Graded Age of Consent Laws

Why not propose a scheme along these lines?  The first number is the age of one partner, and the range of numbers is the range of people of a certain age who can legally have sex with a person of first.  It goes for any combination or number of sexes.

14: 11-17
15: 12-18
16: 12-24
17: 12-25
18-21: 14-up
21: 15-up

The thing that really bugs society is the whole ADOLESCENCE/children question around the consent laws.  In theory, we have no immediate moral problem with a 25 year old fucking an 80 year old, since both of them have made the mystical transition into adulthood.  However, we say that a 40 year old and a ten year old is RIGHT OUT.  To quantify the ages so precisely around adolescence seems strange, as well.  To accomodate this, we could have less nasty non-jail sentences (seeing a shrink/community service) for, for example, an 18 year old tapping a 13 year-old), all the way up to whatever age is right-out.  Send a 25 year old who got with an 8 year old to jail.  The process of fixing the age cutoffs could be helped by the psychological establishment.

as soon as someone hits puberty, sexing them should be legal.  parental consent for under eighteens may make sense, but outright illegaling sex to young people, even after they have all the appropriate hardware and hormones telling them to do so, that's just a recipe for not-goodness.

forty year olds sexing ten year olds might not be socially acceptable, but eighty year olds sexing eighteen year olds is looked down upon too, yet still perfectly legal.  social acceptance shouldn't have any bearing on legal 'right' vs 'wrong'.  it's just 'ewwww'.