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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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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 don't think most people care that much IRL unless it's over 15 years and even then. Half your age plus seven plus a decent buffer seems to me to be the point where people actually start raising eyebrows.

I don't think most people care that much IRL unless it's over 15 years and even then

I tend to agree with this, although I was a bit taken aback by the article I read about the football coach. That being said, a lot of the posters have presented decent arguments that the AGR was not a factor, so who knows.

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.

It's 2a. It, like so many other things, is downstream from female empowerment: women see younger attractive women as threats and therefore exert social pressure to reduce their sexual marketplace value.

It's 2a. It, like so many other things, is downstream from female empowerment: women see younger attractive women as threats and therefore exert social pressure to reduce their sexual marketplace value.

I agree that this is a plausible explanation, but what's the evidence?

I’m not even sure what evidence could exist for this, given that 2a is very much an answer which could only be proven by mind-reading. Jealous spinsters aren’t going to write it down that this is their real motivation, and that’s if they even realise that it’s their real motivation - this is the sort of evo-psych thing that they might be reflexively denouncing on instinct without bothering to self-reflect their real motives, a’la Hanson’s “elephant in the brain”.

Asking for the receipts here may genuinely be too high a bar for the 2a-ers to clear even if they’re 100% right. It’s the sort of explanation that doesn’t really leave evidence in its wake.

I’m not even sure what evidence could exist for this, given that 2a is very much an answer which could only be proven by mind-reading. Jealous spinsters aren’t going to write it down that this is their real motivation, and that’s if they even realise that it’s their real motivation - this is the sort of evo-psych thing that they might be reflexively denouncing on instinct without bothering to self-reflect their real motives, a’la Hanson’s “elephant in the brain”.

I agree that it's not an easy thing to analyze. One potential avenue is to look at things which are objected to and which are not objected to; and see if that sheds any light on the motivation.

Just... the reason they see them as threats is that an increasing proportion of older women are unattached.

A married woman might worry about a young floozy stealing her man, but that's simpler to police. Realizing that she has to compete with that same floozy for EVERY SINGLE ELIGIBLE MAN'S attention probably feels like an existential threat by comparison.

A married woman might worry about a young floozy stealing her man, but that's simpler to police. Realizing that she has to compete with that same floozy for EVERY SINGLE ELIGIBLE MAN'S attention probably feels like an existential threat by comparison.

I agree that this is a plausible explanation, but what's the evidence?

On the one side, the immense increase in anxiety disorders and antidepressant prescriptions among women over 35.

On the other, the fact that married women are, by most reliable recent data, happier than single women across the board.

I'd have to dig deep to find data that pinpointed this exact effect, though.

On the one side, the immense increase in anxiety disorders and antidepressant prescriptions among women over 35.

This could be the result of any of dozens of factors.

That being said, participating in this thread has changed my thinking a bit; I think that the "mate-guarding" hypothesis is actually pretty likely to be the correct one.

One interesting data point was the reaction of UMC women to Bezos' second wife. You may recall that instead of going for some 25-year-old hottie, he went for a woman who was middle-aged but had had a lot of plastic surgery including breast augmentation, more consistent with the values of working class women. My impression was that UMC women were rather bothered about this.

This could be the result of any of dozens of factors.

I mean, yes.

But all of those factors can also be boiled down to "women have acquired all the independence and concurrent responsibility they ever wanted, and this has caused them immense psychological distress."

Part of that independence is "now you have free rein to choose any mate you want... provided you can attract them."

And on top of the "paradox of choice" problem, now they realize that every other woman has this option... and is now competing for the same mates. This problem intensifies given that women are already primed to want the things they see other woman wanting.

My impression was that UMC women were rather bothered about this.

The rule that I've realized explains 90% of it: a woman will amplify any signal or story or selective pressure that raises her own status/desirability as a mate.

She will attack any signal or story or selective pressure that raises other womens' status, thereby compromising her own.

See the "body positivity" movement. Even though NO HIGH-STATUS MALE IN THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET has married an obese woman, they unionized around the idea that they're perfect and beautiful as they are and men selecting based on size/weight had the problem.

But Ozempic has hit and now they're all happily losing weight.

And the outrage over Sydney Sweeney is likewise explained by this. Women who aren't pleasant-looking blondes with massive honkers are threatened when men seemingly declare this the ideal for female appearance.

Do you have any evidence to think that UMC women were especially bothered by this? I didn't notice. For sure his low class taste is another way to mock Bezos in a world where a lot of people want to mock him (for reasons good and bad). I'm not sure I saw UMC women taking advantage of this opportunity more than the UMC in general though.

Do you have any evidence to think that UMC women were especially bothered by this?

Not really, it's just my general impression.

It would be interesting to research how this tracks with overall demographics of society, especially in historical times. After WW2 there was a huge shortage of males (because of the war) and also a huge baby boom (...maybe because of the war? But maybe other reasons too? Still not fully understood). As a result, there were a lot of young women, so I think people just didn't notice or didn't care as much about age gaps. If anything, they were more worried about the opposite- what if a woman couldn't find a suitable husband!? Disaster!

Nowadays the population pyramid has been inverted. There's more people above 30 than below, and more men than women below 30, so the competition to date under-30-women is intense. I think it's natural that society in general takes a harder look at such relationships (are we sure there isn't an unhealthy power dynamic there?) and also that under-30 men would feel jealous and protective.

It would be interesting to research how this tracks with overall demographics of society,

Yeah, as a side note I have wondered if the current wave of hatred against men is partly due to the fact that there is an overabundance of men, combined with less need (on an individual level) for male labor.

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.

It's really not ideal (from a childbearing perspective) for a woman who is in her peak fertile years to be with a guy who is pretty far past his most fertile years (the persistence of male fertility notwithstanding). This might not be the explanation for the actual negative reactions of people, but it is probably good to keep in mind, although obviously it applies mostly to really big gaps like the one mentioned above.

A lot of people have spoken (correctly, I think) about the female jealousy angle, but I think it's also correct that guys don't want people their dad's age elbowing in on their mating pool. And it's bad for romance and male-female relations for men (and women) to start to think of romantic or sexual relationships as one where a woman tries to get as much money/status-adjacency out of a man. (Obviously this does not describe all age-gap relationships.)

The way I tend to think about this is that although it's not really morally wrong for age-gap relationships to exist (presuming no age of consent or other issues) but it's probably good for society to put a few cultural norms that hedge against it, to keep it from being normalized. If older men and younger women were typical, you'd see reduced fertility and a lot of angry young men. All things being equal, it's best if the norm if most people get married relatively young.

The way I tend to think about this is that although it's not really morally wrong for age-gap relationships to exist (presuming no age of consent or other issues) but it's probably good for society to put a few cultural norms that hedge against it, to keep it from being normalized.

I tend to agree (notwithstanding my personal circumstances), but I would also like cultural norms against promiscuity, single motherhood, etc.

No disagreement from me on that. If anything those seem higher priority to me.

Also - in case it's not clear - I'm not trying to pick on you. Merely suggest what I think is a pretty defensible explanation for the norm. I think it's helpful for understanding society to be able to separate out "morally wrong" from "norm" while also leaving room for norms to exist.

Also - in case it's not clear - I'm not trying to pick on you. Merely suggest what I think is a pretty defensible explanation for the norm.

I would probably choose the word "rationalization" over "explanation," but thanks.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose society is made up of 2 groups, one favored and the other disfavored. It could be whites and blacks; gentiles and Jews; women and men; or whatever. Suppose further that there is a hypothetical social norm which, generally speaking, is a good idea. For example "don't play loud music in the library." Would you rather have a world where (1) the social norm does not exist at all; or (2) the social norm exists, but is enforced only as to the disfavored group?

This is a very interesting question, and I think my answer would depend on the specifics (my apologies - I know this is not a satisfying answer). I think sometimes people reframe natural divisions as "disfavored groups" - for instance someone complaining about how "disfavored groups" have a social norm of having to work to sustain themselves - wherein the disfavored group is "adults." But I think a lot of times a social norm of disparate treatment breeds resentment that is itself a bad thing.

Still, if we imagine that only women aren't allowed to play loud music in the library...I might bite the bullet and hope that doing so reduces my odds of hearing loud music at all.

I mean, realistically, this is a very old debate. St. Bernardino (~1400) had writings and sermons criticizing older men marrying very young women. So, I think any explanation that treats it as a novel phenomenon is wrong.

It's more something that will slip in an out of the overton window as cultural and social dynamics shift.

I think there's a reason you're missing in your list, that at least explains why young men would support / go along with prohibitions. Older men taking younger women is fishing in their pond. I think there is some inherent disgust to it, that from an evopsych perspective comes from resource protection.

There is absolutely a social effect with the practice widely tolerated, on the shape of mating and family formation, and whether one finds those effects net ill or not, trying to handwave feelings about it as arbitrary is the most incorrect response.

Given the time period, are we sure st Bernardino was talking about conventional age gap relationships rather than actual child marriage?

I was rabidly against even two or three year age gaps in a relationship...between the ages of 13 and 17, when I felt like every girl I tried to date had an older boyfriend, or had previously had an older boyfriend who took her virginity and then broke her heart and now she wasn't interested in dating/sex anymore.

2 to 3 year age gaps when young are equivalent to 20-30 years when older. A 15 year old dating a 17 year old gets access to a bf with a car and making a McDonalds job. Boys her age do not have that. So now she could do things like go to the movies and he can pay for it. A big difference and lots of independence for that age. A 25 year old dating a 45 year old with savings of a couple millions get access to international travel, gifts, maybe some boat excursions versus her age equivalent taking her out to the local restaurant.

This is extremely relatable, and serves as a good reminder (of what should already be obvious) that encouraging AGRs without restoring functioning sexual morality is worse than nothing.

I think there's a reason you're missing in your list, that at least explains why young men would support / go along with prohibitions. Older men taking younger women is fishing in their pond. I think there is some inherent disgust to it, that from an evopsych perspective comes from resource protection.

That's a good point. I think two factors are at play.

One: in earlier times, an older guy unashamedly, routinely pursuing younger women simply ended up getting beaten up by younger men sooner or later. But in an age of online dating, social atomization and the death of clubbing, this risk disappeared.

Two: few young women are signalling a willingness to settle down with equally young men and thus practice assortative mating. This erodes young men's willingness to mate-guard.

Death of clubbing removed the risk of death of clubbing. How apropos.

I mean, realistically, this is a very old debate. St. Bernardino (~1400) had writings and sermons criticizing older men marrying very young women.

Fascinating, would you mind linking to some of them? The narrative I've heard is that in the past, age-gap relationships were completely normal and unremarkable.

I think it's more that they were comfortable with a certain degree of age gap, but uncomfortable with an excessively large one. It was considered perfectly normal for an 18-year-old woman to marry a 35-year-old man, but abnormal if the man was in his 70s.

The reason was just that there was generally a shortage of eligible men. 18-year-old men were less likely to have a living to support a wife regardless of social class, whereas by 35 they might have a successful career. This wasn't just for artisans and farmers, either; for a younger son of the gentry this career might be as a lawyer, clergyman, or army officer, but the trend of only becoming established later in life was there.

In other words, there were a lot of 18-year-old women who preferred to marry a man who was established and able to easily support them over one who was actually their age. This has the opposite effect for a 70-year-old man who might not be able to support his wife, not least of which because he'll soon be dead.

I doubt they would put it this way, but I would expect that the rule of thumb in the olden days would be that an age gap is appropriate if the man is likely to continue to be able to impregnate his wife through her entire fertile window. Otherwise he's a dog in the manger depriving her of the opportunity to have children with a more suitable man.

Women spend a significant chunk of their life in infertility. Once their fertile days are over their best reproductive strategy is to limit reproductivity of the still fertile members of the population so that their children will be a larger percentage of the next generation.

Menopause is old enough that this trait is probably selected for, women probably have some innate instinct to see sex of younger women as bad once they are above a certain age. I think many of our norms around sex and marriage are downstream of this (marriage, vows of chastity, transgender fads, aversion to 'sexualized' portrayals of women, etc). The justifications for this stuff (consent, power imbalances, serving the church, etc) are just an irrelevant detail, you know something is bad inside your soul and then you search for an explanation to explain why you felt the wrongness to others. Morality is just what it feels like to be a member of a social species from the inside.

Our society is increasingly controlled by women and their infertile period has been lengthening as percentage of their total lifespan. Age gap is just one of the sticks that was nearby.

Fascinating. So then what explains infertile old hags urging their children to get married and provide them with grandchildren?

I really love reading you guys (and boy do I mean guys) earnestly explaining female biology to me. It's like reading Martians trying to explain dolphins.

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what explains infertile old hags urging

Because they are their children?

I really love reading you guys (and boy do I mean guys)

You can take your feminism to bluesky, thank you.

I don't know whether to be horrified or hilarious about that last. Bluesky, quotha? For me?

Someone sufficiently snarky may be tempted to describe your combination of rejecting progressivism and still expecting progressive-style deference towards your lived experience as a "leopards eating my face" moment.

More seriously, what is your working principle here? Your interlocutor, it seems, is not allowed to engage in evopsych speculation about women on account of not being a woman. Does this restriction only apply to the human male/female categorisation, or are there more? (Can Americans speculate about what motivates Europeans? Zoologists about animals? Christians about Atheists?)

It's when men ascribe all kinds of motives to women, having no more insight into what is behind biology than a glass jar has of its contents, that makes me laugh. I would not go "all men are X because Y" even when it is very tempting to do so, and I'd appreciate that not happening to women.

It's like someone trying to describe what having four legs is like because of course they know all about being a quadruped, they've read the latest online hot take on why dogs don't walk upright by choice!

I think you are kind of dodging my point here. To say it a bit differently: what do you think gives you more of an authority to speculate about the motivations of the modal woman than the person you were responding to? If you are just going to say that it's your own presumable female biology, the "take it to Bluesky" charge seems fair enough. "I'm a woman, and I don't feel anything resembling that instinct" would have been a fair response; the implicit "I'm a woman, so I can authoritatively assert that women don't feel that instinct" is just progressive tokenism.

It's when men ascribe all kinds of motives to women

I didn't ascribe motives to anyone, btw.

I would not go "all men are X because Y" even when it is very tempting to do so

You certainly have gone "all men who want the AoC lowered, or object to the stigma of age-gap relationships above the AoC, personally want to fuck teen girls below the current AoC", and continued insisting on it in the face of denials - i.e., very deliberately implied we're liars based purely on your own model of men.

That's not "all men", that is "the subset of men who want age of consent lowered and talk about banging minors".

Interesting. But it seems that younger women are complaining of age gaps more than older women. That's my anecdotal observation.

Because they're the target. This stuff is supposed to work on young women, if it didn't there would be no point in doing it.

But it seems that younger women are complaining of age gaps more than older women. That's my anecdotal observation.

I actually have a theory to explain this: It very much reminds me of the stereotypical ultra-conservative religious preacher who is constantly condemning homosexuality. Which is of course consistent with his religion, but he does it so frequently and so emphatically that it makes you wonder what's going on. In that situation, it's reasonable to (strongly) suspect that this individual has homosexual impulses, and is perhaps even full-on gay, and that he vocally condemns homosexuality as a way of fighting his own (perceived) demons.

In the same way, I think that there is a small percentage of young women -- maybe 5-10% -- who are attracted to older men in the sense that the man's age is not just a matter of indifference to her but rather it makes him more attractive. On top of that, I think there is a much larger percentage - perhaps 75-80% who are not specifically attracted to older men but are somewhat indifferent to age, and therefore they occasionally feel attracted to older men who are otherwise desirable to them. At the same time, at least online, most of these women are aware that AGRs are socially disapproved of, so perhaps they complain loudly as a way of compensating for these feelings of attraction.

All that being said, I realize that this is kind of a just-so story and I don't want to add too many epicycles to the model. The mate-guarding argument is intriguing, but it does seem to be contradicted, at least to an extent, by the phenomenon of young women vocally objecting to AGRs.

It is a good just so story because it's so easily observed when you look at some women's revealed preferences. Take written erotica/smut fiction for example. The male hottie is a 5000 year old white haired vampire/demon/sky daddy. It's all just variations on daddy issues where the fantasy excuse for dialing up the age of the male character to infinity is paper thin.

Oh, hot take here, but one of the cool things about women once you notice it is that they tend to say the opposite of what they mean. This is because they are conflict-averse and avoid direct communication so as to maintain deniability.

If a woman complains that you're not spending enough time with her, you're probably spending too much time with her. If she tells you she's happy with your body despite the recent weight gain, it's time to hit the gym. They will tell you everything you need to know provided that you have ears to hear and never let on that you understand this.

My model predicts that the more rights women have, the more vociferously they will complain about oppression. Women dressing up as Handsmaid's Tale concubines and complaining about high-status men wanting to control and breed them speak for themselves.

Female sexual attractiveness inevitably and steeply declines relatively early in life.

It's not just that: female sexual usefulness ends at 50ish in a way it doesn't for men. After menopause, is there really any reason ever not to just be FWB, retirement home style? Men can invest and save for this so they can afford someone who can still build a family but no amount of financial prudence will save that for women.

And sure, you could compensate with basic things like "not being openly hostile", but feminists are [by definition] at a disadvantage there, so...

What remains to be seen is how the spinsters are going to take it out on everyone else, because they will have some political capital to getting revenge on the men they feel they are entitled to, and will likely act accordingly. But there will be no State-mandated husbands (besides perhaps Big Brother, imposed with "protecting women" as the main justification- a concept that's 20 years out of date, but history shows this demographic does not care about that); it'll take on the character of a society-wide divorce.

Society has become aware that these types of relationships have a much greater opportunity for abuse

No, this is 100% just the "I consent/isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" meme.

seem to be an exception to what could be called the "love is love" principle.

No, the general principle is "love is love so long as it benefits women-as-class", and has been that way since 1900 or so. This is why it's OK for young boys to be sex objects for gay men, but never young girls.

No, the general principle is "love is love so long as it benefits women-as-class", and has been that way since 1900 or so. This is why it's OK for young boys to be sex objects for gay men, but never young girls.

Interesting. I'd never thought of that in that way. It's not a psychological universal either - the "appropriate age" in Japan seems to have been about equal until relatively recently, for example. So cultural?

Yes. The women in that society have (for reasons that I think have a lot to do with not having a frontier to loot or expand into) evolved to defend/accept men's sexual interests just as much as men have evolved to defend/accept women's sexual interests. This is why you get things that look weird from broader Western perspectives, like female Japanese politicians defending loli hentai (and all of the other kinda-weird-kinda-sexual stuff they have going on more generally).

A Western woman would bitterly complain about "internalized misogyny" and be baffled by why an Eastern woman wouldn't be trying to Take Back What's Hers, but sufficiently advanced temperance/co-operation isn't meaningfully distinguishable from self-hatred (compare "voting against one's interests", or the justifications for free speech in general). And Western society doesn't really have good mechanisms for hammering out what that co-operation should be, or discovering why that temperance needs to exist, because up until 100 years ago the frontier could be depended upon to provide an alternate answer.

What remains to be seen is how the spinsters are going to take it out on everyone else, because they will have some political capital to getting revenge on the men they feel they are entitled to, and will likely act accordingly.

Worry not, my friend, your virtue is safe from me as a life-long spinster who wouldn't take on a man if you threw in five million dollars/euro with him.

Men can invest and save for this so they can afford someone who can still build a family

I do like the notion of men aged 50+ trading in their infertile wives once they've fathered twenty kids on her during her fertile years so they can do it all over again with a fertile young bride. Mmm-hmm. That's precisely what happens. If you're Rupert Murdoch, who seems to have got new babies by new wives pretty much, or at least three of his five wives plus one partner. Ditto Elon Musk.

I guess that's what Leonardo diCaprio is doing with his string of girlfriends? Remind me again, how many kids does Leo have?

I do like the notion of men aged 50+ trading in their infertile wives once they've fathered twenty kids on her during her fertile years so they can do it all over again with a fertile young bride.

You misunderstand: this is the notion of men aged 50+, who never got married, now never having any reason to. And the matching women, 50+, trying to punish them for never having married them.

I believe those femcels will demand state-mandated husbands. It might not take that form specifically, since men and women are different, but I suspect something along those lines will occur. Technically, it already is through progressive taxation.

You forget, of course, that men who never got married are not an unselected group- they’re very disproportionately men nobody wants. Some might have extenuating circumstances, sûre, but unmarried women as a class largely accurately see unmarried men as a class as undesirable.

that men who never got married are not an unselected group- they’re very disproportionately men nobody wants

In modern times, symmetrically, so are unmarried women.

This is why it's OK for young boys to be sex objects for gay men

And straight women...

True; Adolescence is basically the distaff equivalent of whatever that salacious Victorian-era book about young teenage prostitutes was (and all the wokeshit is, to lesser degrees).

It's a clear sign there's something real nasty going on, but the relevant actors are too weak to deal with that (to the point that they're too busy getting off on the oppression, in that same awkward/harmful way women do when they stay with a man that abuses them in the ways typical of men).

I have seen no reason to believe that Bill Belichick was denied getting into the hall of fame this year because of his relationship with Jordon Hudson. I am not even sure that Hall of Fame voters would care about that. For example, Peyton Manning was voted into the Hall in 2021 despite sexual assault and performance enhancing drug use allegations against him. The NFL's culture usually isn't very sensitive to stuff like this.

My understanding is that it was some combination of the weird College Football detour, perceived arguments with the press and his professional career ending on a sourish note. Maybe the young girlfriend is some part of the press/vibe weirdness, but I think the other dot points are doing the work

I’d say a combination of 1, 3 and 4. Social media does make otherwise-invisible relationships a matter of public record. Conversely, the plural of “tweet” is not “data”, and the existence of a story is itself invisible until it hits some critical mass.

Then again, I hate and resent this topic for a different reason, so maybe I’m just extrapolating.

Do you really think the Hall of Fame voters are being nagged by their wives into not voting this guy in? Really?

No; what gave you that impression?

I figured it was something like this explanation. But I’ve been blissfully ignorant of this particular Main Character of Twitter.

One other thing to add. I often see criticism of the form, "What could an 18 year old and a 27 year old have to talk about? They are at totally different points in their lives with totally different interests and experiences." Which of course reminds me of another great twitter joke that went something like this, "I'm opposed to sex-gap relationships, what could a man and a woman possibly have to talk about?" I think there is this fantasy among college-educated, urban professionals, that an ideal relationship should be some great 'meeting of the minds', where someone finds their intellectual twin. Like ideally, perhaps two chess grandmasters would partner up over their deep love of chess. But man, I just don't think relationships really work that way now or for the vast majority of human history.

With my wife, of course we really had no shared interests when we got together. But you develop those by virtue of being in a relationship. Now we have a toddler and he is an enormous shared interest, we both (of course) find him endlessly fascinating and can talk about him endlessly. Or our shared house. Or our shared friends. Or things like some new restaurant in town, or something we saw on the news. We still don't really have any "hobby" in common, but that's perfectly fine, we have a lifetime of things to talk about. The very act of sharing your life with someone is what generates those shared interests and topics of conversation, it doesn't really matter where you started.

It's funny that you mentioned that. When the subject of mainstream discussion is old people, their declining quality of life, social isolation, solitude and the health risks that entails, people inevitably make the argument that it's harmful for different demographic cohorts to self-segregate, that it's important for your overall well-being to interact regularly with people of different ages, that it's important to open yourself up to the lived experience and perspective of people that are either younger or older than you etc.

One other thing to add. I often see criticism of the form, "What could an 18 year old and a 27 year old have to talk about?

I agree that this is probably just a rationalization. If the couple consists of a man and woman who are from two very different ethno-cultural backgrounds, I doubt you would hear this objection.

Also, here's a thought experiment: Suppose the couple consists of (1) a man who is a well respected orchestral composer and conductor who is 60 years old; and (2) a woman who is a talented 25-year-old flute player. In that situation, society isn't going to say "oh, well probably they have plenty of common interests, so there's no problem." Instead, you will probably get the "power imbalance" objection.

Also, here's a thought experiment: Suppose the couple consists of (1) a man who is a well respected orchestral composer and conductor who is 60 years old; and (2) a woman who is a talented 25-year-old flute player. In that situation, society isn't going to say "oh, well probably they have plenty of common interests, so there's no problem." Instead, you will probably get the "power imbalance" objection.

Fantastic point. I will extend that proof to power imbalances. Imagine Jeff Bezos pairs up with a random 62 year old elementary school teacher. Would feminists be decrying power imbalance? I think not, I think they would love it! I think they would say: finally, here is a man that picks an age appropriate woman, where he loves her for who she is.

But surely the power imbalance between a random elementary school teacher and one of the wealthiest men in the world is far greater than the power difference between a couple of socio-economically average 18 and 25 year olds? Ergo, it isn't really about power imbalance either.

I mean, that's ultimately the funny thing.

This implies that a Billionaire male will have a power imbalance with regard to ANY woman he pursues, unless its other Billionaires or particularly prominent female politicians.

But if you thought Billionaires were 'in bed with' the government and cooperating together before, then imagine if they were literally only marrying each other and further isolating their genes from the common man. (I've heard this is approximately how the "gay mafia" of San Francisco came to be).

I guess a good progressive would suggest that the billionaire should intentionally dispossess himself of almost all of his wealth and power and then pursue a partner on a more equitable basis.

Meanwhile One of the best selling books of the current century is about a kinky Billionaire pursuing a lower-middle class female... obsessively. The movie adaptation of said book grossed half a billion dollars.

Women LOVE the power imbalance (where, discreetly, the other party's obsession means she actually holds power over him).

I think the analogy needs work. A conductor and flutist, I see the issue. She could be demoted/ promoted to first chair, etc. Or whatever. Bezos isn't likely to hold a lot of sway with the elementary school board in the same way.

I think the analogy needs work. A conductor and flutist, I see the issue. She could be demoted/ promoted to first chair, etc.

The conductor and the flute player are not necessarily in the same orchestra. But for the avoidance of doubt, let's assume that they are in entirely separate orchestras.

People who make the "power imbalance" argument don't limit it to situations where both members of a couple are in the same institution.

I agree that this is probably just a rationalization. If the couple consists of a man and woman who are from two very different ethno-cultural backgrounds, I doubt you would hear this objection.

This is gold. Seriously.

"Age-gaps, am I right"

"ohmygod yesssssss uggghhh"

"Miscegenation, am I right"

"..."

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.

Was with a woman at one point who started drinking the feminist kool-aid and hit me with the whole "Wanting me to shave down there is patriarchal pedophilia" thing. I countered by pointing out that she also preferred me (my face) to be clean-shaven. No answer to that of course.

That relationship lasted a lot longer than it had any right to and many years later I still feel relief to have escaped. I have a beard now, too.

Honestly? Shaving the pubic area only came in for the West relatively recently. It used to be for softish porn, where you couldn't show any sexual elements too overtly yet you wanted your models to reveal as much flesh as you could get away with, hence the notion of shaving the pubes so it wouldn't be seen as signal of sexual maturity.

There's a reason this is called a Brazilian wax, because skimpy thongs were and are the de rigueur beach wear. And now apparently there's a Hollywood wax, which is complete hair removal.

It really does smack of wanting a Barbie doll/immature partner, where normal female hair growth which comes about with sexual maturity during puberty is now seen as "ugh, disgusting, unnatural". We've moved from shaving armpits and legs to "you must be hairless everywhere except abundant flowing locks of head hair".

When guys start normalising shaving their legs, pits, and groins as well as faces, come back to me on this demand.

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I for one prefer natural pubic hair and eyebrows.

Dear God, the eyebrows on modern women, it's an atrocity worse than any genocide.

So, you know. Checkmate feminists.

Yeah, plucking eyebrows is something that needs to be done carefully if you're going to do it. Plucking too much will eventually cause the eyebrows to stop growing and then you have to pencil in fake brows and it looks terrible.

Occam's non-razor: Just stop it altogether. I'd rather Frida Kahlo than the pencilbrows.

I assumed a big factor in all of this was the prevention of crabs / pubic lice infestation? Anyway, I as just another dudebro can assert that I find the Brazilian wax rather cringe, whatever aesthetic value skimpy thongs may or may not provide. On the other hand, I find the argument regarding signals of sexual maturity to mostly just be motivated reasoning from lipstick feminists.

You bothered to write that so I'll respond in kind.

Shaving the pubic area only came in for the West relatively recently.

Not really pertinent imo.

It really does smack of wanting a Barbie doll/immature partner, where normal female hair growth which comes about with sexual maturity during puberty is now seen as "ugh, disgusting, unnatural".

I've met plenty of women who seem hellbent on making this analytical leap, and about zero men who think that way at all. I don't think women's pubic hair is disgusting or unnatural. I do think it hides the structure of the pussy, which I enjoy looking at, and that going down on her is about fifteen times more pleasant when I'm not fighting through hair and stopping constantly to pull loose strands from my mouth. Also, any grooming methods coded as 'interested in enjoying sex' are going to be de facto attractive on some level.

I've never met a sexually-confident woman who has weird paranoias on the subject, whereas every woman I've met whose mind runs immediately to 'this is some kind of weird desire for prepubescent girls' has been, uh, we can say sexually-not-confident. In short it seems to me that it tends to have more to do with personal insecurity than any kind of rational objection.

When guys start normalising shaving their legs, pits, and groins as well as faces, come back to me on this demand.

I wouldn't. But it is worth noting that 'more body hair' is masculine-coded and 'less body hair' is feminine-coded so this is a pretty poor equivalence. Roughness, coarseness, and hairiness are masculine traits; smoothness and so on are feminine ones. Calling attention to, and amplifying, places and patterns that are sexually-dimorphic is normal human sexual behavior and no weird motivations need to be imputed beyond that.

Also just... just, while we're here, I have several prepubescent daughters whose hairless vulvas I see fairly often (during diaper changes, bathtimes, and general little kid craziness) and hopefully it doesn't need to be affirmed that I don't find anything attractive or sexually-compelling about that per se.

It seems to me that the "pedophile!" argument proves too much. Because the same argument could be made about leg hair and armpit hair. Is there something very wrong with a man who prefers female partners who shave their legs and armpits? Hard to believe it.

Anyway, as another poster pointed out, it's easy to flip the argument around. If a woman prefers a man with (1) a full head of hair; and (2) a clean-shaven face, does that mean there's something very wrong with her? I would say "no," it's possible she simply prefers an adult man with a more youthful appearance.

Cunnilingus is not the point of having pubic hair. I'm not objecting to grooming, I'm objecting to "this is one more chipping away at the natural appearance of women for an artificial beauty standard that does not apply to men".

Yes, your young daughters are not yet at the age to undergo the bodily changes of approaching adulthood. But are you going to raise them that the beauty standard men prefer is that they retain as much of their neotenous features as possible? "Hi girls, now you've turned ten, here's a complete shaving kit because men don't like hair on women! Now that you've started growing some in those places, it's yucky and disgusting, shave it all off or no man will want you!"

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"Hi girls, now you've turned ten, here's a complete shaving kit because men don't like hair on women! Now that you've started growing some in those places, it's yucky and disgusting, shave it all off or no man will want you!"

I don't find this statement appropriate in context and appreciate it even less in quotation marks.

Hello, Butterfly! I kind of remember you for something, did we exchange views before?

All too often. I'm thinking that this may be the last time.

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Women only optimize for this "beauty standard men prefer" because they are too caught up in competing with other women in exploiting male sexual attention. If they viewed men as partners rather than exploitable peons they wouldn't be "forced" to retain "as much of those neotenous features as possible". Instead they impose this race to the bottom on themselves, because obviously treating men as people rather than resources is a bridge too far.

Cunnilingus is not the point of having pubic hair. I'm not objecting to grooming, I'm objecting to "this is one more chipping away at the natural appearance of women for an artificial beauty standard that does not apply to men".

I don't think pubic hair removal is that odd for men. Most women, if they chose to tell their male partners to remove their pubic hair, their male partners would do so. Especially if it is offered as a condition for more or better sex. It seems odd to penalize men morally for asking for something and getting it.

Do women ask it of men? I've heard of gay men shaving, but are men getting Brazilian waxes too? Google, help me out here!

Apparently even men are going for Brazilians now, though the most popular is still "get rid of back hair".

Gentlemen, my sympathies. Wax hair removal is no fun, and on sensitive areas like the groin? Ouch!

Do women ask it of men?

Most don't, but some do. Being women they tend to ask in a more passive "wouldn't it be sexy if..." or "gee, it'd feel better down here if..." way rather than a "YOU DISGUSTING PIG MAN SHAVE IT OFF" way. Manscaped sponsors half the podcasts I listen to lately, they're selling to somebody. Sex and the City and Larry the Cable guy had comedy bits about this twenty years ago.

Personally, I trim my pubic hair periodically, mostly because I grow little other visible body hair, and I just think it looks vaguely ridiculous to have smooth skin and then a four inch bush. I do it for me <3

Do women ask it of men?

N=1, but my female partner is generally appreciative of me keeping the area well-groomed and trimmed down (not waxing) for the sex-adjusted equivalent of the reasons TitaniumButterfly mentions.

I have no reason to believe she's attempting to make me look younger or more feminine as she's quite happy with hair in other places, but hair in the mouth is never pleasant, and trimming things down in that region often visually accentuates what's there quite well.

She appreciates my mustache being kept trimmed down for similar reasons.

I've met plenty of women who seem hellbent on making this analytical leap, and about zero men who think that way at all.

Hello, I'm the strawman you're suggesting doesn't exist. I personally find body hair, including pubic hair, unattractive on women for the same reason I prefer shorter women with smaller breasts (and bigger eyes!), because I see signs of physical maturity as unappealing in this context. Yes, I am aware that this is weird/creepy/gross/pedo-ish of me, but that's how the concepts connect in my head, femininity is right next to neoteny, and while I'm aware that most men don't think the same way, I didn't feel I could let the idea that men in general don't think that way stand.

I don't think that men in general think that way, and yes you're fairly unusually pedo-adjacent. Certainly pedos exist and that's probably some kind of a spectrum and hopefully you're on the right end of it, but this doesn't imply anything about normal male sexual preferences.

Fair enough! Though the reasons to be skeptical of self-reporting on this particular issue are fairly obvious.

It's depressing how easy it is to run circles around so many arguments I've heard from women I've dated. But it doesn't strengthen the relationship, i.e. she treats as dispassionate sport and maybe learns something. It just creates bad vibes and results in a breakup. But I can't be with a dullard either, who isn't interested in ideas and arguing, no matter how nice or well-composed or healthy she is. It's a bummer.

But it doesn't strengthen the relationship, i.e. she treats as dispassionate sport and maybe learns something. It just creates bad vibes and results in a breakup.

My ex once burst into tears in the middle of a restaurant because, after several days of sending me Instagram reels about female emotional labour (and me managing to discuss them as dispassionate sport), I sent her one reel back about how male weaponised incompetence (“babe, where do we keep the paper towels”) gets wives incandescent with rage but female weaponised incompetence (“what’s this light on the car dashboard mean”) is treated with amused paternalism by husbands. “Why would you defend being a useless husband who doesn’t know where the paper towels are?!?!” she wailed, over the wagyu beef I paid for.

…which is my long-winded way of saying, I also recognise the dynamic that you identified. I wonder why women are so bad at decoupling? If I had to hazard a guess, it’s because they’re evolved to operate at such an Nth-level epicycle of social intrigue in their status-jockeying against other women that it is very difficult to get them to believe that any conversation you’re having with them is not actually about them, in some way.

Of course the shorthand term we have for that is ‘narcissism’. YMMV.

Stuff like this is why chillness is in my opinion an extremely underrated quality in women.

My ex once burst into tears in the middle of a restaurant because, after several days of sending me Instagram reels about female emotional labour (and me managing to discuss them as dispassionate sport), I sent her one reel back about how male weaponised incompetence (“babe, where do we keep the paper towels”) gets wives incandescent with rage but female weaponised incompetence (“what’s this light on the car dashboard mean”) is treated with amused paternalism by husbands. “Why would you defend being a useless husband who doesn’t know where the paper towels are?!?!” she wailed, over the wagyu beef I paid for.

I don't love the sound of your ex but this is surely a lot about areas where partners are proud to have knowledge. A lot of men are proud to know a bit about cars, compared to women being proud to know about cleaning kitchens.

Weaponised incompetence by women can be as legitimately annoying as by men, in household finances for example, but I definitely don't find it hard to understand why 'Where are the paper towels?' wrt one's own household would annoy someone, anyone, everyone outside of a household setup so traditional as to be anachronistic.

They just communicate differently. The object level is a distant concern compared to the status signals it encodes. Once they feel safe and satisfied they're as capable of sincere intellectual exploration as anyone else.

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.

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.

This thread also made me think about just this.

I wonder if we won't see some sort of "divorce of love" memetic concept develop. That, in age-gap relationship, the elder partner, once they hit say 80 or so, permits the other partner to date freely again in order to spare them of unintentional hospice nurse status.

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.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose there's a skinny male computer nerd who hits it big and is a billionaire at age 30. He marries a 30 year old woman who is very attractive, objectively much better looking than him. To the point where it's pretty obvious she never would have been interested in him if he weren't such a big success.

How will society react? I expect much less negatively than if the same man were 60. If you agree with me, then you presumably agree that there is more to the story than just a relationship which is overly transactional.

Interesting question. I'd say you are probably right but I also wonder how much of that is just because age can be talked about objectively whereas there's no shared way to quantity objectively how far "out of his league" she is.

I'd say you are probably right but I also wonder how much of that is just because age can be talked about objectively whereas there's no shared way to quantity objectively how far "out of his league" she is.

That's a fascinating point. Perhaps part of the reason age-gap relationships get so much flak is that it's very easy to quantify and describe them.

"Can you believe that 60-year-old is dating a 24-year-old" seems to carry a lot more punch than "Can you believe that ugly guy is dating a hottie?"

The latter item invites an argument over exactly how attractive or unattractive each person is.

Here's another thought experiment: Suppose that our hypothetical 30-year-old billionaire tech bro is 5'5" and his bride is a 5'10" runway model. How will people react? I think people would probably laugh about the situation, but I don't think it would provoke the kind of negative reaction you'd see if he were 60 years old.

I’ve been thinking about this as a puzzle all day and the best explanation I can come to that fits all the evidence is that the older women are mad at men being attracted to female youth because it breaks their suspension of disbelief that “I could get him if I wanted to”.

In the previous 30yo shlub billionaire x 30yo model example, I agree that this wouldn’t prompt as much rage as 30yo shlub billionaire x 18yo shlub woman - because when a man’s attracted to a 30 year old model, the 40 year old spinster can still tell herself “If I really crash-coursed my hot yoga class I could still look roughly like that and get that kinda guy”. But if they suspect the guy is choosing his woman specifically because he is attracted to the flower of youth, it breaks her suspension of disbelief that she yet still has time to turn her life around, and indeed tells her that actually that ship sailed 22 years ago. Bezos’ wife makes them mad for a similar but slightly different reason. My understanding it that Lauren Sánchez Bezos spends a lot of time harping on about how her routine to still look good at 56 is a brutal full-time job and most women couldn’t do it, which is sufficiently believable to again knock the spinsters out of the fantasy that they could get a guy like that if they merely doubled down on the hot yoga.

Jealous unmarried spinsters don’t get worked up about 30 year old women dating billionaires, or dating 50 year old men, or dating 70 year old men - because 30 year old women are inside jealous unmarried spinster’s own self-reference class, and they like seeing that women (perceived as) similar to them can still get married. But no amount of self-deception can convince the spinster that she’s in the same reference class as an 18 year old, so now she feels competition rather than solidarity.

TL;DR - women don’t like it when men are attracted to attributes that they (believe they) can’t have, held by other women outside their own self-reference class. Youth is the most obvious one, but this also serves to explain the hate for passport bros who like different colours.

I think another way to put your hypothesis is that if women see a relationship between (1) a desirable man; and (2) a woman they identify with, then it's ok. Otherwise it's a problem. Does that kind of sum things up?

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.

But the story about the money was so much more interesting that even Anna Nicole Smith's tits. 25 years of litigation, continuing after the deaths of both parties and a judge, seven courts in three jurisdictions, two trips to SCOTUS (with amicus briefs by two different SGs), and meaty issues around conflict of jurisdictions and separation of powers.

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.

This is a big part of it. Consider also that an older, wealthy man is typically going to have existing children/heirs who are expecting his resources and attention, which is now being taken by a young floozy.

which is now being taken by a young floozy.

My research into step-children on various adult oriented documentary websites suggests this outcome is often welcomed by the male heirs.

My research into step-children on various adult oriented documentary websites suggests this outcome is often welcomed by the male heirs.

Now that you mention it, I remember that this issue was played for laughs in the 80s movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure." The two main characters (Bill & Ted) were high school students and the father of one of them got married to a woman who Bill & Ted had known as a hottie in their high school who was a few years ahead of them.

I wonder if a movie with a gag like this would get green-lighted in 2026. I tend to doubt it.

I remember that. What was unconscionable was the father and his young wife getting it on Bill (or Ted's) room!

I was laughing about that to myself the other day in the FFT, when @FtttG said that men have fallen out of lust with lesbians because they saw actual lesbians and they weren't that hot, and then I thought of the average stepmom...

I can't imagine the average stepmom is especially attractive, but how many stepmoms can you name off the top of your head? It's not a highly visible identity in the way that "lesbian" or "black" is: no woman introduces herself by stating that she's a stepmom. Probably the only time we hear about women raising the children of her husband from a previous marriage/relationship, it's a celebrity, who are selected for being attractive. Hell, even searching the term "stepmom" (specialised websites excepted) would probably just bring you to the movie Stepmom (starring a young Julia Roberts). Most of the time you hear the word "stepmom" used in the media, it's in reference to an unusually attractive woman!

(Funnily enough, the primary context in which I heard the word "stepmother" growing up was the "wicked stepmother" archetype in Grimm's fairy tales: that being an evil, sexy woman who seduces a hapless man and persuades him to abandon or kill his children. I wonder to what extent porn studios are consciously playing on this archetype. Certainly the "stepmom" in porn videos is a wicked, conniving seducer.)

Personally, the incest/faux-incest trend in porn never appealed to me – I just find it creepy and off-putting, and downright paedophilic when it comes to the "stepdaughter" stuff.

Though weirdly, this is one of the scandals for which St Paul rebukes the unruly Corinthians:

5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. 2 And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.

And given the restrictions on this in the Old Testament, clearly in ancient times there were enough cases of men with adult sons marrying much younger women (maybe as second wives or concubines) that this was a real problem where propinquity led to affections between the parties closer in age.

6 “None of you shall approach any one of his close relatives to uncover nakedness. I am the Lord. 7 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness. 8 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife; it is your father's nakedness. 9 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your sister, your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether brought up in the family or in another home. 10 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your son's daughter or of your daughter's daughter, for their nakedness is your own nakedness. 11 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife's daughter, brought up in your father's family, since she is your sister. 12 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister; she is your father's relative. 13 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother's sister, for she is your mother's relative. 14 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's brother, that is, you shall not approach his wife; she is your aunt. 15 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law; she is your son's wife, you shall not uncover her nakedness. 16 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife; it is your brother's nakedness. 17 You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and of her daughter, and you shall not take her son's daughter or her daughter's daughter to uncover her nakedness; they are relatives; it is depravity. 18 And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive.

11 “If a man lies with his father's wife, he has uncovered his father's nakedness; both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them. 12 If a man lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall surely be put to death; they have committed perversion; their blood is upon them. ... 14 If a man takes a woman and her mother also, it is depravity; he and they shall be burned with fire, that there may be no depravity among you.

17 “If a man takes his sister, a daughter of his father or a daughter of his mother, and sees her nakedness, and she sees his nakedness, it is a disgrace, and they shall be cut off in the sight of the children of their people. He has uncovered his sister's nakedness, and he shall bear his iniquity. ...19 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your mother's sister or of your father's sister, for that is to make naked one's relative; they shall bear their iniquity. 20 If a man lies with his uncle's wife, he has uncovered his uncle's nakedness; they shall bear their sin; they shall die childless. 21 If a man takes his brother's wife, it is impurity. He has uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless.

You shall not uncover the nakedness of your son's daughter or of your daughter's daughter, for their nakedness is your own nakedness.

Interesting that this is the only one that refers to uncovering your own nakedness. Does that mean masturbation? Or is it really forbidding looking at yourself naked?

but how many stepmoms can you name off the top of your head?

...I feel like I can name five or six that I know closely pretty easily? I'm not even sure how to process this question. Do you not know divorced people?

There were (probably still are) tabloid scandal stories about step parents and step children having relationships/getting married. The calibre of people involved, we're not talking supermodel looks. Underclass types doing underclass things.

I mean, don't forget one of our greatest living directors.

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I personally know several divorcés, but off the top of my head can only think of one stepmom.

I suppose what I was really getting at is that being a stepmom is rarely the most salient fact about a person in a way that "lesbian" is. "Lesbian" is a highly salient trait about Megan Rapinoe, such that when someone says "lesbian" she might be one of the first people who pops into your head. Meanwhile "bookkeeping clerk" isn't a very salient trait about someone. If someone says "bookkeeping clerk" you would probably draw a blank, even though statistically most people surely know at least one woman in that line of work. I think "stepmom" is more like "bookkeeping clerk" than it is like "lesbian".

Huh. I guess I know a lot more blended families than average or something. Just on my block growing up I can think of three or four stepmoms of friends of mine. Stepmom is a very salient fact from the perspective of the stepchild or their peers.

But once it's the porn genre it's a very salient fact about the person. If I clicked on "hot stepmom porn" I know a lot of facts about that woman.

My point is more that I'm not sure that the differential between PornLesbian and RealLesbian is any bigger than PornStepmom and RealStepmom, or PornTeacher and RealTeacher. There's a few hot ones that form the basis of our fantasies.

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If he's 50 and she's 20 years younger, then she's 30. That's a woman, not a girl. Yeah, I know it's nit-picking, but it does infantilise women. Would you refer to your friend as a boy if you were talking about him in terms of "I know a boy who is dating a younger woman"?

I understand the feminist objection to referring to women as "girls" regardless of age in dating-related contexts, but it is in fact standard English (both BrE and AmE) usage.

Would you refer to your friend as a boy if you were talking about him in terms of "I know a boy who is dating a younger woman"?

Have you never heard the term "boy toy"?

I have, and it seems to have changed its meaning since the 80s and Madonna, where I first heard it.

Boy toy is girl boasting of being, ah, generous with her sexual attentions for a range of young men.

Toy boy is the gigolo or kept man for an older woman. Now it seems that "boy toy" is the term used here, and has lost the first meaning.

I remember being young and finding this terminology collapse confusing myself. I think gay men were responsible? For them the distinction would become rather blurry.

FWIW, girl has been so normalized as a generic casual word for young-ish woman that it doesn't really register to me the same way as "boy". Boy is pre-puberty; Girl can be anything below ... 40 or so? It functions more like "guy" nowadays, woman would sound stilted to me.

It flows back to societally valuing youth in women and age/experience in men (common idea in this thread), doesn't it? "Boy" is almost insulting to an of-age male in various instances (some related to racism), while "girl" is acceptable because it's considered flattering.

Not endorsing, just observing linguistic implications.

"Boy" is almost insulting to an of-age male in various instances (some related to racism), while "girl" is acceptable because it's considered flattering.

I know a Russian girl who got offended when someone referred to her as a woman. She said it made her sound old.

To move from being called 'madame-moiselle' to 'madame' is an unpleasant right of passage for every young French woman.

Really, the anglosphere is weird in that we think referring to a young woman as a girl might be a bad thing.

Interesting, because even back in the stone age (the early 90's) I was taught that all women above school age who were not personally known to you were "Madame" and that calling an undergraduate-age waitress "Madmoiselle" was hitting on her.

It does depend. Referring to a girl in her twenties as a girl? Yeah, okay. Referring to a woman of thirty or more, as a lot of early 20th century fiction I've read does, as a girl? It just doesn't fit right. He's a mature man of fifty, established in the world and his career, married to a lovely girl (who you later find out in the narrative is thirty-five). It just sounds odd, as though wives were to be permanent children (and yeah, I've read some ghost stories* where the ostensibly male narrator weeps about his child, his little girl, when his wife has been fridged for plot purposes, which maybe sounded terribly romantic in 1910 but today sounds uncomfortably like Daddies and Littles).

*Man Size In Marble by E. Nesbit. Great story, really spooky, and I want to shake the idiot narrator until his teeth fall out, because just maybe if he treated his wife like an adult woman instead of his little girly-wirly, she would still be alive. Though being fair to him, the wife is a bit of a 'learned helplessness' type who does like being treated like his little girlie and has panic attacks about 'oh no the housekeeper is quitting, I shall have to cook meals and wash dishes!'

FWIW, girl has been so normalized as a generic casual word for young-ish woman that it doesn't really register to me the same way as "boy".

As a side note, I agree. But I think when age-gap relationships are being discussed, it's important to use the words "woman" and "man" so it's clear that we are discussing relationships where neither partner is underage. But yeah, in common parlance, a 25 year old woman is a "girl" and a 25-year old man is a "guy."

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.

Exactly, if a woman marries me for my money, extends me love and attention, raises my kids, watches me die of natural causes and then goes to the Bahamas to cry on a cruise ship, I'm not really seeing the issue here.

There are very few women who don't care about money at all. I ask the married male Mottizens here to consider what would happen if they suddenly gave away all their money, quit their jobs and then told their wives that. "But don't you love me for who I am?", you'll have to cry plaintively as she files papers and takes the kids.

goes to the Bahamas to cry on a cruise ship

Don't get a Bahamas mourning wife, get you a St. Barts mourning wife.

Got a few million? / start chasin a billion.

Aim higher, king.

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 never married, and those 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 their '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:

These are the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between June 20-23, 2023. For this survey, a sample of 1,210 adults and oversample of 201 Men that have dated women 10+ years younger than them and 207 Women that have dated men 10+ years older than them, age 18+ from the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii was interviewed online in English.

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!

Oh, yeah. Marriage was not all about romance and your true love and soul mate and whatever until relatively recently. Families wanted their daughters to make good marriages, so if that meant an older man or even a widower, then yeah, that's who you are walking down the aisle with.

Also widowers - men getting married a second (or more) time because they need someone to look after their household and young children.

Kipling, in a funny poem, has the distaff version of that; young officers/company men in India flocking around older women (possibly because young men were not encouraged to/permitted to get married, taking native mistresses was frowned upon, so a flirtation or even affair with a married or widowed woman was one of the few sexual outlets, and if sufficiently old no chance of inconvenient and scandalous pregnancy):

My Rival

I go to concert, party, ball —
What profit is in these?
I sit alone against the wall
And strive to look at ease.
The incense that is mine by right
They burn before her shrine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
And She is forty-nine.

I cannot check my girlish blush,
My color comes and goes;
I redden to my finger-tips,
And sometimes to my nose.
But She is white where white should be,
And red where red should shine.
The blush that flies at seventeen
Is fixed at forty-nine.

I wish I had Her constant cheek;
I wish that I could sing
All sorts of funny little songs,
Not quite the proper thing.
I'm very gauche and very shy,
Her jokes aren't in my line;
And, worst of all, I'm seventeen
While She is forty-nine.

The young men come, the young men go
Each pink and white and neat,
She's older than their mothers, but
They grovel at Her feet.
They walk beside Her 'rickshaw wheels —
None ever walk by mine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
And She is forty-nine.

She rides with half a dozen men,
(She calls them "boys" and "mashers")
I trot along the Mall alone;
My prettiest frocks and sashes
Don't help to fill my programme-card,
And vainly I repine
From ten to two A.M. Ah me!
Would I were forty-nine!

She calls me "darling," "pet," and "dear,"
And "sweet retiring maid."
I'm always at the back, I know,
She puts me in the shade.
She introduces me to men,
"Cast" lovers, I opine,
For sixty takes to seventeen,
Nineteen to forty-nine.

But even She must older grow
And end Her dancing days,
She can't go on forever so
At concerts, balls and plays.
One ray of priceless hope I see
Before my footsteps shine;
Just think, that She'll be eighty-one
When I am forty-nine.

Yeah a big (if hidden) part of this story is the combination of the extraordinary reduction in childbirth mortality and the concurrent reduction in the "work in a dangerous male-only environment on the frontier for 10 years before getting married" life trajectory for men over the last century. Men would often get married later (to a younger woman), having returned to their poor home towns as impressive figures with money in their pockets to whisk away a bride from the local church social, then remarry (to a much younger woman) years later once the first died in childbirth, again organized by the local church, this time at the behest of the older ladies who couldn't stand to see the children grow up without a mother.

The comic reverse of that is the older woman who marries the younger man (often he marries her purely for her money), such as Chaucer's Wife of Bath who boasts of five husbands (at least, the ones she married, not counting any other friends she might have had) and the last is a scholar twenty years younger than her.

Or the Irish song Cailleach an Airgid which literally means "the hag with the money" and is supposed to be about a woman who went to America, made money there, and came home to get married, and having money she hooked a young husband.

Men would often get married later [...], having returned to their poor home towns as impressive figures with money in their pockets to whisk away

No, they really wouldn't. The vast majority of men in history were subsistence farmers who never traveled particularly far from their home and certainly didn't "work on the frontier" (except sometimes when that meant starting a farm on the "frontier" and staying there).

This may be a cultural difference. I'm from the American West and what I wrote describes pretty much every one of my ancestors from the 17th century through my great grandparents, and used to be a very common family story based on others I've talked to with similar backgrounds.

This dynamic existed in middle class Anglo families in America and England (making a fortune on the frontier or in the colonies) for maybe a hundred years. It barely lasted longer than our current modern dating dynamic,

17th to 19th century American West was very much an outlier. I won't say similar things never happened elsewhere but they were a rarity. Even in the rest of America that was an exception as there wasn't a sizable body of people who expanded the frontier by conquest for an expanded length of time and then replaced the original people more than culturally. Ultimately the amount of wealth that can be gathered by that route for ordinary men is limited (almost as a tautology - where would masses of men they get such wealth from?)

It was fairly often the norm for the man to gather enough wealth to support himself and his family before getting married (although even that depended very much on the time and place) but that involved traditional boring stuff like working as a farm hand etc.

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!"

We don't want the same group of people berating them thusly

Indeed- now it's the women doing the

"Settle down! Have kids! Sacrifice your freedom for family and the state! If your partner fucks off for some old dick and takes those kids and most of your resources, don't get in your feels about it!"

dance, and it's just as bad as it was when the men were doing it.

In a healthy system, men and women check each other (according to their biological/instinctual strengths and weaknesses), but we broke that system in the 1900s with the first wave of mass automation (replacing mostly men, which removed their ability to check the way women conduct abuse due to being in surplus) and then entered an economic boom that temporarily restored that balance (and the people in power now grew up under these conditions). If the second wave of mass automation, which may or may not be bearing down on us right now, replaces mostly women, society will rebalance somewhat; if it does not, and it replaces mostly men, this will get worse.

Once again, the institution of marriage was solving some pernicious coordination problems (women don't want to get pumped and dumped and left preggers, men want to to have sexual access to women who are virgins or as close to it as possible, neither can truly verify the intentions of the other) so for COMPLETELY SECULAR REASONS its very very useful to have "abstinence until marriage" as a strong norm and "'til death do us part'" as an 'enforceable' obligation.

There's a lot of other obligations that we tie up in there that trip people up, to say nothing of the obligations to the children that emerge.

But

A) You can't really construct a piecemeal version of this and expect it to work. and

B) You need some severe punishment for breaching the covenant to really make it stick. Religious folks have fear of their God as a factor, I don't know what we can impose on nonbelievers (short of a death sentence) that will keep them in line, even against their baser instincts.

Any secular punishments we create can likely be circumvented by clever/powerful enough actors.

India seems to have a pretty strong taboo on dating and marriage solely from a secular framework. There's very little religous shame about it more family honor and intense cultural and patriarchal enforcment.

East Asia in general also has this. But on a much lesser level. Having a few relationships before marriage is ok but Westerns style serial/casual dating is rather scandalous and not common.

However, the highest levels of both India and East Asia are becoming more westernized so it's possible that like many things the Western model will prevail because the West is seen as enviable and high status.

Doesn't help that of you make a diagram of the carve outs vs the actual events the average evangelical person makes for divorce, cheating, etc etc;

what you end up with is a circle. All divorce is wrong and bad, except for my divorce which was justified. And his divorce, he was in a different place in life than she was! And her divorce, she fell out of love with him!

It's like, Bitch! It said till death do us part, not till mild inconvenience do we cling together! There are +/- 30% divorces in my church, much higher than in my hobby wargame group of mainly autistic mainly communists. Probably the autism doing the heavy lifting there, though.

The nasty thing is once someone decides they want a divorce, they can go about trying to create the conditions to justify it (to others) and to make the other party feel it is the only option.

With my own breakup, I realized the meta issue: its not just that someone doesn't want to be with you, but they no longer want to want to be with you. Like, some people have a full switch flip and not only don't desire the other person, but have no residual memory of desiring them? Feelings just gone without a trace.

Whereas me, if I was feeling like I was falling out of love or feeling disgust for a partner, that triggers an alarm for me. "I want to make this work, so what can I do to address my own feelings."

Quitting easily is not in my personality makeup, for better or worse.

It's a problem.

On account of the aforementioned autism, I had similar issues where it was like "I don't like this but upon the first splitting of the check we entered into a sacred contract to just shovel a mile of shit every day" and I had to train myself into "No actually, the sacred contract comes later, dip out now before it's too late!"

Oof, I also know that feeling.

Learning to to 'gracefully' (but rapidly) extricate yourself from unhealthy situations once you realize where you're at is an important skill, rather than letting sunk costs dictate your actions.

As a side note, I have contact with a lot of religious types and putting aside threats of divine punishment, what these groups do is they heap social status on couples that get married and stay married. The flip side of this, of course, is that it's shameful to be long-term single, or even worse, a single mom.

India tends to do this on a secular level.

I don't know what we can impose on nonbelievers (short of a death sentence) that will keep them in line, even against their baser instincts.

It seems to me that there are two nodes for human sexuality.

Going full chimpanzee "Death do us part except for cheating [oppresses and protects men and women equally], all sex is rape, woman must marry rapist, woman must be virgin if still living at home [protects father's property rights]" is stable. (Yes, the enforcement for deviation from this procedure was death, but enforcement for everything in the ancient world was death. Personnel were cheap back then.)

(The all sex is rape + woman must marry rapist requires a bunch of unpacking: technically speaking, it doesn't prohibit casual sex, but gives the woman the means to invoke a shotgun wedding if she becomes pregnant. It also draws a stated distinction where a woman was assumed, and not assumed, to have cried rape by default- which protects the man.)

Going full bonobo "No STDs or pregnancy and everyone fucks like rabbits, marriage is for life (even including adultery) and carries sexual/financial obligations for both parties, single motherhood very institutionally difficult" is also stable.

You can't really construct a piecemeal version of this and expect it to work

Law must protect and bind men and women equally. Right now, it only binds men; 100 years ago, it only bound women. (To a point, modern problems are caused by women taking revenge for this bondage against their sons.)

Well, there's an inherent inequality in that its really only men who can truly enforce the law (sans that threat of eternal damnation from an all-powerful God), so it would be harder to maintain that sort of equality if men didn't want to be bound by it.

We can refactor the question to be basically "how can we convince men to accept strong limits on their sexual freedom (i.e., stop using their physical prowess to secure sex) when their baser instincts would prefer more of a free-for-all? AND convince them to actively police each other?"

For me, it is easy. I believe that the second, third, and beyond order effects of enforced monogamy are self-evidently worth it: we get to have a civilization with internet, running water, and a functioning air travel system. Eventually space travel.

But a guy who finds himself near the top of the hierarchy, he might be well aware that he could vastly increase the variety of his sexual partners if he defects... and he reasonably believes he has sufficient power to get away with it. And a biological imperative to spread his genes to boot.

Guys at the bottom also have reason to defect, but rarely the capacity.

So refactoring it further: "How can we convince elite males who could improve their own position by defecting (whilst destroying the game for everyone else) to accept limits on their sexual freedom and thus their genetic success when other humans have limited ability to even police them?"

I don't have a good answer to this that isn't "Convince these elite males that there's an even higher power that sees all their actions and declares which actions will be punished. And punished VASTLY dis-proportionally, to boot."

We start to slide back towards my classic Skin in the Game screed. Elites need to suffer for misbehavior too.

Guys at the bottom also have reason to defect, but rarely the capacity.

The story of Henry resonated with a lot of readers of Radicalizing the Romanceless, so I am not certain that this is the case. The top and bottom seem capable of defection for different reasons but the middle of the hierarchy get made into chumps.

Guys at the bottom defect by not making an effort to turn into eligible husband candidates, because it's only marginally rewarded or even feasible. This is not a bit less of a social defection than that of certain elite males but it only has social consequences long-term and invites less attention, so it's easy to assume that it doesn't matter or that it's not happening at all. Indeed it's the men in the middle who have the least reasons to defect.

I am doubtful that the elite males were ever convinced to a significant degree that God existed, or at least that He would punish them for taking many mistresses, specifically. Certainly all the commandments against not murdering and such were treated as nothing but a polite suggestion, judging by the stories of power struggles around thrones.

What did hold elite males back was that older societies were less atomized, and their escapades were more likely to be known, fueling regular, non-supernatural consequences against them such as their brother getting angry and leading a coup.

Maybe it's the people who should be willing to punish elites, vastly disproportionately. At least for as long as the elites have names and addresses and can't murder us all with drone swarms.

Maybe it's the people who should be willing to punish elites, vastly disproportionately. At least for as long as the elites have names and addresses and can't murder us all with drone swarms.

Yes, but that's another doozy of a coordination problem.

I've sometimes thought about actively attempting to rally disaffected young males who are otherwise prone to wasting their lives on video games and porn and helping them acquire training, purpose, and power, to use towards demanding better treatment for males across the board and, ultimately, to punish the worst malefactors who oversaw the current decline.

Which, yes, looks very much like a paramilitary force if you squint, and so I wouldn't be surprised if I got assassinated before it hit any critical mass.

(Gavin McInnes tried this approach with the Proud Boys, and it really got away from him)

I think that is easily disrupted by, e.g. the Andrew Tate grift, where some guy who can convince men that he knows shortcuts to getting wealth and pussy and wrings all the money and enthusiasm out of them by having them chase superficial goals.

I've given up hope that 'the people' will enforce accountability, sans the rise of some Napoleonic (Trumpian? Messianic?) figure who can represent them and guide them strategically to advance a righteous goal on behalf of the whole.

And I won't ever pretend to be that kind of guy.

If we treated adultery and dumping the wife and mother of your children for some young hottie the way elites are policed about racism that would certainly keep elite males in check. IDK how we could create that sort of taboo but it's definitely doable.

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Can you maybe offer, at least, some perspective or background on why you feel this way?

Right now, this post is just three or so "boo outgroup" assertions.

My religious and cultural background, mainly.

Nobody in my neck of the woods got divorced for anything less than domestic violence, and only after the traditional intervention had been tried: a fairly strong beating by the victims relatives. Not gender segregated either, an aunt of mine showed up to the woman in questions house with a padlock attached to a bike chain and threatened to change her whole life right now if she felt like it.

The thought was, if you wanted a divorce you shouldn't have gotten married in the first place, dumbass. Be a real adult and just have business partnership while sleeping in separate beds.

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.

jailbroken woman

Thank you for this bon mot.

despite having intentionally optimized for finding such a girl

Any tips for the young trad turboautists on the bored to replicate your success?

Fish in the right pond. If you don't want a normie liberal woman you are going to have to do something else then just use the apps in a big city this could be joining a church but depends what you want. Searching outside the West is the easiest way by far. The amount of guys who could score a trad hottie by putting half the time and money they did for their degree to find a wife but don't is unreal to me. If you want something different you have to go fish in a different pond. But just depends what you want

For me I'm not really religious or super trad but I didn't do well in the West. I went to East Asia and dating became much easier Just don't be stupid about it. A lot of guys say they want that but then just end up hanging out with English groupies and bar sluts (what‘s a female chad and a male alpha widow lol？ that's basically the dynamic) But it's not hard to wife up a nice traditional girl if you look outside the US for a year or two and learn some of the local lingo.

What if I am strictly a Caucasian dater?

Then go date in the literal Caucuses*, or Moldova. I wasn't saying East Asia was for everyone more that I chose there for a more traditional and serious dating culture while still being non-religious. Choose the pond for the fish you want to catch.

Edit: Caucasus

Caucuses

Caucasus.

You got me.

idk where you are but at least in the US there's an enormous amount of alpha in majority-Caucasian minority-Latina. You can even get light hair and blue eyes sometimes.

The only good advice is to date a neurotypical woman. Do not under any circumstances try to date a "based" woman.

Sam Hyde's advice on this is very good to keep in mind.

There's a lot of truth to this but I think it's phrased a bit too strongly. A based woman may be fine and they are out there; a woman reaching for the 'based' stereotype is bad news.

Any tips for the young trad turboautists on the bored to replicate your success?

I'm leery of this for the reason I already gave, which is that I cannot take credit and I mean 'the grace of God' entirely literally.

But, off the top of my head:

  1. It wasn't until relatively late in life that I discovered that I'm very attractive. All the signs were there all along but no one ever told me so I didn't know. Hilarious amount of history snapped into place when I realized it, etc. But this doesn't help anyone not in the same boat.

  2. That said you may be more attractive than you know and regardless you are absolutely capable of maximizing this by working out and dressing well. The former does take a lot but pays its own dividends; the latter is much easier and cheaper than commonly supposed. Happy to expand on either upon request.

  3. The usual advice seems to be that women are attracted to confidence (true) so the winning move is to learn to fake those signals (effective but ultimately pyrrhic). In fact the 'secret' is to genuinely become confident, which can only be accomplished through intentionally choosing to become worth that sense of self. In my case, going into business for myself and learning to stand my ground unflinchingly in the face of despair may be the single greatest factor in my maturation. Whoever said that trying to get one's own business off the ground is like eating glass every day until (and if) that changes was correct. While I've never gotten much alpha from stuff like BJJ I expect that in most cases something like that would be a helpful and viable path for other men. At least in the US we have been raised in a culture which seeks to infantilize and emasculate us; this must be countered consciously, but not obnoxiously. Women out there, regardless of what they repeat to themselves and each other, are desperate for grounded, confident, masculine men.

  4. In that vein, if you want a hot young happy wife, and especially one content to be a full-time woman rather than pursuing her own career in the masculine sphere, you need to be able to generate enough income to keep her comfortable that way plus the inevitable frivolous expenses which please women so well. This may sound callous but it's almost impossible to manage that with a job at this point; starting your own business is, in our generation, the only plausible path I've found to this level of income, and it's far from a guarantee.

  5. Learn basic stuff like how to repair things around the house, cars, etc. Youtube is amazing for this and a little bit goes a long way. My wife likes to say "A husband is a Daddy you choose" (tongue in cheek, mostly) and whatever you can do to push that button is probably worthwhile. Gets back to masculine confidence.

  6. Trite as this may sound, I don't think I could have landed my wife until I had made peace with the possibility of not finding anyone, especially as I got older. Once I was at peace with myself as a single man I instantly became much more attractive. Not much turns off women like the smell of desperation. When a mutual friend introduced us I told her up front "I'm not really interested in dating at the moment," (true; I had decided to raise my SMV a bit more before getting serious about that) "but you seem really interesting so let's at least meet up." Was I conscious of this as 'game'? Yes. Did it only work because I actually meant it? Also yes. In other words, don't chase girls and don't try to make them into anything they don't want to become. Raise your own value, stand firm, and let the illiquid market come to you. This may be a comparatively high-risk strategy but the rewards, if any, are commensurate. She was amazed at how unconcerned I was with impressing her. "This is going to be yes or it's going to be no and either way it'll be by a landslide," I said; "Either way we don't need to worry about it."

  7. Know what you want (this takes experience and maturity) and hold to it. When I met my wife I told her that if we were going to move forward she wasn't a vegan anymore (because babies) and that her beliefs were her business but we'd be going to church together, and ultimately as a family, every week. Pop relationship advice might label this as controlling or somehow abusive but I could almost see her sigh with relief. Women want you to establish structure and boundaries and can't feel safe unless you do. Flip side, again, is that doing this in a loving and appropriate way requires a certain gravitas which cannot be effectively simulated in the long run.

  8. Your wedding is the starting gun, not the finish line. She married you because you gave every indication of continuing on the trajectory that she found so attractive and you owe it to her to live up to that, and only by doing so may you expect the same in return. Failure is more acceptable than you'd think, but defeat is a state of mind and must never be accommodated. Learn to take losses in stride without losing your own frame before imagining that you are ready for a wife.

  9. Pray without ceasing. This will go over the heads of many here but you want the woman God has for you, or else none at all, and those really are the only two good options. You can be ready for her to appear but you cannot cause her to appear. Thy will be done.

Learn basic stuff like how to repair things around the house, cars, etc. Youtube is amazing for this and a little bit goes a long way. My wife likes to say "A husband is a Daddy you choose" (tongue in cheek, mostly) and whatever you can do to push that button is probably worthwhile. Gets back to masculine confidence.

The strongest relationship among my friend group is not a marriage, but still 10 years in. And I think a large part of that is the way she cleary considers him to be an atom-manipulating demigod. "[Name] can fix it" is a core, fundamental part of her worldview. Either he knows how to fix her car, faucet, beloved childhood electronics, etc, or he will after a few hours on Youtube. The admiration, comfort, and security this generates in her is plain for anyone to see.

The single greatest compliment I've ever heard a wife pay to a husband was "casual omnicompetence."

i.e. she considers him capable of addressing literally ANY problem. He has the toolset, the mindset, and the physical capacity to unfuck anything. And not just mechanical issues either.

And from her perspective, he does so while barely breaking a sweat. Though he will tell you, outside of her earshot, that sometimes it really does irritate him and/or stress him out to have to keep doing this.

But he knows he's appreciated, so that hardly matters.

A friend of mine once got a workplace review saying:

The good thing about X is that with a bit of effort he can do anything.

The bad thing about X is that he might do anything.

Good advice. Especially 8. I see a lot of guys here extremely paranoid about “random" divorce. In general choosing a good woman and keeping 8 in mind should really eliminate that. Women want commitment from a high value male.

In general choosing a good woman and keeping 8 in mind should really eliminate that. Women want commitment from a high value male.

Given the number of women around age 40 I've seen blow up marriages (to men who were correctly maintaining their trajectory) because "they weren't happy," I think you are underestimating the pro-divorce psyop being waged on women in the U.S.

This does keep me up at night. OTOH it's already happened to me once and in the long run that turned out to be an incomparable blessing.

Possibly, and I'm being a hypocrite in that I would be wary to marry an American woman. That said the guys online who fear divorce never seem to optimize against it. If you are both older than 27, both college educated, both same race, same religion. That knocks it down to something like 15% odds of divorce. Staying fit and having kids probably moves it down further.

I'd echo this, especially 3, 5, and 9, as great advice. However I'm speaking as a guy who got pretty damn close to marriage before things imploded.

4 is where guys will stumble b/c pursuing that wealth can become all-consuming, and at the very least will interfere with actually looking for a woman. Although I gather that once you hit a certain level of success women are more likely to just show up in your life. You've time to make a decent number of dice rolls in your mid-twenties, but you also have to be smart.

So I'd say there's no shame in somewhat lowering your expectations and while you should walk around with dick-swinging swagger being modest enough not to promise the sun, moon, and stars to a woman avoids some problems.

If nothing else, I 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. Between the two of us I might be the objectively more-attractive one but not by a lot and her youth goes a long way toward closing that (notional) gap in a manner that feels sustainable -- no matter how old I get, she's younger than me enough that she occurs as much more attractive than any women my age. I enjoy the stares she gets when I take her out to nice places; other men dating older women seem to have a hard time taking their eyes off of her and what can I say except that this works for me.

When we started dating she was mistaken for a highschooler a couple of times (actually in her 20s) and while we never went out of our way to generate the age-gap-curiosity stares we did enjoy laughing about it when it happened. She's old enough now, and I seem to be preserving myself well-enough, that it happens less often, which is good also. I'd say it was fun but it's also nice to draw a bit less attention nowadays.

How large is your age gap out of curiosity?

That veers too hard into personal info, unfortunately. But I don't mind that you asked.

God Bless.

I see enough 'mismatched' couples appearancewise that I always wonder at what else is cementing their bond. Having it all is wonderful.

willing to notice what she actually wants

Our culture is so fixated on individualism that the contrarian pseudoreactionaries are reinventing women’s lib. Respect.

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.

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.

I basically agree with this line of reasoning, but at the same time, it seems like a rationalization to me. Arguably single motherhood is just as bad for Democracy, and probably worse since it is so very common compared to situations such as those of Belichick. And yet, outside of a few dark corners of the internet, I don't see anywhere near the level of hostility towards single mothers that I see towards men in AGRs.

I think single motherhood is bad too. It is part of low expectations society especially for blacks.

The family unit though seems to be the core of the American experiment. It can survive X% of that but I think breaks down when the mass of society isn’t invested in the American experiment together .

Yep. I wrote an article for a website called Topix ~2012 that was very respectfully written, claiming single motherhood was deleterious for children. The focus of the piece was almost entirely ON THE CHILDREN. Putting their welfare first. But it was rejected for "punching down" at single mothers.

But it was rejected for "punching down" at single mothers.

No, it was rejected because the notion that "if you become a single mother, it might not totally be the man's fault" is offensive to gynosupremacist thought, and single mothers were just the political excuse to invoke that.

Nobody actually cares about the welfare of single mothers, or of children more generally, beyond their usefulness as an excuse to do this. Helping these groups is generally the domain of the religious.

Yep. I wrote an article for a website called Topix ~2012 that was very respectfully written, claiming single motherhood was deleterious for children. The focus of the piece was almost entirely ON THE CHILDREN. Putting their welfare first. But it was rejected for "punching down" at single mothers.

Yeah, by contrast one can imagine a hypothetical article arguing that it's bad for children to have a father who is far older than their mother. I'm pretty sure the same reviewers would eat it up like a pack of hungry wolves.

Why is single motherhood bad for democracy?

I also think you need to look to your bubble if you don't see anti-single motherhood content out there. I still know a few guys with the traditional truck sticker on the topic.

To a big extent Democracy is dependent on equality. You need a large majority or the dominant vote being relatively equal people with similar values and goals. If that is not true then the population balkanizes. I think it would be fair to say children of single mothers are at a disadvantage.

You also introduce male-female voting gaps. If 5% of men have multiple partners, 20% are incels, 20% of females are single mothers, and then around 50% are paired off you have a very bifurcated voter base. The 20% who are incels all become Littlefinger types wanting chaos in a hope that in a new order they become the 5%. 20% of females want government money. When you have 90% of people in stable relationships raising children they mostly just want stability and good governance. Huge incel populations want civil war because they either die childless or become the new ruling class.

You mean the people that keep this country movin'?!

Why is single motherhood bad for democracy?

If nothing else, it makes it harder for young men to find a wife. A lot of them will reasonably decline to become a step-dad. And even among those who are willing, a lot of those single mothers will take themselves off the marriage market, to the extent that they were ever on it in the first place.

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.

It’s fine if it’s limit to 1-2% of the population. We put 2% of men in prison so there is some slack. Gets bad though if it’s scaled.

Agreed. But to keep that limit there has to be some actual friction in place. We now know exactly where the slippery slope will take us.

This is arguably why dating apps blew up the market in short order. Took away ALL the friction for high value guys looking for one night stands AND removed it all from public view.

I agree with what you say here and in many other posts.

The biggest single policy device would be to end no-fault divorce and to make adultery a crime (perhaps without incarceration time).

"Til death do you part" has to mean what it says.

Right. But the problem with relying solely on social technology is that if a high-status guy doesn't like them, he might break the norms and 'win' due to everyone else deferring to his position, as our monkey brains are wont to do.

I think the threat of eternal damnation is a necessary component we haven't figured out a replacement for.

For Henry VIII even that wasn't enough.

The only compromise position I've hit on that might align incentives is setting it so that 'marriage' is 25 year contract that can't be exited without EXTREME difficulty during that time, but can then be 'extended' if the parties choose at the end of that period.

Logic being that's enough time to raise the kids to adulthood and get them set up well.

Its not very romantic or aspirational though, so it is probably too autistic of a solution.

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.

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":

Multiple sources told ESPN that Spygate and Deflategate, the twin cheating scandals during the Patriots' championship run, came up in deliberations among voters. A voter who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Polian, an ardent Kraft supporter and former general manager of the Buffalo Bills and Indianapolis Colts -- a chief Patriots rival during their dynasty -- told some voters he believed Belichick should "wait a year" before induction as penance for Spygate, the 2007 cheating scandal that cost the team a first-round draft pick. Commissioner Roger Goodell also fined Belichick $500,000 and the Patriots $250,000.

"The only explanation [for the outcome] was the cheating stuff," a veteran Hall voter told ESPN on Tuesday. "It really bothered some of the guys."

  • -20

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.

Wow, this really takes the blue ribbon for nasty strawmanning. Sadly, I am not a moderator so I cannot ban you for this. However I am no longer going to engage with you.

To quote an author of one of my favourite novels:

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.

Oh, noes! Seems I can haz bin blocked, alas and alack I cannot indulge in intercourse with this person no more!

  • -10

Glad you got there first.

Bill is both probably the greatest football coach of all time, and the co-leader and spirit animal of a Patriots organization that was ontologically evil during the dynasty years. He got caught cheating twice, and there's no doubt in anyone's mind that there were other creative strategies that were never (publicly) found.

No one cares that he (was) banging a influencer, it was mostly just hilarious to see them together.

he believed Belichick should "wait a year" before induction as penance for Spygate, the 2007 cheating scandal that cost the team a first-round draft pick.

Shit man, he should be disqualified for that reason. You cheat, you don't get accolades. Very simple, or it should be very simple.

You (and @ArjinFerman):

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. @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.

  4. @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.

Yes sir, right sir, sorry sir 😁

I did think it was rather curious that we'd get two guys in a row complaining about how unfairly society treats older men/younger women couples (which caused me to raise both eyebrows because dudes, that's been society forever, the only current modern complaints are (a) idiot online social media about how a small age gap is terrible grooming power imbalance and (b) the more common 'yeah man you're literally twice her age, that's not a good idea').

But I suppose it's entirely possible that Mr B was encouraged to tell his tale of woe after reading Mr A's posts on how 15 is totally old enough to be having babies.

No it’s a totally different person and this isn’t his hobby horse.

Okay. Just amused that when I looked it up, the teeny-weeny age gap between Mr. Belichick and his second squeeze after breaking up with his missus was a mere 48 years. Nothing at all, really. Why shouldn't a sprightly, virile, famous (presumably rich?) 71 year old man be attractive to a 23 year old woman? Just like Mrs Merton!

Is this you, baby? Back under a fake name?

  • You could at least check someone's profile, before making an accusation. He's been here for a while.
  • Aren't you on you third or fourth alt, that you set up specifically to get around a permaban?

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.

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!

It just seems awfully coincidental that a second person with the same bee in his bonnet over age gaps should pop out of nowhere

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.

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!

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.

I tend not to click on profiles, unless I'm very infuriated and want to know what other stupid crap this stupid idiot who annoyed me has been spouting.

Also, I have a terrible memory so I really don't keep track of "this is A, who used to go by name B, who got banned back in year C, and then came back as new account D". I have enough to do to remember to set my alarm clock for the morning.

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.

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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 seems like in real life thé people who get very upset about age gap relationships are mostly young, not old. There’s obvious reasons- if you don’t like it, it affects you personally, which is a different thing.

Right, this is influenced by my own demographics, but most of my experience of people complaining about AGRs takes the form of young men complaining about old men stealing all the attractive young women (and, to a lesser extent, older men who don't have the game to attract younger women and now resent the fact they seem to have lost out on both ends). I certainly remember being frustrated about my female classmates dating 30-year-old obvious losers in high school and college.

I also see a lot of older women complaining about age gaps with romantic leads in movies, but I'm not sure if that's more a personal resentment thing or a "representation in media" thing.

I'm somewhat more sympathetic to the "representation in media" complaint here, but it actually slightly cuts against the complaint about real AGRs. The problem is that the fictional relationships are rarely actually being depicted as AGRs. A fifty-year-old actor is playing a Generic-Age Man and a twenty-year-old actress is playing a Generic-Age Woman. If the script was actually trying to portray an AGR - which it may well be likelier to do if AGRs were more culturally accepted - the implications would be quite different.

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.

It occurs to me that the "power differential" argument could actually be analysed as almost entirely upside down.

I tend to agree with this. Just looking at Belichick's girlfriend, it's obvious that she has a tremendous amount of power to walk away and quickly replace Belichick with a man who is highly desirable in terms of money, social status, and physical attractiveness.

The "power differential" argument has more merit if the man exclusively controls something the woman desperately wants, for example she is an aspiring actress and the man one of the few entertainment executives who makes casting decisions. But that's why we have laws against sexual harassment.

Large age differentials are so uncommon in my social sphere, that my actual encounter is from time spent in rural Muslim Albanian villages. I don't think I've met a mainstream American woman who was sexually attracted to a settled boomer man, so it's not really a point of concern. I suppose if it happened, I might think something like "huh, that was unexpected," and not much else.

power [...] differential

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.

Can you define this for me? What does "power differential" mean in the Western context?

There's only very few 10+ year age gap relationships in my extended bubble, but those I can think of have clear power differentials: the guy already owned a house and was established in his career when she left grad school. This means, once she decided to enter that relationship, he got to choose the city they would live in. She's also, by not pushing for it in a prenup, not on the title of the house.

At some point, his pension scheme is going to allow him to retire, maybe even retire early. Whether she will continue to work or retire extremely early herself - together with him - will probably not feel like her choice.

She could have pushed against all that, but by being older, a lot of the default choices were already locked in by him. It would have taken a lot of effort to change some of those defaults, and realistically, the relationship would not have survived that effort.

Oh the other hand: free rent, lots of disposable income, friends in similar situations, a network to boost her own career... certainly nice perks, but I bet she wonders how much of that would survive a divorce.

She could have pushed against all that, but by being older, a lot of the default choices were already locked in by him. It would have taken a lot of effort to change some of those defaults,

She could've also stopped dating him, right?

"locked in by him" is written in - literally - the passive voice. How passive is this woman?

Every couple, before marriage, should absolutely sit down and have complete conversations about finances, divisions of responsibility, future plans (where to live), career expectations, etc. If there's a hard disagreement on something, this is a good time to walk away without signing the most consequential legal document of your life.

The woman you described above affirmatively agreed to every single item you listed by signing the marriage license. There is no power differential.

That doesn't make much sense. Being aware of, and agreeing to, a power imbalance doesn't make it go away.

And I agree, every couple should have those discussions. But going into the discussion with a younger man would obviously change the stakes, and the style. There would be, on average, more room for compromise. And sure, if both actually want the exact same thing in every aspect of life, that doesn't matter. But most relationships don't have a 100% match, so compromising is important.

Same with the threat of divorce. As long as one party is significantly more fucked by separating, there is a power differential. Agreeing to it doesn't make it vanish.

But none of what you're describing would have been unknown, to either party, even at the start of the relationship. I don't know, to me it just sounds like they're both giving something up (money or choice of where to live) and both getting a lot out of the relationship. Maybe it's not perfectly balanced, but life seldom works out that way.

Admittedly I'm biased, because I finally escaped from a relationship that would have pattern-matched to a "power imbalance" from outside, but from inside was soul-crushingly bad for me. Appearances can be deceiving.

But none of what you're describing would have been unknown, to either party, even at the start of the relationship.

That doesn't make a difference, does it? A professor dating his student is an obvious power imbalance, no matter how aware both of them are at the start.

just sounds like they're both giving something up (money or choice of where to live) and both getting a lot out of the relationship.

Sure, still different than a couple graduating together and deciding where to move together - who then also get a lot (but often different things) out of the relationship.

That doesn't make a difference, does it? A professor dating his student is an obvious power imbalance, no matter how aware both of them are at the start.

It does if you accept that women have, y'know, agency, even to make (what you think are) mistakes. It's not even like the professor example where the student might be left in an awkward situation if she turns him down. Here, she could have just not dated the guy with money and career prospects.

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.

Yes, my main experience with age gaps is in Islamic villages. It's so uncommon in my home culture as to not have an opinion other than "huh, guess you have unusual tastes," without that much more thought put into it.

I mean at the very least the west is sufficiently different from Islamic third world societies as to be an irrelevant point of comparison, rendering your point two a different point about different people?

There are a decent number of muslims and extremely conservative Christians in America.

Do secular Americans care about an age gap unless it's someone literally in their family? If it's within their family, they would have a lot more to go off of than just that, so their opinions would probably be specific to the people involved.

The median American Muslim- and the vast majority of ‘not a literal cult’ fundamentalist Christians- practice what amounts to love matches, between adults, which are extremely different from middle eastern or third world behavior. This does not produce the same dynamics, because husbands love their wives. Hotbeds of spousal abuse in the US are mostly alcoholism driven, not driven by power structures within religious subcultures.

You’re significantly overrating the structural behavioral similarities to Middle eastern societies. Neither American Christians nor American Muslims regularly practice arranged marriages with unconsenting or underaged brides, preach domestic violence from the pulpit, forbid female education, etc. This includes the sects which teach that women ought to be submissive and domestic.

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.

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.

The only attitudes I see going in the opposite direction are those related to hedonism (legalization of weed, porn, psychedelics, gay marriage, etc.).

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.

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.

If the pedophiles aren't going to be exposed and punished

many upper class elites being pedophiles was suspected or known even before Epstein's fall exposed it

Like Bill Cosby, Huw Edwards, and Kevin Spacey? Afrika frikkin Bambaata? Okay they're not upper class elites, but neither was Jimmy Saville. They're all public figures though, which is its own type of status. They've also been exposed and they've been punished. Epstein himself was in prison. Maxwell is in prison.

Upper class elites certainly have a lot more resources available to evade detection, but that doesn't explain the Rotherham rape gangs. Immigrant minicab drivers and takeaway owners are not elites in any sense and they got away with it for years.

I'm tired of seeing the "everyone knew" narrative when it's such obvious confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. People only remember the famous ones and people only focus on the ones that suit their agenda, but because dodgy sex abusers exist in all strata of society (immigrants, Hollywood, establishment figures, pop stars, priests, Jewish financiers, teachers, gay adoption parents, straight adoption parents, young old rich poor left right up down and 100x as many unremarkable nobodies) people can always find an example to grind their axe that "everyone knew x is evil", neglecting all the other non-deviant or baselessly-suspected members of those demographics. The true commonality is that they're ~99% men (when women abuse children it tends to be the non-sexual type of abuse, and thus less scandalous and correspondingly less discussed).

Like a 40 year old who only wants to date people 18-20? Pretty suspicious.

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?

be weary of anyone who does pedophile lite behavior

"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.

Good points! I'm surprised at how many native speakers use risky when I'm pretty sure they mean risquè.

I would suspect that they're not mixing up spellings, but are just unaware that it's a separate word instead of a weird way to pronounce risky to make it euphemistic.

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.

as a practical matter, a lot of women really don't actually like the fruits of the sexual revolution.

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 personally find it fascinating to notice how the cultural stereotype of the incel is actually a sort of amalgam of two different archetypes of men, and one of them is indeed the established pickup artist who's lost his fucking mind. That really puts the lie, IMO, to the idea that "incels" hate women as a sour grapes thing; by far the most vicious misogyny I see in those online spaces seems to trace back to men who have led terribly disordered and promiscuous lives; they were already quite misogynist in the first place but got worse when their lifestyle proved unsatisfying. I think there's something of a feedback loop between the celibate woman haters and the caddish woman haters, but the latter are much more aggressive and manic in any case, where the former are more depressive and blackpilled.

Most "redpill" pickup artist advice basically boils down to "find an emotional unstable and needy women. Then, use these tactics to manipulate her into sleeping with you."

If that's the strategy a guy chooses, he's going to overexpose himself to emotionally unstable and needy women. It makes sense that would create a false perception of the median woman and therefore lead to a lot of misogyny despite the "success" of the pickup artist.

The corollary to that is strippers. (Side note: I should do my effortpost on strippers). Having dated a few of them in my pre-Jesus days, they all develop a cynical misandry-lite because so many of their male interactions are with drunk men attempting to do or say nasty things to them. Strippers do have an extra cognitive dissonance; many, many of them are hardcore progressives who believe what they're doing is "sexual empowerment" manifest. That this, in reality, entails literally crawling around naked for money thrown at them by cro-magnons means their mental model of the world is much like a snake eating its own tale tail.

Yeah many Redpill and PUA articles discussing female nature are essentially describing borderline personality disorder because those are the types of women who are prone to have one night stands with randos in clubs and bars.

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.

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.

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.

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, :*

If I were 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)

As you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend a significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. No matter what he's telling himself on his setting page, a 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging 18- and 19-year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.

A woman's desirability peaks at 21, which ironically enough is the age that men just begin their "prime"—i. e., become more desirable than average. Following that dotted line out, you can see that a woman of 31 is already "past her prime", while a man doesn't become so until 36. As we mentioned above, after age 26, a man has more potential matches than his female counterparts, which is a drastic reversal of the proportion in young adulthood, when women are much more sought-after. Because men's dating preferences skew so young, and women's are age-equitable, men peak later, and have a longer plateau of desirability, than women.

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.

doesn't quite match your assertion

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:

as you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend athe median 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. No matter what he's telling himself on his setting page, a 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging 18 and 19 year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.

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.

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.

(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.

"he left me and married his secretary"

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)".

That's a better examination of it. Thanks.

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.

I guess in a time before regular elections, "young buck tears the throat out of the aging alpha and leads/fucks the pride into a bright new future" seemed as good a model as any to pin your hopes on for positive change. The only way for the sons of Mars to grow up big an strong is to periodically murder the old men so the young and verile warriors can start breeding.

Though he's a villain rather than a hero, I take Absalom as a Biblical ur-example here.

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.

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.

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!

  • -11

Sometimes you post very interesting, level-headed perspectives, and then you post very uncharitable misrepresentations of this sort. It's odd.

I read him as saying he was in his forties and dating a 20 something woman, not a teenager.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

(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.

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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