(the discourse in question being the morality around why older women dating young men is treated differently by American culture and by feminists than older men dating younger women. specifying America cuz that's my experience of culture)
okay okay so I've cracked it, ive found a non-skeevy reason the MILF Manor Milves might prefer younger men. here goes:
- when an older woman in 2024 looks at the dating pool of men in her age group, she is by definition dating a pool of men who grew up in a country with way more regressive gender politics and heterosexusl norms. Setting politics aside, this drastically effects how most of these men will treat a girlfriend and, for the slutty Milves out there (affectionate), how he treats the women he hooks up with (or if thats even something he does). It also affects what his expectations in bed will be and what he does or does not think is expected of him in bed, and he may be incredibly uncomfortable around a sexually liberated woman his own age. Think Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things.
- While younger men are not all enlightened feminists, statistically it is more common than in older age groups that 1. they will genuinely believe and try to uphold egalitarianism in their relationships, and 2. they had more comprehensive sex ed, and both that and the sex in the pop culture they grew up on was likely to actually acknowledge womens pleasure and involve modelling communication and consent. In short, they are just statistically more likely to have grown up with some feminist ideals and less likely to be an unteachably bad lay.
so these are non-frivelous reasons why an older woman in the US might give up on dating men her age. im not saying its "morally good" or "feminist" or whatever, i dont know or have an opinion. but it is a reason you could argue that it
is not automatically morally equivalent to the same situation with the genders swapped. In fact, I would argue that these reasons are are actually just the flip side of the coin of some of the more sinister reasons some older men seek out younger women
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when older men in 2024 look at the women their age in their dating pool, they are seeing a large percent of women who grew up in a more repressive patriarchal era and then lived through two waves of feminism and were able to go after more from life then their mothers did. All of the reasons I listed that older women may have a parade of disappointing experiences dating or hooking up with men their own age, are reasons those men might feel inadequate and insecure trying to date or hook up with those women and turn to younger women. These are women who have not only the benefit of experience and age, but the benefit of living through drastic social change that lessened their systemic and cultural marginalization and allows them to ask for more from their partners then their moms ever could. If yr a raging patriarch that wants a mommy-wife, or if you just want to fuck women but do not come to it with sexual curiosity or a desire for reciprocity, yr gonna have a bad time dating women who have learned that they can ask for more and expect you to do more and leave you when you refuse to change.
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young women are less experienced, more likely to still be figuring themselves out, may reflexively deffer to an older person's authority, more likely to ignore her own needs, and not identify patriarchal or even abusive behavior. there is a power imbalance twice over, each of which reinforce and strengthen the other. None of the attractive attributes of young men that I listed above are applicable here. A young woman may be more likely than an older one to be an out and out feminist and have had better, consent-forward sex ed, but that doesn't actually innoculate her from patriarchy. Inexperience and the double whammy power imbalance of being both much younger and a women make her more at risk of being taken advantage of or nudged into very patriarchal power dynamics.
Basic intersectionality. The middle-aged woman has some relational power over a younger man from her experience and position in society, but he in turn has systemic and relational power over her as a man. The two power imbalances dont cancel each other out, but i dont think you can definitively say that the power is always 100% in the older person's hands. Its contextual the power imbalances affect each other, existing simultaneously. Think of how many spaces highly value young men and openly deride older women. Think how much social capital a woman loses by aging compared to a man. So I would say its at least a very gray area and highly context specific whether a younger man in a relationship with an older woman is holding power over her or vice versa. If both parties are acting in good faith its easier to come to some kind of power equilibrium here.
So compare this to the older man/younger woman situation: the middle aged man has all the power from both his age and gender over a young woman. a middle aged man truly, genuinely committed to egalitarianism in his relationships, would probably not end up dating 20-somethings in the first place.
