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What's silly is the idea that a well-past-puberty 16-year-old is a child. That she's a child is an artificial legal and social construct -- biologically she's a woman. In other cultures women that age are married mothers. In the United States only 50 years ago the average age for marriage for women was 17. Furthmore, she's over the age of consent for more than half the states in the U.S., so even by our laws she's legally entitled to be sexy.
The forces in our society that rail against the sexualization of young women are just as much liberal as they are conservative, and both sides of the political spectrum are equally guilty of sending girls in their mid-teens mixed messages about whether they're supposed to look and act more like children four years younger or like women four years older.
