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I'm kind of confused by your response. Let me clarify:
A. I don't know what "phebophilia" is. It's just "ephebophilia". (Hebephilia, if that confused you, is a different thing, the next youngest age bracket.)
B. My model is definitely not that ephebophilia is a mere fetish. Ephebophilia, for a refresher, is the sexual attraction to older teens, around 15-17 (the arbitrary cut off for it only because of the common legal age of consent, even though I'd say that being sexually attracted to a 17 year old is far more similar to being sexually attracted to a 20 year old than a 12 year old or even a 14 year old).
My model is that this is essentially universal (at least and especially among men) if not the default ideal and strongest preference (in the absence of social pressure, mostly from women), because there is zero reason that we would evolve to not be sexually attracted to perfectly (and freshly, more unblemished ones, thus arguably superior) fertile humans right next to us (and history proves that's not the case) just because future people millions of years later would decide that the age of 18 is the correct arbitrary cutoff for sexual autonomy. Porn cannot probably "exacerbate" ephebophilia any more than fast food commercials can "exacerbate" your need to eat food to live or your inherent desire to do so with greasy high-fat/high-carb junk food (which is maybe some via exposure effects (though this is likely to more just affect particular brand preference as opposed to preference for the entire underlying category), availability heuristics, etc., but it's still not in any way rewiring your fundamental preferences as opposed to just appealing to them).
(A simple proof of this is the massive popularity of "barely legal" pornography, girls who "just turned" 18, and the overwhelming popularity otherwise of young girls, particularly (legal) teens, in porn, relative to their percentage of the overall female population. That is, men already park their erotic preferences pretty much as absolutely close to the legal line as they can, suggesting that they'd have no issue going lower if it were more legal/frictionless (and actively want to). If I'm pressed up against the doors of a store, that's evidence that I want to get in when it opens, not that I want to stay pressed up against the doors. It's just that this one door isn't budging.)
To elaborate on my prior analogy: McDonald's does not make people desire unhealthy food; our brains are wired to crave unhealthy food and McDonald's simply provides it. Maybe a McDonald's commercial shifts things psychologically on the margins somewhat, erodes your willpower to have a healthy salad instead by reminding you that the dark side exists, but if McDonald's didn't advertise at all, they'd maybe lose 2-10% of their business max (which still makes it more than worth their while to pay for them), not 100% or even likely 80%. The desire, which necessarily precedes the object that grants its fulfillment (otherwise nobody would have any reason to produce the object), would still exist.
The same is true of any erotic stimuli and ephebophilia. Maybe it can make you more likely to actively think "Hey, I'd like to fuck [a/that] 15 year old." in any given moment, but it can't put the desires/neurology/psychology producing that thought in your head (as proven by the fact that equivalently seductively produced content of a toilet or a banana isn't likely to make anybody who didn't have those thoughts before suddenly think they want to fuck a toilet or banana). Nature did that. (And if you see in real life a sexually attractive 15 year old, your probability of thinking "I want to fuck her." isn't likely going to be affected by prior/recent exposure to sexualized content of 15 year olds any more than your probability of accepting a free greasy burger in real life that's suddenly offered to you is going to be by whether you've seen a fast food burger commercial recently (which is again probably maybe some, but again not in any that alters the underlying inherent calculus much).)
Calling it a fetish is like saying people have a "food fetish" for McDonald's. That's obviously not the case.
Thanks for explaining, that does makes sense and is pretty convincing. People who consume the barely legal type porn are definitely marginal ephebophiles, if not full-blown ones.
There's definitely variation among people's taste, though. In my view, someone could have a "youthful" fetish the same way they have a mature/milf or an asian fetish. I suppose whether these are "fetishes" or not is a terminological debate, but I certainly did not have your view pinned down until you explained it.
There is, but it seems transparently obvious to me based on all of the data about the subject that in the statistical distribution of age-based attraction those who prefer the young/"barely legal" teens/etc. vastly outnumber those who prefer the old/MILFS/etc. (again at least among men).
Can somebody have a "youthfulness" fetish? I think they can have a fetish for the perceived social paraphernalia of youthfulness (which to me explains the distinction between ageplaying, which is genuinely a fetish as you describe I believe, and youth-oriented chronophilias), but to say that they have a fetish for youthfulness itself seems as nonsensical to me as saying someone has a "fetish" for symmetry or pertness or fair skin (all traits commonly enhanced by youthfulness).
The extreme ends of youth-oriented chronophilia could perhaps be explained/characterized as a "fetish" for neoteny (and I believe they are explained by simply having a higher-than-average genetic preference for neoteny), but this is so fundamental that "orientation" describes to me more accurately the character of it.
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