of which homo sapiens sapiens is a member, there is a predilection for the male of a species to want to continue to sow its seed in order to propagate his species does not end over the course of its sexually-active years of life, whereas the child-bearing capacity of the female of our species has known start and stop dates--offers a set window of opportunity--which happens to start, predominantly, in the teen years. Why, then, should the life-long male attraction to young women be denigrated and abhorred when it is truly a product of our biological imperative to perpetuate our species (and, privately, to perpetuate our personal line of DNA)?
While religions and intellectual waves like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment made us aware of the virtuous and elevated goal of rising above our animal nature in the pursuit of realizing our potential as spiritual beings in a material world, the attainment and commitment to such has not come without a lot of resistance and defiance. "Change is hard." People are attracted to ease; they get comfortable with predictable patterns in their world, in their lives. Asking poor, uneducated masses to buy into the altruistic pursuit of things like empathy, compassion, and charity is unrealistic when their own basic needs are precarious on a daily basis. I think a life of contemplative achievement and benevolent philanthropy rarely comes out of a life of suffering and adversity, that it is more often the product of a person blessed with comfort, education, affluence, and leisure time. Thus, it is difficult to expect higher thinking and higher functioning from the oppressed, repressed, and depressed.
