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Notes -
(Replying to the meat of your post)
Good writeup, but you've wasted your considerable analytic ability on a topic that's explained, sadly, by something basic and ugly.
Female jealousy.
(Relatively) older women who really have a problem with AGRs are disproportionately not in any relationship whatsoever. Ask a married woman and you'll get a shrug and, at most, "Yeah, I guess maybe it's a little old. Whatever." The only exception to this rule is if said married women is deep into the progressive left or socially hectoring right.
The intrasexual competition dynamics for women are different than men. Middle aged husbands don't really fear that Chad the pool boy is going to seduce their wife after three kids have done three-kids worth of damage to her body. In terms of direct competition, it's hilarious to envision a situation in which that same Chad confronts the husband at Buffalo Wild Wings and goes, _"Hey, brah! Just want to let you know I'm coming after that sweet Karen you got at home." If such an implausible situation were to occur, I'd bet heavily on the Husband countering with a Dad Joke along the lines of "....Do you promise? Garage code is 1234." [Footnote 1]
This is not the same with older vs younger women. Go to a wedding. Watch a bridesmaid talk totally-non-flirtatiously (seriously) with one of the Husband milling about searching for good finger food and free beer. If that young lady fucks up does the "arm touch" after a Dad Joke, you can actually hear his Wife's radar lock onto the young harpy. The trope of "he left me and married his secretary" was so strong for so long because it was fucking real. Geographic proximity plus regular interaction plus basic physical attraction = relationship.
AGR discrimination is female mate guarding at about the same level as classic slut shaming. Basic stuff.
Footnote 1: This is the present situation in the West. This probably used to be less of the case. In classic / ancient literature, there is a common archetype of a young, righteous warrior or prince fighting the evil old king to then capture (willingly that is, as in a prize) the kept Queen / Princess. This likely reflects the reality that young up and comers might actually try to ace (as in kill) the current powerful male in the local clan / tribe / what have you. However, this was also probably done for very cut and dry power and influence reasons - the Queen was a political asset. It was probably relatively unlikely the young upstart was actually romantically infatuated with the beleaguered lady monarch.
This almost never happened until the 1990's and even then mostly among people in the public eye like actors and politicians. The scenario the older wife would have been worried about before then is "he began an affair with his secretary and I felt duty bound to kick him out".
Given a free choice, men who can keep both women will, and men who have to choose would mostly prefer to go back to the mother of their children than marry a floozy. At some point the social rules changed so adultery is a purely private matter, whereas trifling with your mistresses affections is mistreating a vulnerable member of a protected group, which made it increasingly disreputable for a man not to marry his mistress, and also increasingly embarrassing for the wife to stay with a cheater.
While I'm pretty sure it doesn’t outweigh the social instability of the large single male population, this situation feels like a decent argument for polygamy. There's an obvious local equilibrium there in "the man takes the secretary home, marries her also, and sweetens the deal for the first wife by giving her an elevated position of authority over the second (and third, and so on)".
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That's a better examination of it. Thanks.
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RE: your footnote, I vaguely associate that trope with the kept Queen herself being closer to the young man's age than the King's. I wonder to what extent that's part of the original trope and to what extent that's something imposed by later adaptations as an instantiation of modern values.
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.
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