This is what a genuinely Hot Take looks like; anyone unwilling to write candidly about this topic should never pretend to be a provocative or heterodox thinker.

It's entirely correct that the exaggerated contempt society shows for men with these tendencies doesn't make sense in a world of rampant precocious puberty where tons of middle schoolers look 20 while tons of co-eds look 14.

I'll add to this that visual neoteny doesn't really correlate with behavioral neoteny, and if anything I've observed that more “womanly” looking girls around the 18-22 range are on average significantly more childish and less agentic, while the ones who look thirteen tend to assume you’ll infantalize them and often game around that by genuinely becoming more mature.

In fact the most capable girl I've ever dated was just short of 19 but easily could have passed for a 13yo, and when we were together I LOVED having her play up her youth to antagonize fat middle aged women in public. These days she’s running a tech startup that just got funded by a VC and will prob be richer than me in a few years. Meanwhile the 20-something broads who'd call that “grooming” can't muster up the spoons to get out of bed each day and struggle with impostor syndrome at their fake PowerPoint job.

Anyway there are lots of confounding variables at play and it's a thorny issue, but the broads who hysterically call men “pedophiles” should they ever confession attraction to someone under 18 (or merely express a preference for a physique slightly more girlish than the Venus of Willendorf's) are entirely unhelpful even when considering their own very narrow priorities.