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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.
There is a theory I've seen floated around by Louise Perry (author of "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution") that, as a practical matter, a lot of women really don't actually like the fruits of the sexual revolution. As much as the manosphere theories float around about women generally loving riding the "the cock carousel" with Chad before settling down or whatever with some beta cuck, in actual fact, that's not really a great description of a very broad slice of women and what they really would prefer (see the jokes about lesbians bring a U-Haul the first date, or the phenomenon I've been seeing discussed more recently of successful professional well-educated women getting trapped in a sequence of serial monogamous relationships over the course of their fertile years that never results in a proposal from the men they're with or children, and these women eventually having to end it and move on and getting really frustrated and eventually never producing families and children - obviously progressive discourse frames these women as victims of misogyny, but there is an interesting phenomenon in the background).
But Perry's theory is something like, ideologically, these women are heavily socialized into accepting the sexual revolution as progress, and as liberation, and as a key part of the freedom they have inherited, and so on. The sexual revolution is Progressive. Women having the freedom to have the same sexuality as caddish men = progress. So... well, at least in her telling, this disconnect ends up getting sublimated into all sorts of other social critiques that previously would have just been part and parcel of prior more restricted sexual norms for both men and women. I think she noted it especially about #MeToo - given the realities of sexual dimorphism in humans, it's extremely difficult to have sexual revolution behaviors and its "upsides" without having a lot of risk taking, overly assertive, overly optimistic male sexual initiation and gambling of a sort that will be hurtful and unwanted sometimes. And that's specifically what #MeToo was built to demonize the hell out of. And this applies more generally. We love sexual liberation, but men asking women out who they don't know is creepy. We love sexual liberation, but if a women "consents" to sex but then her friends convince her she didn't "consent" six months later, that's actually rape, because women are in an oppressed class and can't really ever truly give consent. We love sexual liberation, but "consent" is the highest moral good, and it can only exist in the most legally explicit, legible-to-the-world contexts, and so conceived, it requires social behaviors that are awkward, unpragmatic, and functional anti-erotic. We love sexual liberation, but any male-female age gap, or any possible social power differential, automatically makes "consent", the highest good", impossible. We love sexual liberation, but male heterosexual desire is dangerous and misogynistic and objectifying and intrinsically suspect. We love sexual liberation, but really we don't, and so expect these norms to be revised over and over and over, each time framed as progress, never resolving, with no stable norms for men, especially, to just count on. And on and on and on.
Obviously not everyone (or even most women, anyway) feel this way consistently, and I think everyone in this system ends up highly conflicted and confused... but I think the larger argument is that, on some level, many of these critiques are getting purchase because the actual reality is in conflict with this dominant ideology... Women want many things, but one thing many of them really, really want is to live in a world where female sexuality is treated as though it were really, really special and important, and they want to be treated that way especially by actual appealing men in their personal lives, and they want to live in a world where that leads to them being pursued and supported by worthy, desirable men with some sort of happily-ever-after stability attached to it. And the actual reality of the sexual revolution world, even with legal "consent" philosophies attached to it, is just fundamentally contrary to those desires.
Agreed, and I'll take it further (farther?)
A lot of men don't either. The very heavy movie Shame is somewhat about this. Although it's further down the line and gets into themes of real sex addiction, the movie can also be seen as the emptiness that comes from being a really rich and hot dude who sleeps with whoever he wants.
This post is an excellent summary of how many, many of the online "pickup artists" have success across a decade or more and bed perhaps hundreds or thousands of women ... and then lose their fucking minds.
To me, it's almost a "fish don't know what water is because they live in it" situation in terms of how obviously sexual libertinism is actively harmful to 99% of humans and the 1% who it does "work for" are pretty much sexual pathologists who we should highlight as cautionary tales for mental disorders instead of "liberated" heroes.
I 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
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