It isn't quite correct to say that people are upset about "age gap relationships." No one is upset about a 40 year old dating a 30 year old, nor are they likely to be anytime soon, if ever. What bothers them is older men dating very young women, generally leveraging money/status in order to do so. The reason that this bothers people is not simply the mathematical difference between their ages, but rather the lecherous motivations that it clearly implies. This is the same reason that people (especially women) are bothered by pornography, prostitution, or any other form of sexual degeneracy that you can name.
Leonardo DiCaprio is an excellent example of this. Despite dating various young supermodels, at 54 he has never bothered to marry any of them, and has fathered no children. This clearly suggests that he is not optimizing for family life, marriage, or reproduction in how he conducts his love life. He is optimizing for sexual gratification and that's it. You can argue "that's his right" if you want, but this is equivalent to people also noting it is their "right" to criticize whatever they consider to be "pedophilia," so the entire exchange becomes pointless if we go that route.
Either way, it makes perfect sense for women to feel instinctive revulsion towards a man who deploys his resources only to ride the latest piece of 20-year-old ass he can find, without ever committing to any of them or giving them any children. Such behavior is clearly not conducive to resolving the "fertility crisis." I might agree with lowering the stigma around "age gaps" *if* this were being done with the specific and clear understanding of everyone involved that the ultimate goal is to foster family formation and have more kids, but that is most certainly not the case with the typical "age gaps" that people tend to criticize and get upset about.
This assumes that 20 year old women are always rational actors and not still emotionally immature beings. I think the whole Monica Lewinsky thing shows otherwise. Did Lewinsky give Bill Clinton blow jobs in the Oval Office because she was getting something valuable out of it? The way the story reads, it's more like she just got the hots for him because he's the President.
The law says they are, and our prurient curiousity about their motives is not relevant. If you want to infantalize women by saying that men can't rely on their consent to have sex until they are, what, 30?, go ahead and try. No man will ever approach a woman, for fear of being charged with statutory rape if she says yes, and sexual harassment of a minor if she says no and complains. Maybe that's what you want, I dunno. Not so different from #MeToo, is it. Another approach is to say that only married women can legally consent, so any sex before marriage is by definition rape on the part of the man. Then you can say that men can rely on the fact of marriage to force sex on her whenever he wants. After all, if adult-appearing women are assumed to be irrational actors and emotionally immature beings, why does consent even matter? Your cat doesn't consent to her vet visits, or to congress with the local tomcat.
I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about why people frown on older men having sex with 20 year old women. Even if it's not illegal it can be exploitative. You argument that they must be getting something out of it doesn't hold water. People consent to things because they are stupid all the time, and realize when they are a bit more mature that they were being used.
So if it's exploitative but shouldn't be illegal, why are we having this conversation if it's nobody's public business? That's up to the girls' mothers to teach them not to be exploited. Do you just want me to agree Bill Clinton was a creep and then we can be done with it? It won't bother Bill if I do.
I disagree that it should be seen as automatically exploitative. I see no reason to believe that Di Caprio's girlfriends, for example, are being hurt in any way by having a relationship with him. The two that actually commented on his dating habits in no way seemed to regret the relationship, if anything they had a problem with the press going on and on about their relationship as if it was any of their business. In Clinton's case, we are talking about two people who were sexually attracted to each other and chose to have sex together. It seems clear to me that they both now think it was not worth the hassle, and certainly it was immoral (for reasons that have nothing to do with Lewinsky's age, given that she was legally and factually capable of consenting to the sex). I don't think anyone alleges he pressured/threatened/coerced her into doing something she didn't want to do, and I am not aware of him tricking her in some way, for example telling her he loved her and meant to leave his wife, either.
That's a pretty silly argument. It's up to all sorts of people, such as society teaching men not to sexually exploit naive women who are much younger than them.
> I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about why people frown on older men having sex with 20 year old women.
This reminds me of a bunch of objections to Leo Di Caprio's behavior where I saw comments to the effect of "a relationship between two consenting adults being legal does not make it moral", and about him "getting away" with dating younger women. I find this language utterly revolting. Let me be absolutely clear: not only is Di Caprio dating hot young supermodels not illegal, it is *also* not immoral, because manifestly choosing to sleep together is fully within the rights of legal adults, everyone knows about his dating habits, he clearly didn't promise his partners marriage and eternal love, and they are literally hurting no one (in fact, the only annoyance Zang and Marone, two of his ex girlfriend, expressed, was with intrusive gossips opining about it). As for him "getting away" with dating them, well, the only two people whose opinion matters as far as him and his partner choosing to sleep together, is his and his partner's. Certainly neither him, let alone the adult woman he is with, owe it to society to organize their dating and sex life around the opinions aired by uninvolved internet randos. "Getting away with it". Nuts.
It's simple. At a family level, people want to be able to control the decisions of legal adults whose lives they should have no control over. The days where your father could choose your partner and sell you for two cows and a chicken are thankfully over. At a societal level, people like to grandstand over nonsense because they are gossipy lowlifes. While I don't understand how anyone could be so arrogant as to feel entitled to judge, let alone shame, the relationship of total strangers whose lives they know nothing about, it's a fact that they do, and therefore I feel no compunction in judging them for judging, and judging them to be gossiping trash who should be told to mind their own business and stay in their lane.
Again, this is not something that one needs to wonder about. Iirc Hanania's article contained links to actual studies that showed that, in fact, age gap relationship are not more exploitative than other relationship, and have as good or better outcomes (not that I think that any of those should, a priori, be a reason to choose whether to engage in them or not, given the size of the effect). Similarly, the question of why people object to them was studied in the literature. Example, this scientific paper linked by the BBC: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691830120X : "this condemnation promotes self-serving interests of those who stand to lose from violation of age-based assortative mating"
> Even if it's not illegal it can be exploitative.
The fact that something *can* be exploitative does not mean that it *is* exploitative, just like the fact that I *can* steal someone's wallet does not make me guilty of anything if I don't, in fact, steal their wallet. The possibility one could do something bad is not the same thing as them actually doing something bad.
Certainly in Di Caprio's case it's not possible to claim that he is exploiting anyone. His dating habits are perfectly known to everyone, and both him and his partners are doing something that is fully within their rights, and that literally doesn't hurt anyone else. Neither Leo, nor his supermodel girlfriends, are any worse off because of it, so I fail to see why it should be seen as in any way exploitative or immoral.
In the Lewinsky case, I am 100% with Hillary Clinton here where she claimed that this was a relationship between two consenting adults. The fact that Bill might have been in a position to pressure/coerce/threaten her into doing something she didn't want to do is irrelevant, given the fact that no one, Lewinsky included, ever suggested that he did anything of the sort.
Separately, I am also skeptical of the claim that he could have indeed done this, given that all the evidence points to the fact that, had she gone to the press telling them he pressured her into giving him sexual favors, he wouldn't have been able to keep things under wraps, the way his affair was handled.
> You argument that they must be getting something out of it doesn't hold water. People consent to things because they are stupid all the time, and realize when they are a bit more mature that they were being used.
I am sure that in retrospect Bill Clinton thinks that getting a blowjob in the Oval Office was a pretty dumb idea. The fact that he was short sighted and thought getting his jollies off was worth the risk in no way means that he wasn't getting something out of the affair, namely sexual satisfaction. Similarly, in Lewinski's case, she was sexually attracted to Bill, and what she got out of the affair was having sex with him (though they never had full intercourse). Pretty simple. The fact that in retrospect she didn't think it was worth it in no way means that she didn't get anything out of the relationship. It's not rocket science really. Two people were sexually attracted to each other and chose to have sex together. Then, later on, realized that it was not worth it.
Again, I will just have to reject the claim that anyone here was being "used" or "exploited". They were sexually attracted to each other, and chose to sleep together. Full stop. Nobody ever alleged that he promised her eternal love or tricked her into believing that he would leave his wife. As far as we know, no deception was involved. The same goes with Leo di Caprio and his numerous girlfriends: obviously they are both okay with the relationship. In the latter's case, it's not even obvious to me that generally his ex girlfriend regret having had a relationship with him. In fact, the two that have spoken publicly on the topic, Zang and Morone, merely remarked on the fact that people feeling entitled to judge their relationship as immoral or fundamentally illegitimate, let alone attempt to shame those involved, is repulsive and unacceptable (I concur).
Anyway, regretting a relationship in no way implies that you have been exploited. I fundamentally reject the notion that Lewinsky could just decide, at 44, to retroactively retract consent she gave more than two decades earlier. Well, she kind of didn't, to be honest, she was sure to point out that she did in fact consent, but then spouted some nonsense about whether her consent even mattered for anything given Bill's power. My answer is that yes, obviously it counted for a lot, given that without it, what he did to her would have been rape, while with her consent, it was a relationship between two consenting adults. Again, by this reasoning, Bill couldn't have had a romantic relationship with anyone, as he was literally the most powerful man of the world. Same with Bezos, etc.
I think in Lewinsky's case specifically there is an additional level that had to do with it being a relationship with, in a sense, her employer, which is not the case if Di Caprio's case. Regarding that, US companies are pretty opposed to office romance, and have policies in place to prevent it. I can fully understand where they are coming from: they don't want a Letwinsky like scandal, and it makes more sense for them to avoid the situation altogether than to try to determine whether someone got unfairly favorable treatment because they slept with the boss, or unfairly negative treatment because the relationship ended badly, or were pressured/threatened/coerced into doing something they didn't want to do. At the same time, it's worth pointing out that this kind of policies are in fact *illegal* in the EU, as they violate the European Convention of Human Rights and various national laws, as Walmart tried to apply such policies in Germany. And not only is this considered a gross violation of civil and worker rights, but culturally speaking, while office romance might not be popular in the US, it simply doesn't have the same stigma attached to it in many countries in Europe, with the overwhelming majority of the population (like ~75% in some Western European countries) being in favor of it. Now, my personal position is that I don't have a problem with a company having such policies in place, and then a worker can choose to work there or not. I myself work at a FAANG company in an EU site, and would never date anyone at work even if I was not in a relationship, given that it's simply not worth the hassle. But it's just a fact that if the company tried to actually prevent me from doing so, they would be violating my rights and would likely lose in court (as Walmart did), and the vast majority of the population here would be against the company's policy.
> This assumes that 20 year old women are always rational actors and not still emotionally immature beings. I think the whole Monica Lewinsky thing shows otherwise.
Actually @susanmacmillan639812 's claim in no way assumes that. People in general are not "always rational actors", and can be "emotionally immature" way past the legal age of majority. In the Lewisky case, I would say that objectively speaking both apply to Bill Clinton: he was clearly not "always a rational actor" and was definitely "emotionally immature".
This has absolutely nothing to do with OP's claim, which was that, by definitions, legal adults have the right to consent to have sex with whomever they please, and that if they chose to do so, absent threats or coercion, obviously it's because they want something out of the relationship, be it even just entertainment.
> Did Lewinsky give Bill Clinton blow jobs in the Oval Office because she was getting something valuable out of it? The way the story reads, it's more like she just got the hots for him because he's the President.
I mean, by your own words, the answer to your question is obviously yes: you say that she was sexually attracted to Bill because he was the President (and, from what I am told, at the time was good looking and charming), and thus she wanted to have sex with him. "Having sex with someone she was sexually attracted to" is what she got out of the relationship.
When you're older and more mature you might understand what I'm talking about. I'm not trying to claim that *every* relationship between an older man and a much younger woman is exploitative. I'm saying that *often* the older man is cynically manipulating a much younger naive woman, and this explains why people frown on these relationships. In no way am I implying that this should be illegal. But we do have social norms that say "you shouldn't date women who are way too young for you" for a reason. Lots of women have negative experiences of having been in a relationship with an older man where it turns out he was married or something and was just using them for sex. Of course there are plenty of cases where the younger woman may be cynically using the older man in a quid-pro-quo to get a leg up in a job or something (especially in Hollywood). But typically its the older more experienced people who are exploiting the younger less experienced person. The funny thing also is at the time a lot of people pointed out that in the Monica Lewinsky affair, she never actually "had sex" with him in the sense of full penetration. It was all her giving him blow jobs with no reciprocation. One time he used a cigar as a dildo, but that's it. There's no mention of her even having an orgasm. She also didn't get a promotion or a permanent job of anything, so you can't even say she was fucking her way up the career ladder.
Can you stop treating 20 year old women as mentally deficient children. They are not, they are grown up woman with agency. If a 20 year old woman agrees and consents to a relationship with an older man, its none of your business!
People have a right to criticize Dicaprio to their heart's content, but it is quite another thing for people to label someone something they are not. Pedophilia is an attraction to PRE-pubescents. Why do so many people feel a need to try and make someone worse than they are by using a dishonest label just because they don't like what they're doing? These people are contemptible.
I don't think anyone calls DiCaprio a "pedophile." Everyone he has dated has been of age, as far as I know. I am talking about "age gaps" that make people uncomfortable or upset, not "pedophilia."
My response was based on the overall points of your email where you attempt to smear DiCaprio's dating of much younger women in a very negative way. You claim he is "leveraging" his money and status. I'm sure that word "leveraging" didn't instantly pop up in your mind as you want to describe him as "exploiting" but want to be more subtle about it. In exactly the same way young beautiful women are "leveraging" their looks - see how that puts a negative slant on youth and looks? You are trying to make him sound MANIPULATIVE, but rich older men aren't "leveraging" anything. Women are ATTRACTED to money and status. The ones who aren't won't be hanging out with DiCaprio. Just because you don't like what he's doing doesn't mean he is "leveraging". I have no doubt these young women are eager to be with him.
You also draw a false equivalency when you write: "You can argue "that's his right" if you want, but this is equivalent to people also noting it is their "right" to criticize whatever they consider to be "pedophilia," so the entire exchange becomes pointless if we go that route.". The problem is the 2 things are NOT equivalent. What DiCaprio is doing is perfectly legal. However, calling someone a pedophile is slander if you can't back it up. We need to put a hard stop on the idea that people can just start calling "whatever they consider to be pedophilia" pedophilia. There IS a definition and it's an attraction to PRE-pubescents. If language continues to be distorted and mangled in this way, then accusations of "pedophile" will start to be met with the same wariness we give to "racist" or "transphobe". Language DOES evolve from the bottom up in normal situations but this idea that someone can call someone something that would be slanderous at the current moment is a problem.
Why can't you simply say I don't like when men do this because it doesn't track with my religious beliefs. But there is nothing inherently wrong w/ what DiCaprio is doing. Anyone calling him (and it's reaching that point) or any man sexually attracted to a POST-pubescent a pedophile isn't being honest. It is my belief that language should CLARIFY, not muddy. Not everyone shares this, but it would be a much better world if people were clear about what they really thought.
When I was 19 - 20 I had a fling with a 40 year old woman, and hooked up with some girls in their 30s. Just by meeting them at bars, clubs and whatever. It was all just casual fun really. They were way more interesting and better company than a lot of woman my age, and they were hot. So surely younger woman feel the way the same way about older guys?
In some cases maybe, but I thought it was fairly common knowledge at this point that men and women tend to seek very different things from dating and relationships. Men want sex, women want resources and status. Men are often more than willing to sleep with a woman for no particular reason besides that she is also willing, as your own experience demonstrates. On the other hand, you will not often hear of 20 year old women having "casual fun" with 40 year old men who have nothing to offer them in the way of resources or status.
This is a vast oversimplification. Men often seek status through sex - trophy wife thing. Women find the skills that lead to men gaining resources and status attractive. DiCaprio is handsome, has acting skills, which imply social skills and so on.
As you yourself note: women WANT resources and status. So why do you describe DiCaprio as "leveraging" his resources and status in an earlier post other than you don't like what he is doing? That was my point: he is not "leveraging" anything. I'm sure many young women approach him eagerly. You clearly don't approve of him returning their interest, but I see no logical reason why.
This is a bizarre and simplistic view of the world of sexual relations. Women do want sex. Many women like casual sex and want to explore relationships with different men to find out what they like. Many women really like sex and want to have it frequently. The female orgasm is not a myth!
When I was well into my 30s I frequently had brief flings with women in their 20s, often their early twenties. I was a DJ and rode a Ducati, hence my nickname. I was handsome and roguish and a had reputation as a good lover. Whenever I was single some young woman would aggressively pursue me, sometimes more than one. I never made any promises to any kind of lasting relationship and my reputation proceeded me, so most women I dated knew what they were getting into. I guess you could argue that they were getting "status" by dating me, I certainly wasn't offering them resources. A good time, perhaps.
My teen daughters today call that kind of man a fuckboi. It's not a compliment.
Your experience if your experience, nothing more than that. Plenty of women like casual sex.
When I got a bit older, I decided to get married and settle down and changed entirely the age and profile of the women I dated. Within a few years I did get married but that does not invalidate the experiences of my youth. My story isn't really that unusual either.
Women feel revulsion towards lechery because it threatens their status within relationships. We need to stop focusing on and debating the one-in-a-million exceptions to the norm in topics like this. 99.99% of men are not Leonardo DiCaprio, and 99.99% of women are not the young models he dates. He fulfills his lecherous desires, and they take advantage of his fame and wealth while they can. It is an entirely different arrangement from even a non-famous, wealthy man his age dating normal women that age. A young woman in that scenario has social pressures, stigmatization, and the possibility of commitment issues and infidelity to deal with. That does not apply when you are dating one of the most famous men in the world, who has been a sex symbol for almost 30 years, where just dating him for any period of time is self-serving for these women on a career and social level.
You make a good point but there is nothing about DiCaprio's "desires" that are "lecherous". They are common. The women he dates are - by objective measures like symmetry in the face and other signs of health (youth) - desirable. Most men don't act on this because they don't have the resources/status to do so. And many of the ones who do have the resources and status are already attached.
"Lechery" is an absurd term. It's totally normal for human being to feel physically attracted to other human beings they want to date and sleep with. Pretending that this is not the case is just plain delusional.
> He fulfills his lecherous desires, and they take advantage of his fame and wealth while they can. It is an entirely different arrangement from even a non-famous, wealthy man his age dating normal women that age. A young woman in that scenario has social pressures, stigmatization, and the possibility of commitment issues and infidelity to deal with. That does not apply when you are dating one of the most famous men in the world, who has been a sex symbol for almost 30 years, where just dating him for any period of time is self-serving for these women on a career and social level.
The women dating Leo Di Caprio (and Leo Di Caprio himself) obviously experience much more social stigma and pressures relative to someone dating a non famous rich man, because the press is all over Di Caprio in a way that is much more invasive that they would be for a normal couple (also, afaik in many legislations VIPs have less protection to their privacy relative to regular people, which makes them more vulnerable to being slandered, defamed, harassed and otherwise messed with in ways that a regular person wouldn't, because they could sue those bothering them.
I don't think that commitment issues and infidelity would be more of an issue in the regular case relative to Leo's case. I mean, an age gap relationship in no way automatically implies that one is jumping to a girlfriend to the next. Not that I think that is a fair description of Leo's dating history either: he is together with his girlfriends for years at a time, they are not exactly one night stands.
Again, I fail to see why any of this should be anyone's business (besides the business of the people directly involved). It's not as if Leo di Caprio is forcing anyone into a relationship. And if one as an aesthetic preference against age gap relationships, they are free to avoid them, like they are free to avoid men for their height, ethnicity, religion, political persuasion, etc. They might want to investigate their prejudices, but nobody is forcing people to date someone they don't want to (and if they do, that's coercion and that's illegal). In other words, don't want it, don't buy it, but why go around bothering consenting adults who have every right to sleep with whomever they like, and who are literally not hurting anybody? Particularly when, being the ones directly involved in the relationship, with all probability they know the other person, their relationship and their desires much better than some internet rando who literally knows nothing about any of them?
I agree; that is why I said it is a waste of time to focus on cases like his, which constitute a minuscule number of all the relationships in our society. Maybe lecherous wasn't the right word. Obviously, sexual attraction is normal; I never claimed otherwise. However, a 50-year-old man not having children because he prefers having a rotation of young women to have sex with, whom he can set aside when they begin to lose their youth, is also obviously not a normal or desirable standard for coupling in a society that needs stable families and a higher fertility rate. I don't understand the point of defending an unprincipled exception that is unsustainable on a societal scale, just because a man technically has a right to do so. It is understandable from a male psychological standpoint of maximizing pleasure and minimizing responsibility. Still, his case doesn't even address the justifiability of the age-gap relationships proposed by Hanania; he argues for them on the basis that they would boost fertility rates.
I am not even judging DiCaprio personally; he can do what he likes. However, what he does is obviously not a functional categorical imperative, and justifying it or critiquing it is a waste of time, as I said originally, because 99.999% of men are never in a position where they have access to a dating pool of 18-25 year old models well into middle age.
But wait a bit, saying that men should want marriage and kids is basically a conservative thing, right? So why would feminist women who are per definition leftists be bothered by it?
I will answer that. I think for every one person who is a principled feminist or leftist, there are ten who simply follow their self-interest and find the currently fashionable political justification for it. So many feminist women are in fact not, they just want the best possible deal for their careers, relationships etc. and call it feminism. But of course that is also how many men are conservative, only as long as it suits them, and in economic hardship they will immediately want a government bailout.
"Giving them any children" itself is a deeply sexist mindset.
In fact, this kind of view does in fact infantilize women, and also presumes that what they seek in the relationship is not sexual gratification and companionship, but obviously other more "womenly" benefits.
I get your point about leveraging money and status for sex, but that itself is build onto a sexist view of women.
A women doesn't have to get anything out of a relationship to have "benefitted" from it.
A women doesn't have to be "rewarded" for sex by having children or something else.
Women's own revealed preferences are that they generally seek to get "something else" out of relationships with men besides only sexual intercourse for its own sake. This is not "sexism," it is simply an observation of reality.
And men also seek something else out of relationships with women besides only sexual intercourse for its own sake...
It is the definition of sexism to look at socially and historically shaped patterns amongst sexes, and with them draw conclusions about inherent traits of these sexes.
That is how all of sexism works.
There certainly are some biological differences between the sexes, but especially in a mostly emancipated society like we have today, I fail to see any compelling evidence refuting that the human condition that we all share and is responsible for 99.9% of things we want out of a relationship, is in any way trumped by the female or male condition.
It is a very popular opinion online though, that somehow being a man or women makes one wired to do certain things or want certain things.
>And men also seek something else out of relationships with women besides only sexual intercourse for its own sake...<
At first, no, that's pretty much what they're after. Then as we age and mature, most of us do at some point realize that it's worthwhile to invest in our mates and create stable families.
This is why we look down on men who, at 40, still only want to have sex with 20 year olds and aren't interested in anything else. They are acting out the priorities of a horny teenager rather than those of a mature adult.
As an aside, I would say that, manifestly, a 40 year old dating a 30 year old is *also* something people have an issue with, as demonstrated by some replies in the thread.
I also find the word "lecherous" ridiculous. I mean, as if people wanting to date and have sex with someone because they find them sexually attractive is somehow abnormal. Laughable.
I don't see the decision of two adults choosing to sleep together as equally legitimate to someone feeling entitled to judge, shame and potentially harass them when it's none of their business, as equally reasonable. Two adults choosing to sleep together is fully within their rights and hurts nobody. Gossipy lowlifes trying to shame them and their relationship might potentially be illegal (depending on the law system, if it's defamatory or slanderous, or turns into harassment), and in any case illegitimate.
It's simply galling for people to act as if two adults choosing to sleep together would require their approval, I don't quite understand how someone could feel so arrogant and delusional, and have so little epistemic humility (they are opining about stuff that is none of their business, disregarding the opinions of the people directly involved, including the one of Leo's female partner, which are the only relevant ones, and acting as if they think their opinion about a person and relationship they know nothing about is more valid than that of the people directly involved). But given that they manifestly do feel entitled to judge these people and their relationship, I feel no compunction judging them for judging, and specifically judging them to be gossipy lowlives with too much time on their hands and a chip on their shoulders the size of Mnt. Everest, who should be told to mind their own business and stay in their lane.
Again, we are talking about people liking to grandstand about a non problem, given that neither Di Caprio nor his hot supermodel girlfriend manifestly have a problem with their relationship, and their opinion is and should be the only ones that matter in any sane society (well, if he was married, I would say his wife's too, but since he clearly isn't and afaik neither are the women he sleeps with, it's a non issue). Leo seeping with his hot supermodel girlfriend hurts literally no one, so I fail to see why it should be considered "immoral", it also doesn't change society one way or another.
I mean, obviously if they could quite a bit of men would no doubt strive to imitate him, or a few famous millionaire rockstars, but I don't think that that's something one ought to worry about changing society as a whole, because the truth of the matter is that, contrary to the absurd notion being pushed about this, it is in fact not the case that "loser 50 year olds" are "reduced" to date hot 20 year old supermodels because they "couldn't cut it" with the 50 year old women around them. That's as delusional as believing that a woman is "reduced" to dating the multimillionaire hot actor because she couldn't "cut it" with the 50 year old unemployed former construction worker down the block. I mean, I saw something like that once, but it was a comedy sketch, and everyone recognized the obvious absurdity of it.
Said another words, no, the average low status 50 year old male does not, in fact, have an easier time sleeping with hot 20 year olds, that's manifestly utter nonsense, as Hanania correctly hinted at with irony in this post.
There is a clear difference here. The decision of two legal adults to sleep with each other is something that depends only on their opinions, they are not hurting anyone by choosing to do so, and have every right to decide to sleep with whomever they please. Conversely, I feel it astonishing that random internet strangers should feel entitled to opine on who an adult woman (or man) should or shouldn't sleep with, using language such as Leo Di Caprio "getting away" with dating the people he wants to date. I am sorry, "getting away" with dating them? This is a person who is convinced that two consenting adults, including an adult woman, should need *their approval* before they choose to have consensual sex? As if they literally felt entitled to tell her who she should and shouldn't sleep with, while completely discounting her own opinion on the matter, which, incidentally, given she has first hand experience with her partner and relationship, would be about a billion times more informed than that of an internet rando who knows nothing about either? These two things are not equally unreasonabl.
What I am getting at, is that two consenting adults choosing who they should sleep with is fully within their rights and entirely appropriate, while thinking that two adults dating or having sex should require their endorsement is just plain delusional. Manifestly, the only two relevant opinions when it comes to two consenting adults dating and sleeping with each other, are the ones of the two adults in question. Conversely, one opinion that shouldn't in any way, shape or form figure in that decision, is the one of a random internet stranger. The latter deserves nothing better than to be told to mind their own business, a sentiment that at least a couple of Di Caprio's ex girlfriend (Zang and Marone) did in fact express, with good reason.
You've got to be kidding. His "resources" are why the women are drawn to him in the first place. It's like saying feeling revulsion towards a woman who deploys her "assets" to snare men. Her assets are the point! His resources are the point! Match made in Heaven, and the harpies don't like it.
As to marriage and family, don't be ridiculous. No teenager will marry. They'll be getting dick anyway all throughout their teen. Better be to a successful man than to a string of young losers her father will hate anyway.
Stop ffs. A 40 year old dating a 30 year old pisses off every single woman over the age of 35 too. I know because I’m a dude who’s choosing to date these younger fertile women, not least because it protects ~3 of my offspring from ~3 miscarriages before one healthy child arrives (if it ever does). What man who respects himself and has options, would risk that?
And it isn’t “older” men “leveraging” their status and money etc. Women fuck and date men with status and money. The age of the man has little to do with it. Am I “leveraging” my “money” (as a partner at a private equity firm), predatorily? No — women wait at the finish line and fuck the winners.
Then they “leverage” marriage law for half, buddy.
I'm honestly surprised, given the amount of money he has, that none of them have lied about being on birth control and then sued him for child support.
One of your more popular themes in your work has been how law effects culture. If the age of consent was 20, the culture would slowly shift to make it so anyone attracted to a 19 year old is branded a pedophile.
Jeffrey Epstein's greatest mistake (besides not checking the IDs of the "victims" who all lied about their ages) was buying a house in a state where the age of consent is 18. If he had just lived in New York, where soliticing an underage prostitute was just a misdemeanor until recently, he'd still be living his best life on the island.
Epstein raped girls as young as 14. I agree with Hanania's general point that age gaps are overblown, and that conspiracy theorists have blown up the Epstein case into something much bigger than it really was. But Epstein personally is still a heinous person who was a pedophile, not just an ephebophile. Epstein's mistake was getting off on fucking girls he knew were illegal to fuck. He's not some guy who slept with a 17 year old who never told him she was only 17. Having a high libido and party life style doesn't lead you to make a grooming ring where you convince highschoolers to bring you freshmen to fuck
Pedophiles are people who are attracted to PRE-pubescents. Look it up and stop exaggerating. Why can't you condemn Epstein without unilaterally changing what words actually mean? What he did was illegal and wrong, pure and simple, you don't have to try and make it sound worse.
In common parlance a pedophile is someone who has sex with a person who is underage. Most people haven't even heard of hebophiles. You are insisting on technical definitions that few people use.
I could not disagree more. By "in common parlance" you mean the people inside your bubble. We all have a bubble and in mine pedophile means PRE-pubescent, as it's abundantly clear that there is nothing unusual about men finding post-pubescent women sexually attractive. That is the whole biological point of puberty and the development of secondary sexual characteristics. And don't even pretend that grown-ass men didn't find Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson in her prime very sexually attractive. That is NORMAL even though certain people like to pretend it isn't, especially by labeling it "pedophile". Law-abiding men agree not to act on these desires in the same way good men agree not to cheat on their wives or significant other. But the attraction is 100% normal and requires no special name, except by people who are attempting to virtue signal their particular morality.
You are in a bubble such that you are apparently insulated from social and traditional media where pedophile means what I say. I worry about the behaviour in your bubble.
I note that you have reframed the discussion. I referred to having sex, not finding someone sexually attractive.
I am not reframing anything. I am adhering to the definition of pedophilia, which is common and well understood, even if certain people in social and traditional media are distorting it to virtue signal their opposition to someone engaging in behaviors society disapproves of on moral/ethical grounds. As for the idea that "social and traditional media's" definitions of something tracks with what the general public believes? It's demonstrably untrue as no one believes that men become women simply by identifying as such. However in that bubble, everyone pretends that is true even though they know it isn't. All of these distortions should be pushed back against, not gone along with IMO.
By the way, some examples of what happens when people don't push back against a select group of people distorting what established words actually mean are not only "racist" or "transphobe" or "men" or "women" or "sexist" but what happened when EVERYONE fell in line with no longer using the term illegal immigrant. There was nothing wrong w/ that word. But people in power changed it from the top-down and everyone went along with it, and now the same people in power routinely claim that conservatives have a problem with "immigration" and "migrants". Nope. They have a problem with ILLEGAL immigration and ILLEGAL immigrants. By changing the words - which everyone understood - the language itself makes Cons look bad. And I say this as a lifelong liberal who hates Trump by the way. I just don't like the dishonesty. If someone is having sex with underage women, it's illegal, full stop. I see no reason why I should go along with mislabeling that person as a "pedophile" when they are not other than to just go along to get along or virtue signal.
Fuck common parlance. You call someone a pedophile, you are calling them a child molester! And you know what people say about child molesters. Kill them all. You say an 18 year old man and a 17 year old girl, the man is a child molester!
How about we call him a nonce then since thats an apt description without upsetting your specific criteria for the pedophilia word? He’s a freak and a nonce and anyone like him should be hung drawn and quartered imo
My hot take of the year: Epstein was not a pedophile. He's actually worse than a pedo. Pedos have an excuse for breaking the law. Epstein doesn't. 14 year olds don't look that different from 16-18 year olds. Epstein had a choice and he purposely chose the worse one.
It is normal for an adult man to want to have sex with an attractive 16 year old. Just as it is "normal" for men to want to rape women. But control your urges and do the decent human thing and keep it in your pants. And try to leer at her either, it creeps her out and makes you look foolish.
I never implied or suggested that it is okay for men to start having sex w/ 16 year olds so your advice is presumptuous and unnecessary. That you immediately fall back into conflating the two after conceding my point is a sign to me that you are reacting emotionally to what I'm saying, and that's part of the problem.
I also don't agree that it's normal for men to WANT to rape women. I understand what you're trying to say regarding that, but it's normal for men to WANT to have sex with women they're attracted to. WANT to rape them? I'm not so certain. I'm not trying to be nitpicky here. Again I understand what you're trying to say, but you're using rape in a context where it doesn't belong as in caveman or other primitive beasts. Rape is the norm with primitive beasts, yes. But to me that's like saying cavemen or apes are impolite. True, but is the idea of consent or rape something a caveman or ape would even grasp?
The fact that you bring up rape as an analogy is also part of the problem IMO.
That's already becoming the norm. I have a liberal friend who was horrified at the idea of a 23 year old dating an 18 year old. "That's a child!" is what he said. All that effectively does is make 19 the new age of consent, or 20 if you feel sufficiently puritanical.
A 23 year old dating an 18 year old IS weird. That's a relationship between someone who has finished a college degree and someone who has literally just graduated high school. It's more about their life experience, not their age.
This is just leftist reaction formation, which seems to dominate US politics, where left wing people suppress how they actually feel about things and then pretend they never felt it at all and it was in fact that bad right wing person over there who then becomes a monster.
Its not weird at all, they are both grown ups. And your examples are irrelevant since most people dont go to college anyway. An 18 year old and a 23 year old could both be working adults. So you are totally wrong here
Idk, my boyfriend was 22 when I was 17, and I was far more mature than he was, so I won't say it should get anyone thrown in jail. BUT, it does make a difference in the US because there's a hard cutoff of 21 to even be allowed to go into certain establishments. If the 23 and 18 year old share a bottle of wine, the 23 is going to jail. The 18 year old literally cannot accompany the 23 year old to many venues where adults normally socialize (ie anywhere serving alcohol). So it *does* make the 23 yo look suss...like just find someone who's 21, instead of choosing to date someone that is in fact not treated as a full adult for plenty of socially relevant laws. Of course, I'd also advocate that the drinking age be lowered to 18, but since it is not, this is kind of a big deal and makes the two in fundamentally different adult/not-adult categories.
Kryptogal. I am going to be honest with you. The drinking age being 21 is one of the stupidest and nonsensical laws we have in the US. I believe America is the only country in the West where that is the case. You can have sex, you can get married, you can vote, and you can have your intestines blown out on the battlefield for the military at 18 but you cannot drink alcohol.
So the law is insanely stupid and I am glad you agree it should be lowered to 18. Obviously none of us should base our personal morality on that stupid drinking age.
Finally I would also add that I dont like drinking and I would prefer being in a relationship where nobody drinks alcohol. I dont like this view that most people have with adulthood, seeing it synonymous with drinking. I think a society where nobody is drinking would be a much better society. I understand in todays society you might have to drink from time to time to be able to socialize, but still I think its the best thing to try to avoid drinking as much as possible.
Its the same thing with saying someone goes to high school. Okey, if I am older and I date a 17 year old high schooler, its going to be weird. And if I drive her to school every day I might be a bit embarrased. But why should I base my personal morality on it being weird to date a high schooler? Because that would mean its wrong to date a 19 year old woman if she goes to high school. And it would mean that its perfectly fine to date a 17 year old if she quits school and starts working. We shouldnt base personal morality on that.
Besides people get older. If you date a 17 year old it might be weird in the beginning but she is going to turn 19 and be out of school soon. And then she is soon going to turn 21, in case you really enjoy drinking. So I am never bothered by a relationship being weird in the beginning, If I know that things are going to get back to "normal" 1 or 2 years from now.
It doesn't seem like a partnership between equals. Feels creepy, for the same reason I don't like 16 and 18 year olds dating. Lot of opportunity for abuse.
I'm not saying it should be illegal man I just think it's weird
That's what Michael Wolff said Epstein's character flaw was. For someone so closely connected to power and sex, he lived way too carefree, didn't care what the media thought until it was too late.
I'm surprised you think this mostly comes from older women because this just really does not comport with reality. Where are you getting that? The very loud, very furious, very disgusted heat and anger behind all this is coming from young girls and women themselves, and also to some extent young guys. Tik Tok is full of teenaged and young girls going off about it. Every reel I've seen on Insta with someone going off on a rant about sick twisted older men is by a 16 or 17 year old girl.
It is true that there are some men and women who are the age where they themselves have teenaged children and they no doubt do also get very protective because they always see their children as babies who are younger than they are. But mostly this comes from young people themselves. The reality is that the vast majority of young girls have zero interest in older men and never did and just had to marry them in the past bc they don't have a choice. All through history they were often crying about it, running away, railing against their parents for having to do it. There has always been a small portion, maybe 10-20% tops who are okay with it, though ironically they tend to be the ones least interested in men themselves as people and just looking for resources. But the other 80% who are interested in love and sex are not. I remember being that age and having one friend who was interested in older men and we all thought she was insane bc for the rest of us, someone over late 20s was the same as someone 60 and just old and gross to us. Like I clearly remember being revolted by 30 year old guys. I think that is actually most of what is driving this is young women pissed off and grossed out by every old guy drooling over them. It terrifies them for their own future and pisses them off that those guys think they have a chance. By the time they themselves are in their late 30s, 40s, or 50s+ they are well used to this, it's been going on their whole life and they no longer give a fuck. i really am curious where you get the impression that it is mostly older women because I guarantee for every one post or comment you find by one on this issue, I could find you 1,000 by young girls on Tik Tok. There are also plenty of young guys who don't like it either and don't appreciate older guys always trying to horn in. Look at the article you linked it was a bunch of college students who did that. They're the ones most likely to have a problem with thirsty old guys.
Old guys have been trying to come up with reasons that if XY or Z would just get out of their way, they could get with hot young chicks like they want to forever. The real issue is that they simply don't want to, unless you pay handsomely for the privilege, and even then they obviously still don't want to or you'd see it more often than you do. Epstein's problem is he was a cheap fucking bastard ... The dude had hundreds of millions and only paid those girls $409 to spend time with his old ass. He should've been paying at least 10x that amount, that's pennies to him.
That was probably Ghislaine's role: to manipulate the women into coming cheap. He might have been willing to pay $4000, but the reason he had millions of dollars is because he didn't waste it. Hiring a fixer to get the girls for regular hooker prices was good business.
This is my impression too. GenZ is an incredibly neurotic generation, women generally even more so, and just the thought of someone whom they find gross hitting on them is unbearable. In 1995 or so it was more accepted that unwanted sexual attention is simply a part of life, you just blow them off and move on.
I think that Hanania mentioned Gen-Z's attitude in one of the linked tweets. Anyway, I don't quite get why we are acting as if this phenomenon is not studied in the literature. From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691830120X (which I found linked in a BBC article) we can see that age gap condemnation promotes self-serving interests of those who stand to lose from violation of age-based assortative mating (kind of expected), and additionally that younger women endorse prostitution more than older women (surprising), both of which track claims made by Hanania here and in other posts.
The thing that is particularly weird about people getting upset by Massachusetts's age of consent is that it's one area where liberals completely ignore European parallels. See https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/hbzl5e/age_of_consent_map_in_europe/#lightbox; there is literally no European country except Ireland which has an age of consent above 16, and a lot where it is as young as 14.
Personally I have zero interest in having sex with teenagers, but I can't get very exercised about Jeffrey Epstein either. Most of his activities would have been completely legal in almost any European country - but all the Europhile liberals are apparently indifferent to that fact.
Left-leaning Americans do this weird thing where they constantly gush about how wonderful Europe is, but are no less informed about European legislation than conservative Americans. E.g. there is no European country with abortion laws as liberal as the most liberal laws in American blue states; many European nations are rowing back on gender medicine for children; Scandinavian countries are not "socialist" in any meaningful sense; contrary to California lawmakers' claims, Portugal's drug decriminalisation did not result in people openly injecting heroin on the streets of Lisbon; there are many European nations in which citizens can legally own guns.
When a left-leaning American talks about doing things the "European" way, you're generally better off assuming they're talking about some fictional utopia that exists in their imagination, as opposed to any actual nation.
Yes, and they do not know that we Europeans just because we have a number of laws American liberals like, such as tax-paid healthcare and universities, are not the same kind of people as American liberals. We are much more cynical. We do not see these laws as a moral issue, as social justice or helping the less fortunate. We just simply want these things for ourselves and our kids, and do not mind much if other people get them too. If I had to get into $200K debt for a degree, I would have rather made do without. From my European middle-class perspective "free" education is not a charity or a justice question, but something I personally needed.
That because the European middle-class counts as relatively poor by American standards. The average European say data scientist makes about $60K per year, so paying something like $25K in taxes for education, healthcare, unemployment and retirement is not actually such a bad deal, there is nothing particularly charitable or justice-y about this.
Also it is precisely our cynicism that makes it necessary. I do not know anyone who donates to charity, or "volunteers at a soup kitchen", whatever is that. If the welfare state would not exist, most people would just shrug at starving people here, the whole church-centric US charity scene does not exist. Welfare is ultimately about the state taking over church functions once people stop going to church.
"More often" is a difficult thing to quantify, but to my mind the most prominent American socialist politician of the last decade (Bernie Sanders) routinely described the Scandinavian nations as socialist, a characterisation that even they were moved to dispute.
Yes, YOU know that hunting is a leisure activity in Europe – because you're better informed about Europe than the average American. I've interacted with plenty of left-leaning Americans who seem to believe that hunting is a weird anachronism only practised in the US and that guns are functionally impossible to get a hold of in Europe legally.
Yes, Bernie was dead wrong. However, many on the right were just as deranged when they describe Obama and Biden’s economic programs as “socialist,” and there were many.
I imagine that name would mean nothing to a majority of Americans. I was debating with an American a few weeks ago who was under the impression that mass shootings were literally unheard of outside of the US, except maybe the occasional Columbine copycat. I pointed out that e.g. the Dunblane massacre in the UK predated Columbine.
The NY Times article about the situation in Massachusetts did not say or quote anyone saying the age of consent was too low. It only said folks believe there should be a law preventing school teachers from having relations with minor students, a special case. I found Hanania a little dishonest about this.
Which, to add to this, is in fact illegal in most european countries.
Sex with 14 year olds isn't illegal per se, because the law grants them the right for sexual self-determination. What is explicitly illegal is to leverage any position of authority (like being a teacher) to have sex with people under 18.
Epstein raped girls as young as 14. I agree with Hanania's general point that age gaps are overblown, and that conspiracy theorists have blown up the Epstein case into something much bigger than it really was. But Epstein personally is still a heinous person who was a pedophile, not just an ephebophile. Epstein's mistake was getting off on fucking girls he knew were illegal to fuck. He's not some guy who slept with a 17 year old who never told him she was only 17. Having a high libido and party life style doesn't lead you to make a grooming ring where you convince highschoolers to bring you 14 year olds to fuck.
These activities amount to rape only in the sense that they were statutory rape. The women were under the age where Epstein could legally interpret their assent as consent. It's also not alleged in the story that sexual intercourse occurred in all cases, including the 14-year-old who came to the house for money. A naked massage with touching is not what most of us understand as rape. It would be referred to in some jurisdictions as sexual interference with a minor, or sexual assault if the person was deemed unable to consent, depending on how the law is written. Canada, for instance, has both "sexual interference" and "sexual assault" in its Criminal Code.
Doesn't it give you even the slightest pause in your condemnation to know that if Epstein had done exactly the same thing in Germany or Austria or Italy it would have been perfectly legal? (As far as I know - corrections welcome - the "rape" in all of the cases was statutory, not because of lack of consent.) Yes, he was sleazy - I don't think many people in those countries would have thought it was a desirable way to behave; and yes he was reckless and entitled, because the fact is that the age of consent in the jurisdictions he was living was 18, and he ignored the law.
But there is also the basic fact that America is a massive outlier internationally in the way it sets the law on consent, and in most other contexts plenty of people - certainly on the Left - would see that as a reason to be more indulgent, and not regard the person as some kind of monster because they broke a law which in many other countries doesn't even exist in that form.
We can’t justify rich 50 year olds manipulating teenagers into sex with money and attention just because we are worried about the birth rate. If those relationships ended up with children that would be a disaster. The rich 50 year old in this scenario is more likely to be a non monogamous sexaholic who will not be interested in the day to day child rearing. As a result, you will see an explosion of pregnancies to poor teen women who are emotionally unstable. These teen women would be awful mothers. They will be unable to support their children financially and will most likely end up on public assistance. There’s got to be a healthier way to raise the birth rate without trying to increase the cultural acceptability of middle age high sexual market value men getting involved sexually with teenagers.
The thing to renormalize is the more socially acceptable, but still increasingly stigmatized 20F-25M type marriages. Everyone waiting until their early to mid-thirties for marriage and late 30s / early 40s for kids is what is lowering the birth rates. Even for the idea that women can have both the strong family life and strong career, having kids earlier is something can be done better physically an earlier age, and is less of a career disruption.
I agree with the premise. If you were to say this to people the vast majority would respond that it’s almost financially impossible to afford kids at 25. This has been my experience. I am 37, college educated, worked a corporate job since age 22, and was not able to afford a home with my partner until this year. Kids are 50/50 given our age. I would love to go back to a society where two people working a full time job could afford kids by even 30. Given the mess our economy is in, I just don’t see it outside of a Great Depression type event.
What you really need is a society where one man working a full time job can support a wife and children.
Women working is a collective-action problem. Two incomes make each family individually better off. But because women's work is mostly not wealth-producing -- it's largely women in government making sexual harassment regulations that women in HR document compliance with, regulations that wouldn't even be necessary if there were no women in the work force to begin with -- having millions of women working has the effect of merely bidding up the price of all the actual wealth that working men produce. We see this especially with housing because there are scarcity effects that magnify inflationary effects.
The idea that women's works 8 "mostly not weath producing," is quite the stretch and basically requires you reject the fundamentals of capitalism. Otherwise, why do you have so many employrtrs willing to pay women to work?
Firms pay women to work in HR to avoid trouble with the government. The government pays women to work making regulations because that's what women working in firms want them to do. Considering the actual value of this work, neither firms nor government should want to pay very much. But then they wouldn't be able to get women to do the work, and that would get firms and governments in trouble with their stakeholders who expect that work to be done. So they have to pay the women not because they produce wealth but because they protect the firms from being sued by governments for non-compliance with regulations. And this cadre is successful under pay-equity laws to compel the firms to pay them as much as men doing "comparable" work, comparable defined by pay-equity bureaucrats, not as defined by the capitalists working out how valuable the work really is.
There is another category of traditional women's work that, while very useful and necessary, still doesn't easily translate into wealth generation: nursing, school-teaching, and university professors in what passes for the humanities for example. As healthcare takes up an ever greater slice of the GDP (driven by insurance coverage) more money goes to (female) nurses and less to (male) engineers. And insurance itself employs hundreds of thousands of female clerks and claims adjusters whose job is to prevent the wrong insurance company being billed for the patient's knee replacement. Most observers of the system say this activity is mostly waste, essential as it is for each insurance company. And teachers are civil servants in all but name. Ideally they are an investment in the future wealth of the nation but when you look at educational standards today one has to wonder how much wealth teachers really contribute except to their own pension funds. Many schools are now just a place to park children and socialize them while their mothers are at work.
Anyway, I'm telling an allegory here. But it is certainly true that once a profession or category of employment becomes feminized, men abandon it. Part of the reason for this is that "women's work" is work that is family-friendly and when push comes to shove, mass layoffs will occur there simply because we can do without family-friendly work more easily than we can do without engineers. The women will simply go home and take their kids out of day care and look after them themselves. The HR lady doesn't have to work through the weekend to get an engineering specification to work and the female general practitioner doesn't stay up all night with a sick patient in the hospital the way old-time GPs used to when they were all men. And there are far more female GPs doing family-friendly medicine with regular office hours today than there were old-time male GPs doing it all, who never saw their children because they had a "doctor's wife" at home. That was a job description in the old days. We can't get women to do neurosurgery or interventional radiology -- both have brutal night and weekend obligations -- even though med schools are mostly female students now.
All these little effects sum to produce less wealth per dollar of earned income paid to women as compared to men, and that, my friend, is how you get inflation.
Extremely dubious. Roughly 1% of working women work in HR, so its not that big a factor. And even if even you want to assume that we'd be better off without the compliance requirements they deal with, unless you get rid of those requirements, someone's got to do them
I'm also curious how you figure healthcare doesnt "generate wealth." Like, what are you considering "wealth" here? Ultimately, the goal is to get the end consumer something they want, whether its widgets, or a hamburger or cancer treatment. Providing medical care seems at least as "wealth producing" as providing a car or television or AI chat bot.
No, because healthcare is mostly not paid with your own money. You consume the service and the government or the insurance company pays the doctor/hospital for it. You have no incentive to decide whether spending your money on a checkup or a hamburger will increase your utility more. You buy the hamburger with your own money and the insurance pays for the medical care. Even insurance is not voluntary. You have to pay for it (to avoid adverse selection) if your employer enrolls with an insurance company.
Most health care doesn't produce wealth. Professional athletes get back to playing if they have, e.g., Tommy John surgery but most sick people either recover on their own and get back to work without much impact from doctors, or they don't get better enough to get back to work ever. Marx called doctors "repairmen". There is a limit on how much you will pay to fix a broken automobile or washing machine, before you junk it and buy a new one. The obligations to pay for medical care are open ended and constrained only by the doctors' ingenuity and enthusiasm. Medical care is valued only because it is (nearly) free. If people had to pay out of pocket, you'd see just how much they really valued it. This has been looked at in economic studies. The net value we get from health care spending is mostly captured by providers as their wages, salaries, and practice profits.
The compliance obligations are the whole point. When women started entering the workforce in large numbers they demanded protection from sexual harassment, in the form of regulations and HR departments. When women were secretaries with no promotion expectations, sexual harassment wasn't something we cared about. If workforces were purged of career women, those compliance obligations would disappear and, theoretically, the government that imposes them could shrink also. (There aren't very many secretaries anymore to be harassed anyway.)
In general, all work that women do produces less value per dollar because everyone knows that it will be women who have to take time off work to attend to sick children or attend piano recitals. They are less engaged in the work because they are always thinking about their children and therefore produce less value per dollar of wage paid to them. Then there's obligation to pay them maternity leave and hire a replacement while they're off. It all adds up. Unless you can show where a working woman contributes more to the firm's wealth creation than a man does, her salary is inflationary in the aggregate.
If women doing women's work accepted 60 cents on the dollar compared to men, then their wages might not be inflationary. But because they demand equal pay for "equal" work, they have to be paid more than what their actual work is worth....because the government says so, and employs more women to police it.
I work in local government and most women in it are not HR or compliance. There's 1400 employees give or take in the county I work for and the HR staff is maybe 6 or 7 people, one of whom is male.
I work in IT specifically and approximately 10% of the staff are female most doing actual technical or management work (I'm the cybersecurity officer, we also have a female programmer, female helpdesk lead, and female support workers) and with one office coordinator who I assure you is *very* useful because she is a kind of central repository of information. She saves me a lot of time.
Other common roles women have in local government that are very much not useless are things like 911 dispatchers, female jailers, medical staff of various kinds, accountants, et al.
There are plenty of mostly useless roles in government. They do overall probably skew female, but there are men in them as well.
Women's labor is not useless or it would not be that tons of girls and women went and worked in textile mills at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
It was specifically because they were a giant pool of underutilized useful labor that this did happen.
Didn't say that the work women do is useless. Just that it doesn't produce as much wealth on average. If it is useful but doesn't produce wealth, it still has to be paid for out the wealth that someone else produces. Women working in textile mills obviously produced wealth but I'm talking today about work that employers and customers would not pay for it they had a choice. We wouldn't pay for jailers if we didn't have to, if, say we executed criminals instead of keeping them in jails....or if there was less crime in the first place. Jailers don't produce wealth even though they are necessary. They have to be paid through taxes on the wealth that other people produce. Obviously the mill owner would pay for his loom operators. But the modern firm pays for its compliance and HR workers only because legislation or regulation says it has to.
To the extent that women get paid for not producing as much wealth per dollar of salary as their husbands do, the effect of women working is still inflationary. All those productive wealth-producing women's jobs could be done by men, too, right? The jobs currently done by women that don't produce wealth would just not get done unless we want to pay women enough to want to be nurses because we need them. Then men would have jobs and women would be home raising children, doing OK on one income. That was my point. That women working cause a family first to enjoy two incomes, but then as the second-order effects work through, they come to *need* two incomes. If we don't want to organize our society with women strongly discouraged from working (by making child care very expensive, say), fine, but we have to be prepared for housing and other scarce goods to be more expensive than if they didn't work.
Also highly feminized workplaces are toxic, related to the way women compete and undermine one another. They enforce consensus by gossiping and shunning and exclusion. Men foster open disagreement with arguing, which if you try that with a woman she will cry because you didn't respect her feelings and then you're in trouble with the HR lady.
"Also highly feminized workplaces are toxic, related to the way women compete and undermine one another."
I don't see this at all, working at majority-female cosmetics company. Mostly they are professional.
"Men foster open disagreement with arguing"
Again not my experience, you are just spewing stereotypes really. We have few arguments because mostly we are not that much invested in our jobs, we typically do not want the best solution but the solution that requires the least work from all, and thus a consensus is quickly reached. Let the business owners argue. We are just here for a paycheck.
"which if you try that with a woman she will cry because you didn't respect her feelings"
A huge stereotype again, I do not see this. What would we even argue about? I do not care about anything that does not mean extra work for me. If she wants something that is extra work for me, I will just be vaguely non-committal. Be sympathetic, understand their viewpoint, hint at willingness to help while not committing to anything, easy.
"But because women's work is mostly not wealth-producing"
That makes no sense. I work at a cosmetics and vegetarian food retailer company. 90%-95% of our workforce are women, simply because they are more interested in these things, and know more about them. Marketing, purchase, everything. Even half of the warehouse - these products are not heavy. There are three of us IT guys and that is mostly all, a few in the warehouse.
Right but we don’t want to encourage a society where high smv sexacholics start procreating with teens who are then dependent on child support. This is the exact opposite of what we need.
That's somewhat offset by being rich requiring having good genes. You get more good results with good nature and bad nurture than the other way around, to the point that the "self made man" is a trope.
I think there are two things going on here. One is just status anxiety mostly among women. As a female, I can tell you it *really* fucking sucks to know that your value peaked in the eyes of approximately half of the human race when you were 20 and that at most through herculean and fairly miserable effort obsessing about your appearance you can extend this to maybe something like 35 and then after that you need to just accept you are a worthless old bat for 60% of your life. This is an extremely shit deal evolution handed us (on top of having to bear most of the physical toils of pregnancy and birth) and most women instinctively rebel against it when they have any kind of luxury to do so. This part is known and talked about though probably not as much as it should be. It's the main source of the drama.
The second issue overlaps with this and is not talked about as much. It's the paradox that many women want to be treated like women but they do *not* want to be treated like children. The old bargain of marriage was that women traded their autonomy for physical and material security. It was never the case that women did not want to pursue their own self interest and exercise their own reproductive strategies to the maximum extent possible just like men did.
To put it bluntly, we don't need men for security anymore so why should we still trade our autonomy?
The main things men have to trade today are things like entertainment, wealth, companionship, and commitment. These traits don't necessarily square up nicely. Female dependency tends to work out well for men in ways it does not for women *unless* you found the sort of man who 1) will actually be a committed father and 2) will put up with you for the 60% of your life in which you are an old bat. A high status, wealthy male who uses his status and wealth to pursue a rotating roster of 20ish year olds is extremely unlikely to be either.
I don't really have an issue with transactional relationships like this of themselves and I certainly don't want to make them illegal. I also know if I had a 17 year old daughter I would turn the hose on almost any 40ish year old dude, wealthy or not, who came sniffing around her. *Not* because I was worried she would be trafficked or damaged by having sex with him but because I know he's most likely a piss poor prospect for her future happiness.
It's also the case that if you want to normalize arrangements like this and a very high percentage of them don't work out long term (and they won't) that the remainder of men would have to be much more willing to take a risk on women who displayed overt gold digger behavior in their youth.
This might actually be a fair trade now that I think about it. We normalize high status men being rakes *and* that hot young women are prone to gold digging. People who really value beauty and money and status can have fun on that merry-go-round and the rest of use can develop an alternate set of signals. I have low confidence this will do anything about fertility, but it might at least allow people of average hotness and wealth and who are capable of self-discipline and want families to find each other more easily.
Most likely though in an age of mass media, it will just create a bunch of resentment and a bunch of people with no real hope of entering the merry-go-round wasting a lot of effort trying to do so.
Relevant book: Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by Sarah Hrdy
Kind of old at this point but still on point. Talks frankly about female reproductive strategies from an evolutionary point of view.
I think one could argue that princess treatment and aspiring to be a trophy wife are examples of women asking quite explicitly to be treated like children.
Very insightful perspective though. I agree with pretty much everything.
Idk.. if we were a society of well intentioned and relatively mature people id 100% agree with all this. But we arent. We have shitty predator types that can cause some real damage in peoples lives. On top of that, a lot of parents *arent* raising their teenagers to be mature and responsible. This is the type of situation im used to encountering in my neck of the woods. Ive met some of the people on both sides of that equation. It can fuck a young girls life up. And the dudes are always sleezy, the type of guys *you* would not want anyone you care about spending time with, regardless of their age.
So yeah leo fucking supermodels seems fine to me. But thats one end of a spectrum. The other end is pretty shitty.
For the record i dont think theres any "fixing" this. Theres always been people that get taken advantage of, and people that take advantage, and thats baked into our brains, like all the other dumb shit we do.
The bigger problem is that the institution of marriage is failing, and more important than marriage itself the full bundle or surrounding norms. On one end, I regularly encounter couples that have been together for many years, have a child, own a home together, and still aren't married, and aren't sure they are ready. What do they think marriage means at that point? On the other end you have endless dating (or being single and being on the dating "market" but not really dating) and having no long term commitments outside of varied "situationships." On both sides there is no notion of what successful outcome looks like, outside of a some magic, pure romance, with no outside doubts. It seems like a lot of divorce stems from the same thing: expecting much more than is probably reasonable. People probably should have lower standards - not in a spouse as such - but in what the marriage is bringing to you individually. Ironically is the society wide eqilibera that probably brings more value, if people did.
The value of the marriage (beyond some bundle of legal rights) is about the social reinforcement of the norms for having sex and raising kids. It channels pairing up vs the skewed distribution of a small number of men getting access to large groups of women. It sets a structure driving both expectations and financial and social obligations for dealing with children (and incenting having them). All of that can be done outside of marriage too - but it seems to really screw up things with the balance of second order impacts.
I dont disagree with you. For the most part i very much agree with you. But i think its kinda like saying "phones/social media ruined community or just having friends(irl)". I would say thats pretty true(i realize its a little more complicated than that). But theres no going back. Same with marriage, what killed that for us cant be undone. At least not without a unified effort(lol ik!). You mentioned that "magic romance" everyone wants.. thats the myth story we've been telling ourselves and teaching our kids for generations now. We need a new story.
But yeah, i agree with your assessment of the situation, i just dont know how thats going to change
For sure - I don't have any answers on how to change the social equilibria here. The change was probably inevitable once reliable, widespread birth control became available.
That said, I don't think we're at the end yet of the changes (not that I know where it is going). We've had a huge shift in the past 15 years of app-based dating become the norm and that hasn't yet stabilized. Even without other technological change, how that looks after another generation could be very different. And so many different legal and cultural factors intersect. It seems, despite the current political environment, we are on a long term trajectory of more gdp growth and thus more willingness to have welfare and UBI-like benefits. That along with birth control and removal of social stigmas removes the immediate negative feedback mechanisms. Longer-term incentives like the difficulty of single-motherhood, or the dissatisfaction with long term dating, don't seem to outweigh the other factors. Some early signs like increased religiosity don't seem to have been stable trends.
We are in for a few decades of interesting times, roll in AI, and geopolitics and the world will continue to be a social churn.
Some young women naturally happen to find older guys attractive. If age-gap relationships are stigmatized, the only older guys who pursue younger women will be sleazeballs. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at a certain point.
I actually think something like the Tea app could be a really good idea if it was implemented correctly. In a small town, gossip spreads, which creates an incentive for good behavior. In the modern "global village", the population size is too big and gossip breaks down. There needs to be a new enforcement mechanism.
That article sums it all up nicely. Of course you’ll have those who think differently pretending like you’re speaking some interplanetary language, but it makes perfect sense.
I generally agree with you on this (despite being hesitant to say so in most forums).
I think that, at least in general, it's not great for a 30-year-old to be dating a 17-year-old, and it seems reasonable to make it against the law. But I also agree that conflating someone being attracted to a 17-year-old to their being attracted to a 7-year-old also doesn't make sense.
I'd compare it to the distinction between someone who murders someone in the course of a robbery vs. a serial killer. Robberies and killing someone in the course of a robbery are both appropriately illegal, but they are also both things that you could see a normal-ish person doing. Even if you don't condone it (and you shouldn't), you can understand someone wanting something, deciding the best way to get it is by use of force, and then winding up killing someone along the way. On the other hand, being a serial killer is really outside the scope of the normal human condition - most people don't have a drive to kill people for the sake of killing them.
Similarly, while it is, in fact, deviant to be attracted to a pre-pubescent children, we shouldn't pretend that people (particularly men) aren't frequently attracted to teenagers. Notably, it's pretty clear that the advertising industry has, at least at times, leaned into this, frequently using quite young models in advertisements, and it isn't because they were targeting some niche demographic. But we can also say that, just like you shouldn't act on your understandable desire to get something you want through robbery, you shouldn't act on your understandable attraction to a 17-year-old (assuming you aren't also around that age). Keven Spacy's character in American Beauty was supposed to be a creep, but his creepiness mostly came from him acting on it his attraction, not his having it in the first place.
Matt Yglesias had a good point on Politix yesterday - if you go to a party as an adult and there are a bunch of 17-year-old girl there, you very well may leave, and may even tell the host it isn't cool, but you wouldn't necessarily call the police. But if you went and there were a bunch of 10-year-olds there, you're much more likely to pull out your phone.
> it's not great for a 30-year-old to be dating a 17-year-old, and it seems reasonable to make it against the law
But why? This is the norm for many historical and some current societies. The standard objections are around maturity - for any relationship - for the 17 year old. And thus the balance of power and naiveté makes it wrong. As mentioned, we used to know that the line was somewhere post-puberty and using age, though arbitrary. make the law easier for everyone. No need for some 7-part maturity assessment test. But presuming both a legal jurisdiction, and intellectual maturity (though clearly, not experience) I don't see why it would be wrong. Especially if move things up a few years, such as 20-33 pairings, if the teen number is what gives the ick.
Plenty of people have just changed their baseline intuitions and assumptions that this is wrong, without examining if it really is.
If the intention of the 30-year-old man wasn't some hookup at a house-party, but rather a chaste courtship with the intention of marriage, with mutual vetting from both families (and the both individuals) along with the reason not just being compatibility in temperament, but also fiscal stability of their new joint household because the man has an established career - is there anything wrong with that?
It's the norm for many historical and some current societies, but a lot of those societies weren't/aren't exactly great places to be a women (or in some cases, a young boy). It seems that there is a decently high risk for a relationship between a teenager girl and older man to go sideways, at least partly because there are some real differences in life stage that raise questions as to why an older guy would want to date a teenage girl and at least partly because teenagers are, in fact, stupid.
I actually don't think that this is a hard and fast rule. I have a friend who, at around 30, started dating and eventually married a 16-year-old, and, at least from the outside, the relationship seemed reasonably fine (though they ultimately did get divorced pretty quickly). But it seems like these relationships are likely enough to go bad that it's probably worth making them off limits, especially since it's easier for the government to say "don't date 17-year-olds" than it is for them to go in and inspect each relationship to make sure it's OK.
This is all obviously a sliding scale. A 21-year-old dating a 17-year-old is much more likely to be fine than a 13-year-old dating a 50-year-old. But the fact that there is no sharp cut-off doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't pick a line and draw it.
I'm probably more sympathetic to this sort of thing than a lot of people, and in particular, I'd probably give more leeway or "Romeo-and-Juliet" exceptions than we currently do, I think that the adult women who date Leonardo DiCaprio know what they are getting themselves into and we should respect their adult choices, and if, when my daughter is ~16, she comes home and tells me she's met a wonderful 30 year old, I wouldn't immediately reject the concept out of hand (though I would be suspicious), but I also don't think it's a tragedy to deny people in their 30s an opportunity to date high schoolers, if doing so helps protect some of those high schoolers from making traumatic life choices.
For context, my wife is 11 years older than I am, though we started dating when I was 27. Her next longest relationship was with a guy she met when she was ~16 when he was her ~25 yo camp counselor, though they didn't date until ~10 years later, and that relationship seemed to be fine, even if it didn't work out. My next most serious relationship was with a girl who I think had just turned 18 when I was 23 - she was a college sophomore, I was a 1L law student - it probably ended b/c I was too immature.
I'm not sure it's age gap hysteria that's at the center of the Epstein controversy. Remember, Trump has been accused of sexually assaulting 25 women, and of going into underage beauty contestants' dressing rooms, and no Republican cared. If it came out that he had sex with a 15-year-old on Epstein Island, that would be only incrementally worse than what he's already been accused of doing. The entire thing is based on the notion that Epstein was a Mossad agent, and therefore that Trump, and many other powerful men, are being blackmailed into supporting Israel. (Not sure why Israel needed to blackmail Prince Andrew, who has no political power, or Alan Dershowitz, who'd support Israel without needing to be blackmailed, but who cares, conspiracy theories don't have to make sense.) That's what this is really about, and the age gap stuff is a distraction.
Several things going on there. I contend it really is about age gap hysteria. The blackmail theory really didn't take off until much later and at first wasn't even attributed to any foreign power. When Virginia Roberts and her lawyers introduced the idea in 2009, it was more of a subplot and wasn't publicly discussed.
But what really supercharged the hysteria was after #MeToo and the Miami Herald compiled all these accusers' testimony, turning an underage sex scandal into something that more resembled QAnon. Just before Epstein's arrest and death, a tabloid journalist Vicky Ward started a rumor from a single third-hand quote that Epstein "belonged to intelligence", which the person she attributed it to denied under oath.
But why is it creepy? Who wouldn't find achingly beautiful young women attractive? Don't tell me you don't (if you're straight.) I sure do. The only people who find it creepy are the wives of these men who know from their own lived experience that they aren't as attractive anymore as teenagers are.
Fourteen-year-olds who dress in a way that invites ogling are careful to make sure their fathers aren't around. But yes, for any dodgy activity you have to be discreet. I know full well that a young woman doesn't expect that her blast radius will extend to someone my age and would be grossed out herself if she busted me. That's how women learn that they don't dislike the male gaze. They only dislike the male gaze if the male is someone who is not attractive to them. About the guys who they are trying to attract, they pout, "How come he's so stand-offish? I show as much of my tits as I can get away with!"
I think young women are well aware that they're born to be rape bait.
They don't even need to be dressed provocatively to be arousing. 10 year old females have boobs now. We'll need to change the definition of pedophilia to account for this.
As someone who has taught at several summer programs for very academically advanced high schoolers, I would consider a 30 year old who is attracted to a 16 year old to be, maybe not a pedophile, but at least deeply weird
Like these kids I work with are probably some of the most intellectually mature in the US; they can certainly solve math problems that academic mathematicians would struggle with, and are more capable of abstract reasoning than probably the vast majority of adults. And they're not one-trick ponies, either; almost all of them have perfect GPAs and are also manage other extracurriculars, being in orchestras, writing for school newsletters, competing at state or regional levels in piano, violin, dance, figure skating, tennis, debate, etc.
But if you hang out with them for more than a few hours, you quickly see that they don't have adult worldview or behavior, in a way that would be kinda weird for an adult to be sexually attracted to.
Like the most obvious thing is the revolving door of slang and memes. We've all heard of skibidi toilet, rizzler, ohio, orz, admit, cooked, cooking, 67, etc, and college kids partake, too, but I think adults who don't spend time with high schoolers may not understand the sheer volume of it. Like a group of college kids will have a conversation where some memes come up, but with high schoolers it's the majority of what comes out of their mouths. They can keep it out of their written solutions, but even when they're explaining math proofs to each other, it's rife with "degeneracies" (the term for memes and slang that the kids were using at the camp I taught 2 years ago, but was passe by last year).
And that's just the surface level. If you have deeper conversations with these kids, or listen to their conversations with each other or with their parents, it's super clear very quickly that there's a clear maturity gap between them and even 20 year old frat bros, not to mention people who live independently and support themselves.
And I'm someone who generally does believe in letting 15-16 year olds decide some things for themselves. Like I believe they should be allowed to choose their gender presentation (at least socially), and have some input in big things like their custody arrangements and small things like what foods go on their plates (though given the way I've heard some of them talk about their parents, and the food choices I've seen them make, I'm not even 100% on the latter two...).
I'm even okay with them having sex! But I do think it's weird for a 30 yo to be into them.
I'll add re: the maturity gap between a 15-16 year old and a 20 year old frat bro, one difference is that the 20 year old frat bro has at least considered choosing some interests or hobbies that aren't imposed on him by parents or teachers. He's also chosen what foods go on his plate for at least a year and knows the consequences of different choices.
But from the perspective of the instructor, I'd say the biggest maturity difference is that if the 20 year old has a problem with the way one of his homeworks or exams was graded, he almost certainly goes to the instructor himself without involving his parents.
Whereas even with 18 year old college freshmen, I've seen parents come in to discuss midterm/homework grading without their kid, be informed that the professor can't discuss it with them because of FERPA, and then drag their (probably mildly embarrassed) son in with them.
Based on my interactions with high schoolers, I wouldn't be surprised if overwhelmingly when they encounter this kind of issue, their parents handle it for them. (In international math olympiads, there's actually a designated time and place for coaches to dispute the kids scores for them.)
I think it's important to understand the difference between the full scope of attraction to a person and purely sexual attraction. I'm sure Epstein's clientele didn't have deep soul-searching conversations with these girls. (If anything, I suspect they appreciated how much easier it is to manipulate a younger person into staying quiet.)
Think of it this way: if you could put yourself into a rejuvenation machine that restored your body but preserved your memories and personality, how far back would you rotate the dial? How far back would your husband/BF/partner rotate the dial? Assume no condemnation from the society.
You are missing the point. Epstein didn't have "relationships" with younger women he used money and subterfuge to exert power over young girls. He groomed them and sexually abused them. He passed them to other men. He was less attracted to their youth than their lack of power that allowed him to dominate them.
We generally as society oppose 'unbalanced' relationship., regardless of age. Officer cannot date their subordinate. Teacher cannot date their student. Rich men dating young woman.
I think the crux here is really that out of your three examples, 2 are in an obvious hierarchy while the third, rich people and young people, just aren't.
And still, there is an obvious power imbalance there.
But a rich guy can't really coerce a young girl. A teacher can threaten a student indirectly by implication. Just the expectation being there can cause the one with lower status to feel like they can't refuse.
This dynamic just doesn't exist with rich people - young people.
But then again, for a homeless young girl, whose only source of income/housing may be the rich party, it may feel that way.
But if the young person walks away, there would be no repercussions, just a withdrawal of benefits. Which may feel like punishment, and lead to coercion.
I think the difficult part is that the we have to acknowledge that the young person obviously plays a big part in submitting to and creating such a dynamic unnecessarily in the first place, but that we can't really expect from young people to have the maturity to not do so.
Not true - this seems to be a very American thing. The EU is very much riddled with modern feminism, and yet has been lower age of consent and doesn't have the same moral outrages, at least on this topic.
France didn't used to have a minimum age of consent at all. But it was episodes of lechery with girls as young as eleven who got involved with Arabs from the Maghreb that convinced the French government after much debate to settle on 15, only in 2019 or so.
You can bet a lot of French men were also enjoying those 11 years olds until Muslims ruined the fun. Getting men to support age of consent laws is probably the best psy-op feminists have ever run!
Lester never fucked Angela. He pulled the reigns back when she told him he was a virgin. This was Lester's redeeming moment. The fawning Hollywood crowd may have thought differently if Lester took her to his island as Carolyn took her passport. I guess we'll truly never know.
Is the Epstein case primarily about him fucking one 17 year old? Weren't some of the girls in Miami 14? You sure you're not mixing this up with the Matty Gaetz II predicament? Besides, the fact that Angela was best friends with Lester's high school daughter always seems to be the primary moral dilemma as opposed to pedophilia. But I'm also a bit of a perv.
You think Epstein, Trump, or anybody in their circle would have tucked it away if Angela told them she was a virgin? If it were to be myself, I would have calmly collected myself and asked,"Folkston's still in Georgia, ain't it?"
This really is part of a broader trend where the meaning of the "age of majority" (and to a lesser extent, the "age of consent") has shifted over time from "the age where someone is definitively an adult" to "the age where someone starts to become an adult". Not too long ago it was widely understood that people began to become adults at puberty and would assume more and more adult responsibilities over the course of their teen years - getting their first job, learning to drive, going on their first dates, etc. And at 18, we could assume that most people had enough of these experiences that we could legally treat them as adults for all purposes.
Now people assume that 18-year-olds are adults only by technicality, and you see this in tons of online policy discussions. Part of the justification people will give for policies like student loan forgiveness is that 17–18-year-olds can't possibly be expected to make rational long-term financial decisions. You see similar arguments against the draft. These people don't realize that the age of majority literally does not make sense if they aren't fully adults, and that they are implicitly arguing for raising it.
This is one of those issues where biology conflicts with sense and morals. I've coined the term "cheerleaderopedia" to describe the attraction all men and high school age almost-men have for high-school age girls (and hard bodied just past high school "women"). All you have to do is spend some time scrolling thru the former MSN (on every windows computer) to recognize that half the clicks are on images of cheerleaders and just past high school female athletes. Sense and morals say that men with money are an incredible lure to young women who usually have no money and few hopes of getting more. No easy way to level the playing field here.
You're being way too generous assuming girls start pinging men's sexual radar in high school. It starts in middle school. Girls are starting puberty so much earlier nowadays that there are elementary school girls who any normal man would find arousing.
Walt Bismark has an excellent article called "Girls are going through puberty too early" that elaborates more on this.
All I can do is report what i personally see. I remember picking up my daughters at middle school and seeing middle school cheerleaders decorating for a football game and wondering, "Do their mothers know how their dressed?" Picking them up at high school was a different experience: the cheerleaders looked a lot like the younger women I met at my local country bar except showing more skin. Of course it was easier because most of the younger women couldn't dance very well.
It isn't quite correct to say that people are upset about "age gap relationships." No one is upset about a 40 year old dating a 30 year old, nor are they likely to be anytime soon, if ever. What bothers them is older men dating very young women, generally leveraging money/status in order to do so. The reason that this bothers people is not simply the mathematical difference between their ages, but rather the lecherous motivations that it clearly implies. This is the same reason that people (especially women) are bothered by pornography, prostitution, or any other form of sexual degeneracy that you can name.
Leonardo DiCaprio is an excellent example of this. Despite dating various young supermodels, at 54 he has never bothered to marry any of them, and has fathered no children. This clearly suggests that he is not optimizing for family life, marriage, or reproduction in how he conducts his love life. He is optimizing for sexual gratification and that's it. You can argue "that's his right" if you want, but this is equivalent to people also noting it is their "right" to criticize whatever they consider to be "pedophilia," so the entire exchange becomes pointless if we go that route.
Either way, it makes perfect sense for women to feel instinctive revulsion towards a man who deploys his resources only to ride the latest piece of 20-year-old ass he can find, without ever committing to any of them or giving them any children. Such behavior is clearly not conducive to resolving the "fertility crisis." I might agree with lowering the stigma around "age gaps" *if* this were being done with the specific and clear understanding of everyone involved that the ultimate goal is to foster family formation and have more kids, but that is most certainly not the case with the typical "age gaps" that people tend to criticize and get upset about.
Twenty-year-old women make their own choices about having sex with wealthy older men. They must get something valuable out of it.
This assumes that 20 year old women are always rational actors and not still emotionally immature beings. I think the whole Monica Lewinsky thing shows otherwise. Did Lewinsky give Bill Clinton blow jobs in the Oval Office because she was getting something valuable out of it? The way the story reads, it's more like she just got the hots for him because he's the President.
The law says they are, and our prurient curiousity about their motives is not relevant. If you want to infantalize women by saying that men can't rely on their consent to have sex until they are, what, 30?, go ahead and try. No man will ever approach a woman, for fear of being charged with statutory rape if she says yes, and sexual harassment of a minor if she says no and complains. Maybe that's what you want, I dunno. Not so different from #MeToo, is it. Another approach is to say that only married women can legally consent, so any sex before marriage is by definition rape on the part of the man. Then you can say that men can rely on the fact of marriage to force sex on her whenever he wants. After all, if adult-appearing women are assumed to be irrational actors and emotionally immature beings, why does consent even matter? Your cat doesn't consent to her vet visits, or to congress with the local tomcat.
I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about why people frown on older men having sex with 20 year old women. Even if it's not illegal it can be exploitative. You argument that they must be getting something out of it doesn't hold water. People consent to things because they are stupid all the time, and realize when they are a bit more mature that they were being used.
So if it's exploitative but shouldn't be illegal, why are we having this conversation if it's nobody's public business? That's up to the girls' mothers to teach them not to be exploited. Do you just want me to agree Bill Clinton was a creep and then we can be done with it? It won't bother Bill if I do.
I disagree that it should be seen as automatically exploitative. I see no reason to believe that Di Caprio's girlfriends, for example, are being hurt in any way by having a relationship with him. The two that actually commented on his dating habits in no way seemed to regret the relationship, if anything they had a problem with the press going on and on about their relationship as if it was any of their business. In Clinton's case, we are talking about two people who were sexually attracted to each other and chose to have sex together. It seems clear to me that they both now think it was not worth the hassle, and certainly it was immoral (for reasons that have nothing to do with Lewinsky's age, given that she was legally and factually capable of consenting to the sex). I don't think anyone alleges he pressured/threatened/coerced her into doing something she didn't want to do, and I am not aware of him tricking her in some way, for example telling her he loved her and meant to leave his wife, either.
That's a pretty silly argument. It's up to all sorts of people, such as society teaching men not to sexually exploit naive women who are much younger than them.
> I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about why people frown on older men having sex with 20 year old women.
This reminds me of a bunch of objections to Leo Di Caprio's behavior where I saw comments to the effect of "a relationship between two consenting adults being legal does not make it moral", and about him "getting away" with dating younger women. I find this language utterly revolting. Let me be absolutely clear: not only is Di Caprio dating hot young supermodels not illegal, it is *also* not immoral, because manifestly choosing to sleep together is fully within the rights of legal adults, everyone knows about his dating habits, he clearly didn't promise his partners marriage and eternal love, and they are literally hurting no one (in fact, the only annoyance Zang and Marone, two of his ex girlfriend, expressed, was with intrusive gossips opining about it). As for him "getting away" with dating them, well, the only two people whose opinion matters as far as him and his partner choosing to sleep together, is his and his partner's. Certainly neither him, let alone the adult woman he is with, owe it to society to organize their dating and sex life around the opinions aired by uninvolved internet randos. "Getting away with it". Nuts.
It's simple. At a family level, people want to be able to control the decisions of legal adults whose lives they should have no control over. The days where your father could choose your partner and sell you for two cows and a chicken are thankfully over. At a societal level, people like to grandstand over nonsense because they are gossipy lowlifes. While I don't understand how anyone could be so arrogant as to feel entitled to judge, let alone shame, the relationship of total strangers whose lives they know nothing about, it's a fact that they do, and therefore I feel no compunction in judging them for judging, and judging them to be gossiping trash who should be told to mind their own business and stay in their lane.
Again, this is not something that one needs to wonder about. Iirc Hanania's article contained links to actual studies that showed that, in fact, age gap relationship are not more exploitative than other relationship, and have as good or better outcomes (not that I think that any of those should, a priori, be a reason to choose whether to engage in them or not, given the size of the effect). Similarly, the question of why people object to them was studied in the literature. Example, this scientific paper linked by the BBC: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691830120X : "this condemnation promotes self-serving interests of those who stand to lose from violation of age-based assortative mating"
> Even if it's not illegal it can be exploitative.
The fact that something *can* be exploitative does not mean that it *is* exploitative, just like the fact that I *can* steal someone's wallet does not make me guilty of anything if I don't, in fact, steal their wallet. The possibility one could do something bad is not the same thing as them actually doing something bad.
Certainly in Di Caprio's case it's not possible to claim that he is exploiting anyone. His dating habits are perfectly known to everyone, and both him and his partners are doing something that is fully within their rights, and that literally doesn't hurt anyone else. Neither Leo, nor his supermodel girlfriends, are any worse off because of it, so I fail to see why it should be seen as in any way exploitative or immoral.
In the Lewinsky case, I am 100% with Hillary Clinton here where she claimed that this was a relationship between two consenting adults. The fact that Bill might have been in a position to pressure/coerce/threaten her into doing something she didn't want to do is irrelevant, given the fact that no one, Lewinsky included, ever suggested that he did anything of the sort.
Separately, I am also skeptical of the claim that he could have indeed done this, given that all the evidence points to the fact that, had she gone to the press telling them he pressured her into giving him sexual favors, he wouldn't have been able to keep things under wraps, the way his affair was handled.
> You argument that they must be getting something out of it doesn't hold water. People consent to things because they are stupid all the time, and realize when they are a bit more mature that they were being used.
I am sure that in retrospect Bill Clinton thinks that getting a blowjob in the Oval Office was a pretty dumb idea. The fact that he was short sighted and thought getting his jollies off was worth the risk in no way means that he wasn't getting something out of the affair, namely sexual satisfaction. Similarly, in Lewinski's case, she was sexually attracted to Bill, and what she got out of the affair was having sex with him (though they never had full intercourse). Pretty simple. The fact that in retrospect she didn't think it was worth it in no way means that she didn't get anything out of the relationship. It's not rocket science really. Two people were sexually attracted to each other and chose to have sex together. Then, later on, realized that it was not worth it.
Again, I will just have to reject the claim that anyone here was being "used" or "exploited". They were sexually attracted to each other, and chose to sleep together. Full stop. Nobody ever alleged that he promised her eternal love or tricked her into believing that he would leave his wife. As far as we know, no deception was involved. The same goes with Leo di Caprio and his numerous girlfriends: obviously they are both okay with the relationship. In the latter's case, it's not even obvious to me that generally his ex girlfriend regret having had a relationship with him. In fact, the two that have spoken publicly on the topic, Zang and Morone, merely remarked on the fact that people feeling entitled to judge their relationship as immoral or fundamentally illegitimate, let alone attempt to shame those involved, is repulsive and unacceptable (I concur).
Anyway, regretting a relationship in no way implies that you have been exploited. I fundamentally reject the notion that Lewinsky could just decide, at 44, to retroactively retract consent she gave more than two decades earlier. Well, she kind of didn't, to be honest, she was sure to point out that she did in fact consent, but then spouted some nonsense about whether her consent even mattered for anything given Bill's power. My answer is that yes, obviously it counted for a lot, given that without it, what he did to her would have been rape, while with her consent, it was a relationship between two consenting adults. Again, by this reasoning, Bill couldn't have had a romantic relationship with anyone, as he was literally the most powerful man of the world. Same with Bezos, etc.
I think in Lewinsky's case specifically there is an additional level that had to do with it being a relationship with, in a sense, her employer, which is not the case if Di Caprio's case. Regarding that, US companies are pretty opposed to office romance, and have policies in place to prevent it. I can fully understand where they are coming from: they don't want a Letwinsky like scandal, and it makes more sense for them to avoid the situation altogether than to try to determine whether someone got unfairly favorable treatment because they slept with the boss, or unfairly negative treatment because the relationship ended badly, or were pressured/threatened/coerced into doing something they didn't want to do. At the same time, it's worth pointing out that this kind of policies are in fact *illegal* in the EU, as they violate the European Convention of Human Rights and various national laws, as Walmart tried to apply such policies in Germany. And not only is this considered a gross violation of civil and worker rights, but culturally speaking, while office romance might not be popular in the US, it simply doesn't have the same stigma attached to it in many countries in Europe, with the overwhelming majority of the population (like ~75% in some Western European countries) being in favor of it. Now, my personal position is that I don't have a problem with a company having such policies in place, and then a worker can choose to work there or not. I myself work at a FAANG company in an EU site, and would never date anyone at work even if I was not in a relationship, given that it's simply not worth the hassle. But it's just a fact that if the company tried to actually prevent me from doing so, they would be violating my rights and would likely lose in court (as Walmart did), and the vast majority of the population here would be against the company's policy.
> This assumes that 20 year old women are always rational actors and not still emotionally immature beings. I think the whole Monica Lewinsky thing shows otherwise.
Actually @susanmacmillan639812 's claim in no way assumes that. People in general are not "always rational actors", and can be "emotionally immature" way past the legal age of majority. In the Lewisky case, I would say that objectively speaking both apply to Bill Clinton: he was clearly not "always a rational actor" and was definitely "emotionally immature".
This has absolutely nothing to do with OP's claim, which was that, by definitions, legal adults have the right to consent to have sex with whomever they please, and that if they chose to do so, absent threats or coercion, obviously it's because they want something out of the relationship, be it even just entertainment.
> Did Lewinsky give Bill Clinton blow jobs in the Oval Office because she was getting something valuable out of it? The way the story reads, it's more like she just got the hots for him because he's the President.
I mean, by your own words, the answer to your question is obviously yes: you say that she was sexually attracted to Bill because he was the President (and, from what I am told, at the time was good looking and charming), and thus she wanted to have sex with him. "Having sex with someone she was sexually attracted to" is what she got out of the relationship.
When you're older and more mature you might understand what I'm talking about. I'm not trying to claim that *every* relationship between an older man and a much younger woman is exploitative. I'm saying that *often* the older man is cynically manipulating a much younger naive woman, and this explains why people frown on these relationships. In no way am I implying that this should be illegal. But we do have social norms that say "you shouldn't date women who are way too young for you" for a reason. Lots of women have negative experiences of having been in a relationship with an older man where it turns out he was married or something and was just using them for sex. Of course there are plenty of cases where the younger woman may be cynically using the older man in a quid-pro-quo to get a leg up in a job or something (especially in Hollywood). But typically its the older more experienced people who are exploiting the younger less experienced person. The funny thing also is at the time a lot of people pointed out that in the Monica Lewinsky affair, she never actually "had sex" with him in the sense of full penetration. It was all her giving him blow jobs with no reciprocation. One time he used a cigar as a dildo, but that's it. There's no mention of her even having an orgasm. She also didn't get a promotion or a permanent job of anything, so you can't even say she was fucking her way up the career ladder.
Can you stop treating 20 year old women as mentally deficient children. They are not, they are grown up woman with agency. If a 20 year old woman agrees and consents to a relationship with an older man, its none of your business!
People have a right to criticize Dicaprio to their heart's content, but it is quite another thing for people to label someone something they are not. Pedophilia is an attraction to PRE-pubescents. Why do so many people feel a need to try and make someone worse than they are by using a dishonest label just because they don't like what they're doing? These people are contemptible.
I don't think anyone calls DiCaprio a "pedophile." Everyone he has dated has been of age, as far as I know. I am talking about "age gaps" that make people uncomfortable or upset, not "pedophilia."
My response was based on the overall points of your email where you attempt to smear DiCaprio's dating of much younger women in a very negative way. You claim he is "leveraging" his money and status. I'm sure that word "leveraging" didn't instantly pop up in your mind as you want to describe him as "exploiting" but want to be more subtle about it. In exactly the same way young beautiful women are "leveraging" their looks - see how that puts a negative slant on youth and looks? You are trying to make him sound MANIPULATIVE, but rich older men aren't "leveraging" anything. Women are ATTRACTED to money and status. The ones who aren't won't be hanging out with DiCaprio. Just because you don't like what he's doing doesn't mean he is "leveraging". I have no doubt these young women are eager to be with him.
You also draw a false equivalency when you write: "You can argue "that's his right" if you want, but this is equivalent to people also noting it is their "right" to criticize whatever they consider to be "pedophilia," so the entire exchange becomes pointless if we go that route.". The problem is the 2 things are NOT equivalent. What DiCaprio is doing is perfectly legal. However, calling someone a pedophile is slander if you can't back it up. We need to put a hard stop on the idea that people can just start calling "whatever they consider to be pedophilia" pedophilia. There IS a definition and it's an attraction to PRE-pubescents. If language continues to be distorted and mangled in this way, then accusations of "pedophile" will start to be met with the same wariness we give to "racist" or "transphobe". Language DOES evolve from the bottom up in normal situations but this idea that someone can call someone something that would be slanderous at the current moment is a problem.
Why can't you simply say I don't like when men do this because it doesn't track with my religious beliefs. But there is nothing inherently wrong w/ what DiCaprio is doing. Anyone calling him (and it's reaching that point) or any man sexually attracted to a POST-pubescent a pedophile isn't being honest. It is my belief that language should CLARIFY, not muddy. Not everyone shares this, but it would be a much better world if people were clear about what they really thought.
excellent post and rebuttal, thanks
A LOT of people do.
When I was 19 - 20 I had a fling with a 40 year old woman, and hooked up with some girls in their 30s. Just by meeting them at bars, clubs and whatever. It was all just casual fun really. They were way more interesting and better company than a lot of woman my age, and they were hot. So surely younger woman feel the way the same way about older guys?
In some cases maybe, but I thought it was fairly common knowledge at this point that men and women tend to seek very different things from dating and relationships. Men want sex, women want resources and status. Men are often more than willing to sleep with a woman for no particular reason besides that she is also willing, as your own experience demonstrates. On the other hand, you will not often hear of 20 year old women having "casual fun" with 40 year old men who have nothing to offer them in the way of resources or status.
Eh you need to go outside.
Right? (Your reply was just a pithy way of saying it is obviously not so and you’d know how obvious it was if you had more experience, outside.)
That's what being chronically online does, totally warps your perception of the world.
Insightful.
"Men want sex, women want resources and status."
This is a vast oversimplification. Men often seek status through sex - trophy wife thing. Women find the skills that lead to men gaining resources and status attractive. DiCaprio is handsome, has acting skills, which imply social skills and so on.
As you yourself note: women WANT resources and status. So why do you describe DiCaprio as "leveraging" his resources and status in an earlier post other than you don't like what he is doing? That was my point: he is not "leveraging" anything. I'm sure many young women approach him eagerly. You clearly don't approve of him returning their interest, but I see no logical reason why.
why criticise the man's behavior (reciprocating) instead of the girl's initial proactive behavior, seeking him out eagerly?
This is a bizarre and simplistic view of the world of sexual relations. Women do want sex. Many women like casual sex and want to explore relationships with different men to find out what they like. Many women really like sex and want to have it frequently. The female orgasm is not a myth!
When I was well into my 30s I frequently had brief flings with women in their 20s, often their early twenties. I was a DJ and rode a Ducati, hence my nickname. I was handsome and roguish and a had reputation as a good lover. Whenever I was single some young woman would aggressively pursue me, sometimes more than one. I never made any promises to any kind of lasting relationship and my reputation proceeded me, so most women I dated knew what they were getting into. I guess you could argue that they were getting "status" by dating me, I certainly wasn't offering them resources. A good time, perhaps.
My teen daughters today call that kind of man a fuckboi. It's not a compliment.
Your experience if your experience, nothing more than that. Plenty of women like casual sex.
When I got a bit older, I decided to get married and settle down and changed entirely the age and profile of the women I dated. Within a few years I did get married but that does not invalidate the experiences of my youth. My story isn't really that unusual either.
Women feel revulsion towards lechery because it threatens their status within relationships. We need to stop focusing on and debating the one-in-a-million exceptions to the norm in topics like this. 99.99% of men are not Leonardo DiCaprio, and 99.99% of women are not the young models he dates. He fulfills his lecherous desires, and they take advantage of his fame and wealth while they can. It is an entirely different arrangement from even a non-famous, wealthy man his age dating normal women that age. A young woman in that scenario has social pressures, stigmatization, and the possibility of commitment issues and infidelity to deal with. That does not apply when you are dating one of the most famous men in the world, who has been a sex symbol for almost 30 years, where just dating him for any period of time is self-serving for these women on a career and social level.
You make a good point but there is nothing about DiCaprio's "desires" that are "lecherous". They are common. The women he dates are - by objective measures like symmetry in the face and other signs of health (youth) - desirable. Most men don't act on this because they don't have the resources/status to do so. And many of the ones who do have the resources and status are already attached.
"Lechery" is an absurd term. It's totally normal for human being to feel physically attracted to other human beings they want to date and sleep with. Pretending that this is not the case is just plain delusional.
> He fulfills his lecherous desires, and they take advantage of his fame and wealth while they can. It is an entirely different arrangement from even a non-famous, wealthy man his age dating normal women that age. A young woman in that scenario has social pressures, stigmatization, and the possibility of commitment issues and infidelity to deal with. That does not apply when you are dating one of the most famous men in the world, who has been a sex symbol for almost 30 years, where just dating him for any period of time is self-serving for these women on a career and social level.
The women dating Leo Di Caprio (and Leo Di Caprio himself) obviously experience much more social stigma and pressures relative to someone dating a non famous rich man, because the press is all over Di Caprio in a way that is much more invasive that they would be for a normal couple (also, afaik in many legislations VIPs have less protection to their privacy relative to regular people, which makes them more vulnerable to being slandered, defamed, harassed and otherwise messed with in ways that a regular person wouldn't, because they could sue those bothering them.
I don't think that commitment issues and infidelity would be more of an issue in the regular case relative to Leo's case. I mean, an age gap relationship in no way automatically implies that one is jumping to a girlfriend to the next. Not that I think that is a fair description of Leo's dating history either: he is together with his girlfriends for years at a time, they are not exactly one night stands.
Again, I fail to see why any of this should be anyone's business (besides the business of the people directly involved). It's not as if Leo di Caprio is forcing anyone into a relationship. And if one as an aesthetic preference against age gap relationships, they are free to avoid them, like they are free to avoid men for their height, ethnicity, religion, political persuasion, etc. They might want to investigate their prejudices, but nobody is forcing people to date someone they don't want to (and if they do, that's coercion and that's illegal). In other words, don't want it, don't buy it, but why go around bothering consenting adults who have every right to sleep with whomever they like, and who are literally not hurting anybody? Particularly when, being the ones directly involved in the relationship, with all probability they know the other person, their relationship and their desires much better than some internet rando who literally knows nothing about any of them?
I agree; that is why I said it is a waste of time to focus on cases like his, which constitute a minuscule number of all the relationships in our society. Maybe lecherous wasn't the right word. Obviously, sexual attraction is normal; I never claimed otherwise. However, a 50-year-old man not having children because he prefers having a rotation of young women to have sex with, whom he can set aside when they begin to lose their youth, is also obviously not a normal or desirable standard for coupling in a society that needs stable families and a higher fertility rate. I don't understand the point of defending an unprincipled exception that is unsustainable on a societal scale, just because a man technically has a right to do so. It is understandable from a male psychological standpoint of maximizing pleasure and minimizing responsibility. Still, his case doesn't even address the justifiability of the age-gap relationships proposed by Hanania; he argues for them on the basis that they would boost fertility rates.
I am not even judging DiCaprio personally; he can do what he likes. However, what he does is obviously not a functional categorical imperative, and justifying it or critiquing it is a waste of time, as I said originally, because 99.999% of men are never in a position where they have access to a dating pool of 18-25 year old models well into middle age.
But wait a bit, saying that men should want marriage and kids is basically a conservative thing, right? So why would feminist women who are per definition leftists be bothered by it?
I will answer that. I think for every one person who is a principled feminist or leftist, there are ten who simply follow their self-interest and find the currently fashionable political justification for it. So many feminist women are in fact not, they just want the best possible deal for their careers, relationships etc. and call it feminism. But of course that is also how many men are conservative, only as long as it suits them, and in economic hardship they will immediately want a government bailout.
"Lechery" is a propaganda term used by demisexuals to shame normal male sociosexuality.
I agree, I mean, as if being physically attracted to someone you want to date and sleep with should be in any way abnormal. A total denial of reality.
"Giving them any children" itself is a deeply sexist mindset.
In fact, this kind of view does in fact infantilize women, and also presumes that what they seek in the relationship is not sexual gratification and companionship, but obviously other more "womenly" benefits.
I get your point about leveraging money and status for sex, but that itself is build onto a sexist view of women.
A women doesn't have to get anything out of a relationship to have "benefitted" from it.
A women doesn't have to be "rewarded" for sex by having children or something else.
Women's own revealed preferences are that they generally seek to get "something else" out of relationships with men besides only sexual intercourse for its own sake. This is not "sexism," it is simply an observation of reality.
And men also seek something else out of relationships with women besides only sexual intercourse for its own sake...
It is the definition of sexism to look at socially and historically shaped patterns amongst sexes, and with them draw conclusions about inherent traits of these sexes.
That is how all of sexism works.
There certainly are some biological differences between the sexes, but especially in a mostly emancipated society like we have today, I fail to see any compelling evidence refuting that the human condition that we all share and is responsible for 99.9% of things we want out of a relationship, is in any way trumped by the female or male condition.
It is a very popular opinion online though, that somehow being a man or women makes one wired to do certain things or want certain things.
>And men also seek something else out of relationships with women besides only sexual intercourse for its own sake...<
At first, no, that's pretty much what they're after. Then as we age and mature, most of us do at some point realize that it's worthwhile to invest in our mates and create stable families.
This is why we look down on men who, at 40, still only want to have sex with 20 year olds and aren't interested in anything else. They are acting out the priorities of a horny teenager rather than those of a mature adult.
As an aside, I would say that, manifestly, a 40 year old dating a 30 year old is *also* something people have an issue with, as demonstrated by some replies in the thread.
I also find the word "lecherous" ridiculous. I mean, as if people wanting to date and have sex with someone because they find them sexually attractive is somehow abnormal. Laughable.
I don't see the decision of two adults choosing to sleep together as equally legitimate to someone feeling entitled to judge, shame and potentially harass them when it's none of their business, as equally reasonable. Two adults choosing to sleep together is fully within their rights and hurts nobody. Gossipy lowlifes trying to shame them and their relationship might potentially be illegal (depending on the law system, if it's defamatory or slanderous, or turns into harassment), and in any case illegitimate.
It's simply galling for people to act as if two adults choosing to sleep together would require their approval, I don't quite understand how someone could feel so arrogant and delusional, and have so little epistemic humility (they are opining about stuff that is none of their business, disregarding the opinions of the people directly involved, including the one of Leo's female partner, which are the only relevant ones, and acting as if they think their opinion about a person and relationship they know nothing about is more valid than that of the people directly involved). But given that they manifestly do feel entitled to judge these people and their relationship, I feel no compunction judging them for judging, and specifically judging them to be gossipy lowlives with too much time on their hands and a chip on their shoulders the size of Mnt. Everest, who should be told to mind their own business and stay in their lane.
Again, we are talking about people liking to grandstand about a non problem, given that neither Di Caprio nor his hot supermodel girlfriend manifestly have a problem with their relationship, and their opinion is and should be the only ones that matter in any sane society (well, if he was married, I would say his wife's too, but since he clearly isn't and afaik neither are the women he sleeps with, it's a non issue). Leo seeping with his hot supermodel girlfriend hurts literally no one, so I fail to see why it should be considered "immoral", it also doesn't change society one way or another.
I mean, obviously if they could quite a bit of men would no doubt strive to imitate him, or a few famous millionaire rockstars, but I don't think that that's something one ought to worry about changing society as a whole, because the truth of the matter is that, contrary to the absurd notion being pushed about this, it is in fact not the case that "loser 50 year olds" are "reduced" to date hot 20 year old supermodels because they "couldn't cut it" with the 50 year old women around them. That's as delusional as believing that a woman is "reduced" to dating the multimillionaire hot actor because she couldn't "cut it" with the 50 year old unemployed former construction worker down the block. I mean, I saw something like that once, but it was a comedy sketch, and everyone recognized the obvious absurdity of it.
Said another words, no, the average low status 50 year old male does not, in fact, have an easier time sleeping with hot 20 year olds, that's manifestly utter nonsense, as Hanania correctly hinted at with irony in this post.
Exactly. Another way of saying what I said in the comment above yours.
There is a clear difference here. The decision of two legal adults to sleep with each other is something that depends only on their opinions, they are not hurting anyone by choosing to do so, and have every right to decide to sleep with whomever they please. Conversely, I feel it astonishing that random internet strangers should feel entitled to opine on who an adult woman (or man) should or shouldn't sleep with, using language such as Leo Di Caprio "getting away" with dating the people he wants to date. I am sorry, "getting away" with dating them? This is a person who is convinced that two consenting adults, including an adult woman, should need *their approval* before they choose to have consensual sex? As if they literally felt entitled to tell her who she should and shouldn't sleep with, while completely discounting her own opinion on the matter, which, incidentally, given she has first hand experience with her partner and relationship, would be about a billion times more informed than that of an internet rando who knows nothing about either? These two things are not equally unreasonabl.
What I am getting at, is that two consenting adults choosing who they should sleep with is fully within their rights and entirely appropriate, while thinking that two adults dating or having sex should require their endorsement is just plain delusional. Manifestly, the only two relevant opinions when it comes to two consenting adults dating and sleeping with each other, are the ones of the two adults in question. Conversely, one opinion that shouldn't in any way, shape or form figure in that decision, is the one of a random internet stranger. The latter deserves nothing better than to be told to mind their own business, a sentiment that at least a couple of Di Caprio's ex girlfriend (Zang and Marone) did in fact express, with good reason.
Prude.
You've got to be kidding. His "resources" are why the women are drawn to him in the first place. It's like saying feeling revulsion towards a woman who deploys her "assets" to snare men. Her assets are the point! His resources are the point! Match made in Heaven, and the harpies don't like it.
As to marriage and family, don't be ridiculous. No teenager will marry. They'll be getting dick anyway all throughout their teen. Better be to a successful man than to a string of young losers her father will hate anyway.
Stop ffs. A 40 year old dating a 30 year old pisses off every single woman over the age of 35 too. I know because I’m a dude who’s choosing to date these younger fertile women, not least because it protects ~3 of my offspring from ~3 miscarriages before one healthy child arrives (if it ever does). What man who respects himself and has options, would risk that?
And it isn’t “older” men “leveraging” their status and money etc. Women fuck and date men with status and money. The age of the man has little to do with it. Am I “leveraging” my “money” (as a partner at a private equity firm), predatorily? No — women wait at the finish line and fuck the winners.
Then they “leverage” marriage law for half, buddy.
I'm honestly surprised, given the amount of money he has, that none of them have lied about being on birth control and then sued him for child support.
Maybe he always insists on condoms.
One of your more popular themes in your work has been how law effects culture. If the age of consent was 20, the culture would slowly shift to make it so anyone attracted to a 19 year old is branded a pedophile.
Jeffrey Epstein's greatest mistake (besides not checking the IDs of the "victims" who all lied about their ages) was buying a house in a state where the age of consent is 18. If he had just lived in New York, where soliticing an underage prostitute was just a misdemeanor until recently, he'd still be living his best life on the island.
Epstein raped girls as young as 14. I agree with Hanania's general point that age gaps are overblown, and that conspiracy theorists have blown up the Epstein case into something much bigger than it really was. But Epstein personally is still a heinous person who was a pedophile, not just an ephebophile. Epstein's mistake was getting off on fucking girls he knew were illegal to fuck. He's not some guy who slept with a 17 year old who never told him she was only 17. Having a high libido and party life style doesn't lead you to make a grooming ring where you convince highschoolers to bring you freshmen to fuck
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/newly-released-epstein-transcript-florida-prosecutors-knew-billionaire-raped-teen-girls-years-before-cutting-deal
Pedophiles are people who are attracted to PRE-pubescents. Look it up and stop exaggerating. Why can't you condemn Epstein without unilaterally changing what words actually mean? What he did was illegal and wrong, pure and simple, you don't have to try and make it sound worse.
In common parlance a pedophile is someone who has sex with a person who is underage. Most people haven't even heard of hebophiles. You are insisting on technical definitions that few people use.
I could not disagree more. By "in common parlance" you mean the people inside your bubble. We all have a bubble and in mine pedophile means PRE-pubescent, as it's abundantly clear that there is nothing unusual about men finding post-pubescent women sexually attractive. That is the whole biological point of puberty and the development of secondary sexual characteristics. And don't even pretend that grown-ass men didn't find Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson in her prime very sexually attractive. That is NORMAL even though certain people like to pretend it isn't, especially by labeling it "pedophile". Law-abiding men agree not to act on these desires in the same way good men agree not to cheat on their wives or significant other. But the attraction is 100% normal and requires no special name, except by people who are attempting to virtue signal their particular morality.
You are in a bubble such that you are apparently insulated from social and traditional media where pedophile means what I say. I worry about the behaviour in your bubble.
I note that you have reframed the discussion. I referred to having sex, not finding someone sexually attractive.
I am not reframing anything. I am adhering to the definition of pedophilia, which is common and well understood, even if certain people in social and traditional media are distorting it to virtue signal their opposition to someone engaging in behaviors society disapproves of on moral/ethical grounds. As for the idea that "social and traditional media's" definitions of something tracks with what the general public believes? It's demonstrably untrue as no one believes that men become women simply by identifying as such. However in that bubble, everyone pretends that is true even though they know it isn't. All of these distortions should be pushed back against, not gone along with IMO.
By the way, some examples of what happens when people don't push back against a select group of people distorting what established words actually mean are not only "racist" or "transphobe" or "men" or "women" or "sexist" but what happened when EVERYONE fell in line with no longer using the term illegal immigrant. There was nothing wrong w/ that word. But people in power changed it from the top-down and everyone went along with it, and now the same people in power routinely claim that conservatives have a problem with "immigration" and "migrants". Nope. They have a problem with ILLEGAL immigration and ILLEGAL immigrants. By changing the words - which everyone understood - the language itself makes Cons look bad. And I say this as a lifelong liberal who hates Trump by the way. I just don't like the dishonesty. If someone is having sex with underage women, it's illegal, full stop. I see no reason why I should go along with mislabeling that person as a "pedophile" when they are not other than to just go along to get along or virtue signal.
Fuck social and traditional media! They are wrong!
Fuck common parlance. You call someone a pedophile, you are calling them a child molester! And you know what people say about child molesters. Kill them all. You say an 18 year old man and a 17 year old girl, the man is a child molester!
How about we call him a nonce then since thats an apt description without upsetting your specific criteria for the pedophilia word? He’s a freak and a nonce and anyone like him should be hung drawn and quartered imo
My hot take of the year: Epstein was not a pedophile. He's actually worse than a pedo. Pedos have an excuse for breaking the law. Epstein doesn't. 14 year olds don't look that different from 16-18 year olds. Epstein had a choice and he purposely chose the worse one.
????
He was a hebephile.
It is normal for an adult man to want to have sex with an attractive 16 year old. Just as it is "normal" for men to want to rape women. But control your urges and do the decent human thing and keep it in your pants. And try to leer at her either, it creeps her out and makes you look foolish.
I never implied or suggested that it is okay for men to start having sex w/ 16 year olds so your advice is presumptuous and unnecessary. That you immediately fall back into conflating the two after conceding my point is a sign to me that you are reacting emotionally to what I'm saying, and that's part of the problem.
I also don't agree that it's normal for men to WANT to rape women. I understand what you're trying to say regarding that, but it's normal for men to WANT to have sex with women they're attracted to. WANT to rape them? I'm not so certain. I'm not trying to be nitpicky here. Again I understand what you're trying to say, but you're using rape in a context where it doesn't belong as in caveman or other primitive beasts. Rape is the norm with primitive beasts, yes. But to me that's like saying cavemen or apes are impolite. True, but is the idea of consent or rape something a caveman or ape would even grasp?
The fact that you bring up rape as an analogy is also part of the problem IMO.
If the AOC is 16, why would it be wrong to have sex with a girl that age.
16 year old girls can have sex with men in 46 states.
Sorry, he's only a borderline pedo. I'm sure that 14yo was much closer to looking like a mature adult than a 10 year old.
Well, that is objectively obvious, I'll give you that.
There’s no such thing as borderline pedo. You are one or you’re not.
"Epstein raped girls as young as 14."
How do you know that? I've seen no credible evidence of that.
UPDATE: The latest release of files does contain credible evidence of a 14-year-old.
You can’t be a ephebophile and a hebephile.
To tell the truth, he’s a hebephile.
That's already becoming the norm. I have a liberal friend who was horrified at the idea of a 23 year old dating an 18 year old. "That's a child!" is what he said. All that effectively does is make 19 the new age of consent, or 20 if you feel sufficiently puritanical.
Honk! Honk!
A 23 year old dating an 18 year old IS weird. That's a relationship between someone who has finished a college degree and someone who has literally just graduated high school. It's more about their life experience, not their age.
This is just leftist reaction formation, which seems to dominate US politics, where left wing people suppress how they actually feel about things and then pretend they never felt it at all and it was in fact that bad right wing person over there who then becomes a monster.
Or I actually just feel that way 🤯
Its not weird at all, they are both grown ups. And your examples are irrelevant since most people dont go to college anyway. An 18 year old and a 23 year old could both be working adults. So you are totally wrong here
Idk, my boyfriend was 22 when I was 17, and I was far more mature than he was, so I won't say it should get anyone thrown in jail. BUT, it does make a difference in the US because there's a hard cutoff of 21 to even be allowed to go into certain establishments. If the 23 and 18 year old share a bottle of wine, the 23 is going to jail. The 18 year old literally cannot accompany the 23 year old to many venues where adults normally socialize (ie anywhere serving alcohol). So it *does* make the 23 yo look suss...like just find someone who's 21, instead of choosing to date someone that is in fact not treated as a full adult for plenty of socially relevant laws. Of course, I'd also advocate that the drinking age be lowered to 18, but since it is not, this is kind of a big deal and makes the two in fundamentally different adult/not-adult categories.
Kryptogal. I am going to be honest with you. The drinking age being 21 is one of the stupidest and nonsensical laws we have in the US. I believe America is the only country in the West where that is the case. You can have sex, you can get married, you can vote, and you can have your intestines blown out on the battlefield for the military at 18 but you cannot drink alcohol.
So the law is insanely stupid and I am glad you agree it should be lowered to 18. Obviously none of us should base our personal morality on that stupid drinking age.
Finally I would also add that I dont like drinking and I would prefer being in a relationship where nobody drinks alcohol. I dont like this view that most people have with adulthood, seeing it synonymous with drinking. I think a society where nobody is drinking would be a much better society. I understand in todays society you might have to drink from time to time to be able to socialize, but still I think its the best thing to try to avoid drinking as much as possible.
Its the same thing with saying someone goes to high school. Okey, if I am older and I date a 17 year old high schooler, its going to be weird. And if I drive her to school every day I might be a bit embarrased. But why should I base my personal morality on it being weird to date a high schooler? Because that would mean its wrong to date a 19 year old woman if she goes to high school. And it would mean that its perfectly fine to date a 17 year old if she quits school and starts working. We shouldnt base personal morality on that.
Besides people get older. If you date a 17 year old it might be weird in the beginning but she is going to turn 19 and be out of school soon. And then she is soon going to turn 21, in case you really enjoy drinking. So I am never bothered by a relationship being weird in the beginning, If I know that things are going to get back to "normal" 1 or 2 years from now.
Why? What's actually weird about it? So what if the older partner has more life experience?
It doesn't seem like a partnership between equals. Feels creepy, for the same reason I don't like 16 and 18 year olds dating. Lot of opportunity for abuse.
I'm not saying it should be illegal man I just think it's weird
Seriously? 16 and 18? That seems like such a nothing burger to me. There are opportunities for abuse of any kind in any relationship.
There’s nothing weird about it! It’s the most normal thing in the whole universe.
That's what Michael Wolff said Epstein's character flaw was. For someone so closely connected to power and sex, he lived way too carefree, didn't care what the media thought until it was too late.
I'm surprised you think this mostly comes from older women because this just really does not comport with reality. Where are you getting that? The very loud, very furious, very disgusted heat and anger behind all this is coming from young girls and women themselves, and also to some extent young guys. Tik Tok is full of teenaged and young girls going off about it. Every reel I've seen on Insta with someone going off on a rant about sick twisted older men is by a 16 or 17 year old girl.
It is true that there are some men and women who are the age where they themselves have teenaged children and they no doubt do also get very protective because they always see their children as babies who are younger than they are. But mostly this comes from young people themselves. The reality is that the vast majority of young girls have zero interest in older men and never did and just had to marry them in the past bc they don't have a choice. All through history they were often crying about it, running away, railing against their parents for having to do it. There has always been a small portion, maybe 10-20% tops who are okay with it, though ironically they tend to be the ones least interested in men themselves as people and just looking for resources. But the other 80% who are interested in love and sex are not. I remember being that age and having one friend who was interested in older men and we all thought she was insane bc for the rest of us, someone over late 20s was the same as someone 60 and just old and gross to us. Like I clearly remember being revolted by 30 year old guys. I think that is actually most of what is driving this is young women pissed off and grossed out by every old guy drooling over them. It terrifies them for their own future and pisses them off that those guys think they have a chance. By the time they themselves are in their late 30s, 40s, or 50s+ they are well used to this, it's been going on their whole life and they no longer give a fuck. i really am curious where you get the impression that it is mostly older women because I guarantee for every one post or comment you find by one on this issue, I could find you 1,000 by young girls on Tik Tok. There are also plenty of young guys who don't like it either and don't appreciate older guys always trying to horn in. Look at the article you linked it was a bunch of college students who did that. They're the ones most likely to have a problem with thirsty old guys.
Old guys have been trying to come up with reasons that if XY or Z would just get out of their way, they could get with hot young chicks like they want to forever. The real issue is that they simply don't want to, unless you pay handsomely for the privilege, and even then they obviously still don't want to or you'd see it more often than you do. Epstein's problem is he was a cheap fucking bastard ... The dude had hundreds of millions and only paid those girls $409 to spend time with his old ass. He should've been paying at least 10x that amount, that's pennies to him.
That was probably Ghislaine's role: to manipulate the women into coming cheap. He might have been willing to pay $4000, but the reason he had millions of dollars is because he didn't waste it. Hiring a fixer to get the girls for regular hooker prices was good business.
I begin to suspect that Epstein was just the beard and it was Maxwell's show. One that was about far more than sex.
Interesting!
This is my impression too. GenZ is an incredibly neurotic generation, women generally even more so, and just the thought of someone whom they find gross hitting on them is unbearable. In 1995 or so it was more accepted that unwanted sexual attention is simply a part of life, you just blow them off and move on.
I think that Hanania mentioned Gen-Z's attitude in one of the linked tweets. Anyway, I don't quite get why we are acting as if this phenomenon is not studied in the literature. From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691830120X (which I found linked in a BBC article) we can see that age gap condemnation promotes self-serving interests of those who stand to lose from violation of age-based assortative mating (kind of expected), and additionally that younger women endorse prostitution more than older women (surprising), both of which track claims made by Hanania here and in other posts.
The thing that is particularly weird about people getting upset by Massachusetts's age of consent is that it's one area where liberals completely ignore European parallels. See https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/hbzl5e/age_of_consent_map_in_europe/#lightbox; there is literally no European country except Ireland which has an age of consent above 16, and a lot where it is as young as 14.
Personally I have zero interest in having sex with teenagers, but I can't get very exercised about Jeffrey Epstein either. Most of his activities would have been completely legal in almost any European country - but all the Europhile liberals are apparently indifferent to that fact.
Left-leaning Americans do this weird thing where they constantly gush about how wonderful Europe is, but are no less informed about European legislation than conservative Americans. E.g. there is no European country with abortion laws as liberal as the most liberal laws in American blue states; many European nations are rowing back on gender medicine for children; Scandinavian countries are not "socialist" in any meaningful sense; contrary to California lawmakers' claims, Portugal's drug decriminalisation did not result in people openly injecting heroin on the streets of Lisbon; there are many European nations in which citizens can legally own guns.
When a left-leaning American talks about doing things the "European" way, you're generally better off assuming they're talking about some fictional utopia that exists in their imagination, as opposed to any actual nation.
Yes, and they do not know that we Europeans just because we have a number of laws American liberals like, such as tax-paid healthcare and universities, are not the same kind of people as American liberals. We are much more cynical. We do not see these laws as a moral issue, as social justice or helping the less fortunate. We just simply want these things for ourselves and our kids, and do not mind much if other people get them too. If I had to get into $200K debt for a degree, I would have rather made do without. From my European middle-class perspective "free" education is not a charity or a justice question, but something I personally needed.
That because the European middle-class counts as relatively poor by American standards. The average European say data scientist makes about $60K per year, so paying something like $25K in taxes for education, healthcare, unemployment and retirement is not actually such a bad deal, there is nothing particularly charitable or justice-y about this.
Also it is precisely our cynicism that makes it necessary. I do not know anyone who donates to charity, or "volunteers at a soup kitchen", whatever is that. If the welfare state would not exist, most people would just shrug at starving people here, the whole church-centric US charity scene does not exist. Welfare is ultimately about the state taking over church functions once people stop going to church.
You are erecting straw men.
We more often hear conservatives calling European countries socialist.
What is true is that the “conservative” parties in Europe would often be considered centrist, left-leaning parties in the US.
Nobody said it’s illegal to own guns in Europe. Hunting is leisure activity. The gun laws are nothing like the US however.
"More often" is a difficult thing to quantify, but to my mind the most prominent American socialist politician of the last decade (Bernie Sanders) routinely described the Scandinavian nations as socialist, a characterisation that even they were moved to dispute.
Yes, YOU know that hunting is a leisure activity in Europe – because you're better informed about Europe than the average American. I've interacted with plenty of left-leaning Americans who seem to believe that hunting is a weird anachronism only practised in the US and that guns are functionally impossible to get a hold of in Europe legally.
Yes, Bernie was dead wrong. However, many on the right were just as deranged when they describe Obama and Biden’s economic programs as “socialist,” and there were many.
I never suggested otherwise.
They haven't heard of Breivik?
I imagine that name would mean nothing to a majority of Americans. I was debating with an American a few weeks ago who was under the impression that mass shootings were literally unheard of outside of the US, except maybe the occasional Columbine copycat. I pointed out that e.g. the Dunblane massacre in the UK predated Columbine.
16 is the age of consent in next-door Canada too. Until about 15 years ago it was 14.
Leave it to feminists to ruin the fun.
The NY Times article about the situation in Massachusetts did not say or quote anyone saying the age of consent was too low. It only said folks believe there should be a law preventing school teachers from having relations with minor students, a special case. I found Hanania a little dishonest about this.
Which, to add to this, is in fact illegal in most european countries.
Sex with 14 year olds isn't illegal per se, because the law grants them the right for sexual self-determination. What is explicitly illegal is to leverage any position of authority (like being a teacher) to have sex with people under 18.
Epstein raped girls as young as 14. I agree with Hanania's general point that age gaps are overblown, and that conspiracy theorists have blown up the Epstein case into something much bigger than it really was. But Epstein personally is still a heinous person who was a pedophile, not just an ephebophile. Epstein's mistake was getting off on fucking girls he knew were illegal to fuck. He's not some guy who slept with a 17 year old who never told him she was only 17. Having a high libido and party life style doesn't lead you to make a grooming ring where you convince highschoolers to bring you 14 year olds to fuck.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/newly-released-epstein-transcript-florida-prosecutors-knew-billionaire-raped-teen-girls-years-before-cutting-deal
These activities amount to rape only in the sense that they were statutory rape. The women were under the age where Epstein could legally interpret their assent as consent. It's also not alleged in the story that sexual intercourse occurred in all cases, including the 14-year-old who came to the house for money. A naked massage with touching is not what most of us understand as rape. It would be referred to in some jurisdictions as sexual interference with a minor, or sexual assault if the person was deemed unable to consent, depending on how the law is written. Canada, for instance, has both "sexual interference" and "sexual assault" in its Criminal Code.
"Rape" is doing a lot of work here.
It’s called unlawful intercourse in my state.
Doesn't it give you even the slightest pause in your condemnation to know that if Epstein had done exactly the same thing in Germany or Austria or Italy it would have been perfectly legal? (As far as I know - corrections welcome - the "rape" in all of the cases was statutory, not because of lack of consent.) Yes, he was sleazy - I don't think many people in those countries would have thought it was a desirable way to behave; and yes he was reckless and entitled, because the fact is that the age of consent in the jurisdictions he was living was 18, and he ignored the law.
But there is also the basic fact that America is a massive outlier internationally in the way it sets the law on consent, and in most other contexts plenty of people - certainly on the Left - would see that as a reason to be more indulgent, and not regard the person as some kind of monster because they broke a law which in many other countries doesn't even exist in that form.
We are an EXTREME outlier.
We are an EXTREME outlier.
Coercing people into sex and running sex rings is not normal or legal anywhere.
Not just Europe, but have a look at the United States 140 years ago, https://observablehq.com/@radames/age-of-consent-through-the-years-in-the-united-states. Age of consent varies across cultures and time. Of course this does not excuse Epstein, who live in the US during the 1990s and 2000s when he committed his crimes.
No because he was pimping whores.
We can’t justify rich 50 year olds manipulating teenagers into sex with money and attention just because we are worried about the birth rate. If those relationships ended up with children that would be a disaster. The rich 50 year old in this scenario is more likely to be a non monogamous sexaholic who will not be interested in the day to day child rearing. As a result, you will see an explosion of pregnancies to poor teen women who are emotionally unstable. These teen women would be awful mothers. They will be unable to support their children financially and will most likely end up on public assistance. There’s got to be a healthier way to raise the birth rate without trying to increase the cultural acceptability of middle age high sexual market value men getting involved sexually with teenagers.
The thing to renormalize is the more socially acceptable, but still increasingly stigmatized 20F-25M type marriages. Everyone waiting until their early to mid-thirties for marriage and late 30s / early 40s for kids is what is lowering the birth rates. Even for the idea that women can have both the strong family life and strong career, having kids earlier is something can be done better physically an earlier age, and is less of a career disruption.
I'm a Zoomer with parent's who were about those ages when they got together. In their case, the age gap was not a problem.
Gavin Newsom was involved with a 19 year old when he was Mayor of SF
I agree with the premise. If you were to say this to people the vast majority would respond that it’s almost financially impossible to afford kids at 25. This has been my experience. I am 37, college educated, worked a corporate job since age 22, and was not able to afford a home with my partner until this year. Kids are 50/50 given our age. I would love to go back to a society where two people working a full time job could afford kids by even 30. Given the mess our economy is in, I just don’t see it outside of a Great Depression type event.
What you really need is a society where one man working a full time job can support a wife and children.
Women working is a collective-action problem. Two incomes make each family individually better off. But because women's work is mostly not wealth-producing -- it's largely women in government making sexual harassment regulations that women in HR document compliance with, regulations that wouldn't even be necessary if there were no women in the work force to begin with -- having millions of women working has the effect of merely bidding up the price of all the actual wealth that working men produce. We see this especially with housing because there are scarcity effects that magnify inflationary effects.
The idea that women's works 8 "mostly not weath producing," is quite the stretch and basically requires you reject the fundamentals of capitalism. Otherwise, why do you have so many employrtrs willing to pay women to work?
Firms pay women to work in HR to avoid trouble with the government. The government pays women to work making regulations because that's what women working in firms want them to do. Considering the actual value of this work, neither firms nor government should want to pay very much. But then they wouldn't be able to get women to do the work, and that would get firms and governments in trouble with their stakeholders who expect that work to be done. So they have to pay the women not because they produce wealth but because they protect the firms from being sued by governments for non-compliance with regulations. And this cadre is successful under pay-equity laws to compel the firms to pay them as much as men doing "comparable" work, comparable defined by pay-equity bureaucrats, not as defined by the capitalists working out how valuable the work really is.
There is another category of traditional women's work that, while very useful and necessary, still doesn't easily translate into wealth generation: nursing, school-teaching, and university professors in what passes for the humanities for example. As healthcare takes up an ever greater slice of the GDP (driven by insurance coverage) more money goes to (female) nurses and less to (male) engineers. And insurance itself employs hundreds of thousands of female clerks and claims adjusters whose job is to prevent the wrong insurance company being billed for the patient's knee replacement. Most observers of the system say this activity is mostly waste, essential as it is for each insurance company. And teachers are civil servants in all but name. Ideally they are an investment in the future wealth of the nation but when you look at educational standards today one has to wonder how much wealth teachers really contribute except to their own pension funds. Many schools are now just a place to park children and socialize them while their mothers are at work.
Anyway, I'm telling an allegory here. But it is certainly true that once a profession or category of employment becomes feminized, men abandon it. Part of the reason for this is that "women's work" is work that is family-friendly and when push comes to shove, mass layoffs will occur there simply because we can do without family-friendly work more easily than we can do without engineers. The women will simply go home and take their kids out of day care and look after them themselves. The HR lady doesn't have to work through the weekend to get an engineering specification to work and the female general practitioner doesn't stay up all night with a sick patient in the hospital the way old-time GPs used to when they were all men. And there are far more female GPs doing family-friendly medicine with regular office hours today than there were old-time male GPs doing it all, who never saw their children because they had a "doctor's wife" at home. That was a job description in the old days. We can't get women to do neurosurgery or interventional radiology -- both have brutal night and weekend obligations -- even though med schools are mostly female students now.
All these little effects sum to produce less wealth per dollar of earned income paid to women as compared to men, and that, my friend, is how you get inflation.
Extremely dubious. Roughly 1% of working women work in HR, so its not that big a factor. And even if even you want to assume that we'd be better off without the compliance requirements they deal with, unless you get rid of those requirements, someone's got to do them
I'm also curious how you figure healthcare doesnt "generate wealth." Like, what are you considering "wealth" here? Ultimately, the goal is to get the end consumer something they want, whether its widgets, or a hamburger or cancer treatment. Providing medical care seems at least as "wealth producing" as providing a car or television or AI chat bot.
No, because healthcare is mostly not paid with your own money. You consume the service and the government or the insurance company pays the doctor/hospital for it. You have no incentive to decide whether spending your money on a checkup or a hamburger will increase your utility more. You buy the hamburger with your own money and the insurance pays for the medical care. Even insurance is not voluntary. You have to pay for it (to avoid adverse selection) if your employer enrolls with an insurance company.
Most health care doesn't produce wealth. Professional athletes get back to playing if they have, e.g., Tommy John surgery but most sick people either recover on their own and get back to work without much impact from doctors, or they don't get better enough to get back to work ever. Marx called doctors "repairmen". There is a limit on how much you will pay to fix a broken automobile or washing machine, before you junk it and buy a new one. The obligations to pay for medical care are open ended and constrained only by the doctors' ingenuity and enthusiasm. Medical care is valued only because it is (nearly) free. If people had to pay out of pocket, you'd see just how much they really valued it. This has been looked at in economic studies. The net value we get from health care spending is mostly captured by providers as their wages, salaries, and practice profits.
The compliance obligations are the whole point. When women started entering the workforce in large numbers they demanded protection from sexual harassment, in the form of regulations and HR departments. When women were secretaries with no promotion expectations, sexual harassment wasn't something we cared about. If workforces were purged of career women, those compliance obligations would disappear and, theoretically, the government that imposes them could shrink also. (There aren't very many secretaries anymore to be harassed anyway.)
In general, all work that women do produces less value per dollar because everyone knows that it will be women who have to take time off work to attend to sick children or attend piano recitals. They are less engaged in the work because they are always thinking about their children and therefore produce less value per dollar of wage paid to them. Then there's obligation to pay them maternity leave and hire a replacement while they're off. It all adds up. Unless you can show where a working woman contributes more to the firm's wealth creation than a man does, her salary is inflationary in the aggregate.
If women doing women's work accepted 60 cents on the dollar compared to men, then their wages might not be inflationary. But because they demand equal pay for "equal" work, they have to be paid more than what their actual work is worth....because the government says so, and employs more women to police it.
I work in local government and most women in it are not HR or compliance. There's 1400 employees give or take in the county I work for and the HR staff is maybe 6 or 7 people, one of whom is male.
I work in IT specifically and approximately 10% of the staff are female most doing actual technical or management work (I'm the cybersecurity officer, we also have a female programmer, female helpdesk lead, and female support workers) and with one office coordinator who I assure you is *very* useful because she is a kind of central repository of information. She saves me a lot of time.
Other common roles women have in local government that are very much not useless are things like 911 dispatchers, female jailers, medical staff of various kinds, accountants, et al.
There are plenty of mostly useless roles in government. They do overall probably skew female, but there are men in them as well.
Women's labor is not useless or it would not be that tons of girls and women went and worked in textile mills at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
It was specifically because they were a giant pool of underutilized useful labor that this did happen.
Didn't say that the work women do is useless. Just that it doesn't produce as much wealth on average. If it is useful but doesn't produce wealth, it still has to be paid for out the wealth that someone else produces. Women working in textile mills obviously produced wealth but I'm talking today about work that employers and customers would not pay for it they had a choice. We wouldn't pay for jailers if we didn't have to, if, say we executed criminals instead of keeping them in jails....or if there was less crime in the first place. Jailers don't produce wealth even though they are necessary. They have to be paid through taxes on the wealth that other people produce. Obviously the mill owner would pay for his loom operators. But the modern firm pays for its compliance and HR workers only because legislation or regulation says it has to.
To the extent that women get paid for not producing as much wealth per dollar of salary as their husbands do, the effect of women working is still inflationary. All those productive wealth-producing women's jobs could be done by men, too, right? The jobs currently done by women that don't produce wealth would just not get done unless we want to pay women enough to want to be nurses because we need them. Then men would have jobs and women would be home raising children, doing OK on one income. That was my point. That women working cause a family first to enjoy two incomes, but then as the second-order effects work through, they come to *need* two incomes. If we don't want to organize our society with women strongly discouraged from working (by making child care very expensive, say), fine, but we have to be prepared for housing and other scarce goods to be more expensive than if they didn't work.
Also highly feminized workplaces are toxic, related to the way women compete and undermine one another. They enforce consensus by gossiping and shunning and exclusion. Men foster open disagreement with arguing, which if you try that with a woman she will cry because you didn't respect her feelings and then you're in trouble with the HR lady.
"Also highly feminized workplaces are toxic, related to the way women compete and undermine one another."
I don't see this at all, working at majority-female cosmetics company. Mostly they are professional.
"Men foster open disagreement with arguing"
Again not my experience, you are just spewing stereotypes really. We have few arguments because mostly we are not that much invested in our jobs, we typically do not want the best solution but the solution that requires the least work from all, and thus a consensus is quickly reached. Let the business owners argue. We are just here for a paycheck.
"which if you try that with a woman she will cry because you didn't respect her feelings"
A huge stereotype again, I do not see this. What would we even argue about? I do not care about anything that does not mean extra work for me. If she wants something that is extra work for me, I will just be vaguely non-committal. Be sympathetic, understand their viewpoint, hint at willingness to help while not committing to anything, easy.
"But because women's work is mostly not wealth-producing"
That makes no sense. I work at a cosmetics and vegetarian food retailer company. 90%-95% of our workforce are women, simply because they are more interested in these things, and know more about them. Marketing, purchase, everything. Even half of the warehouse - these products are not heavy. There are three of us IT guys and that is mostly all, a few in the warehouse.
Child support and alimony laws can be *quite* favorable to women, depending on the state you're in.
http://www.realworlddivorce.com/
Right but we don’t want to encourage a society where high smv sexacholics start procreating with teens who are then dependent on child support. This is the exact opposite of what we need.
That's somewhat offset by being rich requiring having good genes. You get more good results with good nature and bad nurture than the other way around, to the point that the "self made man" is a trope.
Outside of pointing to a democrat that did this, can you offer any thoughtful response as to why making this culturally acceptable is a good idea?
No one is forcing young women to sleep with 50 year old creepy men. Why are the women even going near them
I think there are two things going on here. One is just status anxiety mostly among women. As a female, I can tell you it *really* fucking sucks to know that your value peaked in the eyes of approximately half of the human race when you were 20 and that at most through herculean and fairly miserable effort obsessing about your appearance you can extend this to maybe something like 35 and then after that you need to just accept you are a worthless old bat for 60% of your life. This is an extremely shit deal evolution handed us (on top of having to bear most of the physical toils of pregnancy and birth) and most women instinctively rebel against it when they have any kind of luxury to do so. This part is known and talked about though probably not as much as it should be. It's the main source of the drama.
The second issue overlaps with this and is not talked about as much. It's the paradox that many women want to be treated like women but they do *not* want to be treated like children. The old bargain of marriage was that women traded their autonomy for physical and material security. It was never the case that women did not want to pursue their own self interest and exercise their own reproductive strategies to the maximum extent possible just like men did.
To put it bluntly, we don't need men for security anymore so why should we still trade our autonomy?
The main things men have to trade today are things like entertainment, wealth, companionship, and commitment. These traits don't necessarily square up nicely. Female dependency tends to work out well for men in ways it does not for women *unless* you found the sort of man who 1) will actually be a committed father and 2) will put up with you for the 60% of your life in which you are an old bat. A high status, wealthy male who uses his status and wealth to pursue a rotating roster of 20ish year olds is extremely unlikely to be either.
I don't really have an issue with transactional relationships like this of themselves and I certainly don't want to make them illegal. I also know if I had a 17 year old daughter I would turn the hose on almost any 40ish year old dude, wealthy or not, who came sniffing around her. *Not* because I was worried she would be trafficked or damaged by having sex with him but because I know he's most likely a piss poor prospect for her future happiness.
It's also the case that if you want to normalize arrangements like this and a very high percentage of them don't work out long term (and they won't) that the remainder of men would have to be much more willing to take a risk on women who displayed overt gold digger behavior in their youth.
This might actually be a fair trade now that I think about it. We normalize high status men being rakes *and* that hot young women are prone to gold digging. People who really value beauty and money and status can have fun on that merry-go-round and the rest of use can develop an alternate set of signals. I have low confidence this will do anything about fertility, but it might at least allow people of average hotness and wealth and who are capable of self-discipline and want families to find each other more easily.
Most likely though in an age of mass media, it will just create a bunch of resentment and a bunch of people with no real hope of entering the merry-go-round wasting a lot of effort trying to do so.
Relevant book: Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species by Sarah Hrdy
Kind of old at this point but still on point. Talks frankly about female reproductive strategies from an evolutionary point of view.
I think one could argue that princess treatment and aspiring to be a trophy wife are examples of women asking quite explicitly to be treated like children.
Very insightful perspective though. I agree with pretty much everything.
Sure and I think if you could do an experiment where you offered those women a choice between:
1) Have a million dollars with no strings attached
2) Have a million dollars but you have to sleep with this old dude first
it's common sense which one most of them would take.
Idk.. if we were a society of well intentioned and relatively mature people id 100% agree with all this. But we arent. We have shitty predator types that can cause some real damage in peoples lives. On top of that, a lot of parents *arent* raising their teenagers to be mature and responsible. This is the type of situation im used to encountering in my neck of the woods. Ive met some of the people on both sides of that equation. It can fuck a young girls life up. And the dudes are always sleezy, the type of guys *you* would not want anyone you care about spending time with, regardless of their age.
So yeah leo fucking supermodels seems fine to me. But thats one end of a spectrum. The other end is pretty shitty.
For the record i dont think theres any "fixing" this. Theres always been people that get taken advantage of, and people that take advantage, and thats baked into our brains, like all the other dumb shit we do.
The bigger problem is that the institution of marriage is failing, and more important than marriage itself the full bundle or surrounding norms. On one end, I regularly encounter couples that have been together for many years, have a child, own a home together, and still aren't married, and aren't sure they are ready. What do they think marriage means at that point? On the other end you have endless dating (or being single and being on the dating "market" but not really dating) and having no long term commitments outside of varied "situationships." On both sides there is no notion of what successful outcome looks like, outside of a some magic, pure romance, with no outside doubts. It seems like a lot of divorce stems from the same thing: expecting much more than is probably reasonable. People probably should have lower standards - not in a spouse as such - but in what the marriage is bringing to you individually. Ironically is the society wide eqilibera that probably brings more value, if people did.
The value of the marriage (beyond some bundle of legal rights) is about the social reinforcement of the norms for having sex and raising kids. It channels pairing up vs the skewed distribution of a small number of men getting access to large groups of women. It sets a structure driving both expectations and financial and social obligations for dealing with children (and incenting having them). All of that can be done outside of marriage too - but it seems to really screw up things with the balance of second order impacts.
I dont disagree with you. For the most part i very much agree with you. But i think its kinda like saying "phones/social media ruined community or just having friends(irl)". I would say thats pretty true(i realize its a little more complicated than that). But theres no going back. Same with marriage, what killed that for us cant be undone. At least not without a unified effort(lol ik!). You mentioned that "magic romance" everyone wants.. thats the myth story we've been telling ourselves and teaching our kids for generations now. We need a new story.
But yeah, i agree with your assessment of the situation, i just dont know how thats going to change
For sure - I don't have any answers on how to change the social equilibria here. The change was probably inevitable once reliable, widespread birth control became available.
That said, I don't think we're at the end yet of the changes (not that I know where it is going). We've had a huge shift in the past 15 years of app-based dating become the norm and that hasn't yet stabilized. Even without other technological change, how that looks after another generation could be very different. And so many different legal and cultural factors intersect. It seems, despite the current political environment, we are on a long term trajectory of more gdp growth and thus more willingness to have welfare and UBI-like benefits. That along with birth control and removal of social stigmas removes the immediate negative feedback mechanisms. Longer-term incentives like the difficulty of single-motherhood, or the dissatisfaction with long term dating, don't seem to outweigh the other factors. Some early signs like increased religiosity don't seem to have been stable trends.
We are in for a few decades of interesting times, roll in AI, and geopolitics and the world will continue to be a social churn.
That we are. And i think the wildest shit is yet to come
Some young women naturally happen to find older guys attractive. If age-gap relationships are stigmatized, the only older guys who pursue younger women will be sleazeballs. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at a certain point.
I actually think something like the Tea app could be a really good idea if it was implemented correctly. In a small town, gossip spreads, which creates an incentive for good behavior. In the modern "global village", the population size is too big and gossip breaks down. There needs to be a new enforcement mechanism.
Back when the US was far more conservative, it was possible to sue for the crime of "seduction". It might be smart to bring that back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_(tort)
That article sums it all up nicely. Of course you’ll have those who think differently pretending like you’re speaking some interplanetary language, but it makes perfect sense.
I generally agree with you on this (despite being hesitant to say so in most forums).
I think that, at least in general, it's not great for a 30-year-old to be dating a 17-year-old, and it seems reasonable to make it against the law. But I also agree that conflating someone being attracted to a 17-year-old to their being attracted to a 7-year-old also doesn't make sense.
I'd compare it to the distinction between someone who murders someone in the course of a robbery vs. a serial killer. Robberies and killing someone in the course of a robbery are both appropriately illegal, but they are also both things that you could see a normal-ish person doing. Even if you don't condone it (and you shouldn't), you can understand someone wanting something, deciding the best way to get it is by use of force, and then winding up killing someone along the way. On the other hand, being a serial killer is really outside the scope of the normal human condition - most people don't have a drive to kill people for the sake of killing them.
Similarly, while it is, in fact, deviant to be attracted to a pre-pubescent children, we shouldn't pretend that people (particularly men) aren't frequently attracted to teenagers. Notably, it's pretty clear that the advertising industry has, at least at times, leaned into this, frequently using quite young models in advertisements, and it isn't because they were targeting some niche demographic. But we can also say that, just like you shouldn't act on your understandable desire to get something you want through robbery, you shouldn't act on your understandable attraction to a 17-year-old (assuming you aren't also around that age). Keven Spacy's character in American Beauty was supposed to be a creep, but his creepiness mostly came from him acting on it his attraction, not his having it in the first place.
Matt Yglesias had a good point on Politix yesterday - if you go to a party as an adult and there are a bunch of 17-year-old girl there, you very well may leave, and may even tell the host it isn't cool, but you wouldn't necessarily call the police. But if you went and there were a bunch of 10-year-olds there, you're much more likely to pull out your phone.
> it's not great for a 30-year-old to be dating a 17-year-old, and it seems reasonable to make it against the law
But why? This is the norm for many historical and some current societies. The standard objections are around maturity - for any relationship - for the 17 year old. And thus the balance of power and naiveté makes it wrong. As mentioned, we used to know that the line was somewhere post-puberty and using age, though arbitrary. make the law easier for everyone. No need for some 7-part maturity assessment test. But presuming both a legal jurisdiction, and intellectual maturity (though clearly, not experience) I don't see why it would be wrong. Especially if move things up a few years, such as 20-33 pairings, if the teen number is what gives the ick.
Plenty of people have just changed their baseline intuitions and assumptions that this is wrong, without examining if it really is.
If the intention of the 30-year-old man wasn't some hookup at a house-party, but rather a chaste courtship with the intention of marriage, with mutual vetting from both families (and the both individuals) along with the reason not just being compatibility in temperament, but also fiscal stability of their new joint household because the man has an established career - is there anything wrong with that?
What is the root objection?
It's the norm for many historical and some current societies, but a lot of those societies weren't/aren't exactly great places to be a women (or in some cases, a young boy). It seems that there is a decently high risk for a relationship between a teenager girl and older man to go sideways, at least partly because there are some real differences in life stage that raise questions as to why an older guy would want to date a teenage girl and at least partly because teenagers are, in fact, stupid.
I actually don't think that this is a hard and fast rule. I have a friend who, at around 30, started dating and eventually married a 16-year-old, and, at least from the outside, the relationship seemed reasonably fine (though they ultimately did get divorced pretty quickly). But it seems like these relationships are likely enough to go bad that it's probably worth making them off limits, especially since it's easier for the government to say "don't date 17-year-olds" than it is for them to go in and inspect each relationship to make sure it's OK.
This is all obviously a sliding scale. A 21-year-old dating a 17-year-old is much more likely to be fine than a 13-year-old dating a 50-year-old. But the fact that there is no sharp cut-off doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't pick a line and draw it.
I'm probably more sympathetic to this sort of thing than a lot of people, and in particular, I'd probably give more leeway or "Romeo-and-Juliet" exceptions than we currently do, I think that the adult women who date Leonardo DiCaprio know what they are getting themselves into and we should respect their adult choices, and if, when my daughter is ~16, she comes home and tells me she's met a wonderful 30 year old, I wouldn't immediately reject the concept out of hand (though I would be suspicious), but I also don't think it's a tragedy to deny people in their 30s an opportunity to date high schoolers, if doing so helps protect some of those high schoolers from making traumatic life choices.
For context, my wife is 11 years older than I am, though we started dating when I was 27. Her next longest relationship was with a guy she met when she was ~16 when he was her ~25 yo camp counselor, though they didn't date until ~10 years later, and that relationship seemed to be fine, even if it didn't work out. My next most serious relationship was with a girl who I think had just turned 18 when I was 23 - she was a college sophomore, I was a 1L law student - it probably ended b/c I was too immature.
16-17 year old girls can have legal sex with men in 46 states.
I'm not sure it's age gap hysteria that's at the center of the Epstein controversy. Remember, Trump has been accused of sexually assaulting 25 women, and of going into underage beauty contestants' dressing rooms, and no Republican cared. If it came out that he had sex with a 15-year-old on Epstein Island, that would be only incrementally worse than what he's already been accused of doing. The entire thing is based on the notion that Epstein was a Mossad agent, and therefore that Trump, and many other powerful men, are being blackmailed into supporting Israel. (Not sure why Israel needed to blackmail Prince Andrew, who has no political power, or Alan Dershowitz, who'd support Israel without needing to be blackmailed, but who cares, conspiracy theories don't have to make sense.) That's what this is really about, and the age gap stuff is a distraction.
Several things going on there. I contend it really is about age gap hysteria. The blackmail theory really didn't take off until much later and at first wasn't even attributed to any foreign power. When Virginia Roberts and her lawyers introduced the idea in 2009, it was more of a subplot and wasn't publicly discussed.
But what really supercharged the hysteria was after #MeToo and the Miami Herald compiled all these accusers' testimony, turning an underage sex scandal into something that more resembled QAnon. Just before Epstein's arrest and death, a tabloid journalist Vicky Ward started a rumor from a single third-hand quote that Epstein "belonged to intelligence", which the person she attributed it to denied under oath.
The reason why I ever cared about Epstein is because the weird sweetheart deal he got from Acosta in Florida was pretty sus.
I think statutory rape is more than incrementally worse than ogling teenage girls. Which is undoubtedly pretty creepy.
But why is it creepy? Who wouldn't find achingly beautiful young women attractive? Don't tell me you don't (if you're straight.) I sure do. The only people who find it creepy are the wives of these men who know from their own lived experience that they aren't as attractive anymore as teenagers are.
If you're blatantly ogling them that's not very smart. Especially if the girl's father is around.
Fourteen-year-olds who dress in a way that invites ogling are careful to make sure their fathers aren't around. But yes, for any dodgy activity you have to be discreet. I know full well that a young woman doesn't expect that her blast radius will extend to someone my age and would be grossed out herself if she busted me. That's how women learn that they don't dislike the male gaze. They only dislike the male gaze if the male is someone who is not attractive to them. About the guys who they are trying to attract, they pout, "How come he's so stand-offish? I show as much of my tits as I can get away with!"
I think young women are well aware that they're born to be rape bait.
They don't even need to be dressed provocatively to be arousing. 10 year old females have boobs now. We'll need to change the definition of pedophilia to account for this.
It’s completely normal.
As someone who has taught at several summer programs for very academically advanced high schoolers, I would consider a 30 year old who is attracted to a 16 year old to be, maybe not a pedophile, but at least deeply weird
Like these kids I work with are probably some of the most intellectually mature in the US; they can certainly solve math problems that academic mathematicians would struggle with, and are more capable of abstract reasoning than probably the vast majority of adults. And they're not one-trick ponies, either; almost all of them have perfect GPAs and are also manage other extracurriculars, being in orchestras, writing for school newsletters, competing at state or regional levels in piano, violin, dance, figure skating, tennis, debate, etc.
But if you hang out with them for more than a few hours, you quickly see that they don't have adult worldview or behavior, in a way that would be kinda weird for an adult to be sexually attracted to.
Like the most obvious thing is the revolving door of slang and memes. We've all heard of skibidi toilet, rizzler, ohio, orz, admit, cooked, cooking, 67, etc, and college kids partake, too, but I think adults who don't spend time with high schoolers may not understand the sheer volume of it. Like a group of college kids will have a conversation where some memes come up, but with high schoolers it's the majority of what comes out of their mouths. They can keep it out of their written solutions, but even when they're explaining math proofs to each other, it's rife with "degeneracies" (the term for memes and slang that the kids were using at the camp I taught 2 years ago, but was passe by last year).
And that's just the surface level. If you have deeper conversations with these kids, or listen to their conversations with each other or with their parents, it's super clear very quickly that there's a clear maturity gap between them and even 20 year old frat bros, not to mention people who live independently and support themselves.
And I'm someone who generally does believe in letting 15-16 year olds decide some things for themselves. Like I believe they should be allowed to choose their gender presentation (at least socially), and have some input in big things like their custody arrangements and small things like what foods go on their plates (though given the way I've heard some of them talk about their parents, and the food choices I've seen them make, I'm not even 100% on the latter two...).
I'm even okay with them having sex! But I do think it's weird for a 30 yo to be into them.
I'll add re: the maturity gap between a 15-16 year old and a 20 year old frat bro, one difference is that the 20 year old frat bro has at least considered choosing some interests or hobbies that aren't imposed on him by parents or teachers. He's also chosen what foods go on his plate for at least a year and knows the consequences of different choices.
But from the perspective of the instructor, I'd say the biggest maturity difference is that if the 20 year old has a problem with the way one of his homeworks or exams was graded, he almost certainly goes to the instructor himself without involving his parents.
Whereas even with 18 year old college freshmen, I've seen parents come in to discuss midterm/homework grading without their kid, be informed that the professor can't discuss it with them because of FERPA, and then drag their (probably mildly embarrassed) son in with them.
Based on my interactions with high schoolers, I wouldn't be surprised if overwhelmingly when they encounter this kind of issue, their parents handle it for them. (In international math olympiads, there's actually a designated time and place for coaches to dispute the kids scores for them.)
I think it's important to understand the difference between the full scope of attraction to a person and purely sexual attraction. I'm sure Epstein's clientele didn't have deep soul-searching conversations with these girls. (If anything, I suspect they appreciated how much easier it is to manipulate a younger person into staying quiet.)
Think of it this way: if you could put yourself into a rejuvenation machine that restored your body but preserved your memories and personality, how far back would you rotate the dial? How far back would your husband/BF/partner rotate the dial? Assume no condemnation from the society.
This sounds like simply a subset of only being attracted to a body and not giving a damn about the person inside.
You are missing the point. Epstein didn't have "relationships" with younger women he used money and subterfuge to exert power over young girls. He groomed them and sexually abused them. He passed them to other men. He was less attracted to their youth than their lack of power that allowed him to dominate them.
Yeah. So?
We generally as society oppose 'unbalanced' relationship., regardless of age. Officer cannot date their subordinate. Teacher cannot date their student. Rich men dating young woman.
I think the crux here is really that out of your three examples, 2 are in an obvious hierarchy while the third, rich people and young people, just aren't.
And still, there is an obvious power imbalance there.
But a rich guy can't really coerce a young girl. A teacher can threaten a student indirectly by implication. Just the expectation being there can cause the one with lower status to feel like they can't refuse.
This dynamic just doesn't exist with rich people - young people.
But then again, for a homeless young girl, whose only source of income/housing may be the rich party, it may feel that way.
But if the young person walks away, there would be no repercussions, just a withdrawal of benefits. Which may feel like punishment, and lead to coercion.
I think the difficult part is that the we have to acknowledge that the young person obviously plays a big part in submitting to and creating such a dynamic unnecessarily in the first place, but that we can't really expect from young people to have the maturity to not do so.
All of this is literally common sense in countries that haven't been infected with modern feminism.
Not true - this seems to be a very American thing. The EU is very much riddled with modern feminism, and yet has been lower age of consent and doesn't have the same moral outrages, at least on this topic.
EU might be a bit too chill. Muslim rape gangs anyone?
France didn't used to have a minimum age of consent at all. But it was episodes of lechery with girls as young as eleven who got involved with Arabs from the Maghreb that convinced the French government after much debate to settle on 15, only in 2019 or so.
You can bet a lot of French men were also enjoying those 11 years olds until Muslims ruined the fun. Getting men to support age of consent laws is probably the best psy-op feminists have ever run!
You are probably right. When it was discreet it was OK.
Why the requirement for discreetness? I suppose if a man rolls up with an 11 year old sex toy the others might get violently jealous.
Lester never fucked Angela. He pulled the reigns back when she told him he was a virgin. This was Lester's redeeming moment. The fawning Hollywood crowd may have thought differently if Lester took her to his island as Carolyn took her passport. I guess we'll truly never know.
Is the Epstein case primarily about him fucking one 17 year old? Weren't some of the girls in Miami 14? You sure you're not mixing this up with the Matty Gaetz II predicament? Besides, the fact that Angela was best friends with Lester's high school daughter always seems to be the primary moral dilemma as opposed to pedophilia. But I'm also a bit of a perv.
You think Epstein, Trump, or anybody in their circle would have tucked it away if Angela told them she was a virgin? If it were to be myself, I would have calmly collected myself and asked,"Folkston's still in Georgia, ain't it?"
To clarify, Lester was not the virgin
This really is part of a broader trend where the meaning of the "age of majority" (and to a lesser extent, the "age of consent") has shifted over time from "the age where someone is definitively an adult" to "the age where someone starts to become an adult". Not too long ago it was widely understood that people began to become adults at puberty and would assume more and more adult responsibilities over the course of their teen years - getting their first job, learning to drive, going on their first dates, etc. And at 18, we could assume that most people had enough of these experiences that we could legally treat them as adults for all purposes.
Now people assume that 18-year-olds are adults only by technicality, and you see this in tons of online policy discussions. Part of the justification people will give for policies like student loan forgiveness is that 17–18-year-olds can't possibly be expected to make rational long-term financial decisions. You see similar arguments against the draft. These people don't realize that the age of majority literally does not make sense if they aren't fully adults, and that they are implicitly arguing for raising it.
This is one of those issues where biology conflicts with sense and morals. I've coined the term "cheerleaderopedia" to describe the attraction all men and high school age almost-men have for high-school age girls (and hard bodied just past high school "women"). All you have to do is spend some time scrolling thru the former MSN (on every windows computer) to recognize that half the clicks are on images of cheerleaders and just past high school female athletes. Sense and morals say that men with money are an incredible lure to young women who usually have no money and few hopes of getting more. No easy way to level the playing field here.
However thin and slender is the string
Bait it with Cunt and it will hold a king.
--Robert Burns. (upper case in original.)
You're being way too generous assuming girls start pinging men's sexual radar in high school. It starts in middle school. Girls are starting puberty so much earlier nowadays that there are elementary school girls who any normal man would find arousing.
Walt Bismark has an excellent article called "Girls are going through puberty too early" that elaborates more on this.
All I can do is report what i personally see. I remember picking up my daughters at middle school and seeing middle school cheerleaders decorating for a football game and wondering, "Do their mothers know how their dressed?" Picking them up at high school was a different experience: the cheerleaders looked a lot like the younger women I met at my local country bar except showing more skin. Of course it was easier because most of the younger women couldn't dance very well.