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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.
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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