This whole thing is just so weird to me as someone who last dated someone get own age about...25 years ago? I've always dated older men. We're not talking about as an 18 year old I was dating men in their forties but a few years older. My husband is 7 years older than men and it doesn't mean much except that I get to call him an old man no matter my age and that he occasionally mentions something about college, like remember in 1993 when we.... And I'll say "no because I was a child at the time " but we met in our thirties which means even the age gap, we are peers.
Such an important point: "Moral behavior is about what you do, not what you feel. Morality is about choice."
Why I keep subscribed to you.
Even tho, as this one is, a bit too long to read everything.
Rob Henderson's first hard lesson learned is to judge people on what they do. Not what they say, or what their ideas are; a related point to the key issue of morality.
And why we can't get rid of racist thinking, but we CAN, and should get rid of racist actions; and actually all immoral actions. Which all actions should be all be punished by a justice system; or by social norms such that using the n-word results in social shame, but not jail time.
Haven't mentioned this year that I wish you and all here a Happy New Year - From Slovakia (6hrs ahead of NYC)
This cuts home to me as a gay man who came out in the early 1980s because I was never attracted to men my own age or younger, as official gay male culture would have it. I was always attracted to older men. I met the love of my life--now dead, alas!--when I was 31 and he 60. Even now that I'm 64, I still gravitate toward men around my own age, and have a renewed appreciation for the silver-haired. Sometimes I wonder if, between the age-gap controversies and the non-binary/femme/drag controversies (while I have the greatest respect for the effeminate, I always preferred to have sex with conventionally masculine men), I would have even come out if I were a gay man in my twenties now rather than forty years ago.
"Moral behavior is about what you do, not what you feel. Morality is about choice."
Great gods I want to put this on a plaque.
There is a crop of people--and they can be found on both the right and the left--who seem to feel that as long as you hold the correct opinions, you are a good person. I remember well in the 80s the Pat-Robertson-style Christians who could be as uncharitable, hateful, and callous as they pleased, but as long as they accepted Jesus as their savior, by their lights they were A-OK. Today, we have woke folks who try to get people fired, thrown out of their apartments, publicly shamed, but because these folks are acting from a belief in diversity, intersectionality, whatever, it's all good. All of these people think they are doing the work of the angels even while they are acting just like demons.
In my view, if you aren't doing good things, you are not a good person, but there's an easy way to repair that: do better things. If you want to claim to wear the mantle of a hero, you've got to act like you bloody well deserve it.
I feel like a lot of the age gap discourse is sort of a case of confusing correlation with causation.
If you are predicting whether or not something is a healthy relationship, and the only information you have is whether there is a large age gap, I think it would be reasonable to predict that the large ag gap relationships will be more likely to be abusive or otherwise bad than the low age gap relationships. If my daughter starts dating a 40 yo when she is 18, I'm going to have some concerns.
At the same I think the predictive power is low and there are both a lot of unhealthy relationships with no age gap and healthy relationships with an age gap. I'm married to a woman 11 years older than me and it's working pretty well. I know a woman who met her future wife when she was 18 and her wife was ~40 and they are happily married 30+ years later. If my daughter started dating a 40 yo at 18 yes, I'd be concerned, but I would also want to know more before condemning the relationship.
I think part of this also suffers from assuming every relationship needs to be on the marriage track. This is particularly true with the criticism of DiCaprio. If DiCaprio is leading on the women he dates, somehow convincing them to make choices on the assumption that he will (or at least may) settle down and marry them, that's wrong, but if it's clear to them women that he's a serial monogamist and they should expect to have fun dating him for a year or two before he gets bored or whatever and wants to move on, that seems like a fine arrangement. I assume it's probably pretty fun dating a rich movie star if that's what your into and, since we fortunately no longer have the concept of a "ruined woman," (at least in sane parts of society) the women can go on to look for more marriagable partners when they break up with him at age 25.
I don’t care about relationships with significant age gaps. But I would like to point that this trope of “I’m sooooo sorry women that your deal is so raw, that 35 yo men want to date 23 yos and you have to spend hours trying to look hot”. Most people date people around their own age--I think the avg age gap of married couples is 2 years. And in terms of these amazing lengths that women are going to to be attractive--please just actually look around yourself at the grocery store sometime. These things exist--big age gap relationships and women in stilettos with 2 hour beauty regimens are def out there, but they are not nearly as ubiquitous as the trope that people always feel they need to start from would have it. Finally, the idea that the great tragedy of my life, the ultimate raw deal, is that, at 41, I’m no longer catcalled by homeless men or harassed at the gym doesn’t make any sense to me.
“Moral behavior is about what you do, not what you feel. Morality is about choice."
I agree, which why I have such a deep antipathy for determinism. Of course, just because I hate it, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But I really want it to be wrong.
Can you believe you even have to spell out what you said in the first few grafs so that we all remember our social responsibility rather than our personal desires? "The moral dictate, in human life, is not to be or feel in some pure way. The moral dictate is to act ethically." Yet I'm so glad you did, and to see that point echoed in comments here. This argument is a welcome particularity in your overall socialist (social-y?) arguments which I read as "come on people, it will be better for us all if we can have some compassion for and restraint involving impulses to prey on the less powerful."
First, some kinks might have an indirect relation to Fitness. [I freely speculate.] Feet might be rich in fitness information, mini homologs of the larger erogenous body, loci of extreme sensitivity, et cet. True, you won't self-perpetuate by inseminating in that general Aah-rea, but the attraction might still be understood by Evo logic. Some of these kinks might be evolutionarily degenerate in that their adherents are made less fit by them, but they are statistically expected aberrations [I don't mean morally aberrant] from the fit form of attraction. Nature endows us with an attraction for skin, and didn't mean for you to focus on the feet, but the feet, dang it, have so much surface area for such a compact little spot of body. . . .and so a certain percent of us are prone to obsess there.
Re the age of consent, should teens be sexually/romantically involved with other teens? Conservatives want to know, I suppose. If teens aren't mature enough to consent to a relation with an adult, are they mature enough to consent to a relation with an immature peer? The adult can exploit the age gap to coerce the teen, but so might they use their wisdom to benignly guide the interaction. That was a Greek ideal, I read, though what the reality was like I do not know.
Age is just one advantage that can be exploited for coercion. Perhaps we focus on the age metric in part because it's a state-registered metric, easily trackable. Unlike, say, charisma. When Tony Stark / Robert Downey beds a mousy fan, is this obviously less coercive than a twenty-two year old bedding a 16-yr old?
I married a woman eight years older than me, so I ended up breaking with societal expectations, I suppose. I didn't feel particularly weird about the age gap, though it was enough that we have completely different pop culture signifiers (all my Simpsons references when we were first dating went totally over her head). It's still going great overall, though we're at an awkward point at the moment where I'm in early middle age and pretty much still feel young, despite having a lot of gray (wear hoodies, play RPGs, shitpost on the internet) while she's really settling into the "aches and pains" era of middle age and likes to putter around in the garden and stuff. She takes a dozen different meds for various (mostly minor) conditions, I'm still not on anything, etc. I'm sure this too will pass, and age will start catching up to me.
My last serious girlfriend before I met my wife was the other way around though - eight years younger. As in, I was 27 and she was...19 (Her last boyfriend before me was 35, which made me feel strange). It was, honestly, an incredibly awkward experience. There were lots of places I just couldn't go with her because she was under 21, not to mention being a grown-ass adult in my early 20s going to her dorm. It was about as drama free as a failed relationship could be (we both mutually decided at the end of her academic year that we weren't in love, and it was fun, but not going anywhere longer-term). Still, the logistics of dating someone of that age just made me wonder why the hell anyone would want to do it. Would absolutely not suggest.
Happily married these days though, but the idea of even dating someone below 30 (I'm 44) is just mind-bogglingly unappealing.
When I saw the word 'discourse' in the headline and then in the text, I thought that appellation was too kind given what I experience from skimming this subject and others on various platforms as more accurately gusts of wind over the wires, the static on my teenage transistor radio. But then I looked up the word and there it is from the OED, "The action or process of communicating thought by means of the spoken word; interchange of words; conversation, talk. Also: the words exchanged by this means; speech. In later use also: the written representation of this; communication in written form."
Discourse has become a pretty big bucket as a word.
Unfortunately, the first meaning of the word dating back eight or nine centuries is termed as obsolete now: "The process or faculty of reasoning; reasoned argument or thought; reason, rationality. Also more fully discourse of reason. Now rare (somewhat archaic in later use)."
That explains my problem of thinking archaically again. I'm eager to read what Freddie has to say about the subject, but no way would I engage in the discourse beyond that perimeter.
"Once again, we’re trapped in useless binaries: when it comes to human attraction, evolution can never explain everything"
Perhaps it can explain the existence of everything but not the prevalence. I may be using the terms sloppily, but I would say evolution programs for variation and therefore variation reveals the engine of evolution. To study natural selection is to study the forces that constrain and direct particular features/behaviors toward the norm. In humans, culture is an enormous constraint.
Great points here. A minor dissent, though: while it's crucial to remember that people get to do things we disapprove of in a free society, I think our judgments do in fact matter materially. Because, once there is a critical mass about the ethical valence of some act or attitude, almost everyone will become aware of the potential social consequences.
Sometimes that social pressure is regrettable and can fuel distorted moral panics or internet silliness. But it has definitely helped discourage all kinds of things that people used to shrug about. Consider that, even very recently, countless prominent and respectable people didn't bat an eye when Jeffrey Epstein would have 19- or 20-year old women, without expertise or even much education, show up with him to meetings with donors and executives. All of those execs and professors and scientists knew that these girls were in his orbit for sexual reasons only. And after his initial conviction, they knew his activities were criminal. But while a few people (like Melinda Gates) found it ethically repugnant, most others simply accepted that whatever Epstein was doing, the girls were consenting to be a party to it, and therefore found it no impediment to being in his orbit––or found it a positive inducement.
This whole thing is just so weird to me as someone who last dated someone get own age about...25 years ago? I've always dated older men. We're not talking about as an 18 year old I was dating men in their forties but a few years older. My husband is 7 years older than men and it doesn't mean much except that I get to call him an old man no matter my age and that he occasionally mentions something about college, like remember in 1993 when we.... And I'll say "no because I was a child at the time " but we met in our thirties which means even the age gap, we are peers.
Such an important point: "Moral behavior is about what you do, not what you feel. Morality is about choice."
Why I keep subscribed to you.
Even tho, as this one is, a bit too long to read everything.
Rob Henderson's first hard lesson learned is to judge people on what they do. Not what they say, or what their ideas are; a related point to the key issue of morality.
And why we can't get rid of racist thinking, but we CAN, and should get rid of racist actions; and actually all immoral actions. Which all actions should be all be punished by a justice system; or by social norms such that using the n-word results in social shame, but not jail time.
Haven't mentioned this year that I wish you and all here a Happy New Year - From Slovakia (6hrs ahead of NYC)
This cuts home to me as a gay man who came out in the early 1980s because I was never attracted to men my own age or younger, as official gay male culture would have it. I was always attracted to older men. I met the love of my life--now dead, alas!--when I was 31 and he 60. Even now that I'm 64, I still gravitate toward men around my own age, and have a renewed appreciation for the silver-haired. Sometimes I wonder if, between the age-gap controversies and the non-binary/femme/drag controversies (while I have the greatest respect for the effeminate, I always preferred to have sex with conventionally masculine men), I would have even come out if I were a gay man in my twenties now rather than forty years ago.
Controlling our "instincts" is what separates us from the animals.
"Moral behavior is about what you do, not what you feel. Morality is about choice."
Great gods I want to put this on a plaque.
There is a crop of people--and they can be found on both the right and the left--who seem to feel that as long as you hold the correct opinions, you are a good person. I remember well in the 80s the Pat-Robertson-style Christians who could be as uncharitable, hateful, and callous as they pleased, but as long as they accepted Jesus as their savior, by their lights they were A-OK. Today, we have woke folks who try to get people fired, thrown out of their apartments, publicly shamed, but because these folks are acting from a belief in diversity, intersectionality, whatever, it's all good. All of these people think they are doing the work of the angels even while they are acting just like demons.
In my view, if you aren't doing good things, you are not a good person, but there's an easy way to repair that: do better things. If you want to claim to wear the mantle of a hero, you've got to act like you bloody well deserve it.
I feel like a lot of the age gap discourse is sort of a case of confusing correlation with causation.
If you are predicting whether or not something is a healthy relationship, and the only information you have is whether there is a large age gap, I think it would be reasonable to predict that the large ag gap relationships will be more likely to be abusive or otherwise bad than the low age gap relationships. If my daughter starts dating a 40 yo when she is 18, I'm going to have some concerns.
At the same I think the predictive power is low and there are both a lot of unhealthy relationships with no age gap and healthy relationships with an age gap. I'm married to a woman 11 years older than me and it's working pretty well. I know a woman who met her future wife when she was 18 and her wife was ~40 and they are happily married 30+ years later. If my daughter started dating a 40 yo at 18 yes, I'd be concerned, but I would also want to know more before condemning the relationship.
I think part of this also suffers from assuming every relationship needs to be on the marriage track. This is particularly true with the criticism of DiCaprio. If DiCaprio is leading on the women he dates, somehow convincing them to make choices on the assumption that he will (or at least may) settle down and marry them, that's wrong, but if it's clear to them women that he's a serial monogamist and they should expect to have fun dating him for a year or two before he gets bored or whatever and wants to move on, that seems like a fine arrangement. I assume it's probably pretty fun dating a rich movie star if that's what your into and, since we fortunately no longer have the concept of a "ruined woman," (at least in sane parts of society) the women can go on to look for more marriagable partners when they break up with him at age 25.
I don’t care about relationships with significant age gaps. But I would like to point that this trope of “I’m sooooo sorry women that your deal is so raw, that 35 yo men want to date 23 yos and you have to spend hours trying to look hot”. Most people date people around their own age--I think the avg age gap of married couples is 2 years. And in terms of these amazing lengths that women are going to to be attractive--please just actually look around yourself at the grocery store sometime. These things exist--big age gap relationships and women in stilettos with 2 hour beauty regimens are def out there, but they are not nearly as ubiquitous as the trope that people always feel they need to start from would have it. Finally, the idea that the great tragedy of my life, the ultimate raw deal, is that, at 41, I’m no longer catcalled by homeless men or harassed at the gym doesn’t make any sense to me.
“Moral behavior is about what you do, not what you feel. Morality is about choice."
I agree, which why I have such a deep antipathy for determinism. Of course, just because I hate it, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But I really want it to be wrong.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/24/determined-life-without-free-will-by-robert-sapolsky-review-the-hard-science-of-decisions
Whatever happened to "half your age plus seven"?
Can you believe you even have to spell out what you said in the first few grafs so that we all remember our social responsibility rather than our personal desires? "The moral dictate, in human life, is not to be or feel in some pure way. The moral dictate is to act ethically." Yet I'm so glad you did, and to see that point echoed in comments here. This argument is a welcome particularity in your overall socialist (social-y?) arguments which I read as "come on people, it will be better for us all if we can have some compassion for and restraint involving impulses to prey on the less powerful."
A couple of thoughts here.
First, some kinks might have an indirect relation to Fitness. [I freely speculate.] Feet might be rich in fitness information, mini homologs of the larger erogenous body, loci of extreme sensitivity, et cet. True, you won't self-perpetuate by inseminating in that general Aah-rea, but the attraction might still be understood by Evo logic. Some of these kinks might be evolutionarily degenerate in that their adherents are made less fit by them, but they are statistically expected aberrations [I don't mean morally aberrant] from the fit form of attraction. Nature endows us with an attraction for skin, and didn't mean for you to focus on the feet, but the feet, dang it, have so much surface area for such a compact little spot of body. . . .and so a certain percent of us are prone to obsess there.
Re the age of consent, should teens be sexually/romantically involved with other teens? Conservatives want to know, I suppose. If teens aren't mature enough to consent to a relation with an adult, are they mature enough to consent to a relation with an immature peer? The adult can exploit the age gap to coerce the teen, but so might they use their wisdom to benignly guide the interaction. That was a Greek ideal, I read, though what the reality was like I do not know.
Age is just one advantage that can be exploited for coercion. Perhaps we focus on the age metric in part because it's a state-registered metric, easily trackable. Unlike, say, charisma. When Tony Stark / Robert Downey beds a mousy fan, is this obviously less coercive than a twenty-two year old bedding a 16-yr old?
I married a woman eight years older than me, so I ended up breaking with societal expectations, I suppose. I didn't feel particularly weird about the age gap, though it was enough that we have completely different pop culture signifiers (all my Simpsons references when we were first dating went totally over her head). It's still going great overall, though we're at an awkward point at the moment where I'm in early middle age and pretty much still feel young, despite having a lot of gray (wear hoodies, play RPGs, shitpost on the internet) while she's really settling into the "aches and pains" era of middle age and likes to putter around in the garden and stuff. She takes a dozen different meds for various (mostly minor) conditions, I'm still not on anything, etc. I'm sure this too will pass, and age will start catching up to me.
My last serious girlfriend before I met my wife was the other way around though - eight years younger. As in, I was 27 and she was...19 (Her last boyfriend before me was 35, which made me feel strange). It was, honestly, an incredibly awkward experience. There were lots of places I just couldn't go with her because she was under 21, not to mention being a grown-ass adult in my early 20s going to her dorm. It was about as drama free as a failed relationship could be (we both mutually decided at the end of her academic year that we weren't in love, and it was fun, but not going anywhere longer-term). Still, the logistics of dating someone of that age just made me wonder why the hell anyone would want to do it. Would absolutely not suggest.
Happily married these days though, but the idea of even dating someone below 30 (I'm 44) is just mind-bogglingly unappealing.
When I saw the word 'discourse' in the headline and then in the text, I thought that appellation was too kind given what I experience from skimming this subject and others on various platforms as more accurately gusts of wind over the wires, the static on my teenage transistor radio. But then I looked up the word and there it is from the OED, "The action or process of communicating thought by means of the spoken word; interchange of words; conversation, talk. Also: the words exchanged by this means; speech. In later use also: the written representation of this; communication in written form."
Discourse has become a pretty big bucket as a word.
Unfortunately, the first meaning of the word dating back eight or nine centuries is termed as obsolete now: "The process or faculty of reasoning; reasoned argument or thought; reason, rationality. Also more fully discourse of reason. Now rare (somewhat archaic in later use)."
That explains my problem of thinking archaically again. I'm eager to read what Freddie has to say about the subject, but no way would I engage in the discourse beyond that perimeter.
"Once again, we’re trapped in useless binaries: when it comes to human attraction, evolution can never explain everything"
Perhaps it can explain the existence of everything but not the prevalence. I may be using the terms sloppily, but I would say evolution programs for variation and therefore variation reveals the engine of evolution. To study natural selection is to study the forces that constrain and direct particular features/behaviors toward the norm. In humans, culture is an enormous constraint.
Great points here. A minor dissent, though: while it's crucial to remember that people get to do things we disapprove of in a free society, I think our judgments do in fact matter materially. Because, once there is a critical mass about the ethical valence of some act or attitude, almost everyone will become aware of the potential social consequences.
Sometimes that social pressure is regrettable and can fuel distorted moral panics or internet silliness. But it has definitely helped discourage all kinds of things that people used to shrug about. Consider that, even very recently, countless prominent and respectable people didn't bat an eye when Jeffrey Epstein would have 19- or 20-year old women, without expertise or even much education, show up with him to meetings with donors and executives. All of those execs and professors and scientists knew that these girls were in his orbit for sexual reasons only. And after his initial conviction, they knew his activities were criminal. But while a few people (like Melinda Gates) found it ethically repugnant, most others simply accepted that whatever Epstein was doing, the girls were consenting to be a party to it, and therefore found it no impediment to being in his orbit––or found it a positive inducement.
"known a lot of guys in my life who have a thing for older women". Me too, and there is nothing wrong about that anymore.