Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention, but this is the very first time I’ve seen fully honesty injected into this situation, other than by me. Radley Balko, on To Catch a Predator.

I also think there’s an important distinction between men who
arrange for with sex post-pubescent girls below the age of consent, and
men who prey on young girls and boys who haven’t yet reached sexual
maturity. The former is a natural, hard-wired attraction. I agree with
laws that put the age of consent at somewhere between 16 and 18, which
means I agree that people who break those laws ought to face some sort
of penalty. The hard-wired attraction, then, is countered by by the
promise of punishment, and hopefully one’s own recognition of the
exploitive nature of engaging in sex with someone not psychological or
emotionally mature enough to make good decisions about physical
relationships.

But there’s something sleazy, unfair, and itself exploitative about sending an attractive girl (who sometimes is
of age, but poses as underage) out to tap those natural impulses,
removing the social barriers to acting on them (by giving the targets
anonymity, the promise of no-strings-attached sex, and massaging away
their apprehension), pouncing on the weak-willed men, then raking in
cash from advertisers while showing the whole thing on television.

I think that men with thoughts of engaging in sex with post-pubescent girls were a lot more deterred back in the day when they understood that they might have to deal with a father, brother, or uncle.