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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.
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.
?
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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