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In his diary for Slate, writer David Amsden chronicles taking a 17-year-old girl to her high-school prom. In this excerpt, he explains his motivations for pursuing the story; his rationalizations could serve as a syllabus for Jailbait Theory 101, as he invokes the names of the Olsen Twins and Lindsay Lohan. You know, we always suspected that Vanity Fair was somehow to blame:

I want to know how I, a grown man, will feel going out on a date with Sarah, an underaged girl. Resist your judgments, please. How can I not be curious? I open up Vanity Fair, and the only desirable women inside are two dewy 17-year-old actresses...

...(Lindsay Lohan and Emmy Rossum) buttressed against a nude spread of Brad Pitt, our nation's middle-aged sex god. I live in a country where we adults ironically salivate over the Olsen twins to mask the fact that we very seriously salivate over the Olsen twins....We're all a bit hung up on high school, pining for our own rosy recollections of our own youth, and, in doing so, we've inadvertently become soft-core fetishists. Laugh if you must. Report me to the police. You can't deny that, in this light, going to prom with a 17-year-old should, theoretically, be every grown man's dream.