I’ve written quite a bit about the older man/younger woman dynamic on this blog. (See archives on that topic and on the somewhat related topic of student crushes.) I’ve generally taken a dim view of age-disparate heterosexual relationships in which the male partner is substantially older than the female one, and in which the woman is still quite young (say, under 25 or so). Put simply, the potential problems in older men/younger women relationships seem to diminish based less upon the actual number of years in between the partners and more upon the age of the gal involved. I’m more concerned about an eighteen year-old woman and a thirty year-old man than I am about a thirty year-old woman and a fifty-five year-old man, even though the latter relationship has twice the number of years in between the partners. Read through the archives for more explanation of my position.
I’ve written virtually nothing about age-disparate relationships between same-sex partners, of course, and very little about the increasingly celebrated older woman/younger man pairing. A superficial concern with consistency would suggest that my feelings about all older/younger relationships ought to be the same, regardless of the sex or the sexual orientation of the partners involved. But I think a compelling case can be made that older women/younger men relationships are much less problematic than their reverse, and that the same is true of same-sex age-disparate couplings.
We don’t fall in love, or fall into bed, in a vacuum. Our desires are heavily shaped by the culture, as is our sense of how power is negotiated in sexual relationships. Patriarchal rules about gender roles show a surprising and depressing resilience; ask many young feminists of both sexes who, despite their deep ideological commitment to egalitarianism, struggle to resist social pressure to conform to traditional ideas about what a man and a woman should do in heterosexual relationships.
The older man/younger woman dynamic reinforces patriarchal conventions; the older woman/younger man dynamic subverts them. This doesn’t mean that traditional roles can’t emerge in older women/younger men relationships. I did write once about the notion of older woman as teacher and initiator, and the exasperation many women feel at being asked to “mother” men. Several folks pointed out that plenty of women are forced to take on mothering roles to male partners their own age or older. That tendency towards a kind of uxorious helplessness that afflicts so many men in their romantic relationships with wives and girlfriends can emerge, it seems, at any age and with any woman. The key is that far fewer women than men generally want to take on the “teaching” role. Women may eroticize youth and vigor in younger men, but they rarely are turned on by displays of ignorance or uncertainty; high-brow Western literature and low-brow pornography are filled with countless examples of men being aroused by much younger women who either “play dumb” — or are the genuine article.
Please understand, I’m not saying that every older woman/younger man relationship is inherently progressive while every older man/younger woman coupling is oppressive and reactionary. A great many young women do exercise great agency in relationships with older men. But there’s no escaping the reality that the potential for abuse and exploitation is likely to be much higher in an age-disparate relationship where it is the man who is the elder of the lovers. We must note, too, that we live in a world where men are seen as growing both more “visible” and more powerful as they age — while women, past a certain age, are either desexualized or mocked. “Cougar” was not coined as a compliment; “silver fox” was.
Same-sex relationships can replicate unhealthy dynamics from the dominant culture. But by their very nature, same-sex relationships “subvert the dominant paradigm” in a very healthy and important way. A romantic relationship between two men and two women reminds us that biology alone isn’t destiny, and that while a certain degree of complementarity is surely present in any enduring relationship, that complementarity doesn’t require radically different genitalia. The age-disparate relationship, while certainly quite common in gay and lesbian communities, doesn’t reinforce an unhealthy norm. Even a wealthy older man with a beautiful young (but broke) “boy toy” is a fundamentally distinct phenomenon from that of a wealthy older man with his hot young girlfriend. The latter relationship reminds us all of women’s relative powerlessness — and of older women’s disposability — in a unique and infinitely more damaging way.
Critics on this blog frequently accuse me of double standards, and of being harder on men. By noting that, all things considered, older men/younger women relationships are more problematic than any combination of partners of a different age, I open myself up to that familiar charge. Yet it’s simply absurd to pretend that we have, even now, achieved full equality for gays and lesbians; it is equally untrue that women, despite the tremendous advances of the past half-century, don’t still get the short end of the stick in virtually ever area of human activity. No matter how well-intentioned the parties involved, every older man/younger woman sexual connection sends a clear and visible signal to the outside world that the patriarchal norms are left untouched; every older woman/younger man bond sends the exact opposite signal. This doesn’t mean a good feminist can’t be involved with an older man, or a pro-feminist man with a younger woman. But it does mean that they will have to work twice as hard as anyone else to keep unhealthy cultural discourses out of their relationship.
Interesting…this reminds me of a thought I had while watching a trailer for the recent movie “An Education” (teenage suburban girl gets hurt in relationship with older man): when a movie or a fiction writer wants to depict a woman growing up, taking risks, having adventures, etc., those adventures are almost always ill-advised sexual relationships, whereas boys and men are allowed to actually *achieve something* in their Bildungsroman. I get so frustrated at this limited range of options for women, be they Lolitas OR cougars.
I get your point about older-woman-younger-man being different from the reverse, but I wonder if your scenario happens very much in real life. Are there really that many middle-aged women having serious relationships with college boys, or is the “cougar” phenomenon mainly another way that sex gets commodified as the equivalent of Botox?
Perhaps the gay daddy/boy-toy relationship is potentially more respectful because the older man might see his younger self in the boy, while the opposite sex is easier to objectify. On the other hand, child sexual abuse is prevalent for both sexes, so there may be unhealthy reasons why the boy-toy ends up in this situation as a young adult. (They don’t call them daddies for nothing.) It’s more complicated than just the presence or absence of gender inequality.
Certainly, Jendi, I’m in no way condoning child abuse. All sexual relationships between an adult and a minor below the age of consent are unethical, and that is true irrespective of the sex of the folks involved.
I think the cougar phenom is partly oversold as hype, and certainly is if we’re thinking about middle-aged women hooking up with college boys. But women in their late thirties dating men in their late twenties? That does seem, anecdotally, to be much more common now than it was in the recent past.
But I think a compelling case can be made that older women/younger men relationships are much less problematic than their reverse, and that the same is true of same-sex age-disparate couplings.
You presented your opinion that older women/younger men relationships are “much less problematic,” but what are you basing this on? Whose experiences are you basing this claim on? What social dynamic are you basing this on? I do not see anything in your post that substantiates your claim.
Same-sex relationships can replicate unhealthy dynamics from the dominant culture. But by their very nature, same-sex relationships “subvert the dominant paradigm” in a very healthy and important way.
I would argue that the dynamic at play in older men/younger men relationships is virtually identical to the dynamic at play in older women/younger men relationships. In both instances the older person tends to objectify and eroticise the younger man, hence the name “boy toy.” I am not certain that the relationships “subvert the dominant paradigm in a very healthy and important way” because in many (if not most) instances younger gay men date older men either for the potential monetary benefit or because those men are more experienced, which is why most women tend to date older men. I also do not see how there is a significant difference in the treatment “boy toys” given that the vast majority of them are treated as disposable or at the very least replaceable, which is an exact reflection of the general status of young men in society.
By noting that, all things considered, older men/younger women relationships are more problematic than any combination of partners of a different age, I open myself up to that familiar charge.
I think that in this instance you open yourself up to that charge because all things have not been considered, at least not as written in your post. It might help if you specifically spelled out the problems in older men/younger women relationships in this particular post and then demonstrated how those problems do not exist in any other combination of partners of different ages.
Toysoldier, I have thirty posts on the older man/younger woman dynamic, and the way in which it functions to exploit women, in my category linked above. I try to avoid redundancy.
that the same is true of same-sex age-disparate couplings
If you don’t consider race, possibly, but I think I read about the problematic tendencies between older gay white men and younger gay asian men before. So there _are_ problems, just not in the areas you’re considering.
Hugo
Yeah, that’s true, but what’s missing is a way to compare that to an older man-younger man or older woman-younger man (or older woman-younger woman) dynamic. Knowing what you think of half a comparison doesn’t allow one to extrapolate the whole comparison.
For what it’s worth, I’d guess you’re right, precisely because of the gender roles we’re instructed in. This is (then) obviously problematic to endorse in this way, I think. Men are being told not to invest themselves as much in sexual relationships, whatnot. So it’s easy for a ~17 year old guy to have sex with a ~37 year old woman and feel totally unconflicted about it, than it is for a 17 year lady to have sex with a 37 year old man and feel totally unconflicted about it, because she’s be taught she should feel bad about it, not want it, regret it, and he’s been taught he should feel good about it, want it, rejoice in it, whatever.
Let me - uh - relate with an analogy. There’s a usual custom in feminist and feminist-friendly environment to preface stories people mind find troubling with a warning that it might be upsetting, so let me issue such a warning. On one occasion, I consumed 18-20 beer (not surprisingly, I lost count), I was dragged (more or less literally, I was falling down drunk, in the sense that I kept falling down, and took time to remove my shirt so I could roll about in the snow) by a friend of mine back to her house, where I agreed to have sex with her if she could arrange the necessary physiological responses (figuring she didn’t have a chance) - I think a lot of things may’ve transpired first, my memory is pretty fuzzy, though I recall yelling or singing in her basement. Well, she did, so we did, and I can’t really say much about how it was for her, though I didn’t vomit, which was more or less all I wanted. At the time, and for a long time after, I was totally nonplussed, or untroubled, and didn’t feel like I should be bothered at all by it. In the last ~year, since I’ve started reading some feminist-oriented writings (such as Hugo), I keep feeling slightly bothered about the whole ordeal. Or, bothered that I’m not bothered. I dunno. But listening to people saying that I should be bothered has certainly affected, to some extent, in some way I can’t characterise well, how I feel about the whole thing.
Of course, this is a local judgment, that may not be global in scope. Iffen we, as a society, move to a place where women and men are given equal instruction in these things, then we should find them equally problematic (or acceptable). But we can adopt stop-gap measures like Hugo’s discussing, if we think addressing the root causes is harder, going to take longer, or (for those of us whose gender role is already some ingrained) unlikely to occur.
Sorry to be unclear, Hugo. What I meant by the child-abuse reference was that given the prevalence of child abuse for both sexes, a significant number of boy-toys may have been abused as children and therefore seek out father figures as sexual partners. I never thought that you were condoning relationships with minors!
But there’s no escaping the reality that the potential for abuse and exploitation is likely to be much higher in an age-disparate relationship where it is the man who is the elder of the lovers.
Let’s rephrase this with the Honesty Filter turned on.
There’s no escaping the reality that the abuse and exploitation that occurs in an age-disparate relationship is likely to BOTHER you much more, or to be NOTICED by you much more, where it is the man who is the elder of the lovers.
As for the notion that boy-woman pairings subvert the patriarchal hegemony, OK. Except that when you talk to the male halves of those couple, it becomes clear that their coupling is upholding kyriarchy - “she buys me stuff and has the resources I need, so I trade her sex for them”, OR “this is so awesome, she is so sexually experienced, I am totally scoring bigtime” - which is pretty much just “privileged young boys getting what they want, even if that’s daringly subversive of the standard script”.
It might help the historical analysis to reflect that younger men have ALWAYS paired off with richer older women, and for basically those two reasons. As a rule of thumb, if the Romans and Greeks made jokes about the phenomenon you’re describing, you aren’t seeing anything new. ;)
The only thing “new” is that there’s TV and the Internet to make our pontificating about this “trend” more visible.
Jay and Brian have it - the analysis here seems rather fatally flawed by its minimal consideration of what the real-world dynamics actually are in same-sex and older-female age-disparate relationships. Perhaps they are less problematic but claiming so merely because some of the criticisms of older-male relationships (i.e. that they “reinforce patriarchal power relations”) don’t apply is like saying that riding a motorbike is obviously safer than scuba-diving, since there’s no chance of getting the bends when doing the former. Another frequent criticism of older-male relationships on this site is that one’s libido should mature along with oneself - does this not apply to same-sex and older-female relationships? To a greater or lesser degree?
The only mention of the actual nature of such relationships is that they “subvert patriarchal conventions”. Well, so would, say, a female boss sexually harassing her male subordinates. It’s hardly such an obvious good that it negates any need for further analysis.
“A superficial concern with consistency would suggest that my feelings about all older/younger relationships ought to be the same, regardless of the sex or the sexual orientation of the partners involved.”
The most telling part of your post is your description of a “concern with consistency” as “superficial.” I notice that it tends to be “superficial” when you would like it to be such.
Toysoldier, I have thirty posts on the older man/younger woman dynamic, and the way in which it functions to exploit women, in my category linked above. I try to avoid redundancy.
You are comparing the two different dynamics and claiming that one is exploitative while the other is not. However, in your post you did not explain the dynamics involved in the other types of age-different relationships and you did not present any examples of what exactly is being compared. One could infer these things from prior posts, but it is not specifically presented in this one. We have the hypothesis and the conclusion. What is missing are the criteria you used to reach your conclusion. I do not think it would be an act of redundancy to present that information given that this is a comparison you have not made before (unless I missed it in one of the thirty prior posts).
On a side note, calling adult women sexually assaulting boys unethical is a rather benign phrasing. One would think it would elicit a more acrimonious response, as surely the reverse would.
Having dated older people of both sexes, and now in a relationship with a woman fifteen years older than me (24-39), I’m in complete agreement that there is something squicky about the older man dynamic that isn’t there in a relationship between two women. I like older people, period. But I feel that there’s a kind of healthy mentoring as well as lovemaking with an older woman that I never felt in the much more sexual relationship with the older men I dated. (Ought to point out: dated older men in their thirties when I was in my midteens, and didn’t start dating an older woman until I was in my twenties. The mumeric age gap was about the same of fifteen -twenty years or so, but my “lower number” had a big effect.)
Patriarchal conventions aren’t the only devils at large in the world. I can tell you from experience that older-woman/younger-man disparate age relationships have their potential for serious abuse and exploitation as well.
Wow, as a dedicated reader and a close follower of this issue of older/younger couples that you seem to take up quite often, I am so thrilled that you have brought the issues of same-sex and older woman/younger man relationships into the fold. Your points are legitimate and while it may seem completely contradictory to some for a pro-feminist man to be anything but egalitarian in treating all kinds of relationships, I think it is clear why exception is necessary here: examining the ways in which the gender of the older party DOES make a difference is crucial. Well said.