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Lately I have been wondering why our society is (or seems to be) increasingly hostile towards romantic/sexual relationships between a (1) a man; and (2) a much younger woman. Recently I read that a well respected football coach -- Bill Belichick -- was denied admission to the Football hall of fame based on the fact that he is in a romantic relationship with a woman who is much younger than him.
What's interesting to me is that for many years, there has been a popular idea that it's completely fine for two consenting adults to enter into a sexual/romantic relationship, even if those two adults are the same sex; even if they are different races; and so on. Societal disapproval of relationships between an older man and a younger woman seem to be an exception to what could be called the "love is love" principle.
I admit that I have a personal interest in this issue: I am a middle aged man and my fiancee is a good deal younger than me. I will call this an "age-gap relationship" or "AGR." (For purposes of this post, I am referring to AGR's involving an older man and a younger woman.)
I can think of a few hypotheses:
(1) My initial assumption is wrong; outside of a few extremists online, most people don't care about AGRs. As noted above, my fiancee is a great deal younger than me; we have gotten the occasional curious glance while out in public, but I haven't directly experienced any hostility. That being said, the case of Bill Belichick seems to suggest that this sentiment is affecting real world decisions.
(2) This is reflective of society's increasing hatred of and hostility towards men. Although it's been common for decades for TV commercials to portray wives as smarter, wiser, and generally better than their bumbling idiot husbands, it seems this trend has gotten much more intense in recent years. "women are superior to men" is pretty much the constant drumbeat in most media these days. Coupled with that is the idea that male desires are invalid and illegitimate. Against this backdrop, arguably one would expect that society would disapprove of AGRs inasmuch as they are perceived to satisfy the common male sexual desire for younger women.
This explanation appeals to me since it fits with the (very satisfying) idea that my outgroup (progressives) are mainly just bad people who are full of hate, but I will try to keep an open mind.
(2a) Women (whose sentiment has a huge impact on societal values) object to these relationships since it reminds them of a significant disadvantage they have in comparison to men: Female sexual attractiveness inevitably and steeply declines relatively early in life. Since women tend to compare themselves to the most elite men, they get the frustrating impression that society has made life extremely unfair for them. Perhaps women have always felt this way and what's changed is that they have more of a voice.
(3) The internet and social media has made it much easier for AGRs to develop so it's a bigger issue. This seems plausible to me, but on the other hand when I was in high school many years ago there were sexual/romantic relationships between teachers and students. Although these were never approved of, they are far less tolerated nowadays than they were in the 70s and 80s.
(4) Society has become aware that these types of relationships have a much greater opportunity for abuse. While there are definitely a lot of predatory men out there, my issue with this explanation is that there are a lot of relationships (both romantic/sexual and non-romantic/sexual) which entail a lot of abuse and predation, which relationships society doesn't seem to care all that much about.
(5) There's no real reason per se. It's just a self-reinforcing bandwagon effect. This is definitely a possibility but it's difficult to think of how this hypothesis could be verified. Besides, this hypothesis doesn't seem to explain, in a satisfactory way, why society would make this exception for the general "love is love" principle.
(6) It reminds people of guys like Jeffrey Epstein. The thinking is that if a man will openly date a 19 year old, chances are he secretly lusts after females who are below the legal age. This seems plausible, but it doesn't really account for societal disapproval of a relationship between someone who is 70 and someone who is 24. (Or does it?)
Anyway, I would be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on this subject.
I met my wife when she was 18 and I was 27. I'm not exactly a social butterfly but I never noticed any obvious disapproval of this in the real world. I think the dynamic is fairly obvious and is an instance of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism. I think your explanations 2 and 2a are most applicable. Male desires are invalid when they aren't female-approved, but female desire for height and a full head of hair are never questioned outside of incel forums.
I once saw a good joke on twitter that went something like this, "Female desire for men to have a full head of hair is rooted in pedophilia", and truthfully, that is exactly the level most of these critiques are operating at.
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You're thinking too much into this and putting forth overcomplicated examples that don't have much to do with the way regular people think about these things. It has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It's that any time there's a large age difference there's a presumption that the guy is in it for the sex and the woman is in it for the money. Most of our social relationships are among our peers, and romantic relationships are just an extension of our social relationships. If a girl in her early 20s invited me to hang out with her friends and they were all in their 60s and 70s, I would certainly think it odd. Since we find these kind of relationships implausible in general, we jump to the conclusion that their must be an ulterior motive, especially since the ones we hear about all seem to involve wealthy men and unusually attractive women. The most pushback I ever got against this idea was incidentally from a rather left-leaning podcast that was discussing Anna Nicole Smith's marriage to Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall. Smith was 26 and Marshall was 89 at the time of the marriage, and he died 14 months later, leading to a probate battle that took years to resolve. They argues that the media focused too much on the money and didn't pay any attention to their personal lives, which made it clear that it wasn't a sham relationship.
Beyond that there are practical considerations. A friend of mine, who is about 50, recently got married to a girl 20 years his junior. There doesn't really seem to be an age difference now, but when she's 65 and at the age when most people are looking to enjoy their retirement, he's going to be at the age when most people are looking at assisted living.
I feel like "in it for the money" is a bad cultural concept in this context, which conflates the natural class interests that go into marriage, especially for a woman, with prostitution. The problem with "gold diggers" isn’t that they find wealth a critically important quality in a man, it's that they simply plan to extract it and leave.
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I feel confident saying its a mix of (2) generally and (2a), specifically intrasexual competition driven by the fact that Millenials are hitting their late 30's 40s, many, MANY of them single (including both those who were married, and who got divorced). And they're now facing down the implications of this situation in a way that prior generations never had to.
And now we've got a sizeable surplus of older women who are effectively 'unionizing' to try and preserve their value in the marketplace, and a surplus of older guys who are in the 'prime' (if they took care of themselves physically) and have the wealth to expend on acquiring the things they missed out on in their younger days. No, its not unique to millenials, but I suspect that the environment they're in is creating pressures previous generations didn't experience at the social level.
On top of the complete demolition of any social/religious guidance around dating, leaving everyone to do things on an ad hoc basis.
Older women would love to prevent older men from getting taken off the market by younger women. Rationally so! They have an uneasy alliance with younger men who would ALSO like to keep older men from competing.
The only way to restrict wealthier older men from 'poaching' young women is either massive doses of social shame (which Celebs, at least, are probably immune to) OR getting them MeToo'd (which is a specific type of social shame that can also carry legal consequences). So some sort of 'moral' framework gets built out around these relationships to attempt to justify the attacks.
I've pointed out that if we don't have a system where EVERYONE (even the King) is Monogamous... then the likely stable alternative is harem-maxxing.
Anyway, here's my prior research into the prevalence of age gape relationships:
https://www.themotte.org/post/120/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/19112?context=8#context
I was actually surprised to find that they were more common (historically and now) than I thought. Husbands being 10+ years older is already about 8% of heterosexual marriages!
And that's not accounting for non-marital ones.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/half-americans-say-they-have-been-10-year-age-gap-relationship
Here's a more recent poll on that point. HALF of Americans say they've been in a 10+ year relationship? I actually find that a bit hard to swallow, but should tell you something nonetheless.
Given the study's design, take it with a whole shaker of salt:
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From my perspective, any man that divorces his wife of simillar age to fuck a just about teenager is morally a piece of shit for deontological reasons.
Secondly: If the only thing you care about is youth and beauty, you are a shallow piece of shit.
Thirdly: Some part of the reason women don't want to have kids or get married is cultural memory of men saying they are down for a life long commitment to this family, then dipping as soon as their dicks could get wet easier elsewhere. We don't want the same group of people berating them thusly: "Settle down! Have kids! Sacrifice your freedom for family and the state! If your partner fucks off for some young pussy, don't get in your feels about it!"
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Just as an anecdote and because I like to talk about it, I'm substantially older than my wife and we've both found it to be a healthy, even ideal dynamic. Coincidentally, yesterday, she told me that sometimes she likes to dream that I'm even older and she's even younger. But then we are also countercultural weirdos who believe in things like traditional gender roles and having lots of kids, so ymmv.
Finding a jailbroken woman who's willing to notice how things actually work and what she actually wants, independent of mass cultural programming, is strongly indicated if one can manage. But despite having intentionally optimized for finding such a girl, I can't pretend it was anything other than the grace of God that we got together. It's hell out there.
If nothing else, I've think the argument about "different life experiences" falls flat on its face.
The whole point of long term relationships is mutually experiencing life. If you stick it out then your life experiences will inherently equalize. One being substantially more experienced than the other doesn't reduce that factor, as long as they're willingly sharing in experiences going forward.
Now, I'm going to politely inquire, in terms of you and your wife's physical attractiveness, would you rate each of you as close on an 'objective' scale? I'm specifically NOT accusing her of being a gold digger or you of flexing wealth to make up for anything, its just helpful context.
People's subjective preferences override such things anyway.
Yes, I think we're extremely well-matched in terms of physical attractiveness. Specifically each other's league as it were. We both find each other very hot.
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Our culture is so fixated on individualism that the contrarian pseudoreactionaries are reinventing women’s lib. Respect.
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It’s fundamentally bad for Democracy for guys like Musks/Belichick getting second or even more cracks at marriage. If some may have many partners it means other men have 0 or partners they hate. There is no way for this to scale in my opinion without having massive flaws that don’t work well in Democracy. Absent war that kills off a huge portion of the male population. The likely result is ending up with 20% of the voter base being angry and looking for a fight.
Thing is, its also utterly unrealistic to expect extreme-high-status men to accept being alone for 40+ years OR marry someone they aren't attracted to.
How do you stop them from using their status to just override any taboos and get what they want?
I do think its a real problem when they cycle through young women and leave them less appealing for the younger guys, of course, so I agree in general.
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I mean, for the belichick example it seems worth noting that she’s not just younger than him- hes old enough to be her grandfather. Normies don’t care about much smaller age gaps thé internet freaks out about.
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Is this you, baby? Back under a fake name? Because the whole aura of "why can't I, a 30 year old man, bang hot nubile sexy little Lolita 15 year olds without society tut-tutting at me" sounds awful familiar.
So far as I can find out, it's not "Belichick was denied because he was banging a chick 48 years younger than him for the past three years", it was "some kind of cheating scandal cooled the vote":
Shit man, he should be disqualified for that reason. You cheat, you don't get accolades. Very simple, or it should be very simple.
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You (and @ArjinFerman):
If you suspect someone of being an alt, report it to us (people frequently do this when pressing the report button). It is much more effective and less annoying. We'll take it under advisement, though we won't necessarily (and probably will not) tell you if we decide someone is a ban evader. People suspect other posters of being alts all the time. Usually they are wrong, sometimes they are right, but publicly calling someone out like this is not productive. It just causes drama, especially the way you do it, in such a taunting "neener-neener I see you" manner.
Length of account history is not a guarantee of not being an alt. Many people create multiple sockpuppets, sometimes going back years, just to establish account history and have backups in case their primary shit-stirring alt gets banned. They frequently brag about this to us when they get banned, and think they are demonstrating their great cunning, because we've surely never anticipated such a genius move.
@omw_68, while on thin ice for other reasons (mostly bad faith attacks on other posters), is probably not Mr. Underappreciated Naturally Whitely Superior Genius Ebophile. That guy is in the category of people who cannot hide their light under a bushel--they always reveal themselves quickly. Most of our repeat obsessives underestimate how difficult it is to hide their obsessions and their writing style even when they are trying to fly under the radar. At any given time, we're aware of a number of alts who think we haven't noticed them yet. Generally our policy is to let them have enough rope. Fact is, subject matter alone is rarely a decisive tell, and guys who want to complain about progressives and specifically why progressives are terrible for disapproving of age gap relationships and prioritizing female preference are... not exactly rare on the Motte.
@HereAndGone2 was never permabanned and is not ban-evading. If she had been, she would not be allowed to still post (she is another one who could never keep a mask on for very long). She has flounced several times and come back under a new name, which we allow because she doesn't exactly try to hide it. That said, her past record doesn't get wiped clean with a new account. Please behave yourself, Daoiseach-of-the-many-names, I would also hate to see you leave forever, even though you keep blaming me for your departures.
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No it’s a totally different person and this isn’t his hobby horse.
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She's never been permabanned. I seem to recall her saying she'd lost the password to her previous account, and she then turned down our offer to restore it.
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It just seems awfully coincidental that a second person with the same bee in his bonnet over age gaps should pop out of nowhere.
Am I? How nice of you to keep track for me, I feel so seen, cherished, and valued that you spend precious time and energy on worrying about what I'm doing!
Sure, in isolation that's a fair thing to base your, but when you can click his profile and see things like "joined 2022 September 08", and "452 comments" that should put the suspicion to rest.
Oh, I can do better. I think you're an indispensable part of this forum's folklore, and I'm happy that you're still posting here. I'm just pointing out that someone's throwing stones in glass houses.
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Two additional points.
One: middle-class, urban, college-educated, office-working single women generally agree that a) society should be OK with them waiting until the age of 31-33 to settle down b) when that happens, 33-37-year-old well-paid, high-status, successful, ambitious, good-fashioned male managers should be lining up to propose to them because, as far as they're concerned, these are the men that are their own equals. It should be just self-evident. When these men refuse to do so and, moreover, decide to jiggle / pair up with 22-25-year-old hot women instead, it generates a considerable level of resentment. That wouldn't normally spill over to other social circles, but the people who write blogs, articles, books etc. about, and generally appear in the media to comment on, the human marketplace are either such women themselves, or are in social circles where most of the women are such women as these. This then has a larger social effect as a result.
Two: the notion of a man openly, unashamedly making selfish and hedonistic use of whatever advantage he has in life is generally not something society is OK with. It's seen as unbecoming behavior. Like taking a long vacation in the Philippines and making local impoverished young women engage in all sorts of disgusting sexual acts with you in exchange for a sum of money that's almost considered a pittance at home.
regarding (2a) and (4), it's not just abuse but also another form of disadvantage. Due to the mismatch in male and female average life expectancy, a woman who marries a significantly older man will be condemned to the lot of a widow with children for many years, someone who's basically an unmarriageable, invisible creature.
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I haven't heard this talked about very much among the women I know, or seen it come up in real life. It seems like opinions vary depending on the specifics, not only of their ages and life circumstances, but also their personal characteristics.
There probably is an annoyed old maid effect, though I haven't encountered it in real life. Nobody I actually know was hoping to date Brad Pitt, and was disappointed when he chose a younger woman instead.
Some religious sects like to emphasize women as those who stay at home under their husband's umbrella of protection, while the men go out into the world, work, and lead. Since this is already playing up the power and agency differential, I would be concerned about a young woman in that culture marrying a much older man with much stronger preferences/opinions/set life circumstances than her. They'll tend to fall into "I do this/like/believe things because my husband does," which I don't like, and seems to be setting them up for abuse.
I would be much less concerned about a couple with an age gap, but similar life development levels, where she's responsible, conscientious, serious, and wants to settle down young and start a family, and he has a steady job and house to make that happen, and they're working together on their household as project. In those cases I'm not sure that I really notice the age gap all that strongly.
It occurs to me that the "power differential" argument could actually be analysed as almost entirely upside down. Isn't it the case that the 20 year old woman is the one with good BATNA/options, and hence greater negotiating power, compared to the 50 year old one who would be left with whatever the market looks like for 50 year old divorcees? In fact, as long as there are in fact 20 year old women who date 50 year old men, the 50 year old woman's equal-age-bracket husband is even less incentivised to stay in his marriage rather than chase that possibility; so perhaps the age-gap relationship is indeed bad for someone's power differential, but not the one of the people involved in it.
I'm not convinced that this is outweighed by whatever impact the difference in "life experience" has. Outside of romance novels, most 50 year old men do not actually seem like they have acquired a mastery of guile and manipulation that no 25 year old could hope to compete with, but are basically what you'd expect a boomer to be - that is, financially a bit more settled, perhaps a bit less anxious, mentally quite a bit less sharp and more rigid, and slowly falling out of touch with modernity. I don't see this conveying a degree of power over young women that must be regulated, unless you hold that they are constitutionally incapable of resisting someone who can stay calm (in a slightly loopy way) and buy them dinner.
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Can you define this for me? What does "power differential" mean in the Western context?
Is this like the Dragonball-Z thing where power levels are quantifiable?
Because, to my understanding, in most (all?) western nations, men and women have totally equivalent rights. There's a lot and, somehow, growing legislation in the U.S. to guarantee this. Where exactly is the extra or additional "power" that a husband has over his wife?
Money? Well, ok. If the wife decided to rely on the man to pay for everything isn't that like her decision? It's not like bridestealing is legal.
Age? Even more of a "wha?" from me. Do old guys get magic powers at 50 that let them bamboozle young maidens? Do women under the age of 30 not have their full faculties developed yet (wait, don't answer that. Yass queen slay at any age).
The entire "power dynamic" or "power differential" trope seems absurd to me. Obviously couples often have one partner who is domineering and authoritative. I don't think that's a good thing but the antidote to that is telling both men and women to not let their partner walk all over them. Furthermore, are there also copious examples of couples loving and respecting one another despite massive actual power imbalances? Isn't that kind of the point of a lot of traditional marriage rituals and covenants?
"Power dynamic" seems to be yet another instance of suicidal absolution in which we tell mostly women - "Oh, you have no agency in your own relationship (that you entered into voluntarily) but that's okay because (somehow) this awful, awful man is using his power differential to "gaslight" you."
Either women over 18 (or 20? 21? 25?) have legally and socially incontestable ability to make and abide by their own decisions or else we have to start taking the crazies' "make women property" argument seriously.
While ‘power dynamics’ are another example of Marxist fan-fiction as theory, age gaps do correlate quite strongly with patriarchy- but the causation probably runs the other way.
Imagine you are a peninsular Arab man. You love your daughter, but you are a man of your culture, and you know that she needs to marry and will then be at the mercy of her husband. Don't you want to make sure it’s a known quantity? Mathematically that’s going to push older. Older husbands that are less likely to change is a sensible risk minimizing strategy when you don’t have a backup plan.
Makes sense. It's men playing indirect chess with one another via their daughters. Yes, very patriarchal but actively with the intent of a better, or, at least, better risk adjusted outcome for their daughters.
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I have four theories myself:
1: People are getting older on average. As the ratio of young people go down, more careful attitudes dominate society. The average age of internet users probably doubled since 2008, and teenagers are much more accepting of sexy 18-year-olds than 30-year-old users are.
2: Womens social value goes down rapidly after the age of 25. They're upset about this, so they hope to change socities standards so that men are forced to choose them over younger women. Your "society hostility towards men" fits in here nicely.
3: Leftist moralizers. Moralizers are ruining society in general, every new law and social attitude is basically "This was okay in the past, but now it's wrong and we need to stop it". The only attitudes I see going in the opposite direction are those related to hedonism (legalization of weed, porn, psychedelics, gay marriage, etc.). While moralizers are ruining society globally, age-gaps are more accepted in Asia (I mean Japan and the surrounding countries, I don't care for other definitions of 'Asia'), which is more traditional.
4: The right hates those in power, calling them pedophiles. The left accuses the right of pedophilia, not because there's signs of it, but because it's the most damaging accusation you can currently use against another person (now that 'nazi' and 'racist' don't cut it anymore). The left attacks anime, saying it sexualizes school girls, and the right attack transsexuals, saying that they're pedophiles and that they want to corrupt children.
The consequences of this is that everyone hates pedophiles and vigilantly looks for signs of it, while also being terrified of associating with anything which might look like pedophilia. And the average person now thinks pedophilia includes sexual attraction to the 13-18 age bracket, even though it does not. So the most neurotic of them think being attracted to 20-year-olds is "almost pedophilia".
Some open-minded(?) leftists tried to get pedophilia to be accepted, with their new "MAP" concept. But due to what I assume is the above reasons, it didn't gain enough traction to sway public opinion. It may still be possible in the future, though. Laws governing porn keep getting stricter as porn is becoming more normalized, so such developments aren't self-contradicting.
What I'm noticing is that these attitudes are almost exclusive to the U.S., and I'd assume the main motivation behind them is to throw ragebait at the Christian Right out of spite, even though I don't think most of the people doing this ever notice that they're about 20 years late because the Christian Right has been a spent force for a long time.
"[Cultural leaders] are always preparing to fight the last [culture] war" sounded funny when I initially considered it, but I think may have a ring of truth to it.
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6 is close but many upper class elites being pedophiles was suspected or known even before Epstein's fall exposed it. I remember the hilarious skit where Sacha Baron Cohen bought a "pedophile detector" when meeting with Roy Moore for instance. Jimmy Savile was able to abuse hundreds of people, many children, without anything being exposed till after his death. There's a former Speaker of the house who was a serial child molester and suspiciously like many others the courts just seemed to drop the ball with him. He literally admitted to it*. Pizzagate was moronic as the only meaningful failure here but that was a bunch of partisan brained morons trying to find "secret messages" rather than actually being against child abuse.
If the pedophiles aren't going to be exposed and punished then the second best option is to be weary of anyone who does pedophile lite behavior. Like a 40 year old who only wants to date people 18-20? Pretty suspicious, makes me wonder how much lower they'd go if it wasn't illegal. Makes me wonder how much lower they are going and how much they care to check if the person they're with is of age.
For a male....No? Nothing at all suspicious.
20 - 30 is objectively when women are most physically attractive to men of all ages. When I was in 8th grade I had Megan Fox or whoever - that is, women older than me as objects of fantasy. My Dad remembers 1990s Cindy Crawford - younger than him then (and, now, too fwiw).
How is this suspicious?
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"wary". Though in the context of serial offenders on two continents with decades of abuses it's an understandable typo.
Weary/wary and risque/risky are two spelling errors that baffle me. I'm a pretty poor at spelling, and mix up there, their, they're more than occasionally, but those two aren't homonyms.
They are natural errors to make if you learn english mostly by reading, so are a strong sign of a non-native speaker. English spelling is unusually arbitrary and it's very easy to read those pairs as homophones. And otoh mixing up there and they're is a nonsensical error to make if you learned by reading, so are a sign of a native speaker. See also could of.
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There is a theory I've seen floated around by Louise Perry (author of "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution") that, as a practical matter, a lot of women really don't actually like the fruits of the sexual revolution. As much as the manosphere theories float around about women generally loving riding the "the cock carousel" with Chad before settling down or whatever with some beta cuck, in actual fact, that's not really a great description of a very broad slice of women and what they really would prefer (see the jokes about lesbians bring a U-Haul the first date, or the phenomenon I've been seeing discussed more recently of successful professional well-educated women getting trapped in a sequence of serial monogamous relationships over the course of their fertile years that never results in a proposal from the men they're with or children, and these women eventually having to end it and move on and getting really frustrated and eventually never producing families and children - obviously progressive discourse frames these women as victims of misogyny, but there is an interesting phenomenon in the background).
But Perry's theory is something like, ideologically, these women are heavily socialized into accepting the sexual revolution as progress, and as liberation, and as a key part of the freedom they have inherited, and so on. The sexual revolution is Progressive. Women having the freedom to have the same sexuality as caddish men = progress. So... well, at least in her telling, this disconnect ends up getting sublimated into all sorts of other social critiques that previously would have just been part and parcel of prior more restricted sexual norms for both men and women. I think she noted it especially about #MeToo - given the realities of sexual dimorphism in humans, it's extremely difficult to have sexual revolution behaviors and its "upsides" without having a lot of risk taking, overly assertive, overly optimistic male sexual initiation and gambling of a sort that will be hurtful and unwanted sometimes. And that's specifically what #MeToo was built to demonize the hell out of. And this applies more generally. We love sexual liberation, but men asking women out who they don't know is creepy. We love sexual liberation, but if a women "consents" to sex but then her friends convince her she didn't "consent" six months later, that's actually rape, because women are in an oppressed class and can't really ever truly give consent. We love sexual liberation, but "consent" is the highest moral good, and it can only exist in the most legally explicit, legible-to-the-world contexts, and so conceived, it requires social behaviors that are awkward, unpragmatic, and functional anti-erotic. We love sexual liberation, but any male-female age gap, or any possible social power differential, automatically makes "consent", the highest good", impossible. We love sexual liberation, but male heterosexual desire is dangerous and misogynistic and objectifying and intrinsically suspect. We love sexual liberation, but really we don't, and so expect these norms to be revised over and over and over, each time framed as progress, never resolving, with no stable norms for men, especially, to just count on. And on and on and on.
Obviously not everyone (or even most women, anyway) feel this way consistently, and I think everyone in this system ends up highly conflicted and confused... but I think the larger argument is that, on some level, many of these critiques are getting purchase because the actual reality is in conflict with this dominant ideology... Women want many things, but one thing many of them really, really want is to live in a world where female sexuality is treated as though it were really, really special and important, and they want to be treated that way especially by actual appealing men in their personal lives, and they want to live in a world where that leads to them being pursued and supported by worthy, desirable men with some sort of happily-ever-after stability attached to it. And the actual reality of the sexual revolution world, even with legal "consent" philosophies attached to it, is just fundamentally contrary to those desires.
Agreed, and I'll take it further (farther?)
A lot of men don't either. The very heavy movie Shame is somewhat about this. Although it's further down the line and gets into themes of real sex addiction, the movie can also be seen as the emptiness that comes from being a really rich and hot dude who sleeps with whoever he wants.
This post is an excellent summary of how many, many of the online "pickup artists" have success across a decade or more and bed perhaps hundreds or thousands of women ... and then lose their fucking minds.
To me, it's almost a "fish don't know what water is because they live in it" situation in terms of how obviously sexual libertinism is actively harmful to 99% of humans and the 1% who it does "work for" are pretty much sexual pathologists who we should highlight as cautionary tales for mental disorders instead of "liberated" heroes.
I have never hidden the fact that I hate the fruits of the sexual revolution. We are currently in what is my own personal hellscape for all romantic purposes, everything about it is my anti-preference. I don't expect my preferences to be universal, its a 'me' problem. But nobody else appears happy either.
If we could have stopped them somewhere around the norms of, I dunno 1995 I might find it tolerable. But alas there were never any brakes on the train.
And people are rediscovering traditional sexual norms from 'first principles' but we don't have the social cohesion to even attempt to rebuild the system as it existed before. This may or may not be an intentional result of certain groups (I make no specific accusation) intentionally stirring the pot.
There but for the grace of God go I. Thankfully when I was doing my study of pickup artists and red pill ideas, I could reason out that following the rules and ideas to their logical conclusion would lead to that exact outcome.
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I had an ex who was actually two years older than me, but could have passed as 18 without much hassle. I visited London with her when I was 26ish, and she was 28. I remember getting dirty looks at a liquor store with her on my arm as we were gawking at the variety of booze on offer. The next time, when she went alone, she got even dirtier looks, and was finally accosted by both a random old granny and the lady at the till on suspicion of underage drinking. It was funny in hindsight, as much as women complain about getting carded, they're even more upset when it stops.
On the other hand, excluding venues where they have a policy of carding anyone who walks in, I haven't been specifically asked for ID since I was 16. I can only presume that the we were giving off the impression of a sizeable age gap.
Anecdotes aside, I think the primary driver of age gap discourse is the bitterness of a specific age group of women engaged in intrasexual warfare that spills out into intersexual forms.
Ages 25-35, I'd say. Just young enough to be terminally online, unlike even older women who grew up and settled down this before this was capital-d Discourse. (There are very few grannies out there who are going to lecture their granddaughters about dating a 35 yo when they're 22.)
They notice that the youth they once prized is fading, and while they're still perfectly happy to go for older men (as are almost all women), they resent the fact that the men in their ideal age range don't consider them to be in their ideal age range.
Lip-service to feminism makes it difficult to directly attack their direct competitors (younger girls), without coming off as bitter and butt-hurt. But you can attack the men. And if you can successfully pathologize male preference for youth as predatory, you accomplish two things simultaneously: you make the competing demographic seem like victims who need protection rather than rivals, and you make the men who prefer them seem like villains.
This reframing has the additional advantage of being unfalsifiable in ways that make it rhetorically robust. Any counterexample, any young woman who says she's perfectly happy in her relationship and was not victimized, can be explained as evidence of how thorough the manipulation was. She doesn't know she's a victim. That's the worst part.
The frontal-lobe argument is where things get especially interesting. The claim is that the prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed until 25, therefore people under 25 lack sufficient judgment to consent to relationships with older partners. I've seen this argument made by people with actual MDs on /r/medicine, which I find both impressive and alarming. It's impressive because it successfully launders a social preference into neuroscience. It's alarming because it's bad neuroscience.
Neurodevelopment is continuous. The "fully developed at 25" framing suggests a step function where below 25 you're basically a golden retriever and above 25 you're suddenly Immanuel Kant. This is not how brains work. The research shows gradual changes in certain cognitive and regulatory processes, with enormous individual variation, and basically no evidence that this translates into systematic inability to make reasonable decisions about relationships.
The younger girls? They absorb this by cultural osmosis. Younger Gen Z is actually the most vocal about age-gap discourse. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that isn't enough to overcome their innate biological preference for older, successful men, so actual behavior doesn't change much. If a 20 year old girl meets a 30 year old man she thinks is cute, she'll usually have few qualms about sleeping with him or getting into a relationship, age-gaps be damned.
Power-disparity is bad? Huh, someone should tell all the women who prefer that kind of disparity, in favor of the men they desire. Men tend to be more focused on attributes such as physical attractiveness and youth, which are, no prizes for guessing, more common in younger women.
I find such pathologization of universal human preferences distasteful, doubly so when my field is molested and forcefully conscripted to shore up bad arguments. Oh well, so be it. I'm lucky enough to be a MILF enjoyer and thus immune from direct blowback for the most part, even if I regretfully note that "MILF" increasingly just means women my age.
(Another anecdote: I remember grinding on a girl I vaguely knew at a club in Scotland. An older friend of mine had a thing for a bisexual woman about the same age as me. She ended up chatting with the first girl, who seemed receptive to her advances. Then the girl disclosed that she was 19, and that made the woman freak out, as they later explained in our company. I put aside any plans to approach the girl later, since the headache was far from worth it.)
If I was less lazy/busy, I'd insert the usual OkCupid stats blogs/archives from before they were bought and cucked. They showed that female attractiveness peaked at 18, but that was their minimum age cutoff, so I suspect the actual figure is even lower at around 16. Men also showed tolerance to wider age gaps as they got older. 30 year old and 35 year old men showed roughly the same willingness to approach 25 year old women.
I believe Gwern has a copy. Someone please do this in the comments, thanks, :*
Link (doesn't quite match your assertion)
Thank you, that's the one. My internal betting market had strong odds in favor of you being the first to find the link, good to see I'm well-calibrated.
Hmm. It seems I was misremembering. I will weaken from saying that 18 (or my speculation of 16) being peak female attractiveness isn't supported by the graph.
I will note:
I think this supports part of my argument: namely, that by setting an age minimum at 18, OKCupid obscures the fact that many/most men would happily approach younger women if they had the option. I suppose this is even less controversial, women don't magically go from being divorced of sexual value at 18 years - 1 Planck time to being hot when the clock strikes 12 on their 18th birthday.
Also look at the charts titled "The shape of the dating pool" and "how a person's attractiveness changes with time":
The latter shows that 18 year old women are about 75% as attractive as they are at their absolute peak at 21. They are roughly twice as attractive as they would be at 34. This strongly implies that women below 18 are more attractive than the majority of older women, the range restriction just doesn't allow us to measure this.
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There's a ton of politics around football (and arguably more around baseball hof voting).
Bill Belichick will get voted into the hall of Fame, but not on a first ballot (after retirement there's a limited window of eligibility and getting voted in the first year of eligibility is a higher honor). Belichick had a lot of smoke around his career being a little too close to cheating scandals (Spygate and Deflategate) and those likely had as much to do with him not getting voted in first ballot as his taste in partners.
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(Replying to the meat of your post)
Good writeup, but you've wasted your considerable analytic ability on a topic that's explained, sadly, by something basic and ugly.
Female jealousy.
(Relatively) older women who really have a problem with AGRs are disproportionately not in any relationship whatsoever. Ask a married woman and you'll get a shrug and, at most, "Yeah, I guess maybe it's a little old. Whatever." The only exception to this rule is if said married women is deep into the progressive left or socially hectoring right.
The intrasexual competition dynamics for women are different than men. Middle aged husbands don't really fear that Chad the pool boy is going to seduce their wife after three kids have done three-kids worth of damage to her body. In terms of direct competition, it's hilarious to envision a situation in which that same Chad confronts the husband at Buffalo Wild Wings and goes, _"Hey, brah! Just want to let you know I'm coming after that sweet Karen you got at home." If such an implausible situation were to occur, I'd bet heavily on the Husband countering with a Dad Joke along the lines of "....Do you promise? Garage code is 1234." [Footnote 1]
This is not the same with older vs younger women. Go to a wedding. Watch a bridesmaid talk totally-non-flirtatiously (seriously) with one of the Husband milling about searching for good finger food and free beer. If that young lady fucks up does the "arm touch" after a Dad Joke, you can actually hear his Wife's radar lock onto the young harpy. The trope of "he left me and married his secretary" was so strong for so long because it was fucking real. Geographic proximity plus regular interaction plus basic physical attraction = relationship.
AGR discrimination is female mate guarding at about the same level as classic slut shaming. Basic stuff.
Footnote 1: This is the present situation in the West. This probably used to be less of the case. In classic / ancient literature, there is a common archetype of a young, righteous warrior or prince fighting the evil old king to then capture (willingly that is, as in a prize) the kept Queen / Princess. This likely reflects the reality that young up and comers might actually try to ace (as in kill) the current powerful male in the local clan / tribe / what have you. However, this was also probably done for very cut and dry power and influence reasons - the Queen was a political asset. It was probably relatively unlikely the young upstart was actually romantically infatuated with the beleaguered lady monarch.
This almost never happened until the 1990's and even then mostly among people in the public eye like actors and politicians. The scenario the older wife would have been worried about before then is "he began an affair with his secretary and I felt duty bound to kick him out".
Given a free choice, men who can keep both women will, and men who have to choose would mostly prefer to go back to the mother of their children than marry a floozy. At some point the social rules changed so adultery is a purely private matter, whereas trifling with your mistresses affections is mistreating a vulnerable member of a protected group, which made it increasingly disreputable for a man not to marry his mistress, and also increasingly embarrassing for the wife to stay with a cheater.
While I'm pretty sure it doesn’t outweigh the social instability of the large single male population, this situation feels like a decent argument for polygamy. There's an obvious local equilibrium there in "the man takes the secretary home, marries her also, and sweetens the deal for the first wife by giving her an elevated position of authority over the second (and third, and so on)".
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That's a better examination of it. Thanks.
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RE: your footnote, I vaguely associate that trope with the kept Queen herself being closer to the young man's age than the King's. I wonder to what extent that's part of the original trope and to what extent that's something imposed by later adaptations as an instantiation of modern values.
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The christian heresy, having jettisoned religious mores on sexuality two generations ago, now struggles to patch the gaping holes in its sexual ideology with the framing of abuse, grooming and rape. Nothing can be "sinful" i.e. morally condemnatory but not legally culpable. They're reinventing Victorian sexuality from the ass-end of sexual degeneracy using criminal acts and therapy-speak.
People have moral intuitions about things, often faulty and biased by ideology, but nonetheless. It's not surprising that a certain sort of middle-class, middle aged woman would be resentful of younger, more attractive women who are trading on their youth and beauty to get what they want. This sort of moral busybodying is completely normal and fuels countless gossip circles, tabloid magazines and hate-crushes. These are just the church ladies of today, only their moral language sounds retarded, because it is. And it's happening on social media instead of around the AIDS quilt.
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Pump the breaks. This is not the reason why he was denied his first attempt at the HOF.
First off, first ballot HOF isn't exactly rare, but it's a big deal. A lot of players get a non-negligible number of votes their first year of eligibility and then the next year, or even several years after, actually make it across the threshold. Belichicks' NFL career was, quantitatively and statistically, incredible. But he had some black marks against him. The Patriots had numerous credible accusations of cheating during the Brady-Belichick era. Furthermore, Belichick is a notorious asshole on a personal level. So much so that Tom Brady, starting last year, began granting open interviews where he states "Yeah, the coach I won six superbowls with actually was such a boner at the end I decided to GTFO."
At another level of analysis, some NFL fans - including me - aren't convinced Belichick was the mastermind coaching genius he gets credit for. The theory goes that Brady was really the "X factor" for the Patriots dynasty. The major piece of evidence in favor of this is that a 40+ year old Brady leaves the Patriots and then quickly wins the Superbowl with Tampa Bay against Patrick Mahomes in his prime.
All of that is aside the primary point imho - Belichick is an asshole and has been since long before he started dating the FemmeBot. In the NFL, the group of coaches who hang around for more than ten years is fucking tiny. They all know each other, they all know the owners (who are heavily involved in the HoF process). It is a High School popularity contest and people remember that one time 9 years ago when you were a dick to them at the party.
Having read the list of "women, the harpies, want to keep the good men for themselves when we all know that women are peak attractive at 16 and once they go past 20 they're ugly crones" responses, thank you for at least examining what our friend with the "I'm middle-aged and my girlfriend is still too young to drink legally even where drinking age is 18" posting asserted as TRUE! REAL! FAX!
I read him as saying he was in his forties and dating a 20 something woman, not a teenager.
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I don't understand what you are saying.
EDIT: nvm. You're a weird troll who is seconds away from another permaban. Sorry for misunderstanding.
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I'm not a football fan, but it's my understanding that this is a gross oversimplification. News articles (1 2) indicate that the voters refrained from inducting Belichick for several reasons. One reason that stands out is the fact that, under the recently-updated voting system, some people are losing eligibility, so this is their last chance to be inducted (before they are relegated to a separate "senior" category, where induction is technically still possible but also harder). Another reason is his involvement in cheating scandals. Neither of the linked articles mentions anything about a scandalously young romantic partner.
You got things a bit mixed up. Regular inductees are selected from a pool of 15 finalists. The number is culled to 10, then to 7, before the final vote, and committee members can vote for up to 5 of the 7, with players receiving 80% of the vote being recommended for induction. This is separate from coaches, contributors, and seniors, who are grouped together for voting purposes. There is a block of 5 consisting of 1 coach, 1 contributor, and 3 seniors, and the voters can select up to three, with the same 80% threshold for induction. This is in contrast to years past, where there were 5 senior candidates and an up/down vote for each one. The upshot is that not only are there fewer senior candidates, but a vote for anyone in the pool comes at the expense of another candidate. The theory was that since the senior candidates this year were especially strong and Belichick was considered a lock, there may have been some strategic voting. The guy from the KC Star admitted to casting all three of his votes for the senior candidates on this basis.
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I have to imagine something like this is the largest factor, after being told they can have everything women become upset when men aren't interested in them for economic success and they find themselves in their late 30s with no partner or prospects.
They will (maybe rightly?) complain.
This is understandable and has been discussed to death on this site as well, but we should consider that female attractiveness equals female fecundity, the maintenance of which is rather taxing on the body. I imagine most women would not prefer a life of being fertile for multiple decades.
Women are, literally, fertile for three decades on average, and tend to be healthier towards the earlier end of that range(granted, largely for different reasons).
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