"Similarly wobbly views on sex and adolescents—or rather sex with adolescents—are on profligate historical display elsewhere. It goes in the opposite direction, too. The age of consent in 1920s Chile was 20, but now it's 16. A century ago in Italy, it was 16, too. But today it's 14 there. Overall, studying the numbers in even the most contemporary international age-of-consent table will give you the impression that you're looking at a flurry of seemingly random digits between 12 and 21 (a sizable range): It's 13 in Argentina, 18 in Turkey, 16 in Canada, 12 in Mexico, 20 in Tunisia, 16 in Western Australia, 15 in Sweden, and so on. "More than 800 years after the first recorded age of consent laws," writes the historian Stephen Robertson, "the one constant is the lack of consistency." Just as when we're assessing religions with conflicting theologies, we can draw only two possible conclusions from Robertson's observation: Either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has therefore got it wrong, or any given society's age of consent is based on what its citizens have simply chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development. And similar to what any objective analysis of competing religious beliefs would force us to conclude, there's no evidence that the former is the case for cultural variations in age of consent laws (that there is "one true age") and every reason for us to conclude the latter is in fact what we're dealing with."