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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Sorry about whoever was downvoting you, and I wish they'd bug off.

how eighteen year old boys feel about fourteen year old girls I can't comment

I vaguely recall thinking "she'll probably be really cute in a few years, but it'd be gross to say so" about a fourteen year old girl when I was seventeen. I don't think I was an outlier. In the OKCupid data, there was a cutoff for both sexes at 18, but the male lower limit for the ages represented was a pretty linear W >= M * .5 + 6.5 (slightly more creepy than the "Seinfeld rule"!), and if we (dubiously) extrapolate that back to 18 that would give us 15.5 as a lower limit.

Nineteen and twenty-three isn't quite so bad, but still a gap.

No, but what throws a wrench in semi-logical explanations is that for both typical men and typical women it's a gap that is considered to be much more significant in just one direction. 23 year old men in the OKCupid data were generally interested in 18-27 year old women, and 19 year old women were interested in 19-25 year old men; 23 year old women were interested in 22-29 year old men, and 19 year old men were interested in 18-23 (probably 16-23, extrapolating) year old girls+women. Apparently "I'm dating the peer of my younger brother" gives The Ick, and "of my older sister" is Ick-adjacent, but "of my younger sister" and "of my older brother" is (or at least was; I'm sure Age Gap Discourse has had its ups and downs over the decades after this data was created) much more accepted.