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Eh, I think the wall hits both sexes in the thirties. Losing all value when you hit puberty is pathetic, at least wait until your skufization.
I think men an women hit the wall 5 years apart. Historically, at 25 and 30, but today I guess most would agree you get some extra time. Although I don't know how much of that is cope.
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I think "the wall" is an expression which isn't very well defined, allowing people to argue past each other. Obviously, everyone's physical appearance declines with age, male or female. But defining "the wall" in this way, elides a significant difference between men and women: Essentially all women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men do not.
I don't think the loss of sexual attractiveness is steep for essentially all women. A woman who takes good care of her body will generally see a slow decline in sexual attractiveness over time in her 30s.
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I agree and I don't. I'd say it's like this:
In other words, women suffer a steep and inevitable loss of sexual attractiveness at some point in their 30s, while men suffer a steep and evitable loss.
In its essence the Wall is simply a biological reality - boys generally mature slower than girls but women also generally age faster then men. It's no wonder that an age gap of 3-5 years has been widespread in marriages throughout history (on both sides of the Hajnal Line, as far as I know, but again, I'm no ethnographer). And in societies where early marriage and childbirth plus enforced monogamy are the norm, the Wall practically does not matter, as the average woman hitting the Wall is already a wife and the mother of multiple children, plus soon to become a grandmother, in fact. So she already bought into the social fabric.
I suggest there are three main aspects to the Wall in the current social reality. One: there are more and more women hitting the Wall when they are single or at least childless, which then causes lots of hurt and disillusionment. Two: the worsening trends of female alcoholism, drug use, prescription pill abuse, sedentary and unhealthy lifestyles in general are all accelerating ageing, which makes the whole phenomenon worse. Three: a small but visible and loud minority of women are capable of spending a great deal of resources on anti-aging measures with notable success, which in turn creates the widespread illusion that the problem is much less worse than it actually is.
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Greater Male Variability hypothesis wins again!
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Anything is unlikely to be well-defined when any discussion of it is purged from society instantly even on the internet.
Yeah, I think that the issue here is that society is uncomfortable with differences between men and women if those differences favor men. So people have a tendency to deflect, distract, and distort when those differences are brought up.
It's interesting to note that people will readily agree to the existence of "the wall" provided it is framed in such a way as to make women seem superior to men. For example:
"Most men are creepily obsessed with youth when it comes to the women they date. Do you see the way Leonardo DiCaprio dates only young women and loses interest the moment they turn 30? Probably all men would do the exact same thing if they could."
This statement is basically identical to the way I defined the wall above. And yet one formulation will make people freak out while the other will make those same people nod their heads in agreement.
One of the pushbacks people will give is that DiCaprio's dating young women is a kind of moral failure. Therefore, your readers would disagree with it this way: many of them are morally upstanding and would only ever want to date someone with similar levels of life-experience and power. And so, they would take issue with "Probably all men..." bit.
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A lot of people seem to have this mythical idea about "attractiveness" or "good looks" or "being pretty" or "beauty" or etc. that exists as a concept outside of human judgment, as if how "attractive" someone is isn't defined by how many and how hard other people actually are "attracted" to them. I think this sort of thinking is especially encouraged in women, which is why the idea that "all women are 10s" is so common among women. And why the idea "straight men will judge you, a straight woman, as less attractive" registers as something different from "you, a straight woman, is less attractive."
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You have a point that slight reframing can change people's opinion depending on who is flattered and who is scolded, but the two statements here are not identical.
The way to reconcile this is to say that while older women are still objectively stunning and great catches, men refuse to acknowledge this because they want unequal, power-imbalanced relationships to oppress women. Over 30 women are too wise to all the manipulative tricks, they are harder to boss around, too financially and professionally stable which intimidates men etc.
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