This could be touchy but please read the comment for more context, I just want to see if I'm remembering wrong. When I was in HS, not only was it normal to hear about 15 and 16 year olds dating guys in their 20's, but the girls that did were "cool"

For sure 100% although they were usually more like 16-18 rather than 15-16. Mostly juniors and seniors for sure. But at times some sophomores would go older (but not old) person crazy. Nobody really thought anything of it. It was considered cool if anything. Especially for juniors/seniors. The younger of the pair were plenty often the aggressive pursuer. Some girls would really heavily chase college or even 20-something guys. It wasn't rare to hear girls say stuff like high school guys are so immature. And it was common talk that girls mature faster than boys. Etc. You'd hear stuff said like that all the time in the 80s. Heck the movie Clueless has lines like that too in 1995 still. That said, it was still much more common for high school kids to date high school kids, but dating college or even 20-somethings was far from unheard of and usually not considered too much of anything (of course things could depend upon the exact situation and extremes etc. and it could possibly, depending). What happened is that in the late 80s the media ran a few scare stories, saw good ratings, saw almost no production costs and then started running scare stories on all sorts of things and creating entire shows in the 90s to get easy money, easy ratings for very little spent on production. Some of the shows started targeting stuff more like this, well not really like this at first, started with like low teens and under, actual PDF stuff and nothing really like what is being talked about here, but from what I've read then quickly ran out of show material so then to keep pumping out shows non-stop they apparently (I never watched any of the scare story shows of any type) started looking at very different stuff like 17 + 20 and such and went nuts with that. And after a decade of that attitudes for the new rising generations, late Gen X and on radically changed and even eventually started changing a bit for older generations if not as much. I do know that back in the late 80s on campus you'd virtually never hear words like creeper, stalker, potential shooter, etc. etc. used. Maybe like once ever two years you could hear such a term? If used would be used for real. When on campus again end 90s. It was crazy how often such terms got used since then and today seems you can't get through a day without seeing/over-hearing terms like that all the time, a few times a day even. And lots of time stuff like stalker and so on tossed around in casually ridiculous fashion. Back in the day only used in the most real of circumstances which was rare enough that you hardly ever heard such terms used much at all. Late Gen X and on do seem very noticeably less open and trusting of other people compared to all earlier generations. And way quicker to try to see or read worst into any scenario. Extremely easy to notice the generational difference. Also the whole definition of "PDF" got totally changed. It actually means attraction to those who are pre-puberty which is a pretty rare thing and somehow it got flipped to being applied to anyone even a single minute under 18. And that also became called underage even though in most of the world even to this day it's still most often actually 16 not 18. And then in recent years, at least online, which quite possibly doesn't really apply too much to the real world, you started seeing crazy stuff like 17 year olds getting called out for "creepily" dating 16.5 year olds and other ridiculous stuff like that. Or the whole people have no formed brain until 25 (a baseless misreading of a study that didn't say anything like that) and how 26 dating 24 is "twisted" and weird takes like that.