Do we need to ask ID beforehand?
Mom and I were both 5'9" tall in our prime. When she was seventeen, she smuggled an infant out of East Germany using forged papers and claiming it was hers. When I was fourteen years old, 5'7" tall and visiting my sister at college, people thought I was a college student when I was on campus.
In our teens, mom and I both could pass for adults and were repeatedly mistaken for such. While at the mall one day, someone at a department store asked me to fill out a credit card application when I was fourteen and refered to the seven year old I was babysitting as my daughter.
But later in life, we were both routinely mistaken for being substantially younger than we really were.
Mom wore a string bikini -- and looked good in it -- until she had a mastectomy in her early fifties. My family went on one family vacation to the beach.
Our mom was a beautiful woman. So at the beach, guys would chat up mom and my sister would wait for this and then do the "Look, Ma!" routine to bust these poor fools. I think she was twelve at the time.
My mom was like nearly twenty-nine when I was born. So when I was eighteen or nineteen, my mom was in her late forties.
Some scandalously younger man was trying to chat her up at work and she was married and trying to politely get rid of him. So she tried to cut the conversation short by telling him -- truthfully -- "I need to go get my daughter from college." because I didn't drive.
He says "You aren't old enough to have a daughter in college." She tells him "It's my youngest." And walks off.
I've repeatedly had people think I'm a few years older than my adult sons and assume I'm their older sister, not their mother. I've had people call me "miss" instead of ma'am who were themselves probably a lot younger than me.
It's a meme that suggests some men genuinely do not know she's underaged. I don't sleep around casually. I don't know how you can readily resolve this without insisting you only have sex with people you know well personally before it gets to that stage.
I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old. We graduated from the same high school in the same class.
I've not ever like gone to a bar and gone home with a total stranger. And I've been celibate for medical reasons for 21 years and counting.
I genuinely don't know how this gets negotiated in the slightest. But some thoughts:
1. Men typically initiate.
Women are supposed to say yes or no and we have a lot of social norms like if she's at a bar, you can reasonably assume it's okay to ask. Not so much in the grocery store.
2. This means men have to decide who to ask and why they are asking.
In other words, men need to think about what they find attractive. Based largely on visual information before speaking to a woman. While we call them shallow bastards for valuing looks.
3. And just one more thing:
Guess her age correctly and don't count on a sixteen or seventeen year old minor to say no merely because she's a minor, then get held legally responsible for inappropriate sexual behavior that makes you sound like a deviant if she says yes and you learn later she's younger than you thought.