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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.
Because they are their children?
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.
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I didn't ascribe motives to anyone, btw.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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