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You're thinking too much into this and putting forth overcomplicated examples that don't have much to do with the way regular people think about these things. It has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It's that any time there's a large age difference there's a presumption that the guy is in it for the sex and the woman is in it for the money. Most of our social relationships are among our peers, and romantic relationships are just an extension of our social relationships. If a girl in her early 20s invited me to hang out with her friends and they were all in their 60s and 70s, I would certainly think it odd. Since we find these kind of relationships implausible in general, we jump to the conclusion that their must be an ulterior motive, especially since the ones we hear about all seem to involve wealthy men and unusually attractive women. The most pushback I ever got against this idea was incidentally from a rather left-leaning podcast that was discussing Anna Nicole Smith's marriage to Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall. Smith was 26 and Marshall was 89 at the time of the marriage, and he died 14 months later, leading to a probate battle that took years to resolve. They argues that the media focused too much on the money and didn't pay any attention to their personal lives, which made it clear that it wasn't a sham relationship.
Beyond that there are practical considerations. A friend of mine, who is about 50, recently got married to a girl 20 years his junior. There doesn't really seem to be an age difference now, but when she's 65 and at the age when most people are looking to enjoy their retirement, he's going to be at the age when most people are looking at assisted living.
This is a big part of it. Consider also that an older, wealthy man is typically going to have existing children/heirs who are expecting his resources and attention, which is now being taken by a young floozy.
My research into step-children on various adult oriented documentary websites suggests this outcome is often welcomed by the male heirs.
I was laughing about that to myself the other day in the FFT, when @FtttG said that men have fallen out of lust with lesbians because they saw actual lesbians and they weren't that hot, and then I thought of the average stepmom...
I can't imagine the average stepmom is especially attractive, but how many stepmoms can you name off the top of your head? It's not a highly visible identity in the way that "lesbian" or "black" is: no woman introduces herself by stating that she's a stepmom. Probably the only time we hear about women raising the children of her husband from a previous marriage/relationship, it's a celebrity, who are selected for being attractive. Hell, even searching the term "stepmom" (specialised websites excepted) would probably just bring you to the movie Stepmom (starring a young Julia Roberts). Most of the time you hear the word "stepmom" used in the media, it's in reference to an unusually attractive woman!
(Funnily enough, the primary context in which I heard the word "stepmother" growing up was the "wicked stepmother" archetype in Grimm's fairy tales: that being an evil, sexy woman who seduces a hapless man and persuades him to abandon or kill his children. I wonder to what extent porn studios are consciously playing on this archetype. Certainly the "stepmom" in porn videos is a wicked, conniving seducer.)
Personally, the incest/faux-incest trend in porn never appealed to me – I just find it creepy and off-putting, and downright paedophilic when it comes to the "stepdaughter" stuff.
...I feel like I can name five or six that I know closely pretty easily? I'm not even sure how to process this question. Do you not know divorced people?
I personally know several divorcés, but off the top of my head can only think of one stepmom.
I suppose what I was really getting at is that being a stepmom is rarely the most salient fact about a person in a way that "lesbian" is. "Lesbian" is a highly salient trait about Megan Rapinoe, such that when someone says "lesbian" she might be one of the first people who pops into your head. Meanwhile "bookkeeping clerk" isn't a very salient trait about someone. If someone says "bookkeeping clerk" you would probably draw a blank, even though statistically most people surely know at least one woman in that line of work. I think "stepmom" is more like "bookkeeping clerk" than it is like "lesbian".
Huh. I guess I know a lot more blended families than average or something. Just on my block growing up I can think of three or four stepmoms of friends of mine. Stepmom is a very salient fact from the perspective of the stepchild or their peers.
But once it's the porn genre it's a very salient fact about the person. If I clicked on "hot stepmom porn" I know a lot of facts about that woman.
My point is more that I'm not sure that the differential between PornLesbian and RealLesbian is any bigger than PornStepmom and RealStepmom, or PornTeacher and RealTeacher. There's a few hot ones that form the basis of our fantasies.
Isn't "hot step-whatever" porn just a way of getting around the incest taboo? Close enough to be titillating to the person who wants kinky thrills, but far enough to keep the law off.
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