The fact is, a 14-year-old girl may be capable of agreeing to sex with a 49-year-old man, but she doesn’t have the emotional and mental maturity to consent. I was 25 before I realized that every man I’d slept with as a teenager was a pedophile. It seemed to me that since I’d courted the attention, that I was fully culpable. What teenager believes she is not mentally or emotionally capable of full consent? I thought I was an adult, although when I look at the picture of myself from the time period above, I see a child.

I thought I was the exception for these men, the girl so precocious and advanced that it superseded social norms. I thought that I was “older than my chronological age.”

It never occurred to me as a young sexually active teen that the adult men I had relationships with may have been manipulating me, that they had designs and motives I couldn’t see from my limited child’s perspective.

Emily, XOJANE, "The Myth of the Teenage Temptress, or Why a Young Girl Can Not Consent to Sex with an Adult Man"

Everyone should read this article if they haven’t already. The anecdotes are upsetting and carry major TW (pedophilia, graphic depictions of sex), but the message is just so on point. 

(via graculus)