No Age
Phoebe Maltz has a piece on prof-crushes that I think raises some smart points about the social acceptability of relationships with large age gaps. Meanwhile, the Vulture has a snarky (of course) post on the increasing age of Ashton Kutcher’s co-leading ladies (not to mention his real-life flame, Demi Moore). Anyway, leading off of these pieces, here’s what I wonder: Is age difference going to remain as relevant an issue in relationships as it’s traditionally been? Because it seems to me that, as people live longer, as youth, adolescence, and young adulthood expand and blur together, the traditional age barriers between individuals might disappear. After all, we’ve already seen major shifts over the last few decades in the way age factors into relationship expectations. Go back and look at John Updike’s Rabbit books, for example, in which the characters are all married by their early twenties and deeply concerned by the idea that anyone — especially a woman — would remain single into his or her 30s. These cultural attitudes seem deeply ingrained and permanent during the times in which they’re in effect, but can quickly shift or disappear entirely.
Frankly I’ve always considered age irrelevant in a relationship. I’m sensitive to the conservative argument aainst the declining influence of taboos, but this one is one which I would definitely not be sad to see go.
— PEG · May 13, 03:31 PM · #
I’m a pedant. I’m sorry, but I am.
How do I know? Because I get frustrated. That’s right, frustrated.
An entire essay making propositions about the the ins and outs of human mating, and not one mention of all the wonderful science we’ve built up around it? Really?
Take this, for example: “The older man-younger woman relationship is presented (by older men, at least) as a pedagogical one, whether the man in question is an academic, an accountant, an investment banker, or the man on the corner selling fruit from a fold-out table, and after a long day on campus, who wants more pedagogy? And traditionally, what the older man teaches the younger woman is sex.”
Are these statements supposed to correlate to reality? Older man has sex with younger woman, and it’s about teaching?
Isn’t it much more likely that the older man is attracted to the younger woman because she’s, ah, fertile? And because she’ll continue to be fertile for quite a while (in no culture on the planet are post-fertile women objects of sexual attraction)? Further, isn’t it much more likely he’s attracted to her at a pre-reflective level? So that it’s not about “teaching” after all?
And isn’t she attracted to an older man because, given her high investment in reproduction relative to the male, she’s instinctively drawn to a male best-positioned socially to be a constant provider? Just like she’s drawn to the center of attention at a party, or in a study group, doesn’t it just make sense she would be drawn to the center of attention in a classroom? (And then you have the hyper-modern pronoun switcheroo, where the young lady becomes a young man, and the old man becomes an old lady. Really? I mean, I get it, I really do. We should challenge our biases at every turn, look at it from the other direction, etc. But are we really at a point where this kind of pairing — between a 20yr old man and a menopausal woman — really something we should talk about? Is this really happening at such a rate that it justifies the switcheroo?)
Now, instincts aren’t everything. We also have response inhibition (which, PEG, develops in late-adolescence and is a signature of maturity — something to think about), and we have other impulses that can dampen or amplify any instinctive sexual draw to a “type” of person — e.g., if it’s socially unacceptable to bed 50yr old professors, women will be much less likely to do so.
And to answer Peter’s question, a maxim:
Friends who say “yuck” can stop a… Well, you know.
While the default is “man wants fertility”, and “woman wants stability”, with both moderated by competitive complexities, the distributions of actual behaviors are informed to a great extent by social convention. Where the society comes down is largely arbitrary, except at the margins (pedophilia, etc.)
(I hate myself. Sorry, and continue.)
— JA · May 13, 04:04 PM · #
“Is age difference going to remain as relevant an issue in relationships as it’s traditionally been?”
Actually I think this is the wrong question. A few centuries back, it was quite common for a 40-year-old man to marry a 15-year-old girl. Today, this phenomenon bothers people on the Left most of all (especially if it involves marriage, not just fornication), since leftists tend to be convinced that such relationships are inherently exploitative. So this is actually one of those exceptional cases where the trend has been toward greater, rather than lesser, disapproval of a sexual behavior.
I’d say there are only two sexual behaviors that leftists seriously have a problem with: pedophilia and incest. These are both construed more broadly than they used to be, so that even if both people are over 18, the relationship can be considered similar to pedophilia, and common membership in something other than a biological family can be considered grounds for comparing a relationship to incest.
(Of course, any of these behaviors are OK for lefties if they involve non-Western people. Non-Western people practicing their “authentic” culture are never wrong.)
— John Savage · May 13, 05:42 PM · #
Well, speaking as a woman in a relationship with a much much older man, I can contribute this anecdotal evidence that age doesn’t matter that much: when I announced this relationship to my family, they were so relieved that it was with a man (my previous long-term gigs had all been with women) that the age issue receded into nothingness. Of course, my family is from a part of the midwest where older men marrying much younger women is a pretty recently common practice.
— LP · May 13, 05:46 PM · #
There are always people, JA, who make appeals to the worst of human nature in the name of “telling it like it is.” They trade on the prurient appeal to the base instincts of human nature and act as though there is no ability for people to rise above those things. But the fact is, there are moral people in the world; there are people for whom principles and higher ideals matter; and acting as though that is not the case is acting in bad faith.
— Freddie · May 13, 06:18 PM · #
<i>there are moral people in the world</i>
There are some moral people in the world. But what do you do with the rest?
— Thursday · May 13, 08:16 PM · #
JA, I think there’s a reasonable degree of overlap between your piece and Phoebe’s original piece, and here it is:
As expectations for college sex become non-procreative, because women don’t want to reproduce before thirty and don’t expect any college relationship to last that long, then you can expect crushes on old guys to reduce in favor of guys with hot bodies and access to weed.
— J Mann · May 13, 09:06 PM · #