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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 haven't heard this talked about very much among the women I know, or seen it come up in real life. It seems like opinions vary depending on the specifics, not only of their ages and life circumstances, but also their personal characteristics.
There probably is an annoyed old maid effect, though I haven't encountered it in real life. Nobody I actually know was hoping to date Brad Pitt, and was disappointed when he chose a younger woman instead.
Some religious sects like to emphasize women as those who stay at home under their husband's umbrella of protection, while the men go out into the world, work, and lead. Since this is already playing up the power and agency differential, I would be concerned about a young woman in that culture marrying a much older man with much stronger preferences/opinions/set life circumstances than her. They'll tend to fall into "I do this/like/believe things because my husband does," which I don't like, and seems to be setting them up for abuse.
I would be much less concerned about a couple with an age gap, but similar life development levels, where she's responsible, conscientious, serious, and wants to settle down young and start a family, and he has a steady job and house to make that happen, and they're working together on their household as project. In those cases I'm not sure that I really notice the age gap all that strongly.
It 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Can you define this for me? What does "power differential" mean in the Western context?
Is this like the Dragonball-Z thing where power levels are quantifiable?
Because, to my understanding, in most (all?) western nations, men and women have totally equivalent rights. There's a lot and, somehow, growing legislation in the U.S. to guarantee this. Where exactly is the extra or additional "power" that a husband has over his wife?
Money? Well, ok. If the wife decided to rely on the man to pay for everything isn't that like her decision? It's not like bridestealing is legal.
Age? Even more of a "wha?" from me. Do old guys get magic powers at 50 that let them bamboozle young maidens? Do women under the age of 30 not have their full faculties developed yet (wait, don't answer that. Yass queen slay at any age).
The entire "power dynamic" or "power differential" trope seems absurd to me. Obviously couples often have one partner who is domineering and authoritative. I don't think that's a good thing but the antidote to that is telling both men and women to not let their partner walk all over them. Furthermore, are there also copious examples of couples loving and respecting one another despite massive actual power imbalances? Isn't that kind of the point of a lot of traditional marriage rituals and covenants?
"Power dynamic" seems to be yet another instance of suicidal absolution in which we tell mostly women - "Oh, you have no agency in your own relationship (that you entered into voluntarily) but that's okay because (somehow) this awful, awful man is using his power differential to "gaslight" you."
Either women over 18 (or 20? 21? 25?) have legally and socially incontestable ability to make and abide by their own decisions or else we have to start taking the crazies' "make women property" argument seriously.
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.
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.
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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.
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Makes sense. It's men playing indirect chess with one another via their daughters. Yes, very patriarchal but actively with the intent of a better, or, at least, better risk adjusted outcome for their daughters.
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