Got an email a week or so ago from “Dana”:
I am 40, single and loving it. I am not ready to settle down yet but I realized a while ago that I am starting on that path. I look much younger than I am. Most people think I’m in my 20’s (Thank you Mom and Dad!) and both my age and the way I look have had some interesting effects. Over the past few years I’ve found it harder and harder to find men my age who want a romantic relationship with a woman *my* age. They all seem to want that young under-30 type of woman. I’m at the point where almost all the men I date are 10+ years younger than I am! In general, I have no problem with it (or the opposite scenario). I get along fabulously with people (male or female) who are younger than I am, but I do find the generation gap (and there is one!) to be somewhat irritating at times. They’re fun to date but I can’t imagine settling down with someone who lacks so much life experience. I have no desire to be anyone’s mother or babysitter.
I had a similar conversation recently with an old friend, my age (and Dana’s). Single again after a twelve-year marriage, she’s recently been repeatedly “hit on” by her daughter’s soccer coach — a handsome lad in his late twenties, well over a decade her junior. My friend is flattered and physically attracted, but said essentially the same thing Dana did: she has no desire to be anyone’s mother, teacher, or babysitter. “I’m not here to give anyone experience”, she says.
Because I post so often on older men, younger women, I periodically get notes asking me to address the reverse: older women, younger men. There are a number of reasons I don’t post on the subject. I work as a college professor and a volunteer youth minister. Over the years, I’ve heard countless stories from high school girls and traditionally college-aged women about their experiences of being pursued by, approached by, ogled by, harrassed by, older men. I’ve worked with many young women who, in their teens or early twenties, had sexual relationships with substantially older men. Though a handful tend to interpret their experiences positively, most — with hindsight — deeply regretted their premature sexualization by much older males.
On the other hand, in all my years of teaching and youth ministry, I’ve only known one teen boy who was sexually involved with an older woman (when their relationship began, he was 17 and she was nearly 30). He only told me about the relationship after he had turned 18. This woman had pursued him (he was a charming, almost unnaturally graceful adolescent, and very handsome) after meeting him in a church setting, and they had had an intense sexual and emotional relationship until he moved away to college. The last time I spoke with him about it, he was deeply conflicted about what had happened, but still at least somewhat in love with the woman who had seduced him.
Bottom line: I don’t see older women pursuing young men at the same rate that I see the reverse. My primary concern has been for substantial age gaps in which the younger partner is in their teens or twenties. In theory, I’ve got as much objection to a 17 year-old boy having a sexual relationship with a 30 year-old woman as I do to the reverse; on the other hand, despite the frenzied tabloid coverage of the Mary Kay Letourneau’s of the world, most evidence tends to suggest that younger men/older women relationships are comparatively rare.
We don’t live in a culture that teaches older women to sexualize teenage boys. Very few teen boys have had the experience that their sisters have had, of having a car filled with middle-aged women pull up alongside them, with the women inside making obscene suggestions. And while I don’t doubt for a second that there are plenty of women in their thirties or forties who find a nicely muscled adolescent male to be visually appealing, I think there’s a substantial (and in this case, welcome) social pressure against an older woman making advances on a younger man. Older men all-too-frequently bond with each other while rhapsodizing about “jail bait”; while older women may joke briefly about a hot high school lifeguard, it’s very unlikely that a woman who did seriously want to pursue an adolescent boy would get much in the way of social support from her peers.
Of course, there’s a colossal difference between a 40 year-old woman dating a 28 year-old man and a 30 year-old woman dating an 18 year-old boy. The meaning of an age gap is largely dependent on the age of the younger party in the relationship; the older he or she is, the less significant the disparity and the lower the likelihood of abuse. If my friend wants to date her daughter’s soccer coach, or Dana wants to date a fellow too young to remember disco, that’s not a similar ethical problem to pursuing an adolescent.
What I find so striking about both my friend and Dana is that they are uninterested in and indeed actively opposed to, taking on the role of teacher. And therein lies what I think is the most significant difference between older men/younger women and older women/younger men relationships. We live in a society where we teach older men to eroticize the role of mentor and teacher; both in pop culture and real life, we send men the message that to be a woman’s “first” (or, more likely, her “first” who knows what he’s doing) is a sublime delight. The fantasy of serving as both father figure and lover, as grotesque and incestuous as it sounds, is inscribed on the psyche of the European-American male by everyone from Shaw to Nabokov. Far fewer women long to serve as teachers and initiatiors. This might be because they’ve been socialized not to fantasize about younger men, but I think there’s more to it than that. It’s not that grown women can’t have voracious libidos, nor is it that too many American women are uncomfortable with power.
The real issue is the simple and obvious one: most grown women already do plenty of teaching and care-giving and hand-holding within their families and their workplaces. Even those who are not mothers have probably spent a great deal of time doing for others what they cannot or will not do for themselves. The idea of extending that to a romantic and sexual relationship as well is, understandably, a less than exciting prospect. We live in a culture, after all, where many young men turn their own adolescence into a quarter-century project. And while younger men may be more receptive to egalitarianism, and while they may have firmer bodies, they are all too likely to be carrying around a heavy dose of post-adolescent anxiety about their lives. Many — too many — are “waiting to be struck by certainty” about what to do with themselves. And for most women, I’d venture to say that helping a man figure out what the hell he wants doesn’t rank high on the list of powerful turn-ons.
Regardless of age, I’m opposed to anyone who doesn’t want to engage in some sort of “teaching” in a relationship. As far as I’m concerned, both people should bring something to a relationship that helps the other person grow. If I’m dating someone who doesn’t have anything to offer along those lines, what’s the point? It’s stagnant before it’s even begun.
Your discussion of older women/younger men brought to mind something that’s not entirely On Topic - not only are these pairings more rare than your often-talked-about older men/younger women, but fewer people recognize the harm in the pairing. I’ve often heard young men respond to scenarios like Mary Kay Letourneau’s by congratulating the underage male, or suggesting that all teenage boys would love to lose their virginity to a hot, older, experienced woman. I can never figure out if they really believe what they’re saying, but it’s appalling.
“Bottom line: I don’t see older women pursuing young men at the same rate that I see the reverse.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, Hugo, but you don’t really see women of *any* age pursuing men. So it stands to reason you don’t see older women (*especially* older women who’d have grown up even more indoctrinated than younger ones) pursuing younger men.
As for whether your friend would really have all that much to mother, teach, babysit, or “give anyone experience,” to someone in his 20s that’s, um, just as incredibly arrogant and “othering” as the older men who imagine they could do likewise to young adult women. So it’s just as well that she declined.
And I want to be really clear here. I’m not calling that attitude “reverse sexism,” I’m calling it just plain old sexism as in “to discriminate against an individual for their failure to adhere to the attributes, characteristics, and roles tradition designates as appropriate.”
Because seriously, it’s not enough for men to get over disdaining women who are taller, better educated, more intelligent, funnier, better compensated, more aggressive, and older if women aren’t willing to get over their complementary biases against shorter, less educated, less intelligent, less funny, more poorly paid, less assertive, or younger men.
And just to be clear, I’m *not* flaming anyone here[1]. The thing about uncovering previously unexamined reservoirs of bias is that nobody needs to apologize or introspect. Not your friend and certainly not you, Hugo. But it does need examination.
I’m not sure you’ve done exercises along these lines in any of your classes but I think series of questions like “would you go out with someone taller/shorter than you” provide great opportunities for uncovering gender-role assumptions.
figleaf
[1] Ok, maybe Maureen Dowd, but since there are only about five single men older, richer, taller, smarter, and more influential than she is and because she thinks it’s *feminism’s* fault she can’t find a “suitable” partner, I think she’s a special case.
Not too long ago, I emailed Hugo asking him if he found this “older women, younger men” issue common. I am at the beginning stages of a relationship with a young man (about 8 years my junior, however we have been friends for a year or so), I am of the opinion that age really has little to do with my attraction or his. After being married to a man that was older than I, my friends who know my ex and my current interest, will tell you that the 22 year old is light years more engaging,gracious, kind and mature.
Sure, I’ve had more life experiences, but I believe that certain people have life attitudes that reveal how ambitious or curious (learners of life in general), that cannot be dismissed by an age gap. Plus, twenty-somethings really know how to kiss. That’s all I’m sayin’.
Figleaf, I agree that there’s a presumption in this post against the possibility that twenty-something men are, for the most part, emotionally mature enough to handle a relationship with an older and more experienced person. Exceptions to the rule of the sort that Skippy raises do not disprove the validity of the general rule.
My primary interest is in writing critically about older men, younger women relationships — a subject to which I have devoted considerably more time and effort and thought. That means that some more glaring blind spots will appear in a post on this reverse topic!
Figleaf, I do want to take issue with one aspect of what you say — in your note about assumptions, you say:
it’s not enough for men to get over disdaining women who are taller, better educated, more intelligent, funnier, better compensated, more aggressive, and older if women aren’t willing to get over their complementary biases against shorter, less educated, less intelligent, less funny, more poorly paid, less assertive, or younger men.
There’s some apples in that there pile with some oranges. “Poorly paid” is one thing. “Less intelligent” is another ball of wax. The latter is a very legitimate deal breaker, wouldn’t you say? You separate intelligence from age and experience and education — rightly so — because intelligence does matter, I think, in a way that these other things may not. I cannot for the life of me imagine being in love with someone whose intellect didn’t match my own, even if the manner in which she expressed it was very different.
You fail to ask an important question here Hugo which is if ‘Dana’ can’t see herself with any of these men then why does she keep dating them?
As a man who actually has been the May in May/December several times I can tell you that there are indeed women out there who enjoy showing a young man the ropes, sexually and otherwise. And there are lots of women out there who mother the men they’re with……….and this can happen with older men or same age men as well. In my case I have indeed played out issues with my mother(and father) by being with older women and am now, on some level, paying the price.
Then there are the Susan Sarandons and the Tim Robbins of the world in which each person appears to be perfectly suited for the other and the age difference is all but irrelevant.
Are we almost ready to say ‘it depends on the two people in question’ once and for all?
No, I’m not ready to say that — because none of us operates independently of the culture, not entirely. And because older men younger women relationships are so often exploitative and predatory, particularly when the younger women is barely an adult, simply saying “age is just a number” is all too often a way of turning a blind eye to very serious problems, which I’ve addressed in many different respects.
After all, Bill, there are plenty of older men who love showing a young girl “the ropes” — frequently because of an eagerness for power, a discomfort with vulnerability, and so forth.
I do think we make a colossal error in seeking to repair a relationship with a parent through a sexual relationship with an older person. But I’ve made the case again and again against age-disparate relationships that take place before both parties are full and complete emotional and chronological adults, and I’m not going to reiterate the contents of all my archives!
“Less intelligent” is another ball of wax. The latter is a very legitimate deal breaker, wouldn’t you say?
I think you and figleaf are talking past each other; you seem to be saying “less intelligent” as synonymous as “they must have a certain level of intelligence”; I read figleaf’s version as “they must be smarter than me.” Absolute versus relative.
I see — if that’s the case, I did misread “fig”. Thanks for clearing that up!
Interesting post. My first visceral reaction was that by categorically crossing out younger men as potential partners Dana is passing up the chance to meet someone who suits her. But I do thinks she has a point. I’ve always wondered about the life experience issue. I’ve dated a number of older men and I’ve often been puzzled as to why they wanted to date me. I have a healthy self esteem but as awesome as I think I am I’m convinced that I’m going to be a lot more interesting in 10, 20 years. I just haven’t had time to do a whole lot. So why weren’t these guys dating women who were as awesome as I was and older? more interesting? more equal in their experience? Of course, there’s the obvious answer of physical attraction, but since I liked these guys I obviously wanted/want to think better of them then that. An answer I often got was that older women were very much focused on getting married… which I didn’t find convincing. But that’s thread drifting.
I’m glad you wrote on this issue! Generally I think the increased acceptance of older women and younger men (when the man is over 20) is a positive development and shows a decrease in sexist attitudes. I do think that some of the reason women don’t want to think of settling down with men 10 yrs their junior are sexist attitudes but also that dating someone more then 10 yrs younger then you is … strange due to the life experience difference. (And makes me suspicious of your priorities). (Obviously 10 yrs is a somewhat arbitrary number).
Hi Hugo. Just to be clear, yes, I did mean “compared to me,” not absolutely. I should have been more clear.
An example of what I’m talking about, by the way, would be how if you take a room full of hetero couples you’ll see that virtually all the men are taller than their partners. On the other hand, if you separate each party and reassign them another partner at random the height difference becomes *way* more random as well. And yes, men’s selection has something to do with it but so do women’s.
You can see, by the way, how that selection bias would tend to give people an overwhelming impression that men are always taller than women. Same with strength, income, intelligence, and so on. And after a point it becomes self-fulfilling.
Sorry for not being more clear earlier, Hugo,
figleaf
This reminds me of a less than positive therapy relationship I had. I’ve been going to a sexual assault group for a year. Something had been said about trust in relationships in this all woman group and the joke had been made of why we didn’t just date other women. A therapist I’d butted heads with before says to me, “women can be sexual predators, too.” I said that yes, I knew, but that it was much less common. Then she says that with all the new evidence coming out now, women might be just as likely as men to be sexual abusers. I just had to say, no, that is just not true by any stretch of the imagination. Just because something happens sometimes, that it’s possible, does NOT disprove general themes. Doing something like that in a conversation is counter-productive and argumentative. I feel the same about using examples that don’t really apply to the conversation when trying to argue against it. It forces the person making the point to address why this example does not apply instead of creating dialogue about the issue at hand.
I hate the notion that women are morally superior to men and that they’re there to keep men in line and be good examples. It keeps coming up in conversations with my mother, grandmother and aunts about adult women abusing male children or much older women dating men in their late teens or early twenties. They’ve gotten to the point where they expect exploitive behavior from men, but are shocked by or disapprove of these of examples because “women should know better.” This frustrates me. It’s not the abuse of power that bothers them, that is expected, but it’s about condemning the women for doing what they already expect men will do without the moral influence of “good” women. I really don’t know what I’m trying to say here…
Maybe this. It’s easier to focus on what seems to be the exception to the rule. Exceptions are easier to pin down and more interesting than what happens all the time. However, these things distract us from more common problems that a lot of us have just given up as impossible to solve. Attitudes that allow people to see others as objects for their own personal satisfaction at the expense of another’s humanity are the problem. It just happens to be that this culture more often encourages the older male/younger female dynamic when it comes to the sexual expression of this attitude. The older woman/younger man dynamic is only a less common (thus more attention getting) outgrowth of this. I think if we quit thinking of men and women as two different species and start thinking of ourselves as “same” instead of “other”, that would go a long way toward curbing a human willingness to exploit.
Also, I like the point about women not wanting to have to do in a relationship what they already do everywhere else. It’s all fun and games for a man to get a sexual kick out of playing Daddy/mentor/caregiver to a younger woman, when the burden probably hasn’t been on him his whole life to make these roles his whole identity. When women are socialized practically from birth (think gendered girls toys) to fill these roles as their gender identity, then have to deal with being pegged in these roles in their adult careers, it really takes the sexual thrill out of playing Mommy/mentor/caregiver with a lover.
A-flippin-men, jennyfields, to your last paragraph.
As I’ve said to you before, I think it’s good that you have brought the issue of age disparate relationships into the open and called to people to examine their motives before getting into them. But while you’ve made a slight distinction between relationships in which one person is extremely young and ones where both are basically adults, I don’t think the distinction has been strong enough. You seem almost as concerned about the latter and that’s where we part company.
i think in general that AGE=POWER. there is a “power gap” between men and women. men have more power than women in our culture. perhaps the older woman/younger man dynamic is a way of equalizing the power a bit? i’m 39. among my female friends of the same age, most of them are dynamic, self-supporting, independent, athletic, etc. men are frequently intimidated by this. some of my friends have found that younger men (maybe they’ve been exposed to more gender studies classes in college than the men who are our age?) can better handle/accept a vibrant, dynamic woman.
my brother is 8 years younger than i. he and i are good friends and we hang out a lot, so sometimes i end up in situations where i’m also hanging out with his friends. these guys who are a decade younger than i seem all too aware that i’m “in my sexual prime.” their fantasy isn’t about a mother/caretaker figure; it’s about capitalizing on my hormones. but what a turn-off when a 26 year old says, in front of your brother for cryin out loud, at thanksgiving dinner, “your sister is in her sexual prime, dude!” no parents were present, thankfully, but still: ugh.
on the other end of the spectrum, i think it could be argued that in a relationship between a younger woman and a much older man, in some senses the younger woman has some power over the man because she could get a younger man if she wanted. he’s lucky to have her and he knows it…?
lastly, i will admit that the idea of “breaking in” some hunky young buck is fun in concept, but in reality the older woman knows that it will probably be a very unsatisfying sexual experience for her.
and as always, there are exceptions to every generalization and someone will always have an individual experience that will defy the “rule.” i realize that but that’s not going to stop me from saying that, in general, in my experience, men only get better with age. i’d take a 46 year old over a 26 year old anytime.