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The hetero age of consent has bounced around, usually bottoming out around puberty. Gay marriage, however, has never been part of the historical experience.

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21632522-laws-teenage-sex-are-converging-so-thinking-about-their-purpose-how-young-too

IN 1275 an English judge condemned a man for “ravishing” a girl aged under 12, the legal minimum for marriage at the time. Three centuries later the rape of a ten-year-old prodded another judge to ban mitigation pleas for the “benefit of clergy”, which had allowed defendants who could read a few words of scripture to escape the death penalty for capital crimes. By the 1880s most countries had set an age, usually between ten and 13, below which children were presumed too young to consent, making intercourse with them a crime. In the following decades, pushed by campaigns to protect children from sexual exploitation, many countries raised their threshold to between 16 and 18.

Now, attempts to balance child protection and teenage freedoms are seeing those clear lines blur. Instead of a single answer to the question, “How young is too young?” many countries are shifting to a “patchwork system of rules and exceptions”, says Kaye Wellings, a sexual-health researcher at London University. How serious an offence is, or even whether one has been committed, can depend on the age gap between the parties, as well as more subjective factors such as emotional maturity and the evidence of harm done.

German prosecutors consider whether a 15-year-old was capable of “sexual self-determination” when deciding whether to prosecute a sexual partner. In 2003 England created a lesser offence for sex between a 16- to 18-year-old and an under-16-year-old—and barred anyone charged with sex with someone aged under 13 from pleading mitigation. “Romeo and Juliet” laws in several American states exempt close-in-age couplings from prosecution. (Shakespeare’s Juliet was around 13, Romeo probably older.)

One reason for the shift is an acknowledgment that adults’ rules have limited influence on what teenagers get up to in private. Surveys show that a quarter of teenagers in Britain, for example, are sexually active below its threshold of 16. But strict laws when the age gap is wide, or the child very young, make prosecuting hardened child-abusers easier—as highlighted by the recent convictions in Britain of several celebrities for under-age sex in the 1970s and 1980s.

The new approach is in the spirit of 19th-century campaigns, says Stephen Robertson, an American academic who studies the history of sex and the courts, in seeking to protect the young from abuse and to limit predation rather than fornication. In 1887, as part of a drive to have rape treated more seriously, America’s Christian Temperance Union cited the “frightful indignities to which even little girls are subject”. Many states raised their thresholds from ten to 14 or 15. Around the same time, London’s Pall Mall Gazette detailed the lives of child prostitutes and greedy procuresses in a series billed as “abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived”. England’s age of consent went from 13 to 16 as a result.