I can recall in my family and with other girls the idea that there are certain girls into older guys (like 10 year olds chasing 20 year olds) was a matter of promiscuity, they'd hear about some girl whos sleeping with some old guy, or some 'slutty' girl who was having sex in middle school and regard it as slutty behavior, in those days there was at least some aspect of the female social ecosystem which kind of believed youngsters had agency enough to be lewd. Or as my grandmother would say "some girls are just born like that", which in my case, being a pretty lewd woman myself, it's probably true.

I think from personal experience (if you can remember your school days) you'd find many examples of overly sexual girls, In my case we were all lusting after guys 15, sometimes 20 or 30 years older, and even my own mother would show me pictures of male stars and talk sexually about them to me while nonchalantly ashing cigarettes as if it was natural for me to also lust after some 40 year old (which it kind of was)

So there was evidently some general acknowledgement that older men were attractive, and that its normal for kids to be attracted or express attraction to grown men generally.
However there was also this perhaps jealousy driven phenomena where any girl whos with older guys was a little taboo hussy. Mixed signals to say the least.
A crab bucket mentality where we're both encouraged to lust for men but also discouraged and ostracized by peers if one does so.

And on top of that you have the confusion of the same parents who did not mind talking sexually about men with you also pretending to be horrified about some guy getting with a young girl. Would a handsome celebrity be in the same category as that criminal to them if he kissed me?

I'm older, so my parents were children in the 60s, and in their day guys who liked young girls were just quirky perverts and you were 'lucky' if you got a handsome one. There was still this ghost lingering that would see an overly sexual girl and laugh or shrug when they hear about some girl getting pregnant at 12 and chalk it up to her being a perverted girl who can't say no to dicks. A ghost that talks about its molestation by an uncle as just another fumbling early sexual experience to be laughed at over lunch with the girls. That kind of indifference can be pretty tough for people were actually assaulted.

Nowadays it's pretty different, everything is trauma, early sexuality cant even be acknowledged as a reality (unless youre gay i guess). You could say its even more repressive, because everything by default is malicious, but the expectation to be sexual is still there. Theres an unspoken acknowledgement that girls find older men attractive yet the expectation to reject it. However, repression can make you like age gaps even more.