Weird. Mrs. Bourbon and I were discussing this just last night.
My pet theory is that both sexes are locked into believing adolescence is the peak of their existence on Earth, primarly because of a tremendous cultural overemphasis on the importance of sex to one's being. Nowadays, it seems once people grow out of adolescence they spend the rest of their lives yearning for it and trying anything to recapture it, whether that means ponying up for round after round of plastic surgery to staying on birth control until age 38.
For some women, I think this yearning is not so much sexual as it is sentimental. It seems to me these women are desperately trying to rediscover the thrill of teenage courtship. I mean, if you look at all of these stories about these women, the women seem far more interested in having long, clandestine 'soul-baring' telephone conversations with these boys than wild sex (e.g. the now infamous 'pinky promise'). The sexual element of these incidents strikes me as strictly secondary.
Not to minimize this criminal activity in anyway, but I really think that a particularly sinister and delusional form of nostalgia is what is really behind this.
Now, another thing...
When I was growing up middle-aged women were uniformly hot-to-trot for masculine men. Men like Tom Selleck or Burt Reynolds or later Mel Gibson. Then about 10 years ago middle-aged women starting cooing (publicly!) over the likes of Leo DiCaprio (someone who was in reality about 20 years old, but looked all of 14). This astounded me and troubled me at the time, and I remember joking on it pretty hard. But maybe it was a signal that something really strange was coming down the cultural pipes?
Keep in mind the movie that got America's moms percolating over Leo was roaringly nostalgic and thoroughly sentimentalized in and of itself. People may have thought Titanic was about a colossal ship going down in the North Atlantic, but it was really the story of a 90 year-old woman reminiscing about her own first sexual encounter. Again, this encounter was especially thrilling as it was both clandestine and socially transgressive (recall that she was "upper class" and poor Leo, a veritable sans culotte).
I know this may sound a little nutty, but I just can't shake the feeling that these two cultural trends are related. When a nation's moms go ga-ga over Leo, can mixed-up, sentimentalized stautory rape be too far behind?
Your idea that some women pine for the angst/joy/thrill of teenage relationship seems to be very insightful to me. I think you are on to something.
I also agree with the comment re: liking of non-masculine men. I think it has to do with living comfortable lives in comfortable times.
In fact, a study post-911 revealed that the "tough guy" came back strong in women's desires, and this is consistent with other studies that show that the "type" of men women consider attractive when there is physcial danger AND during ovulation are big/tough guys.
It's about power, not sentimentality.