Two rights can make a wrong

It's funny how, sometimes, you can be completely right about something, and completely wrong at the same time. Take, for example, a heated discussion about the age of sexual maturity. It's a rather tricky topic, since different cultures have markedly different opinions on the matter. The one unassailable fact, though, would seem to be - for women at least - that menarche signifies the body's readiness to bear children. It would seem to follow, then, that any postponement of sexual congress is a consequence of societal constraints and very little else. After all, girls were married off at a terribly young age in most Western cultures as recently as a century ago (and still are in some African and Eastern cultures) and that seems to have done no real harm, right?

Well, as I realised on doing some further reading, that argument doesn't hold much water, for the simple reason that the age of menarche back then was substantially later than it is now; a relatively mature 17 instead of the almost juvenile 13 of today's youngsters. So arranging the marriage of your pubescent daughter didn't mean the same thing that it does now, and explains why - in spite of physical indications to the contrary - that the contemporary legal age of consent (and quite coscionably the social age of sexual maturity) is kept artificially high. How high is still a matter of open debate, but the argument for keeping it above the current physical age of puberty is sitting a little easier with me.