You guys realize that most of the civilized world has the age of consent at 13 to 16? Europe, Canada, Russia, China, South America, Australia are all 13 to 16. India and half of Africa are 18+.
Many Arabic countries still have laws that say they must be married before they can consent to sex, but then 9 year olds getting married there is common.
So who's right, all those countries, or America, India and half of Africa?
These laws are highly variable here in the USA as well. Remember, the 10th Amendment to the Constitution pretty much leaves sexual matters (among other subjects on which the Constitution is silent) in the hands of our country's 50 states, as well as other local authorities like protectorates (e.g. Puerto Rico) and sometimes the native reservations' councils. In Washington D.C. the legal age of consent is 16, which is why Congressmen caught messing with 17-year-old interns there have been censured and sometimes forced to resign, but never criminally prosecuted.
Various states have "majority age" and "Romeo and Juliet" statutes as well to ensure that young couples with an age difference don't get criminalized just because the boy turns 18 a little earlier than the girl, and some states permit marriages for underage girls who've gotten pregnant when their boyfriends wish to atone for getting them in trouble by marrying them. I remember a particular controversy that arose in Nebraska and Kansas concerning their differing sexual laws when a 22-year-old man married a 14-year-old he'd started dating when she was 12 and knocked up when she was 13: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=1121138&page=1#.UMsRWe9BCho The marriage's legitimacy was ultimately sustained, but the man still had to spend 15 months in prison in Nebraska for statutory rape. (It could have been worse: as the article points out, the judge could have thrown the book at him and put him away for 50 years.)
The real question is, considering the different rates at which children in differing cultures mature, isn't it right for these laws to be a bit more variable? Many cultures around the world and throughout history have had young teen and even preteen marriages, but childhood was and is a lot shorter in most of these cultures; when a 12-year-old boy was well-trained enough to put on armor and ride off to the Crusades and a 12-year-old girl was already fully educated in how to manage her household's affairs and raise children (assuming she survived giving birth to them), marrying off children as young as 12 made a certain amount of sense. A lot of 18-year-old boys and girls these days don't have any of those important life skills, and learning how to raise and sustain a family in our technologically advanced civilizations tends to take a lot longer than it did in the mostly agricultural civilizations of the past.
Of course, that's sort of the point of this movie: the occasional sexual attraction to a girl under the legal age of consent is not the same thing as having a fetish for girls too physically or (more importantly) mentally immature to deal with all the moral and social consequences of having sex, let alone actually acting on that perverted fetish. Men aren't pedophiles (or any other kind of sexual predator) just because they might think some early-blooming teenage girls are attractive; girls nowadays are just maturing faster physically than mentally, while the majority of boys and men still have a normal and healthy attraction to the same physical traits they did back in the old days when girls' mental maturity kept up better with their physical maturity. Trying to criminalize that attraction amounts to trying to criminalize being male, which is a grave injustice to half our species.