In two-thirds of heterosexual couples, the man is at least a year older
nytimes.comYou cannot cheat biology with feminism or education. Some things are impossible to change overnight, regardless of the social pressure or guilt.
Men are attracted to fit, young females. Maybe because women in the past tended to pick not the youngest but the most powerful (in this particular social circle?). Thus humans learned that both parties are ok with age difference.
It seems a bit gross, a 70yo with a 25yo girl. It happens less often now (a wild guess), so maybe social pressure helps a little bit. But i believe that men still prefer fitness over education in women. Not 100% of the time, not in edge cases, but in general. Even in the press, a guy is more often smart, funny, successful and a girl is beautiful, elegant, and so on. Not always, but more often than not.
> Men are attracted to fit, young females
Until they open their mouths. Seriously. I have seen 10/10 bodies lose all advantage in one sentence. I have seen ugly women that after a few minutes talking with I would spend the night with without problem.
You fantasize about perfect bodies until you get to fuck one. Then you realize sensuality is something else altogether.
And once you reach 35, you realize how sexy it is for a girl to be financially independent...
>Even in the press, a guy is more often smart, funny, successful and a girl is beautiful, elegant, and so on. Not always, but more often than not.
You present this as though it supports your point, that you "cannot cheat biology with feminism". To me it's actually more evidence that there is this complicated system running, with multiple feedback loops on multiple levels.
I'm not saying that there is nothing here in terms of biology, of course there is, but the relationship between biology and culture is subtle and complicated. Little in life (maybe nothing) is as pure and simple as many people seem think this issue is.
I'm looking for the 18-year old girl with a 40-year old mentality. It will never happen.
I don't really agree with that. I lost my love for youth but that's because I found someone that kept my most innocent feelings lively. I'm sure that when men end up dating far younger women, it's partly for cheap fun, and partly to relive dear feelings they're missing.
statistics doesn't always apply on a personal level, it's statistics :)
I know, we know. But I'm talking because I rarely see this. Also I believe I have a limit case life.
From my personal experience it's more because they want a partner that will be in a good biological condition to have multiple kids and be willing to do so.
The classical explanation for this is that men are attracted to fertility while women are attracted to status.
I really doubt any self respecting 30 year old woman with a great job is going to find, say, a highschool jock attractive. The appearance of being with someone like that does not do her brand any favors in her social context. She's out of his league.
This is probably a little (a lot) reductionist but it provides a pretty satisfying explanation, at least to me.
Human beings are nasty machines.
Allow me to throw my own theory:
young women want emotional "stability" in seduction/romantic relationships, and young men, lacking experience by definition won't display this, causing more questions and worries, thus going for older men.
Interesting.
I'd like to add, that with people who are of same age, you share being from the same generation. You got similar jingles in your head from commercials and the jokes connect, you heard similar pop music at the age of 16 as well as the age of 5 and 25, you might've seen similar TV series (esp so if your interests align), you experienced your first phone with T9 (whereas a younger person never experienced T9), etc. In short, your reference points are more aligned.
What this also means, generally speaking, is that a younger person is less experienced (not necessarily less intelligent) while an older person is more experienced (not necessarily more intelligent). Wisdom however, comes from experience.
Add to that, that women grow slightly quicker to adolescence and you have a plausible explanation why women seek (slightly) older men but not deviating much so that you speak of different generations.
Well, they don't specify what "attraction" means here. If older men are attracted to 20-yr old minds, then I'm the Easter bunny.
I'm in my mid-30s and I'd be hard pressed to move more than 5 years in either direction (younger or older).
It's an explanation, but it's an explanation that raises more questions than it answers. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that our society is suffering from a hangover that's lasted several thousand years.
> The classical explanation for this is that men are attracted to fertility while women are attracted to status.
Then why don't young women prefer older men, who are more likely than men of their age to be more distinguished and accomplished?
Maybe women prefer partners they can relate better to. Why is that not less plausible than this unjustified cynicism?
But they do, far more often I see older men with younger women. Rarely do I see the opposite, at least, as far as long-term relationships go.
Hugh Hefner just died surrounded by women who were at least half a century or so younger than he.
When we met and began dating (three years ago), my current girlfriend was 20 and I was 35.
Disclaimer: n=1.
> I really doubt any self respecting 30 year old woman with a great job is going to find, say, a highschool jock attractive.
I'm interested in your explanation as to why so many female teachers have sex with their teenage students then.
It is not many. Definitely not "so many."
"Quite a few"
You're probably being downvoted because you're coming off as someone who saw a handful of stories in the news and concluded "this happens often" without ever looking at the denominator.
That's fine, if I cared about downvotes I wouldn't frequent Hacker News. I'm happy to state my opinion, and others are free to judge those comments with up or down votes (or replies). That's how discourse works. I'm just happy to have the chance to participate in discussions with my fellow humans.
paraphilias exist; you're ttalking about rare events; those women are often in their 20s.
Teacher student relationships have spiked [1] with a third of the perpetrators being female (up from only 4% a decade ago [2]). A quick glance at the cases showed the female teachers in their 30s, but I'm digging more to get the age distribution from case datasets.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/20/...
[2] http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/why-are-so-many-fema...
> In 2014 alone, there were 781 reported cases of teachers and other school employees accused or convicted of sexual relationships with students. My firm, Drive West Communications, has been tracking news reports of sexual misconduct by educators for more than a year. Every week has brought news of 15 young people, on average, who were sexually victimized by the educators entrusted with protecting them. That’s an abhorrent rate and a trend that deserves far more attention from school leaders and policy makers.
In a country with 73 million children, and roughly 3.2 million full time equivalent teachers. That's pretty much the definition of a rare event.
In general, any increase in numbers should be regarded as better reporting and better recording of crime, rather than an increase in that crime.
Female teacher on male student sexual crime has only recently been taken seriously (and it's still got some way to go to reach parity in perception with male teacher on female student sexual crime), so I'd expect reporting and recording of this crime to be changing.
You've posted two links, but one refers to the other.
> In 2014, Abbott said, two-thirds of reported teacher-related sexual misconduct cases with students involved men; that means one-third of the cases involved female teachers.
Does it? Or does it mean the sex of the offender isn't always collected?
I can't seem to find his data anywhere.
A bit surprised that the article don't mention what the OKCupid blog wrote, which is that age is not a good statistical predictor for what man a woman will date. It is however an excellent predictor for men.
What is an excellent predictor for what man a woman will date, according to the OKCupid data, is income of the man statistically anchored to the income of the woman. This produce a very similar looking graph to this article, where the older the woman the more income she has and the more income she is looking in a man.
I do not blame women at all for this, totally understandable, but if you are older man without plenty of money, forget it, even if you look OK and are a nice guy, women want the successful man, and why not eh? I'd do the same. Who wants to spend the rest of life scrabbling for money?
Blame should really not enter into the picture. Just because men and women have asymmetrical strategies it don't make one of them more wrong or right. The reason I brought it up is that understanding asymmetrical strategies is key to reach common ground in gender discussion.
It's almost as if men : youth :: women : wealth.
Maybe. I like women of any age really.
The most appealing thing to me is when I feel comfortable with a woman and have a personality connection PLUS physically attracted.
In general however I think you are spot on correct.
I'd be interested to see a reference for that if you've got one
It just a google search away, but here is the top google search for "okcupid blog wealth"
https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
or if you just want data:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*N0OGjZ9WDff4gOrf.p...
Only n=1 and I guess I'm an outlier, but:
I can get attracted to a wide range of physical appearances (including age) if the person is empathic and/or intelligent. However, I never get attracted to someone who lacks those attributes, no matter how physically attractive they might be. In fact I find the combination of being physically attractive but cold and or dumb even a bit repulsive.
I think there's different things going on here.
If I were to point out women that I find physically attractive solely from a set of pictures, they'd probably skew to the younger side.
But in reality, the important aspects of a life mate for me go way, way, way beyond just being attractive physically. That 23 year old on OKC might spur a momentary sexual fantasy, but never in my right mind would I truly want to date someone of that age.
In other words, I picked my mate because I find her very attractive - physically, intellectually, and emotionally. But that doesn't mean younger women aren't attractive in a putely physical sense.
I'm rambling now.
I don't think you're an outlier.
The numbers behind the OKCupid graph are likely based on physical attractiveness. The conclusion to draw is that men are more likely to find women of a certain age physically attractive.
As you say there are other factors based on which men choose life partners... If it were not so, every single man whether 20 or 99 would be hanging out around college campuses trying to 'pick up chicks'.
Me too. Me too man.
There's "dating" for sex and dating to get married. People in the former mode are pickier, and the latter are more nuanced.
PS: Ben Franklin's advice. Older chicks whom are in-shape are animal, bad bitches in the sack.
Good ol' Ben "In the Dark, All Cats Are Gray" Franklin.
Apparently, that phrase actually dates back to at least 1550 -- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_cats_are_grey_in_the_dark
Which suddenly has me curious on the history of advice on how to get "bad bitches" -- is there some grand human tradition I've failed to learn the major milestones of?
(Like fart jokes which are ~4k years old or advertisements which are ~6k years old.)
That's an unscalable, intractable problem unless you go to a certain bar in Los Gatos, CA known as Cougar Central (pun intended). Many of the affluent "bedroom" (pun also intended) communities have bars with bored naughty felines looking to hit it. PUA skills FTW.
The oldest recorded joke is a fart joke— "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."
The double negative confuses me. Are they saying young women never do that or they always do it?
I could be confused too, but I would rewrite it as
"It is a universal practice for a young woman to fart in her husband's lap."
I think 'experience' might be better than 'practice', in the sense that it's an accidental fart.
Which makes it a strangely comprehensible joke -- "there's never been a wife that didn't fart in her husband's lap", which I can see being said as a teasing, crude joke. (Especially if that "girl's don't fart" thing is an older pseudo-belief than I had thought.)
Those plots, though. When has data ever been more clear-cut, or incriminating to the human condition.
I don't think the anti-aging research push is driven by fear of oblivion- we've found so many outlets for that already. It's about sexiness. It would be nice if the first blockbuster rejuvenation pill added years of life expectancy, but its sales will be driven almost entirely by how good it makes you look.
Here's another very interesting article put out by OKCupid in the past that's hit HN a few times before -
https://web.archive.org/web/20101006104124/http://blog.okcup...
What a quote! "women are like cheese, they get blue veins and start to stink."
Older women (even ones with children) can be just as beautiful as younger ones. Not with an attitude like that, though.
It doesn't help working out is perceived as something manly, and many women appear to think it's beneath them. Women under 30 are used to the fact they can have attention with zero working out. They use make-up instead, but it can carry you only so far if you get flabby and overweight.
The phrase "Like lipstick o na pig" might be rude, but it didn't come from nowhere.
Good to see some real numbers - and amusing to read the write up of trying to contextualize those numbers into the NYT's accepted socially appropriate consensus.
Is it just me, or am I getting a slut-shaming vibe from the article? Shouldn't women be able to sleep w/whomever w/o worrying about the "market effect"?
The article has a very pro-sex vibe to it so I'm going to say it's just you.
> Sign a pledge with me here today. Not of celibacy (where’s the fun in that?), but let’s end this scourge once and for all by committing to contemporaries.
> If I could prolong my time as a young adult by, say, 2.3 years, here is a list of things I would like to do:
[...]
• Have more romantic partners. Preferably ones with abs.
No, it's a slut who is shaming. A nuanced but crucial distinction.
For all those older men seeking to score a younger women...head to the Philippines!
From the NYT comments:
"Yes a big age gap 'matters.' But to whom? And in what way? Can it be managed or ignored?? Yes! I was married at age 48 to a 24 yo from the Philippines. We had two beautiful daughters, twins by IVF (her fertility issue, not mine). Then she killed herself (bipolar issues and the local meth) when we moved to the Philippines. So now I have a 30yo gf: A reasonably tall and Truly Beautiful woman. We have been together 4+ years. and I am 73."