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tl;dr ephebophilia is not just an artifact of a fixed age of consent, but an attraction to specific psychological traits
I've been thinking about all the classic American porn paperbacks I've read and it made me realize something about the various flavors of MAPs. A lot of classic smut features ephebophilic scenes. Or, to not mince words, jailbait characters have sex in these books. Why would someone put a well-developed minor (and go into explicit detail about her womanlike voluptuousness) into his story? I could come up with three reasons:
Reading the books actually shows what this difference (in the mind of the writers) is. A grown woman has barriers around sex. Of course, it's porn, so everyone is a happy slut by the epilogue, but the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms. Well, maybe she has a few, passed down from her mother or her Sunday school, but as soon as she realizes that sex is a pleasurable experience (or "neat", as the books from the 70's put it), she's willing to have it for the sake of it (and suffer no ill consequences, because it's porn).
And it is my opinion that this attraction to easy-going relationships instead of torturous courtship is what defines ephebophiles and lumps them together with other flavors of MAPs. They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships, even though they are not attracted to actual physical traits of prepubescence. A literal pedophile might be attracted to specific physical traits, but he's also attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship.
However, I don't want to say this approach is exclusive to MAPs only. They are in a good and diverse company. People joking about "genetically-engineered catgirls" express a very similar sentiment: they imagine a female that is naturally loyal and attracted to them, unlike the messy natural femoids (curiously, this sounds more like a dog than a cat). Dudes mail-ordering brides from abroad expect them to follow a simple and straightforward contract: provide meals and sex, get citizenship. And of course, promiscuous gays are living every horny man's dream (modulo the sex of their partner).
This also explains why certain redditors* brand a 45-yo man dating a 20-yo woman a pedophile (steelman incoming). They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them. The woman should either practice perfect price discrimination or reject him in the name of... social justice?
Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.
* just today I noticed a major vibe shift on Reddit. People were discussing the latest anti-porn initiatives in the UK and were mocking those who think a 17.99-yo is a "literal child", treating them as their outgroup.
Huh? The majority of teenagers come with much more programming of anti-slut defenses, parental controls installed, innocence which keeps them away from sexuality. I'm surprised that anyone thinks that human sexuality is primarily innate, rather than cultural, as regards the kinds of things that typically occur in pornographic media.
From personal experience: dating teenagers-to-twenty-year-olds (when I was that age) was mostly a process of breaking down barriers around sexuality, while dating older women they know what they want and they know what they are going to get. Things are much more direct and simple. I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:
All of which amount to a core logic that dating older women is simpler and more convenient than dating younger ones.
So beyond the obvious "They're hot" and "16 or 18 or 21 is just a number with no inherent relation to human development in particular cases" I propose another reasoning for teenagers being the protagonists of your pornographic novels:
#4 For Older Fantasists, when placing a teenager in the leading role of a sexual fantasy, are placing themselves within the fantasy at the appropriate age to fuck such a girl. The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein.
Let's discuss a particular example of this: Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Listen to it, it's a classic and I don't want to hear shit about anyone here loving America if they don't like Billy Joel, but here's some lyrics for close reading:
I'm pretty sure everyone, ever, who has listened to the song pictured Virginia as a Catholic schoolgirl, around seventeen or eighteen years old; sixteen at the youngest nineteen at the oldest. Now, Billy Joel was twenty seven years old when he wrote this. My parents, who loved this song, were in their twenties when it came out. Does anyone who listens to this song imagine the narrator as twenty-seven talking to his Catholic schoolgirl girlfriend? I mean, I guess somebody might, but if they did we can all agree the song would be deeply creepy and awful, closer to horror than to pop. Even the most determined TRPer can't possibly argue that it's normal or good for a twenty-seven year old to be trying to talk his way into his teenage girlfriend's panties.
No, the normal listener to Only the Good Die Young is picturing a teenage boy talking to his teenage girlfriend. Which is normal, if not necessarily normative. Particularly given the later verse about running with a "dangerous crowd;" we're picturing a charming juvenile delinquent who will straighten himself out later. If we're instead picturing a twenty seven year old criminal, once again, creepy fucking lyrics.
You can tell the song is primarily nostalgic for Billy, and his audience's, younger days in that Only the Good Die Young is the start of Joel's nostalgia-retro-oldies period. You have a series of songs that mime the doo-wop of Billy's youth: Uptown Girl, Tell Her About it, The Longest Time. Then you have a series of songs that explicitly reference and call out Billy's boomer memories: It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Keepin' the Faith, We Didn't Start the Fire.
Joel is picturing himself at sixteen, talking to his sixteen year old girlfriend, and remembering the joys of being a teenager. The freedom of dating at that age, one's own strength and virility, with no stakes for either of you beyond mom's disapproval.
And I think a lot of ephebophilic fantasy is of this nature: the fat out-of-shape 38 year old porn consumer doesn't picture himself as a creepy 38 year old porn consumer when he watches "barely legal" porn, or reads it, rather he pictures himself at his prime at 22, when he at least had potential. Even moreso in a novel.
Moreso yet in real life. So often the balding but rich middle aged man who marries a young floozy second wife is trying to recapture his own rapidly-fleeing youth, when he had hair and freedom.
I'll also add in as a freebie throw-in:
#5 Male attraction is recursive and social in nature, and younger women provide higher status because they provide higher status
Men want to pretend that our attractions are purely simple and biological, but they aren't, they're deeply social and status seeking in nature. One can see this in the way "trends" in attractive women in pornography occur over time. What men want is what other men want, because when other men see that you have it, they will think that you must be pretty fuckin' bitchin' to attract such a girl. Marty's loser dad gets the hot girl in Back to the Future, and instantly everyone wants to make him class president and hang out with him. This applies to age as well: only rich and high status men can get the twenty year old girlfriend, so men seek out the twenty year old girlfriend as a status symbol. So much more the status symbol to have an illegal girlfriend, and be so powerful that no one can stop you!
As for me, hot women are hot, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The rest is just a question of what price you are willing to pay.
This just means that neither of you are ephebophiles.
I just kind of reject ephebophile as a category.
I can imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 10. I can't really imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 18 or 21 or whatever. I don't think those people exist. I don't think really think any man exists who will sooner have sex with a morbidly obese 16 year old than modern day Jennifer Lopez (leaving aside people with fat fetishes, who in turn I don't think would pick a skinny 16 year old over a properly-plump 35 year old).
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I think men are attracted to teenage girls because they are hot. Consider /r/jailbait from reddit's bygone time. I doubt people were that interested in the personalities or psychology of those girls, though I have no proof or firsthand knowledge.
There may have been some other factors like them thinking wishfully 'oh she'd be nice and fun to be around and not a gold-digging frigid bitch who treats dates like job applications' but surely the primary attraction is physical rather than intellectual. The majority of men don't masturbate to a charming personality (or an imbalanced power dynamic per feminist rhetoric) in and of itself, they masturbate to a beautiful body first and foremost. There might be other things on top of that but the beautiful body is the basis. Male smut is visual, physical, sex, sex, sex.
Women are more attracted to personality, character (though still very much interested in a body). We see female smut being more status-obsessed - the equivalent is wanting a billionaire werewolf vampire CEO incredibly respected and feared by other men who has an inexplicable desire for the woman and will reveal his emotional side for her alone... he may well have six-pack abs but it's not quite so much the abs they're into. These are the ones who are into written smut.
As the saying goes, you don't go to the gym to collect girls, you just get the attention of men. Going to the gym will help. But if you want to get girls, get rich or famous or fearsome. CEO, rock star, high-ranking drug dealer.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=57S7LFFHA80?list=RD57S7LFFHA80
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But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.
Our hypothetical woman is with a financially secure older man with disposable income. Not a penniless 40 year old and not a penniless 19 year old. Call her a gold digger if she seeks marriage. Or chuckle at those charts of Leonardo DiCaprio's age vs his girlfriends' age. But this hypothetical woman has determined her sexual value and found a buyer.
If we are going analogize finding romantic partners to buying and selling, then these women are like me when I sold my last house. I didn't sell it to a penniless college student. I sold it to an older man after he showed me his bank account. He had a million dollars in a checking account. I didn't fail to realize my house's value. I found a buyer and we agreed on a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Not that I endorse comparing dating and marriage to selling yourself, but if we're making the analogy then let's follow it through.
In reality, perhaps this is what’s happening. But I don’t think it’s what’s happening in the ephepophile’s fantasy, that causes him to be attracted to the 19 year old, no. Golddigging is an unattractive trait in a partner even if you are the beneficiary. One would prefer to think that the free-spirited young thing with few sexual hangups is exactly that, rather than secretly calculative.
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You've successfully discovered the psychological foundation on top of which "being a liberal" resides: being capable of decoupling X from the rest of the cultural baggage around X (and being disagreeable enough to point that out).
Unless you're in the 1970s (and even then), this is generally a liability, because the logical conclusion of that with respect to sex is "you're OK with fucking 7 year olds", a liberal of this type is ultimately being dishonest if he answers "no"[1], and everyone knows that (and you stated it anyway). This is also the genesis of the traditionalist's "it's a slippery slope from the gays to pedophilia" (but it's only really valid when criticizing classical liberals, which is why progressives appear to be immune to this type of criticism).
And the claim that this is "abuse" hinges on this point. As the risk incurred by having sex is nullified and the marketplace value of sex goes to zero (pornography helps with this), this fades into irrelevance, and "the woman wants to have sex, because having sex is neat" becomes the more salient point.
The fact that this is a childish view of sex is actually really relevant (and I do mean that in a literal sense; when kids- the kind closer to 7 than 17- have sex or do sex-adjacent things, I have it on good word that this is generally why they're doing them). Of course, this only results in a neutral to positive outcome if one or both of the participants can say "I'm done, and this sex was only fucking around", and in practice that's not guaranteed[2].
By contrast, a traditionalist or progressive will say that, because sex is the main thing of value women possess (for a bunch of deep-seated sociobiological reasons), that people being allowed to decouple sex from the cultural baggage around sex is devaluing sex -> destroying a woman's livelihood. And because the traditionalist viewpoint is centered around the willingness of men to pay top dollar for sex, and the progressive viewpoint is centered around forcing men to pay top dollar for sex, those types of people are going to argue that abuse occurs when you devalue sex in that way.
(Note that this doesn't actually consider the age of the participant- which makes sense; neither traditionalists nor progressives are particularly bothered about the subject's lack of age- for traditionalists, we can see that ages of consent higher than that are modern inventions so being married was the salient factor, and for progressives, they think 7 year olds can be meaningfully transgender.)
Only if you started from the traditionalist viewpoint: that the liberals are being dishonest about the above and trying to steal [literal] meal tickets from women. If a traditionalist did that, it would be a grave sin for them to do that: it would be exploitation, abuse, trickery given that they naturally understand sex to be a meal ticket in that way, so obviously, because everyone works like they do, the people not doing that must be lying. (Progressives do this too, just from the other direction because they started out in possession of the meal ticket.)
Of course, to the people who aren't lying about that but can't or won't acknowledge why the traditionalist viewpoint exists, that's going to cause some problems and damage their ability to trust traditionalist motives. After all, if the truth is one way, but they say it's the other way, then the only reason to do that must be hatred and stupidity... which, from the liberal viewpoint, it is.
[1] Which is why the more progressive-sympathetic liberals were very keen on the adoption of "consent" as a framework; it allows them to have their cake (we can do whatever we want) and eat it too (unless society has deemed the other partner sub-human), but is ultimately vulnerable to the fact that, when a society gets poorer and due to the fact the sexual marketplace is a marketplace, regulatory capture in the "declare competition illegal" direction occurs.
[2] Which is the main problem with fucking people who aren't necessarily able to judge that up front, or don't (in fact or perception) have the power to force a disengagement (which is why the "single mom's boyfriend discovered to be fucking the daughters too" thing exists, especially since the mother is herself making that calculation, consciously or otherwise).
That said, fucking people who don't believe they have that power, or are merely giving in, tends to result in dead-fish lays, which means the thing they "should" actually be after (described by faceh in a sibling comment) can't exist in that environment... which is an instant fail condition for someone genuinely interested in casual sexploration (and considering how obnoxious adult women are when they go passive like that, imagine how miserable that experience would be were it an actual kid on the other end- impressionability only goes so far). But that's basically just restating the slightly-hidden thesis that "molester/possessor" and "interested in casual/exploratory sex with for its own sake" are very different things.
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As someone who has been in a decade-long relationship with a woman who was four years younger than me (from my age 28 to 38 or so, so not a particularly creepy age difference) and not very emotionally mature, but who is better (i.e. single) now, just from an egoistical male perspective, there are serious downsides to seriously dating younger women. (I mean, a serial PUA could just dump them whenever they send him 20 texts and try to call five times for some emotional crisis, but he will also not get very wholesome relationships that way.) Not that my sample is very large, though.
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I think your first sentence is wrong and in direct conflict with the second sentence, which is right.
The median 20yo likely has a good idea of her SMV. She is unlikely to be in the situation where no man has ever showed the slightest interest in her, thousands of men have swiped left on her Tinder profile until finally, some pennyless, ugly 45yo comes along and sends her a dick pick, and she is immediately falling for him because she is just so happy that she will not have to die unloved.
Instead, she likely has a good idea that a ton of men want to have sex with her, and quite a few would actually be willing to dump their current partner or wife to go exclusive with her. If she is going for the 45yo, that is simply because he is making her the best offer. I mean, sure, the hottest 20yo she could get exclusively would probably be quite a bit hotter, but it would also mean that she would have to work some job to have a decent lifestyle. As you say, with 25 years of career, the (well-situated) 45yo can offer her a much nicer life -- at least until she gets replaced by a younger model.
An unpopular belief of mine, although not tightly held, is that women really do NOT mature much when they hit their twenties. Nor are they asked or expected to.
So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible. Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall, because dating the 28 year old means you're getting someone who is maybe marginally more mature and put-together than the 21 year old... but with a lot more baggage that you'll be expected to carry.
And if you were present when all that baggage was acquired, hey maybe that's okay. But walking into a relationship with a 28 year old who has been through a series of negative relationships and hasn't figured out how her own decision-making contributed to the problem, you're now dealing with emotional trauma that you had no role in creating, and a woman who is provably not good at maintaining relationships. That's not appealing, especially if you're looking over and spot a 22-23 year old who hasn't yet lost the basic aura of innocence and doesn't hate the world (yet), and there isn't a noticeable maturity difference.
And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either. My brother was/is one of those. But guys, well, they're expected to mature and won't find their feelings coddled during that time.
What's your sample? As a highly social individual / serial dater between long-term relationships, I've noticed that are shocking differences in maturity between even a 26 year old and a 28 year old. To be clearer, when I was 29-ish I found nearly every 26 year old that I dated (n=6ish) insufferably superficial and indecisive, but I found much more success the further into late 20s I went. That's when you usually get your first biggest pay raise, graduate from post-secondary education, change jobs, move cities, etc. These are all highly formative events that may afford you different privileges or even humble you. As a woman, you may even shift your dating priorities from "want to find love" to "want to find someone suitable to raise children with".
But, my bias is urban and at least the "some university" bullet option on the census form - i.e. since high school, I haven't dated anyone who only has a high school education.
My bias is also that most people who do not seek complexity in their life (not a value judgment, just an observation) beyond the age of 22 also do not tend to develop personalities beyond the age of 22 - they are essentially frozen in time. In comparison to individuals who do stretch themselves, those "frozen in time" tend to appear less emotionally and socially mature. Those groups also highly correlate with people who chose to (or accidentally) have children "early" (< 22) - but I don't personally believe that's necessarily causal in either direction. It also brings to mind the insult "peaked in high school" which I think has some classist / blue-tribe-on-red-tribe undertones.
Sometimes those emotionally or socially stunted people have a midlife crisis or some sort of later-in-life mellowing that causes a shift ("Barry really got his life together!"). In sadder scenarios, they may fall into alcoholism or other crippling addictions that are associated with an underformed prefrontal cortex. In the worst case they get elected to congress because they manage to get other like-minded people to the voting booth just by screaming and tweeting about complex problems having simple solutions (populism).
Personally speaking, I had some major shifts in maturity around the ages:
I was an insufferable asshole at the age of 20. I'm still an insufferable asshole, but in a much different way now.
Aside, as I didn't want it to detract from the thrust of my main statement:
This sounds like a character problem, not an estrogen problem. I've met plenty of bitter men who never learn from their bad experiences.
My immediate social circle and the benefit of social media allowing me to keep some distant tabs on people from high school and college. Seeing a good number of women I thought had good heads on their shoulders go off some deep end and regress to behaviors I recognize from when they were younger. Also including my Ex.
And partially through my job where I interact with people of many ages, and one of the more common and frustrating genres of people I encounter is "neurotic woman in her 40s or 50s who still has the demeanor of a teenager."
Dating has not done a lot to change the perception. I get the sense that women either mature quite fast (usually when they have good parental examples) and are generally self-sufficient by age 22-24... or they hit 25 and if they haven't gotten their mental house in order around then, it just isn't likely to improve from there. There's not likely to be a 'flash of realization' where they renounce their behavior before and suddenly they start 'acting their age.'
I keep making this point, But so many of the people that end up on Caleb Hammer's show are women who are absolutely, GOBSMACKINGLY bad with finances. Which is a decent metric for maturity if you ask me. Oh I'm sure tons of men are in dire straits too, but ain't nobody validating their choices.
Yes, I cede the point that many men never reach actual maturity. But 'character problem' can indeed be an estrogen problem.
I would suggest that a combination of hormones (keeping in mind that both estrogen levels too high and too low can have huge impact on mood) and a general lack of restraint/correction of maladaptive behaviors on women results in 'stunted' maturity in women even as they approach thirty. And there's nontrivial number of young women taking hormonal birth control in their teens and twenties which can exacerbate the hormone thing.
Then add in that mental disorders, especially anxiety/depression has spiked particularly badly among young women. And as a result young women are increasingly prescribed antidepressants.
This probably exacerbates the hormone issue above. I am highly suspect of what happens to brain development due to said brain being awash with a combination of exogenous hormones (birth control) and SSRI's and similar drugs for the entirety of one's young adulthood.
I dunno man, I get the sense that women are having an increasing amount of trouble coping with the world-as-it-is. That is, they have bad experiences, and rather than process and learn from them... they use pharma drugs to cope. And they become bitter.
I think men will have issues like this too, but they don't tend to go to social media and scream it from the rooftops, so it is harder to see. If it gets bad enough, they tend to kill themselves. Less serious, they may withdraw from society (or society discards them as useless), or go to prison if they lash out, or they become an Andrew Tate acolyte or something.
I am prepared to believe that this will be less prevalent among higher SES demographics.
I'm not trying to dismantle your argument, as I think you made it well. But I do want to point out that, at least in my circles, there's a strong correlation between "actively using social media" and "not having your shit together". In other words, if your sample is just social media, then you're missing out on all the well-adjusted individuals who are keeping to themselves.
Do you work in inside sales? Mostly making a lighthearted joke, here. Maybe even healthcare or aviation?
Yes, and indeed, in my social circle, the people who are actually keeping it together the best and who aren't basket cases tend to be the ones with the smallest social media footprint. I remain close friends with these ones.
But, uh, that ALSO tends to be correlated with "Got married relatively early" (before age 25) and "had kids" which is one hell of a major shift requiring one to hopefully become more mature. These folks were hitting their milestones 'on time' and usually had their lives in some kind of order at an earlier age.
I think even accounting for selection effects, I'm detecting a lot of women who hit some kind of crisis in their mid to late 20's and never fully moved on or recovered. In fact, that's often when they stop posting on social media altogether, because life has gone so badly for them they no longer want to publicize it. Hence, that spike in mental illness.
Me, I grew up kind of sheltered, but not bring my parent to an actual job interview sheltered
With Gen Z in general, but with, again, women in particular, there seems to be the double whammy of "taught to be afraid of almost everything" and yet "coddled and never forced to overcome actual challenges" that results in difficulty functioning in the uncertain and messy real world.
Which gets towards my original thesis: Women tend not to mature in their twenties, precisely because they're told on the one hand that the patriarchy is holding them back, many men want to hurt them, control them, that the world is completely slanted against them... AND they're given huge legs up for academics, employment, and general financial assistance.
At what point does your average woman need to gain maturity, if there's always some program or other that will render assistance if she finds herself facing difficulty, or there's always someone willing to take them in and shelter them from the consequences of their decisions?
And the upshot that women are actually less happy than they've been in decades.
The gap between how much assistance women are given, across the board, to succeed in life, and how dissatisfied they apparently are with how their lives are going seems to be at an all-time high. This tends to gel with the anectdotal observations I see, with women in particular having extreme difficulty getting their lives in order despite getting help from all sides, and complaining loudly that its not really their fault.
Which reads to me like they're still stuck in an adolescent mentality.
Law. I do a lot of probate work, where someone's parents die and now the children are coming in to close out their final affairs and parcel out their estate.
That's when I sometimes run into the adult woman in her 40's or 50's who starts acting like an entitled brat and trying to boss all the other siblings around and/or acts like everyone else is out to get her/take away what she feels belongs to her, when there's no goddamn reason to do that. Stands out all the more when you've got 2-3 other siblings who are all well-adjusted, and they're saying "yeah we figured this would happen, she's always been like that."
Tends to make the whole process more cumbersome and frustrating (more money for me, though).
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I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.
OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.
So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.
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Well of course. For a long time, the very powerful (extraordinarily) powerful constituency of men who want to no-strings-attached numbers of nubile teenage girls was kept in check only by an even larger, even more powerful force we might broadly call ‘civilization’. Consider that historically, men fucked large numbers of teenage girls in one of three circumstances:
The first was the large harem, limited to a tiny fraction of the most elite men, and a lifelong financial commitment that also required immense social status and power (having two or three wives the way a wealthy, 99th percentile wealthy Arab trader might have had isn’t the same thing). The full-scale harem with many (heretofore) virginal teenage girls and regular addition of new ones, certainly in the last millennium, was limited to kings, emperors, sheikhs, Beria etc. The second was rape and pillage, mostly in wartime. The third was in the case of prostitution, which involved girls sacrificed on the altar of male sexuality by the forces of economics, war, geography, famine, high maternal and paternal mortality rates and so on.
As social technologies, marriage had been invented to ensure lineage for inheritance and monogamy had been invented to reduce the greater instability, lack of buy-in and poor incentive structure (and not just for men, although that is a discussion for another day) common to polygamous societies. Even comparatively affluent and powerful men could not hope to have sexual access to respectable young nubile women of decent background, especially if they were already married (and marriage, of course, was about much more than sexual attraction) and so could not offer that woman or girl the title of wife.
Respectable young women could not be allowed sexual freedom because that exposed them to the great risk of pregnancy (with no way of determining the father), to (incurable and either fertility-destroying, fatal or both) sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and to the social shame that surrounded that kind of thing in traditional societies, and which was deeply intertwined with all the above. These forces (call it the combined weight of fathers and mothers and older brothers of girls, the church, tradition, faith, general propriety) stood firm against even the extraordinary social and economic power of grown men who really desperately wanted no-strings-attached sex with large numbers of teenage girls.
Quietly things started to change in the first quarter of the 20th century, due in part to the sudden emergence of a cure for syphilis and some other common STDs and more viable condoms. Divorce rates increased, which meant a slow decline in the number of two-parent homes when adjusted for lower parental mortality due to modern medicine. Great economic growth meant that young men and women alike could easily afford to live outside the home, not in boarding houses run by prying old women but alone or with each other. Then came the pill and, though it was less important, eventually legal abortion. For aeons, the social bulwark described had effectively precluded sexual liberation. Slowly, the arguments melted away, especially as religiosity began to decline.
Hugh Hefner emerged into a society in which the grand edifice of social tradition, particularly around sex, was uniquely fragile. It existed, but was increasingly little defended, and its defenders were ever less relevant. The men who wanted to fuck teenage girls with no strings attached and who didn’t care about the social consequences made their play, and they won.
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I'm sure there is a based tradcath out there somewhere who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.
But regardless of that, a part of the issue has to be the lack of a centralized authority that decides on this. Allowing everyone to recognize what the parameters are so that they can at least not claim ignorance of how the dating scene works and where they fall on the value curve.
My question would be, would that change be a good thing? Would that information change peoples behavior at all?
You called?
What do you mean by 'back in the day'? The youngest average female age at marriage since the middle ages was in the fifties.
It's true that teenaged marriage with large age gaps was viewed as more acceptable back in the day, and was more common than it is today- my own great grandparents were seventeen and thirty, marrying during the depression. But today that marriage is, contrary to the imaginings of progressives on the internet, sufficiently rare as to distantly aspire to be a rounding error on a lizardman's constant. IIRC married women under twenty have smaller average age gaps than married women in their early twenties.
The fifties were not trad; they were a social experiment that has been in many ways backed off from. In 1900 dating/courting was serious business for adult men ready to assume the responsibilities entailed in marriage and women who understood that this meant it was rather unlikely the man would be younger than about the mid twenties. Sometimes she was a teenager(Little House on the Prairie portrays this) but the average woman who married in 1890 was 23.
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https://acoup.blog/2025/08/01/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiia-family-formation/
So much for meme history.
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Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
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I'll also make a point that isn't an endorsement but is an observation I've made a lot, especially as I'm approaching real middle age.
"Introducing" a newbie to something, in general, is a very gratifying experience. Using your own deeper knowledge to guide them, give them little tips, and see their own development generates a strong sense of frission, in me at least. Hugely rewarding.
When it comes to sex, there's the double gratification of showing someone something new and then getting to partake in it with them for mutual pleasure.
I am told that many guys do prefer an older woman as a partner because such women have worked out their preferences, kinks, and limits and are quite practiced in their techniques and thus deliver a much more enjoyable experience overall.
I believe it. But taking a younger woman (not necessarily virginal) and showing her certain experiences for the first time and getting her unfiltered, completely unrehearsed reaction to such an intense sensation never really gets old. But the woman herself does, eventually after she's tried everything then the joy of new discovery is blunted. Novelty squeezed out. Then its just sex. Fun, but without the extra layer of finding new frontiers of eroticism.
And its not easily replicable! There's a finite supply of inexperienced (yet attractive) young women. Can't be recycled once they're despoiled. So it wouldn't be that surprising if some men try to collect 'em like pokemon.
So while this:
Is an unavoidable factor, I think there's 'obviously' a mutual gain to an experienced partner reaching out and lending some of their knowledge and guidance to an inexperienced one so they don't have to fumble around on their own or with an equally inexperienced partner and trying things out without knowing for sure if they're 'doing it right.'
Whereas a jaded, cynical, "experienced" woman who doesn't need a man's guidance to discover new experiences doesn't give that extra gratifying sense of "I alone have given her this feeling that she's never felt before." And, more directly, you also have to assume she's comparing you to those past encounters and you'll never really know if you measure up.
On net, you'd prefer to be the guy against whom all future encounters are measured, vs. the guy who has to wonder if she's being honest about her past encounters.
And lest I get hit with the leery, suspicious eye, my own preference is for a woman who I've been with long enough to learn all her sensitive spots, favorite positions, her strengths, weaknesses (and vice-versa) and develop a sincere intimacy so you can read them easily and adjust on the fly and otherwise maximize the mutual joy. That's the optimal setup. A slightly more experienced guy, an inexperienced woman, and a long relationship to grow into each other so both get the benefit of knowing that their shared experiences are unique and they're not being compared against some unknown third parties.
I absolutely don't relate at all, and I imagine that many men are on the same boat. But I can understand that a large minority of people feel this way and that minority of men due to their tendencies end up taking the virginity of an outsized proportion of all the women out there, thereby ruining it for the rest of us.
Those pokemon collectors are absolutely ruining it for the rest of us.
I've commented on the issue of Lotharios having an outsize (negative) influence on the pool of 'marriageable' women before.
I had the 'insight' that yeah, these types literally optimize for attracting young, sexually inexperienced women, they know exactly where to look, what to say, how to present themselves, and how to string such a woman along without getting in so deep they can't escape. Its a game they get really good at because they are playing it over and over and over again.
They do it a few times and then it becomes second nature, and since they never stick around, they can keep running up enough of a body count in a relatively short period of time to have a noticeable impact on the local singles market.
And some portion of them, I reckon, fetishize the act of despoiling an innocent girl with no intention of committing, but also take some pleasure from knowing she's been ruined for any other partners that might come along.
I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.
The nature of the problem is that a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner, and if one of these guys gets her first (and as stated above, they're VERY GOOD at this game!), as her first relationship experience it can pretty much ruin her ability to identify and trust a 'good' man, and might make her bitter enough to think all men are like that.
Doesn't work. For every Lothario you execute, there will always be another one eager to take his place. Having sex with a bunch of nubile virgins is the ultimate reward. All you are doing is selecting for more impulsive, risk-taking cads. Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it:
And, yes, this requires SUBSTANTIAL oversight, which our society is optimized to prevent (starting with the institution of college, which is virtually designed to take young women away from the watchful eyes of their friends and families).
Yes, I've zeroed in on college as a particular problem since it has compounding (negative) impact on a woman's marriageability and fertility. Four fertile years burned, racking up both debt and body count, for a degree that they may not use, and then they often opt to go for MORE schooling rather than enter a marriage or the 'real world.'
And of course it also creates the target-rich environment for the virgin poppers. Women from small towns, leaving their high school boyfriends behind, no parental supervision, tons of drugs and alcohol available, and both blatant and subtle nudges towards promiscuity all around.
Without some strong social pressure its almost impossible to expect women to resist for the full four years. And by the sheer numbers, most women don't resist. body counts at time of first marriage have steadily climbed.
So yeah, more supervision on the women is part of the the solution.
AND YET, removing some of these guys and deterring the rest would likely have an overall positive effect as well.
I mean, lets just use a fox and henhouse analogy. Yes, you guard the hens/eggs because they are dear, but if you catch a fox in the act, you still kill it. You don't want a whole population of foxes that are optimized for henhouse raiding to arise.
Except that (generic) you are not keeping your hens in a henhouse; you are sending them out into the forest without a care in the world, then getting upset because most of them end up eaten by foxes. You are trying to make the forest safe for the hens by executing the foxes one at a time, and that is simply not going to work.
First, you have to keep your hens in a henhouse. And in order to do that, you need a priest who tells you that it is good and proper for a man to lock up his hens, a sheriff who recognizes your legal right to do so as the rightful owner of the hens, and friends and family who will look at you like you are an absolute idiot if let your hens roam free. Only then will there be any point to killing the occasional fox that happens to get in.
Needless to say, our priests, our cops, and our communities do the exact opposite.
Agreed on college. Academia delenda est. Man will not be free until the last professor is strangled with the entrails of the last journalist.
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I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."
The problem with waiting until marriage is that Chad, who has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him, is not going to put up with that. And women only want Chad.
The only way this works if you have a third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being, such as her father or her brother, in control of her sexual choices.
I know of a great many men from older generations, and even in this generation, who are not Chads by that definition yet have had long relationships with women who care for them. I probably couldn’t string along 4 women even if I really, really tried — but I’ve had women ask me out before, I figure if for some sad reason I became single I could find a meaningful relationship within a year or so, and the women I’ve dated have shown every sign of cherishing the relationship. I relate to the feeling of hopelessness and marginalization, but not to the feeling that literally 100% of women are only and exclusively interested in a very small group of men regardless of how poorly they’re treated by them. The reason why “wait until marriage” (or some measure of commitment) works is precisely because many women actually desire that. Not because anyone forced them.
The situation for men is far from great, and the inequality between the haves and the have-nots is quite large, but I’m not convinced it’s so bad that it’s literally impossible.
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Or a father who is willing and able to act as the filter.
But yes, 'wait until marriage' works because its dead simple advice (though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached), it aligns incentives, filters out bad faith actors, and ensures both sides are getting what they want whilst constraining the other side from backing out after extracting value.
If you don't create a Schelling point, the marketplace can end up stuck at a different, very undesirable equilibrium. Rather than agonize over the number of dates before putting out, the issue of trusting the counterparty, or figuring out the 'optimal' period of time to wait... just push everyone towards the same standard and enforce it as best you can.
Or the threat of shotgun weddings.
Well yeah, see my point about supporting execution of such men.
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I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age. The only difference worth noting is that, at least in the West, there has been so much social conditioning that people are loathe to accept this fact, and those who do take the risk knowingly likely have other issues.
Back when OkCupid's blog wasn't a joke, they shared a chart showing response rates for women by age. The curve peaked at 18, and declined after. I am convinced that if the platform allowed younger women to sign up, then the actual modal value would be ~16 or 17. We have successfully pathologized very natural behavior, but oh well. I'm lucky enough to have a thing for MILFs, albeit they're just women my age these days.
Yes. I went through a period in my early twenties when I worried about this. But eventually I realized it's all preference falsification: "Women like responsible nice guys who respect women" but for men.
If you've ever thought a 16yo looked pretty as a grown man welcome to the "normal heterosexual male club". Almost everyone else is lying.
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Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking, while most men will find them attractive, to prefer them is more unusual.
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While there are some tells(acne etc) these are more common on younger teens. Most 17 year old girls are not readily distinguishable from young adult women in the same way that is true for boys.
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Hmmm.
I can point out that pretty much every heterosexual male goes through a period where they're exclusively chasing 15, 16, and 17 year old girls. Its called puberty and/or high school.
And with that in mind, its actually weirder to think that a guy's tastes would change drastically as he aged, why wouldn't he continue to be physically attracted to the same things he was physically attracted to as a teen? Even if, as his brain matures, he can optimize for personality traits more than pure looks.
And a part of me sure wishes I had gotten around to banging more 15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket, but alas I was inconceivably ignorant of the signals women would send me... and I'm glad I didn't end up knocking one up and derailing my life plans.
And as discussed last week, I can imagine a world where a 16 year old girl might demonstrate sufficient understanding of the risks and sufficient brain development that she could legitimately "consent" to sex with an older guy.
But even then, I don't think society would look kindly on the guy that did that. There are in fact many 'normal' behaviors that are pathologized to avoid, I guess, a spiral into an unhealthy equilibrium where, say, 40 year olds are regularly snatching up 16-year-old girls and removing them from the dating pool that would otherwise allow teen boys a chance to get some experience.
"15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket..."
When you're also young, they don't seem particularly nubile or special.
Going to disagree. But you do have that awkward period where you're still transitioning from finding girls icky and rife with cootie infestations to kinda adorable and then intrinsically appealing.
Although I also have had pretty much the same "type" since I was about that age, and it is fair to say not many high school ladies could fill out those requirements.
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Let's say there are two women you met in a bar: Alice is your age but has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Barb is in high school, and she also has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Both are making eyes at you. Which one would you (well, the Rawlsian you) rather take home?
Wait, do I know who is who?
Yes, you have talked to both.
Strictly speaking, I'd be happy with either. If I have to choose, the one who's actually my age. More longterm potential there.
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I think a case could be made for making exclusive ephebophilia a pathology. Like "eww, that girl is 22 and has a real job, I don't want to stick my dick into her". Evolutionarily speaking, that would be maladaptive. I do not know if it is very common, however.
I agree that "fuck every woman (except those closely related to you) who looks fertile and healthy if you can", which was probably adaptive for males in the ancestral environment and is probably the most common sexuality in men today does not need a special term.
The kind of "exclusive" ephebophilia you mention seems vanishingly rare to me. Often the kind of men opting to go for much younger women are doing so both because they like them, and because they would have a harder time with the older ones who aren't so tolerant of them being weird/lazy/unsuccessful. Think aging musician or bartender with no other credentials, they can convince a college sophomore that they're super cool, but don't appeal to women in their age group looking for something serious. That is rational from their perspective, they're getting laid at the end of the day. There are rare exceptions like Leonardo Di Caprio, who can afford to make a break for it when they cross 25, as he can easily afford to be picky.
At the end of the day, men tend to prefer youth and correlates for fertility. They might even have preferences that their partners be dependent on them, which describes so many goddamn people that I wouldn't call it pathological. Men were the breadwinners for most of recorded history.
I mostly agree with you here, but I'm not sure about a "preference for dependence". I definitely think that there's something of a provider instinct in men (the proximate cause of findom fetishes and general simpery in its maladjusted forms), but I don't know if it generalizes to an outright preference for incapacity. It certainly doesn't seem like men get the ick from women who are functional and capable as independent adults, and I'll say that men who do recoil in this way are indeed possessed of a pathological mindset/ideology. Caveat: this may not apply if the woman is significantly and obviously better than him at more masculine-coded tasks.
Also, younger women are not necessarily more fertile when you're talking about teenagers. I can't find the source ATM, but I've seen data showing that 14-year old girls are about as fertile as women in their late 20's, with peak fertility being reached at 19 or 20 and then declining linearly from there.
I mostly agree, but I would assume that evolution incentivized attraction to total fertility. If you shack up with a woman in her late teens, you can, at least in theory, get many more kids out of her than you can in the late 20s. We live in a very unusual period of time, when we can take negligible infant or childhood mortality for granted.
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I mean that's part of the Epstein thing to me.
If a given client didn't realize that barely-illegal girls were on the menu it's not like he's gonna be able to tell immediately that somebody's 17 years, 364 days and 23 hours from their aura. Going to dodgy orgy island with Escorts isn't illegal in of itself.
This ended up on the cutting room floor and didn't get into my post, but Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, had sex with barely illegal girls not because that was his kink, but because he got burned having sex with a regular escort.
If you're a celebrity or a politician and your good friend Jeffrey invites you to his island for some frolicking and debauchery, you will want whoever participated in frolicking and debauchery with you to keep her mouth shut and not to blackmail you or to go on a talk show crawl peddling her newest book How I Fucked Bill Gates and Why He Isn't Even in My Personal Top 50. So good friend Jeffrey needs someone who honestly thinks she will get in trouble if people learn what she has been doing with her various orifices.
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The age thing, whilst more viscerally nasty, is probably not the sole reason for why Epstein and friends are looked at so negatively.
The idea of an upper class that lives voraciously lavish lives, engaging in all manner of depravity and indulgence, is pervasive in history and fiction. I don't think there is a single example where people look at these behaviors positively.
To that extent, whilst one might have to make more nuanced arguments against Epstein and friends on those grounds, the argument is there. Epstein and the people going to parties on private islands were doing something shameful and ugly even without the child rape trafficking.
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