No Discourse Has Ever Been More Discourse-y Than Age Gap Discourse

yelling on the internet's hottest club is Age Gap Discourse

is it coherent to think that the beginning of their relationship was gross but to look at it now and say, hey, c’est l’amour?

This piece was inspired by this New York attempt at addressing (lord help us) the age-gap relationship question. I’m gonna take my time here. Fair warning.

There’s a type of (almost always anonymous) internet creeper who’s really invested in justifying sexual attraction towards underage adolescents. This type of dude - it’s always a dude, c’mon - has a set of arguments, usually based in evolutionary psychology or similar, and wants to let everyone know that feeling horny for 15-year-olds is totally normal, that men were meant to be attracted to women in early adolescence. Buoyed with courage by anonymity, they tend not to justify breaking the law by violating the age of consent, but rather are obsessive about the legitimacy of the feeling of this attraction. I’m sure this partially stems from a mild fear of saying something incriminating, but it’s also easy to see it as evidence of an unspoken struggle session over the lust they’re experiencing. Indeed, the explicit ultra-confidence suggests nothing more than internal conflict. Either way, you may have encountered these dudes on Reddit or Discord or a message board dedicated to MMA, and their message is always the same - evolution wants men to have sex with as many fertile women as possible, women who have recently experienced menarche are the most fertile [citation needed], QED. It’s only natural.

The common social and emotional reaction here is, I think, the right one, and really all you need - this shit is creepy, please get away from me. If this performance is delivered by a drunk uncle rather than an internet stranger, you have my permission to reevaluate your relationship with him. However, I do think it’s also important to understand that these guys are guilty of something more important than creepiness: they have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of morality. Moral behavior is about what you do, not what you feel. Morality is about choice. We can’t always control our internal emotional reactions, but we can make adult decisions about how to act on them. I’ve been saying for years that while it saddens me if a white shopkeeper feels a shot of fear when a Black person wanders into their store, that feeling is far less morally and politically important than the decision not to do anything about it. The shopkeeper may not be able to quell his racist impulses, but he most certainly can choose not to chase those Black customers around. And so too with the “teens are supposed to be sexy” set. It makes no difference what evolution “wants” you to do because you are an autonomous being who can make adult choices. Evolution is not literally controlling you. The moral dictate, in human life, is not to be or feel in some pure way. The moral dictate is to act ethically.

That which is unethical about having sex with underage people cannot be undermined through reference to your horny feelings, no matter how much evidence you may have that your desire itself is common. Even if feeling sexually attracted to teenagers really was normal/valid/biologically ordained, that would not and could not change the fact that we as a society have come to the hard-won understanding that people below a certain age, the age of consent, are not emotionally equipped to intelligently choose to participate in sexual acts with adults. The prohibition isn’t about the older person’s desire at all, really; it’s a simple moral and legal consequence of an empirical understanding about the inability of young people to give informed consent. The legitimacy of your sexual desire is no more relevant to the question of whether you should have sex with someone who’s underage than the legitimacy of your desire for money is relevant to the question of whether you should mug someone. And honestly, as long as you follow the letter of the law even as you disagree with it, I’m just not interested in your sexual desire for adolescents. I’m really sorry to be crude about this, but I think this is important and true and also reflects on many larger questions of ethics: the important thing is not that you feel no desire to have sex with underage girls. The important thing is not to fuck them. That is your duty.

I’m not suggesting that every adult man who lays eyes on a sixteen-year-old and find her attractive is a predator. I’m saying that not doing anything about it is the relevant moral criterion. And once we’ve all agreed that men shouldn’t act on those feelings by pursuing underage women, there’s no utility in talking about those feelings or trying to justify them. Just keep that shit to yourself.

That simple point about the supremacy of action over thought is central to the question of adults sexually pursuing adolescents under the age of consent, as it is in so many other moral domains. Frustratingly, the question of where exactly to set the legal standard of age of consent can’t be derived from these simple principles. It’s an unfortunate reality of human law that we must always set arbitrary boundaries; I would much rather that people not go to jail for cocaine possession at all, but in the world in which we live, X grams will get you rehab and probation while X+Y grams gets you jail for years. And essentially everyone will agree that someone is not particularly more mature or ready for sex at 18 years old than they are at 18 years minus one day old, and yet the difference between the two can amount to the difference between a lengthy prison sentence, a place on the sex offender registry, and lifelong shunning, or no consequences at all. No one would doubt that there is something perverse in that, but there is no alternative if we’re to set a legal standard of consent, as we must.

Quite recently, it was the left that argued for more flexibility and forgiveness regarding the age of consent, and not just the Allen Ginsberg/Gore Vidal extremists but ordinary liberals. The theory was that harsh and higher boundaries failed from a harm-reduction perspective, and that raising the age of consent would mostly just increase the number of people who were violating the law. The writer for New York, Lila Shapiro, consigns such attitudes to the extremist fringes, but in fact in the 1990s it was a perfectly mainstream liberal idea that 16 was probably better than 18 for a legal age of consent and that there should be mechanisms in place for exceptions like Romeo and Juliet laws. The idea of establishing the standard to be higher and harsher was a straightforwardly conservative one, which made sense given that conservatives were the anti-sex tendency and liberals the pro. This isn’t at all to say that recent evolutions in liberal mores haven’t been the right ones; I think they very well might be. But acknowledging ideological evolution in this domain does introduce a bit of complexity to what is, as far as political debates go, an issue that is widely regarded as containing none. There’s a reason only marginal and anonymous internet obsessives weigh in the way they do. Once unobjectionable to the average reader of The Nation reader, the idea that an age of consent might be improved by being made a little lower rather than a little higher is the kind of thing that gets you a Twitter pile-on now. That’s how much the discursive conditions around the age of consent have changed in a few decades.

But of course the legal question isn’t the one that we’re currently obsessed with, isn’t the one that inspires lengthy pieces like Shapiro’s. What has come to occupy a unique space in The Discourse is the legal age-gap relationship, relationships between people who are legally of age but whose difference in age is now seen as inherently troubling, the 19-year-old starlet dating the 30-year-old musician. These relationships have become not just a passionate issue in some of our online networks like TikTok or Twitter, but something of a litmus test; it’s difficult to think of a topic that better exemplifies the burgeoning cultural influence of Gen Z than the age-gap relationship fervor. The typical practice is to find someone who has a partner perceived to be inappropriately young - and we’ll get to the evolving definition of “inappropriately” - and to condemn them in extreme terms. In addition to questioning the legitimacy of the legal relationship itself, the typical tactic is to assert that the older partner (almost always the man) has been exposed as a predator who probably wants to date underage women, who would date underage women if he could get away with it. Thus the violation of the social taboo is taken as evidence of a willingness to violate the law. This asserted equivalence is core to the rhetoric of anti-age-gap spaces. When discussing the question of age gaps and sex, there’s a constant slippage between questions of what people want, what the law says people should be permitted to do, and what we should not criminalize but nevertheless socially condemn.

A somewhat amusing example of the slippage between the concepts of the illegally pedophilic and the socially icky can be seen in the reaction to the birth of 79-year-old Robert De Niro’s seventh child, to his girlfriend Tiffany Chen. Because of the age gap between them, De Niro was accused by some of being a “groomer,” a term that refers to how pedophiles manipulate literal children. Tiffany Chen is 45 years old.

The history of the last couple of decades of internet discourse can be seen as the history of good basic values becoming something distorted and ridiculous through constant extremism. Social networks are competitive spaces; people in a given community are directly incentivized to perform an exaggerated version of whatever virtues are celebrated in that community. And so you have the very important societal, legal prohibition against sexual contact with the underaged, and you have a very legitimate set of questions about the potential problems that can arise from large age gaps in relationships, and instead of discussing those in a constructive way, we have a horde of screaming zealots who are known at times to question gaps of as little as a year old. I know that sounds like a strawman, but explore some of these hashtags and similar on the relevant networks, and you’ll be amazed at the number of people who think that a 21-year-old who’s dating a 20-year-old is little different from a child predator trying to lure kids into his van. An interesting consequence of this is that a given age can be represented as either an age of total innocence and lack of guile or as an age of total competence and personal responsibility, depending on what side of the equation they’re on. That is, a 21-year-old who’s dating a 24-year-old is just an innocent baby who doesn’t understand the world enough to know that they’re being manipulated, but a 21-year-old who’s dating an 18 year old is a devious manipulator who knows exactly what they’re doing.

Because this is the internet, there are whole subcultures within this broader world of people who find meaning by yelling about the legal relationships of strangers. Here’s a TikTok hashtag devoted to exploring age gaps in romantic pairings between Disney characters.

Those strange subcultures are a straightforward consequence of the way that cultural issues in time become primarily a means of self-definition, a way to identify yourself with a particular tribe, more than a set of social concerns as such. And demographic differences do assert themselves in this debate. There is, traditionally, a certain gender dynamic at play here, even as we all acknowledge that women and men alike should be held to the same legal and moral standards in this regard. The impolite reality is that we all get less hot as we get older. (I’m told that on earth we are briefly gorgeous.) This is true for all of us; I assure you that if you polled women to ask if they would rather have an affair with a 25-year-old or a 55-year-old man, sight unseen, a majority would pick the former. We don’t, however, always age at the same rates relative to our perceived sexual attractiveness. The degree to which older men retain their hotness is consistently overstated, in my experience, which is probably because older men have disproportionate influence on our cultural conversation. (There’s a lot of what the kids call “cope” there.) But it’s still the case that there’s a definite gender imbalance in the relationship between age and attractiveness. While there are plenty of gorgeous women older than 50, and I’ve known a lot of guys in my life who have a thing for older women, the male preference for younger women comes in dominant majorities, whereas women who prefer older men (as in older than 40, not just older than they are) are common enough to be an inescapable cultural trope. (See: del Rey, Lana.)

And here, I’m afraid, evolution rears its head again: women’s fertile period is shorter than that of men, even accepting growing understanding of the complications that come with very old fathers, and a man’s advantage as a provider and protector is perceived to last longer than a woman’s ability to safely bear children. If we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years under conditions in which the paramount question for men choosing partners was fertility (given that men can contribute to an essentially unlimited number of pregnancies in a year) while the paramount question for women choosing partners was the ability to provide (given that women need to be provided for throughout our long gestation period), and we acknowledge that 40-year-old men are generally more materially secure and able to provide than 20-year-old men, then you wouldn’t be surprised to find a modern world where 40-year-old men were typically perceived to have more romantic market value than 40-year-old women. (Maybe.)

The back-of-the-envelope evo-psych I’m waving at here suggests that men’s capacity to provide food and physically protect others declines later and less dramatically than a woman’s ability to bear children, which without modern medicine can end in the mid-30s. This would seem to offer a crude evolutionary reason for men to prefer younger partners while women entertain much older partners than men will: choosing older women as mates risks an infertile coupling, which would provide obvious natural selection pressures on men to prefer women aged (say) 20-30. Because men can remain fertile throughout life, again with caveats about developmental challenges with the sperm of unusually old fathers, women would be unlikely to select for a preference for 20-30 year old partners to anything like the same degree, and would instead likely have selection pressures that depended on the ability to provide and protect, which seems to last longer than women’s fertile period. Is this true? I have no idea, but it certainly seems plausible. I stress again that evolutionary stories can explain behaviors but cannot justify them; we have free will, including the free will to disregard those urges. But once we’ve moved outside of the realm of legal restriction and into the realm of social judgment, the influence of evolutionary selection pressures will become more pronounced and meaningful.

There are, of course, a hundred caveats here. The simplest is to point out again that the human species is a species of exceptions and there are plenty of older women who any man would pursue and plenty of men who prefer older women in general. (No matter who you are, as a human being, you are someone’s fetish.) More importantly for our purposes here, I would again underline that evolution can sometimes be an explanation but can never be a justification - we are not compelled in our choices by evolution. And as much as desire is physical and visceral, lasting attraction is also deeply intellectual and enculturated. Plenty of men don’t want kids; plenty of women are perfectly capable of providing for themselves. It should be uncontroversial to say that there can be no credible argument that evolutionary pressures play literally no role in human attraction. For example, it seems very unlikely to be a coincidence that hip-to-waist ratio, which offers some crude information about the likelihood of a woman to survive childbirth, has been such a common metric in attractiveness. But of course it’s also absurd to think that evolution dominates our desires, given that we’re a species that includes people who have intense sexual preferences for feet or dominant women or (eep) animals or many other kinks, none of which would seem to have a fitness advantage. Also, you know, homosexuality exists. There are all kinds of sexual and romantic desires that have nothing to do with producing children and passing on our genetic information, and there are all kinds of couplings that have nothing to do with children which are happy, healthy, loving, and passionate.

Once again, we’re trapped in useless binaries: when it comes to human attraction, evolution can never explain everything, or even come close, but when we look at large patterns of preference, it would be foolish not to consider evolutionary pressures. Those pressures can never function as a justification for pursuing underage women. But if you’re annoyed at why your 35-year-old male friends keep dating 23-year-olds, part of the answer lies in the fact that some deep part of the animal brains of those friends looks at those 23-year-olds, sees signs of likely fertility, and inspires feelings of desire. And that happens because, hundreds of thousands of years ago, men who had those feelings had more children than men who did not, and so their genetic information spread more widely until that mechanism was the norm. (Maybe.) Sometimes those internet creepers I identified at the top say things like “if you could force them to be honest, every straight man would admit they think 15 and 16 and 17-year-old girls are the sexiest!” I don’t think that’s true, at all, even beyond the point that underage women can’t really consent to sex either way. But I do think it’s true that a majority of men find women in their 20s to be at the height of their physical attractiveness, and that there are maybe probably likely evolutionary reasons for that.

This is all a pretty shitty deal for women, one of so many shitty deals that women have to accept in our society. I am absolutely gobsmacked at how much money women have to spend and how much time they have to waste to look hot, but we have inculcated a cultural expectation that a woman’s worth is equal to her hotness and that her hotness is on a rapidly-ticking clock. We all start to feel invisible and useless as we age, but women are made to feel that way decades earlier than men. The glory of humanity, of course, is that there are exceptions to all of these things, and many older women are the objects of mass desire or are happy in other ways. (It may also very well be the case that, as fertility medicine advances, the evolutionary pressures that created a preference for younger women will ease over time; if pursuing 40-year-old women is not significantly less likely to result in passing your genetic information on to the next generation, then there will be no selection pressure to avoid doing so.) The thing about the age gap stuff is that all of this is almost entirely verboten to speak about, at all. Look, this entire essay would get me labeled a monster by that set, if they were to discover it. It doesn’t matter that I’ve very clearly said that sex with underaged people is morally wrong and should result in legal consequences. The fact that I’ve suggested that there are complications in this conversation at all defies the white-hot certainty of that niche. That I’ve discussed reasons why many men prefer younger women will be represented as an endorsement of that condition. But I’m not endorsing anything. I am saying that it’s pointless to opine about age gaps without asking why the gender dynamics are so pronounced.

The social/discursive/cultural-tribe-formation questions are more interesting. Why this issue? Why this intensity? Why has this topic captured the attention of Gen Z like few other topics? I think it’s pretty clear that, as I said, this is a classic example of people in a given internet community being rewarded for insisting on the most extreme version of that community’s central dogma. But then that’s true of any issue. (People have formed entire personalities out of their conviction that Luigi from Super Mario Bros is gay.) I think this one has found so much purchase because the gender implications are so clear, making the age-gap niche an offshoot of sorts of conventional feminism; because Gen Z is still mostly young (though getting older) and so issues of youth sexuality are particularly close to their hearts; because age gaps suggest a particular kind of inequality that is unusually obvious and clear to see; and, I think, because a lot of them are scared of sex in general, in any form, between any people, and the age gap discourse has provided them with a ready-made architecture for declaring sexuality to be wicked. These young people are staring down the choices they will soon have to make about romantic and sexual relationships, whether to participate in them at all, with whom if they do, on what terms…. That’s all scary. I think the age gap obsession takes the fear of adult sex and adult love and personifies it in older men perceived, often correctly, to be lecherous.

On the specific question of who should or shouldn’t be sleeping with who, and what society should do about it, here’s my thoughts on these issues in condensed form, in a futile effort to not be misrepresented:

1. You can’t have sex with people who are under the age of consent, which I’d say should probably be 16, 17, or 18, as is now the case in every state in the nation. If you do, you’re a criminal, and you should face legal consequences. Underage people lack the social and psychological and emotional development to consent to sex with legal adults, and allowing that behavior would likely lead to deep distress. That’s why we have the law.

2. Provided that both of you are freely consenting and not under the influence of coercion or any kind of incapacitation, you can have sex with or date anyone who is of age, as long as you are too, regardless of your own age. But you can do all sorts of things that you probably shouldn’t do, in life. There’s a lot of social behaviors that are permissible but which are not wise, fair, kind, thoughtful, or clearly moral. You probably shouldn’t date a 19-year-old as a 48-year-old because there’s differences of emotional and social development that will likely prove bad for your relationship and, worse, for your partner. If we’re close personally and you get into a relationship like that, I might say something about it, and it would make me reconsider our friendship. But I can’t stop you, no one else can either, and as distasteful as that sort of thing can be, I recognize it as a consequence of personal freedom in an open society.

3. The distances in age that get judged by the contemporary age-gap “movement” are just insane to me. It is insane to me to suggest that a 21-year-old who dates an 18-year-old is necessarily a rapist. Insane. It’s insane to me to insist that a 22-year-old can’t freely and knowingly consent to being in a relationship with a 27-year-old. I have zero problem with a 30-year-old dating a 24-year-old. I don’t think there’s sufficient systemic difference in power dynamics in relationships with such gaps, certainly not enough to render the relationship invalid. And everyone is aware that age is a crude metric for psychological development anyway; I’ve known 21-year-olds who I would trust to date whoever they wanted and 35-year-olds who I would worry about no matter who their partner. Human beings are complicated, our desire is complicated, our relationships are complicated. Also, we already have a crisis of loneliness, plummeting birth rates, and younger people who report that it’s very difficult for them to establish meaningful relationships. We’re going to add an edict that you have to be born within 18 months of your partner, on top of all that? Sounds like a real nightmare to me.

4. As a little back-of-the-envelope thing, I really do believe in the “half your age plus 7” rule - it has the intuitive value of allowing for larger gaps the older the partners get. (Nobody cares if a 65-year-old dates a 50-year-old.) I’m happily partnered off, but were I single, the rule would suggest a lower bound of 28 for me, which seems about right.

The age gap discourse is the purest possible example of a certain sad condition we find ourselves in: we as a modern society have invested an unhealthy amount of our hopes and fears into our capacity to judge. Judgment is our obsession; judgment, so many people seem to think, is both our first responsibility and only tool. I find that this reflexive assumption that judgment is the first mover of moral action, judgment the foundation of all politics, is so reflexive and thoughtless that people barely examine it at all. But it’s a profoundly ideological conception of civic values, and besides, judgment itself does nothing. Sometimes these campaigns can result in sufficient social condemnation that there are professional and financial consequences for the person who’s perceived to be too old for his girlfriend, but it rarely ever goes that far. “Leonardo Dicaprio only dates women decades younger than him and its really creepy” has been a meme for a long long time, and yet he’s still a wealthy and successful celebrity who gets to do big prestige movies with the likes of Martin Scorsese. Maybe you see this as a failure of society, maybe you don’t. But what Gen Z and everyone else has to catch up to eventually is a very basic, sad fact: there are things in life that are imperfect that must nonetheless not be forbidden. Some things in life are gross or creepy or manipulative or annoying, and also there’s nothing to be done about them. Sometimes bad things or sad things just have to be that way.

The advantage of illegality is that it prompts a definitive response - when somebody has sex with an underage girl, we can throw him in jail. The misery of mere social judgement is that we judge and the thing we’re judging just keeps going. But this reality is not a statement of some fundamental error we have made as a society. It’s a statement of the basic nature of freedom: that free people are people free to make decisions that we don’t agree with. Adults are going to make decisions that you don’t like, certainly including who they choose to partner off with, and for the rest of your life. You can react however you want in your own social sphere - by all means, give your best friend a talking to if they’re considering an age gap relationship, let such relationships influence who you socialize with, give side-eye to whoever’s age gap gives you the creeps. But people are going to choose what they’re going to choose, whether they know you personally or they don’t. And, yes, sometimes so much the worse for them, and sometimes so much the worse for us. But when we’ve collectively made the societal decision to cut the Procrustean bed to a certain length, as we inevitably must, we once again stumble upon the uncomfortable wisdom of “That’s none of my business.”

When Emily Dickinson said “the heart wants what it wants,” it wasn’t a celebration. It was a statement of fact. We pay the price for that fact all the time.