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I had an ex who was actually two years older than me, but could have passed as 18 without much hassle. I visited London with her when I was 26ish, and she was 28. I remember getting dirty looks at a liquor store with her on my arm as we were gawking at the variety of booze on offer. The next time, when she went alone, she got even dirtier looks, and was finally accosted by both a random old granny and the lady at the till on suspicion of underage drinking. It was funny in hindsight, as much as women complain about getting carded, they're even more upset when it stops.
On the other hand, excluding venues where they have a policy of carding anyone who walks in, I haven't been specifically asked for ID since I was 16. I can only presume that the we were giving off the impression of a sizeable age gap.
Anecdotes aside, I think the primary driver of age gap discourse is the bitterness of a specific age group of women engaged in intrasexual warfare that spills out into intersexual forms.
Ages 25-35, I'd say. Just young enough to be terminally online, unlike even older women who grew up and settled down this before this was capital-d Discourse. (There are very few grannies out there who are going to lecture their granddaughters about dating a 35 yo when they're 22.)
They notice that the youth they once prized is fading, and while they're still perfectly happy to go for older men (as are almost all women), they resent the fact that the men in their ideal age range don't consider them to be in their ideal age range.
Lip-service to feminism makes it difficult to directly attack their direct competitors (younger girls), without coming off as bitter and butt-hurt. But you can attack the men. And if you can successfully pathologize male preference for youth as predatory, you accomplish two things simultaneously: you make the competing demographic seem like victims who need protection rather than rivals, and you make the men who prefer them seem like villains.
This reframing has the additional advantage of being unfalsifiable in ways that make it rhetorically robust. Any counterexample, any young woman who says she's perfectly happy in her relationship and was not victimized, can be explained as evidence of how thorough the manipulation was. She doesn't know she's a victim. That's the worst part.
The frontal-lobe argument is where things get especially interesting. The claim is that the prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed until 25, therefore people under 25 lack sufficient judgment to consent to relationships with older partners. I've seen this argument made by people with actual MDs on /r/medicine, which I find both impressive and alarming. It's impressive because it successfully launders a social preference into neuroscience. It's alarming because it's bad neuroscience.
Neurodevelopment is continuous. The "fully developed at 25" framing suggests a step function where below 25 you're basically a golden retriever and above 25 you're suddenly Immanuel Kant. This is not how brains work. The research shows gradual changes in certain cognitive and regulatory processes, with enormous individual variation, and basically no evidence that this translates into systematic inability to make reasonable decisions about relationships.
The younger girls? They absorb this by cultural osmosis. Younger Gen Z is actually the most vocal about age-gap discourse. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that isn't enough to overcome their innate biological preference for older, successful men, so actual behavior doesn't change much. If a 20 year old girl meets a 30 year old man she thinks is cute, she'll usually have few qualms about sleeping with him or getting into a relationship, age-gaps be damned.
Power-disparity is bad? Huh, someone should tell all the women who prefer that kind of disparity, in favor of the men they desire. Men tend to be more focused on attributes such as physical attractiveness and youth, which are, no prizes for guessing, more common in younger women.
I find such pathologization of universal human preferences distasteful, doubly so when my field is molested and forcefully conscripted to shore up bad arguments. Oh well, so be it. I'm lucky enough to be a MILF enjoyer and thus immune from direct blowback for the most part, even if I regretfully note that "MILF" increasingly just means women my age.
(Another anecdote: I remember grinding on a girl I vaguely knew at a club in Scotland. An older friend of mine had a thing for a bisexual woman about the same age as me. She ended up chatting with the first girl, who seemed receptive to her advances. Then the girl disclosed that she was 19, and that made the woman freak out, as they later explained in our company. I put aside any plans to approach the girl later, since the headache was far from worth it.)
If I was less lazy/busy, I'd insert the usual OkCupid stats blogs/archives from before they were bought and cucked. They showed that female attractiveness peaked at 18, but that was their minimum age cutoff, so I suspect the actual figure is even lower at around 16. Men also showed tolerance to wider age gaps as they got older. 30 year old and 35 year old men showed roughly the same willingness to approach 25 year old women.
I believe Gwern has a copy. Someone please do this in the comments, thanks, :*
Link (doesn't quite match your assertion)
Thank you, that's the one. My internal betting market had strong odds in favor of you being the first to find the link, good to see I'm well-calibrated.
Hmm. It seems I was misremembering. I will weaken from saying that 18 (or my speculation of 16) being peak female attractiveness isn't supported by the graph.
I will note:
I think this supports part of my argument: namely, that by setting an age minimum at 18, OKCupid obscures the fact that many/most men would happily approach younger women if they had the option. I suppose this is even less controversial, women don't magically go from being divorced of sexual value at 18 years - 1 Planck time to being hot when the clock strikes 12 on their 18th birthday.
Also look at the charts titled "The shape of the dating pool" and "how a person's attractiveness changes with time":
The latter shows that 18 year old women are about 75% as attractive as they are at their absolute peak at 21. They are roughly twice as attractive as they would be at 34. This strongly implies that women below 18 are more attractive than the majority of older women, the range restriction just doesn't allow us to measure this.
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