Anatomy of a Sexual "Predation."

50% of infants born to mothers 15-17 years old are sired by males over 20. Males over 25 are implicated in twice as many teenage births as are males under 18 (The Oregonian, May 11, 2004). Why did the Oregonian deem this tidbit newsworthy?

I feel I must admit my personal interest in this matter: my father is seventeen years older than my mother, yet no one in our family greeted my conception with outrage, nor did anyone call 9-1-1 to rat my dad out as a statutory rapist. Indeed, the matter was never even mentioned during my childhood. My parents' age difference was taken completely in stride by a family whose members' general behavior has been described by objective observers as suffocatingly conventional. Admittedly, my parents met when mom was 40 and dad was 57.

Hence, a nagging question presents itself to my mind: At what age does it become socially respectable for a self-respecting woman to copulate with an older man?

After much deliberation and significant consultation with experts in the field, I have determined that there is no definitive answer to this crucial anthropolical and/or sociological inquiry. Surprisingly enough, with respect to any given pairing, the answer to the respectability question posed above appears to vary significantly on the basis of a number of factors, including the following: (1) age of the male, (2) yearly income of the male, (3) the male's likelihood of gifting the female with small samples of the carbon allotrope commonly known as "diamond"; (4) strength of the male for his spawn to attend an educational institution more prestigious than that attended by the female's father; (5) the female's father's occupation, if any; (6) the female's independent means, if any; (7)