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.
I feel you about liking men of a certain age. To me-men in their forties are sort of peak. So now that I'm in my forties, men my age are hot to me. IDK how it will work as I age but there is definitely something to being physically attracted to a certain type.
I'm a lesbian, but when I was an older teenager and thought I was straight, I routinely dated men in their mid-20s because the boys my age were too immature and men in their 20s often have the maturity of an older teen girl. Nowadays that would be seriously frowned upon, but it made a lot of sense to me (and, incidentally, my parents) at the time.
Gay culture also has less stigma around one-night stands or casual sex than at least officially sanctioned straight culture does - it’s interesting that this piece doesn’t really get into the distinction between that and a relationship. When I was a gay man in my 20s I wasn’t interested in actually dating someone much older but would happily have hooked up with them and not felt exploited by doing so.
"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.
Continuing on Freddie's explanation of what defines morality: "I would again underline that evolution can sometimes be an explanation but can never be a justification."
I don't think that this is nearly as correct as the previous quote. It's true if you have an e.g. deontological moral system, but not really otherwise. The reason why we intuitively feel that murder is bad, for example, is because we evolved in a context where antisocial behavior was strongly selected against. We ultimately underpin our moral systems with our intuitions about what is good or bad, which have distinct evolutionary reasons. "We evolved to feel this way" is often the ultimate arbiter in why something is morally justified.
Overcoming our feelings and intuitions, having them be of secondary importance, or otherwise going counter to them is not the default moral action. It happens for edge cases and when one or several intuitions trump another intuition.
None of this is to say that there should be no age of consent law or that it should be violable, of course. Just as someone's intuitive desire to take someone else's property as their own should be overcome in any good moral system and legally prohibited, so should this. The particular definition of moral justification Freddie made was unsupported, which is what I was drawing attention to.
I don't think this is anymore true than saying that, because we evolved to stock up on calories to prepare for lean times, you should eat as many M&Ms as you can.
Intuition plays a part in morality, but the world we live in is not the same world in which those intuitions evolved and it makes sense to question whether those intuitions still accomplish what they evolved to accomplish.
Even this may be being a little to generous to evolved intuitions.
I'm not saying that following one's intuitions is the best way to be moral or that all intuitions are moral justifications. I'm saying that we have no underpinning for our moral systems other than our evolved intuitions, presuming that our moral systems come from humanity.
The question of "Why should I do what my moral system tells me to?" is important. It used to generally be accepted that the answers was something like "because God/s say/s so and otherwise bad things will happen". We're generally moving against that - a more common answer now, and a common answer back then as well, is "because I feel this to be right". The reason we feel things to be right is because they satisfy both our intuitions and some amount of logical reasoning on top of them. The intuitions for prosocial behavior tend to be those we classify as "moral intuitions", but there are some exceptions. Those exceptions generally stem from empathy (the most prosocial intuition).
To further elaborate on how moral judgements either come directly from our evolved intuitions or are derived from them: For example, if we were evolved from r-strategists we would likely not have a strong intuition against infanticide. This would likely lead to "abortions" being generally considered permissible until some amount of time after birth, rather than some time before or not at all. The definition of personhood and what moral value we place on an infant life are strongly determined by our evolution rather than some form of calculation. In fact, this problem, and many moral problems are extremely hard to judge or justify based on some calculation rather than instinct.
There is a theory that killing one's wife upon abandonment has a significant evolutionary component. Reputational loss in small communities could easily have detrimental consequences.
"I would again underline that evolution can sometimes be an explanation but can never be a justification."
But evolution applied to the individual is psychology, and surely we would admit that under certain circumstances we can't hold an individual morally culpable for things which they did as a result of aberrant psychology?
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.
In my view, a lot of the criticism of DiCaprio––which is often more mockery than finger-wagging criticism––is not about his decision not to marry. It's that the specificity of the age of his girlfriends (all very close to 22 or younger), and the fact that he so frequently replaces them for the next 22 year old, seems to say a lot about what a romantic relationship actually is for him.
Someone dates many women over the course of 30 years, but never once felt an attachment that lasted more than a year or two? If conducted honestly, sure, that is an arrangement where no one is exploited. But the gossip and laughter might be conveying an implicit judgment––which I'm not immune to––that is probably a man who doesn't like or care about women enough to feel actual love for one as an individual and equal person.
Yes. The conclusion I draw is not “Leo is a predator” but “Leo seems like a bit of a shallow manchild in the romantic sphere.” It’s not a crime, and the worst I can do is roll my eyes when I meet a man like this.
Manchild, yes, but possibly something akin to a certain contempt for women that blocks the love/vulnerability that comes with lasting attachment. Admittedly that's a vibe, but it seems to emanate from some men (Bill Maher) and not others (George Clooney) who date well into mid life without committing.
The upshot for me: there are a lot of men who don't like women (including plenty who marry). I don't like men who don't like women.
Agree with all of that. I think it’s normal and fine for people to say “Leo’s got issues” and to notice those patterns and to speculate about what they might mean about his character, but it’s bananas for people to paint him or any other men who dares consenting women above the age of majority as predatory groomers.
The DeCaprio discourse reminds me of an old acquaintance of mine who managed to strike it rich join the original Dot Com bubble. My (admitttedly third-hand) understanding is that he has had a very hard time finding a wife because he has never been able to tell whether the women he dated were interested in him or his money.
While I have very little insight into DiCaprios' psyche, I wouldn't be surprised if he has something similar going on. He grew up a heart throb and became a very wealthy movie star. I could easily see him having the same sort of concern that the women who want to date him are more interested in the idea of him than the real him (recently staring in Killers of thr Flower Moon cant help), and basically refusing to get too committed to a relationship as a defense mechanism. I'll agree that that's a little sad - I've gone into pretty much every relationship with the idea that it could end in marriage - but I don't think it's wrong or harmful to the women he's involved with. I also don't even think it's strong evidence that he's somehow exploiting them or doesn't like them. It's may merely be that he's not comfortable or interstate in a long term relationship.
I also don't blame him for exclusively dating 22 year olds in this context. I'm sure some of this is that he finds 22 year olds more physically attractive, but I think some of it is, if you are going to have a string of short-term relationships, 22 year olds are the ones to do it with because they are more likely to be up for it. At 22, a lot of people are not necessarily looking to settle down. They also tend to have less commitments so are probably more up for a movie star lifestyle. If you are 45, even if you aren't anxious about getting married, you probably have a job that gets in the way of partying or vacationing or just hanging out with DeCaprio while he's filming in some foreign location. If you thought the multimillionaire was going to marry you, you may be willing to take a sabbatical or something, but if you're dating DeCaprio that seems like a bad gamble.
DeCaprio had a very real reaction to becoming a heartthrob in Titanic, running away from any romantic roles (or anything even vaguely appealing to women) for the remainder of his career. He seems profoundly uncomfortable with being desired. I wouldn't be surprised if he has some sort of subconscious contempt towards anyone who would find him desirable.
Yeah Gen Z probably doesn't know this, but after Titanic came out Leo was absolutely EVERYWHERE. Half the magazine covers were pictures of him, every single girl in every school had a crush on him, he was on every show, it was nuts. Maybe the closest thing to Beatlemania I'll ever experience. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that left a psychological scar on him that persists to this day
On the other hand, I think it's common that people propelled to global fame as 12 or 14 year olds, like DiCaprio, and grew up from that point onwards with huge amounts of money, yes men, and sycophant helpers, will often be emotionally and developmentaly stunned to a much younger age than their biological one. Which probably explains his case.
I do think there are two things going on with large age gap vs narrow age gap couples. First, for narrow age gap, let's just say 'these are peers.' DiCaprio of course, doesn't have many peers, and likely has gobs of groupies ... how does the song go- "We got a lot of little teenage blue eyed groupies. Who do anything we say" [lyrics from Cover Of The Rolling Stone].
Thus, you're either married to a peer, or a groupie.
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.
I get it...but I also kind of subscribe in the hope that you keep the defensive writing to a minimum. (Its not like the trolls will ever be stated by your defensive comments).
Yeah when you tackled this I'm like "Freddie's about to say something that's basically so reasonable it's banal and some people are going to take one line out of it and freak tf out"
I find that there’s almost always a rough equivalent on the other side (rough, not perfect). If we’re going to feel bad for women feeling they have to work so hard to be hot, take a moment for young men who haven’t found a career path yet, drive a beat up Geo Metro and live in a single room somewhere (or at home).
Or, more likely, young men who overextend themselves on cars, clothes etc that they can’t really afford. And dating. I remember avoiding dating as a young man in my late 20s for long periods just because I couldn’t afford it. There’s a funny scene in the first season of Atlanta where Ern has to sneak out and call for help because he doesn’t have enough money in the bank to pay for dessert. Really hit home, I think maybe not just for me.
I've always thought that a lot of the discourse around who has it harder in dating and relationships often could benefit from walking in the other sides shoes.
In particular, there's this pervasive sense in which the man is the dominant one in the relationship and the woman has to spend a lot of effort and self sacrifice conforming to the man's needs while the man just does what he wants and ignores the woman's feelings. Maybe that is the median relationship model, but certainly does not describe any relationship I've been in and I've seen a lot of other relationships that deviate from that mold.
There's this meme about relationships where, if you each member of the relationship how much housework they do, it most always adds up to significantly more than 100%. I think this is true of a lot of aspects of relationships. On pretty much every metric, I suspect that people over estimate how much they give and underestimate how much their partner does. It's just so much easier to think of times you've compromised because you experience the compromise while your partner may not realize you didn't actually want to do the thing. (In this respect, I'm open to the idea that, while I've experienced being the more accommodating one in most of my relationships, my significant others have experienced the opposite).
And again, there’s always a rough equivalent. In the relationships that I see, women do more of the day to day housework, men have a “honeydew” list (look it up if not familiar), handle emergencies and repairs.
I’m sure it happens, but in marriages between men and women, I have never seen a woman on top of or under a house. I’ve never seen a woman with a chainsaw, cutting up the tree that fell on a fence during a recent storm. Men take on plumbing, wiring issues etc, and any man who doesn’t is held in low esteem, and not just by his wife.
Women do more of the day to day with the expectation that men will take care of the type of work that men traditionally do, even if it’s a matter of finding someone else to do the work and make sure that it’s done properly. Also: anything to do with the car. That’s all yours, gentlemen, and woe betide you if you don’t look after it.
What's wonderful about living in a relatively tolerant society is the flexibility to go against the norm. I don't know any other woman besides myself who uses a chainsaw. BUT I don't split wood! I prefer to cut up (green) logs of the size that will fit in wood stove.
I'm more likely to handle emergencies and repairs, especially on the roof.
Aha, a woman after my own heart. Where were you when I was single; alas, probably in diapers. My 75 year old neighbor-lady has a collection of chain saws, mostly going towards electric, as she has problems pulling the cord anymore.
Plumbing is the worst of all projects. It just...never seems to be one thing. It's always this weird chain of failed things. "I'll just replace the stem in this faucet to stop that leak..." an entire day later, I've replaced every pipe, supply line, and valve there. Oh, and the entire faucet. (Maybe that's just living in a house built in the 60s that the last owner did not care for particularly well.)
May I never have to dig up tiles ever again (no longer permitted anymore anyway...)
Plumbing is always one or more of: difficult to access, stinks to hell, still leaks. Turning a valve to perform a fix has an equal chance of breaking it... Although I will say flexible piping may just be the greatest invention of my lifetime for the DIY homeowner.
Best thing I ever did was hire my best friend to re-plumb the entire house: my father's work of 4 decades and 3 piping systems, as we gradually grew from one toilet and sink to today's 10+ fixtures. My how easily the conversion joints used to like to freeze!
Once I armoured and spiked the exit sewage pipe, so it didn't get broken by trespassing snowmobiles, all has been good!
Random person: "You're handy!" A: "No, I've just owned a house for long time".
>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.
I think the idea is more that as a young woman the only value you're reliably perceived to have is on the sexual marketplace, and when you age out of that you have no value beyond what you're assumed to provide to a family.
I suppose this is true if you plan to be a stay at home mom. If you used your beauty as a tool to advance in your career (as some people, both male and female do), then you will find this diminishes as you age. Women who were never particularly beautiful to begin, or didn't bank on youthful flirtation to get by, don't suddenly feel invisible as they reach middle age (where I am now).
I don't think that had anything at all to do with Sinead O' Connor's "fall".
She had depression, psychological issues, and trauma. She was also alienated from the "business" and could not easily play along (she was perhaps autistic or bpd). So she fell by the wayside.
Nothing at all to do with their cuteness or hotness factor "fading out". She fell by the wayside in the industry when she was still very young and cute anyway.
Besides, there are tons of "nasty" singers, of both sexes, with much nastier attitudes (confrontational, divas, or even downright criminal), that are worse looking, and had fine long careers anyway.
"lacked enduring grace" is a funny complaint from someone who obviously has none. Hopefully you never have to carry what she did--a lifetime of severe mental illness, losing your own child to suicide. What's that expression for when someone should be ashamed of what they've just said--ah, yes. Bite your tongue.
And she's an absolutely wild person to cite as someone who cared about being cute and leveraging her femininity. The fact that she's seen through this lens despite obviously not fitting the framework, when other explanations loom large, is telling to the larger point--to some, it doesn't matter what you do, how accomplished you are, or how conspicuously you don't fit the mold. Sexual object first, piece of garbage second.
Finally, the idea that the great tragedy of my life, the ultimate raw deal, is that, at 41, homeless men don’t catcall me and guys at the gym don’t bother me because they no longer see me as having value on the sexual marketplace and see me as having no value beyond what they assume I provide to a family doesn’t make any sense to me.
Well, the thing is that most people want to be seen as socially valuable. If you don't then I can imagine how this wouldn't make any sense to you. If you do, then I think you're just being flip and haven't actually considered what I wrote. Moreover, "The great tragedy of my life, the ultimate raw deal" are words that you wrote about this circumstance, not somebody else. It can regrettable and frustrating and in need of amelioration without being "the ultimate raw deal;" that's just straw rhetoric.
I don't think the idea is about missing the homeless and gym bros catcalling. It's more about missing a kind of power (the power of hotness) that worked for romantic, social, and business advancement, and starts working less and less. Like "hey, I had all the top picks, why they ignore me now?". Or "I was the *it* girl at work, guys listened to me, why I'm just another coworker now, and younger hires get all the attention and kudos?".
Of course this mainly happens if one has based their esteem of such treatment. This might not always be conscious though, as the effects of such power can be taken for granted, even if not it's something someone actively yields, and then there's a sadness and a realization when it's gone.
No, that's not even a little bit what the idea is! It's surreal that I'm still explaining this.
The idea is that regardless how a woman conducts herself and irrespective of what she achieves, she will be treated first like a sexual object, and then like a mostly irrelevant baker of cookies.
And the idea is wrong. On its face. I work in an office full of women who are neither sexual objects nor irrelevant bakers of cookies. They are getting shit done: designing software, running projects, running teams, solving problems. We are not an abnormal office.
Yes, this certainly happens within some communities and / or families. It's simply nowhere near universal. This weirdly dystopic idea of female existence in the western world is overblown.
I don't defend the strongest version of this claim myself. It's obviously not true de jure, as it was in the past. Women are allowed to vote and have jobs, as you say. The ideal of equality in written into the law. But in some venues and for some people it's still de rigueur. And pretty much all women are aware of the undercurrents of the strong version in the culture, even if few will cop to such attitudes overtly. Women feel pressure to treat themselves like sexual objects (to spend undue money and time on their wardrobes and hair and makeup) because they know they will often be judged first and foremost on their appearance, whether or not they have productive jobs or other qualities of note. If you decline to participate in that arm's race, there are social costs to pay. Women often feel their opinions are worth less than men's and struggle to be taken as seriously--this is one thing that I've heard multiple trans people opine about. Or just consider the Karen meme, which evolved into a straightforward way to punish (middle-age, white) women for complaining about things. Maybe you've also seen a woman preface a reasonable complaint or concern with "I don't want to be a Karen, but..."? If it's about the ostensible bad behavior it's pretty strange that it's never, ever applied to men. Discouraging 'older' (post reproductive age) women from having and expressing opinions communicates that they aren't worth very much. There are plenty of tendrils of affecting sexism that can darken a woman's experience, and many of them connect to the core idea that women aren't useful for much except being pretty, making babies, and taking care of said babies. And you can hold that idea (in competition with other ideas in your head) and treat women differently (in ways you might not perceive) on account of it, while also sharing a workplace with them and espousing conventional ideas of equality. I catch myself harboring related thoughts all the time--not in the big lumbering conscious thinky parts of my mind, where I interrogate ideas directly, but in the quiet fast reacty parts, gone before the moment is. That I absorbed these inclinations passively from the culture (I don't remember reasoning myself into them) is to me satisfactory evidence that they are in fact in the culture--which means they are in other people's minds, too.
That would be true if you don't pursue any other value - and many don't. But one could purse values and achievements, and to value themselves not based on their "sexual attraction rating".
fr, how is it that in “the discourse” I’m somehow the sad sack for getting professional haircuts and wearing clothing that could be considered an “outfit”
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?
My gut instinct is the type of people (let's be honest, men) who like to coerce/pressure their partners into sex start young. As they age, they may continue to "date" younger partners because people their own age "wise up" over time.
Of course, there's another big reason why older dudes pick younger partners - to help them live in denial about their aging. Being with someone decades younger means you're exposed to things the current crop of youth are into, you go out to clubs and concerts in your 40s (or whatever) and you can start thinking of yourself as the "cool old guy" - or maybe, forget about your age entirely, for a blessed moment.
Denial about aging, convincing themselves they are cooler and smarter than they are, hiding their insecurities/bad personality with a naive partner (until they grow wiser), etc. The man child is very real. He’s everywhere.
Also, youth is usually associated with hotness. I guess men tend to be more visual, as the saying goes, though this is unsurprisingly one of those hotly contested things.
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.
This roughly describes my marriage (and prior dating life) as well. My wife and I joke that, because men die earlier, the 11 year age gap probably means we will die around the same time.
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.
But what lesson does a failed cancelation hold? There's any number of May December romances where everyone essentially turns a blind eye--thus article specifically mentions Leonardo Dicaprio. What's the message when there js no uniformity?
By failed cancellation, you mean the fact that so many people maintained social and business ties to Epstein, even after he was convicted of trafficking young women?
Now that the Miami Herald and subsequent stories exposed his trafficking *and* the sweetheart deal he got from authorities, public opinion went strongly against him––with a lot of residual disgust for the men who turned a blind eye. Those who had admired or accepted Epstein's behavior before came out and denounced it (whether or not they were still telling their buddies behind closed doors that they believed this was just the quid-pro-quo that rich men have always arranged with poor or naive young women).
So collectively, our ethical judgments can have an influence (albeit sometimes in ways I might not always like when it comes to other issues––for instance, the market for young women to sell their eggs, which seems to now be accepted as ethical).
To me, DiCaprio doesn't seem at all comparable to Epstein. He dates many young women who consent to be his date or girlfriend, many of them actresses or models when their own (low-level) fame––i.e. an old-fashioned "playboy." Whereas Epstein had scouts who went out to find vulnerable girls, to bring them to his homes under the pretense of giving massages, groomed them to perform sex acts, and then sent them home. A smaller cadre would trail him into appointments and meetings, but these weren't "dates" in any sense, either.
If people claim DiCaprio is a "predator" who "grooms" girls (I haven't heard that), I think it's nonsense and not a judgment shared by the public. In fact, the question of judgment I raised is exactly the capacity to make those kinds of distinctions (Epstein versus DiCaprio).
I mean that social censure is far less dependable than actual criminal charges. Anybody facing rape charges is probably concerned primarily with prison time while reputational damage is a distant second.
With unsavory behavior that is not illegal there is no uniformity when it comes to popular condemnation, as this article points out.
As to why this issue has (arguendo) so captured a non-trivial part of the Gen Z discourse, I think your last intuition (i.e., that Gen Z is just terrified of sex in general) really serves to animate a lot of your previous ones.
On one hand, that people younger than 30 find sex terrifying isn't entirely surprising or even unusual. Sexuality is humanity's most powerful driving force. Anything powerful enough to be useful is, necessarily, powerful enough to be dangerous. But on the other hand, that never really seemed to prevent young people from going at it anyway. . . until the 1990s. Things have only gotten worse since then.
Why that might be is an interesting question, but I think it has a lot to do with the infantilization of society in general, and its emasculation in particular. Society used to encourage people to grow up. Attempts were made to orient incentives in that direction. These days, all of the incentives run the other direction, and there seems to be a concerted effort to prevent young people from stepping into positions of responsibility and authority.
I think one reason that Gen Z might find the age gap idea so fixating is that it ties in with that forcible delay in coming of age, particularly for men. It's bad enough that many young women are naturally attracted to older, more established men for the reasons you describe. That's always been a thing. Historically, this has likely incentivized a lot of young men to go out and make something of themselves. But when the generation(s) ahead are both at an advantage in terms of attracting female attention and seem to be actively preventing one from becoming established in one's own right. . . it's difficult to see how that wouldn't result in a lot of generational resentment.
It does raise an interesting question. Today the lack of the ability of a lot of younger men to secure female partners of any sort is seen as because of their lack of ambition - how many of them seem content (at least in popular culture) to come home from work (if they work) and just play MMOs with their friends all night (or whatever).
But what if it's the inverse? What if the anti-sex, dating averse culture has convinced a lot of guys it's just not worth striving to impress a woman, because the odds are fairly long regardless, so they might as well just do what seems enjoyable in the moment.
Oh, I'm definitely convinced that it is the inverse, but I think that the "anti-sex, dating averse culture" is itself a symptom, not a cause. The cause is Boomers refusing to allow their children, especially their sons, to grow up. It's not that young men have no ambition. It's not even that they have ambition, but that the risk-reward situation is so screwed up that young men make the rational decision that it's not worth it. It's that Boomers actively encouraging young people to delay taking on the kind of responsibility that turns people into functional adults. Indeed, I'd argue that many Boomers are actively preventing younger people from doing this, only to turn around and complain that their successors have no ambition or responsibility.
I don't think using "Boomer" in this sense is quite right. I'm a child of boomers, and I'm 44. The average child of boomers is likely younger, but still probably a 30something millennial. Gen Z are the kids of Gen X, and some elder millennials. Indeed, my daughter is 14 and firmly in Gen Z (My 10-year old son is probably part of the next, undefined generation).
No, assuming the priors of this debate, it's gen X screwing with their kids.
I think it's mostly fears of school shootings and predators from shows like SVU combined with video games and porn that let kids/young adults isolate in unhealthy ways.
Look at the spike in high school boys describing themselves as conservative after 2020. Our conventional definition of generations doesn't match up to reality--there's a split between older and younger zoomers.
I think you're placing far too much emphasis on the influence of personal psychology imparted by the individual family unit as opposed to macro scale cultural and economic structures that no longer incentivize the type of risk-taking/ambition in question. Low wages and slow wage growth, exploding housing costs, centralization of major commerce away from small business, and an unprecedented ubiquity of marketing aimed at creating dependent consumers (and plenty more large scale forces we barely understand) are all exerting far greater force on both family rearing unit and individual decision-maker than the advice a parent gives.
What exactly would an ambitious man do differently from the man who comes home from work and then does something fun and worthwhile? Work so hard to advance himself that he is always working late and brings his work home with him? Why would that impress a woman? I thought men never having time to spend with their wife and/or kids because they were always working was bad. It seems like when I was a kid there were a ton of movies about men who neglected their family and friends because they were so ambitious at work and had to learn to care less about work to mend their relationships (just off the top of my head, "Hook," "Jingle All the Way," "Jungle 2 Jungle," "Liar Liar," and "Jack Frost").
Is it some kind of foot-in-the-door thing, where a woman is impressed by the man's career success when they start dating and aren't really relying on each other yet and only later, after they are in a committed relationship, realizes what a raw deal she signed up for? I guess I can see some women being short-sighted like that, but it seems like lots of others would know better.
Personally, those movies made a big impression on me. I concluded that ambitious men were jerks and vowed to not grow up to be one. As an adult I have succeeded in that goal. When I'm done with work I spend my time hanging out with my wife and taking care of my daughter, and don't give my job another thought for the rest of the day. Honestly this isn't hard, I can't imagine having a job that's more interesting than playing with an adorable baby or watching an old sitcom with one's spouse.
Is it that parents try to keep their children from growing up, or is it that 20,30,40 year olds choose to remain children?
I have a friend with a 40 year old child who has three children. My friend has taken on the responsibility for all of them. Of course, my friend has no authority over the daughter and grandkids.
It's hard to chuck out kids and tell them to sink or swim, especially when it looks like they're drowning. I get it. Been there done that. But I refuse to take on the responsibility when I'm not granted the authority. Sometimes you've got to hand over the tent, camping stuff, a bicycle, rice and beans. Therapy is good if you can afford it.
Millennial here. My boomer mother absolutely worked as hard as she could to keep me any my brother from growing up. She was terrified of her kids becoming adults because we would leave her. And, to her mind, end up resenting her the way she resented her parents. (A fate she very nicely engineered by her sabotage).
Granted, as I've found out since, the lengths that she went to infantalize us were unusual, but I can absolutely believe that boomer parents worked to keep their kids from maturing. My parents didn't spring from Zeus's forehead, you know?
I think Boomer parents were the first to experience the hard core pressure that everything your kids do is up to you. There is definitely a message out there that your kids are what you make them. I know I bought that for a long time. So, when my oldest had some real difficulties making the kid to adult transition, we had to learn that it was up to him, not me. It got scary and ugly for awhile. It was frightening to watch him seriously struggle and not know if he'd make it. He did and is quite successful now.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think a lot of parents have trouble letting their kids fail or suffer the consequences of their stupid choices.
Obviously there's a huge "both/and" bit going on here, but I'm not just talking about individual Boomers and their individual children. I'm talking about the Boomer generation and all generations thereafter. So parents and children, yes, but really, leadership roles across the board.
Take politicians, for example. Almost the exact same set of people have been running the political scene at all levels--federal, state, and local--since at least the early 1980s. 77 of 100 U.S. Senators, about half of U.S. Representatives, and 29 of 50 state governors were born before 1965. Many of them entered politics in their 20s. Today, that's basically unheard of.
I'd bet money you could say the same thing about leadership roles in any organization one might care to name. Academics (the average age of university professors and presidents is something like 20 years older than it was a hundred years ago). Professionals (e.g., lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc.). Business executives.
Not just white collar jobs, either. Skilled trades too. It's one thing to go into a skilled trade knowing that yeah, you'll have to spend half a dozen years doing scut work to both learn the skills and establish yourself as a reliable tradesman before taking on more desirable positions with more responsibility. It's another thing to know that it's going to be ten, fifteen, even twenty years stuck at the entry level before there's any opportunity to move up.
Agree on politicians. I wonder why there isn't more new talent moving up. Could it be that politics has such a bad reputation and not that many people want to go into it?
There's plenty of new talent. Most of it hasn't been given a chance to "move up," as most of the offices/positions that would represent an upward move aren't being vacated on the sort of timescale that would allow such moves.
It's perfectly normal to be scared of sex. The solution has always been to actually engage in the act. For some reason that's not happening with younger generations and so I conclude that humanity is doomed.
But are they scared or just tired of growing up in a country/culture/etc where sex seems to be the all-consuming force? Like I’m not scared of sex at all and I honestly grew up feeling exhausted with how Americans seemed so pathologically obsessed with it. Whether it’s engaging with or denying their lust and all the other nuanced stuff inbetween, it just felt ever so present. I mean, on one hand, I get why, sex is a huge component of life…but, like, there’s other beautiful things out there.
If you want to be a priest, fine. But it looks to me like the change is involuntary and that the lives of a lot of young people these days are filled with porn and loneliness. That is not an improvement.
What does being a priest have anything to do with appreciating other beautiful things? You can just be cool with sex and not overly preoccupied with it and be excited by life in many other ways.
Maybe they just prefer a slower pace or the language of desire/lust/intimacy has become a bit more sophisticated/complicated these days. I mean, who really knows, but not everything has to boiled down to the physical act itself.
Priests don't eschew just sex, they also swear off marriage and relationships.
As far as I can tell the switch to sexlessness is a) also correlated with falling rates of dating/being in a relationship and b) it's involuntary. There is a sense in the commentariat that young men filling up their days with porn, video games and loneliness. That is a problem and I suspect it's going to play out in very ugly ways.
Right. Since religion is also declining in the US, I don’t think we gotta worry about that one. I think maybe putting young and old men through some EQ training or whatever might help everyone out a little. Half joking. Half.
All I'm staying is that for people who have never had sex before, regardless of age, the first time is a big deal, attended by powerful emotions and apprehensions.
Yes, granted, historically that never stopped people from getting it on. Of course, a large part of that arguably had to do with well-established, community-based traditions that helped smooth the transition from, let's be real here, childhood to adulthood. Sex is, and always has been, a big deal. Traditional societies have ways of embodying that fact that provide support and guidance. Contemporary, atomized, deracinated society, very much does not.
I read somewhere recently that sex is the gasoline of civilization. Powerful, useful, and essential when used responsibility, which requires strong, well-engineered, well-maintained equipment. Infrastructure, even. Gasoline is the kind of thing you let young, immature, irresponsible people (but I repeat myself) play around with. Unless you're trying to kill them, in which case covering them with napalm is an incredibly effective way of going about it.
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.
I feel you about liking men of a certain age. To me-men in their forties are sort of peak. So now that I'm in my forties, men my age are hot to me. IDK how it will work as I age but there is definitely something to being physically attracted to a certain type.
I'm a lesbian, but when I was an older teenager and thought I was straight, I routinely dated men in their mid-20s because the boys my age were too immature and men in their 20s often have the maturity of an older teen girl. Nowadays that would be seriously frowned upon, but it made a lot of sense to me (and, incidentally, my parents) at the time.
Gay culture also has less stigma around one-night stands or casual sex than at least officially sanctioned straight culture does - it’s interesting that this piece doesn’t really get into the distinction between that and a relationship. When I was a gay man in my 20s I wasn’t interested in actually dating someone much older but would happily have hooked up with them and not felt exploited by doing so.
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.
Continuing on Freddie's explanation of what defines morality: "I would again underline that evolution can sometimes be an explanation but can never be a justification."
I don't think that this is nearly as correct as the previous quote. It's true if you have an e.g. deontological moral system, but not really otherwise. The reason why we intuitively feel that murder is bad, for example, is because we evolved in a context where antisocial behavior was strongly selected against. We ultimately underpin our moral systems with our intuitions about what is good or bad, which have distinct evolutionary reasons. "We evolved to feel this way" is often the ultimate arbiter in why something is morally justified.
Overcoming our feelings and intuitions, having them be of secondary importance, or otherwise going counter to them is not the default moral action. It happens for edge cases and when one or several intuitions trump another intuition.
None of this is to say that there should be no age of consent law or that it should be violable, of course. Just as someone's intuitive desire to take someone else's property as their own should be overcome in any good moral system and legally prohibited, so should this. The particular definition of moral justification Freddie made was unsupported, which is what I was drawing attention to.
I don't think this is anymore true than saying that, because we evolved to stock up on calories to prepare for lean times, you should eat as many M&Ms as you can.
Intuition plays a part in morality, but the world we live in is not the same world in which those intuitions evolved and it makes sense to question whether those intuitions still accomplish what they evolved to accomplish.
Even this may be being a little to generous to evolved intuitions.
I'm not saying that following one's intuitions is the best way to be moral or that all intuitions are moral justifications. I'm saying that we have no underpinning for our moral systems other than our evolved intuitions, presuming that our moral systems come from humanity.
The question of "Why should I do what my moral system tells me to?" is important. It used to generally be accepted that the answers was something like "because God/s say/s so and otherwise bad things will happen". We're generally moving against that - a more common answer now, and a common answer back then as well, is "because I feel this to be right". The reason we feel things to be right is because they satisfy both our intuitions and some amount of logical reasoning on top of them. The intuitions for prosocial behavior tend to be those we classify as "moral intuitions", but there are some exceptions. Those exceptions generally stem from empathy (the most prosocial intuition).
To further elaborate on how moral judgements either come directly from our evolved intuitions or are derived from them: For example, if we were evolved from r-strategists we would likely not have a strong intuition against infanticide. This would likely lead to "abortions" being generally considered permissible until some amount of time after birth, rather than some time before or not at all. The definition of personhood and what moral value we place on an infant life are strongly determined by our evolution rather than some form of calculation. In fact, this problem, and many moral problems are extremely hard to judge or justify based on some calculation rather than instinct.
There is a theory that killing one's wife upon abandonment has a significant evolutionary component. Reputational loss in small communities could easily have detrimental consequences.
"I would again underline that evolution can sometimes be an explanation but can never be a justification."
But evolution applied to the individual is psychology, and surely we would admit that under certain circumstances we can't hold an individual morally culpable for things which they did as a result of aberrant psychology?
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.
In my view, a lot of the criticism of DiCaprio––which is often more mockery than finger-wagging criticism––is not about his decision not to marry. It's that the specificity of the age of his girlfriends (all very close to 22 or younger), and the fact that he so frequently replaces them for the next 22 year old, seems to say a lot about what a romantic relationship actually is for him.
Someone dates many women over the course of 30 years, but never once felt an attachment that lasted more than a year or two? If conducted honestly, sure, that is an arrangement where no one is exploited. But the gossip and laughter might be conveying an implicit judgment––which I'm not immune to––that is probably a man who doesn't like or care about women enough to feel actual love for one as an individual and equal person.
Yes. The conclusion I draw is not “Leo is a predator” but “Leo seems like a bit of a shallow manchild in the romantic sphere.” It’s not a crime, and the worst I can do is roll my eyes when I meet a man like this.
Manchild, yes, but possibly something akin to a certain contempt for women that blocks the love/vulnerability that comes with lasting attachment. Admittedly that's a vibe, but it seems to emanate from some men (Bill Maher) and not others (George Clooney) who date well into mid life without committing.
The upshot for me: there are a lot of men who don't like women (including plenty who marry). I don't like men who don't like women.
Agree with all of that. I think it’s normal and fine for people to say “Leo’s got issues” and to notice those patterns and to speculate about what they might mean about his character, but it’s bananas for people to paint him or any other men who dares consenting women above the age of majority as predatory groomers.
The DeCaprio discourse reminds me of an old acquaintance of mine who managed to strike it rich join the original Dot Com bubble. My (admitttedly third-hand) understanding is that he has had a very hard time finding a wife because he has never been able to tell whether the women he dated were interested in him or his money.
While I have very little insight into DiCaprios' psyche, I wouldn't be surprised if he has something similar going on. He grew up a heart throb and became a very wealthy movie star. I could easily see him having the same sort of concern that the women who want to date him are more interested in the idea of him than the real him (recently staring in Killers of thr Flower Moon cant help), and basically refusing to get too committed to a relationship as a defense mechanism. I'll agree that that's a little sad - I've gone into pretty much every relationship with the idea that it could end in marriage - but I don't think it's wrong or harmful to the women he's involved with. I also don't even think it's strong evidence that he's somehow exploiting them or doesn't like them. It's may merely be that he's not comfortable or interstate in a long term relationship.
I also don't blame him for exclusively dating 22 year olds in this context. I'm sure some of this is that he finds 22 year olds more physically attractive, but I think some of it is, if you are going to have a string of short-term relationships, 22 year olds are the ones to do it with because they are more likely to be up for it. At 22, a lot of people are not necessarily looking to settle down. They also tend to have less commitments so are probably more up for a movie star lifestyle. If you are 45, even if you aren't anxious about getting married, you probably have a job that gets in the way of partying or vacationing or just hanging out with DeCaprio while he's filming in some foreign location. If you thought the multimillionaire was going to marry you, you may be willing to take a sabbatical or something, but if you're dating DeCaprio that seems like a bad gamble.
DeCaprio had a very real reaction to becoming a heartthrob in Titanic, running away from any romantic roles (or anything even vaguely appealing to women) for the remainder of his career. He seems profoundly uncomfortable with being desired. I wouldn't be surprised if he has some sort of subconscious contempt towards anyone who would find him desirable.
Yeah Gen Z probably doesn't know this, but after Titanic came out Leo was absolutely EVERYWHERE. Half the magazine covers were pictures of him, every single girl in every school had a crush on him, he was on every show, it was nuts. Maybe the closest thing to Beatlemania I'll ever experience. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that left a psychological scar on him that persists to this day
On the other hand, I think it's common that people propelled to global fame as 12 or 14 year olds, like DiCaprio, and grew up from that point onwards with huge amounts of money, yes men, and sycophant helpers, will often be emotionally and developmentaly stunned to a much younger age than their biological one. Which probably explains his case.
I do think there are two things going on with large age gap vs narrow age gap couples. First, for narrow age gap, let's just say 'these are peers.' DiCaprio of course, doesn't have many peers, and likely has gobs of groupies ... how does the song go- "We got a lot of little teenage blue eyed groupies. Who do anything we say" [lyrics from Cover Of The Rolling Stone].
Thus, you're either married to a peer, or a groupie.
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.
I get that it's annoying, and I think you're right. But I also think you should consider how imperative it is that I write defensively on this topic.
I get it...but I also kind of subscribe in the hope that you keep the defensive writing to a minimum. (Its not like the trolls will ever be stated by your defensive comments).
Yeah when you tackled this I'm like "Freddie's about to say something that's basically so reasonable it's banal and some people are going to take one line out of it and freak tf out"
I find that there’s almost always a rough equivalent on the other side (rough, not perfect). If we’re going to feel bad for women feeling they have to work so hard to be hot, take a moment for young men who haven’t found a career path yet, drive a beat up Geo Metro and live in a single room somewhere (or at home).
Or, more likely, young men who overextend themselves on cars, clothes etc that they can’t really afford. And dating. I remember avoiding dating as a young man in my late 20s for long periods just because I couldn’t afford it. There’s a funny scene in the first season of Atlanta where Ern has to sneak out and call for help because he doesn’t have enough money in the bank to pay for dessert. Really hit home, I think maybe not just for me.
The struggle is real! (I kid, a little)
I've always thought that a lot of the discourse around who has it harder in dating and relationships often could benefit from walking in the other sides shoes.
In particular, there's this pervasive sense in which the man is the dominant one in the relationship and the woman has to spend a lot of effort and self sacrifice conforming to the man's needs while the man just does what he wants and ignores the woman's feelings. Maybe that is the median relationship model, but certainly does not describe any relationship I've been in and I've seen a lot of other relationships that deviate from that mold.
There's this meme about relationships where, if you each member of the relationship how much housework they do, it most always adds up to significantly more than 100%. I think this is true of a lot of aspects of relationships. On pretty much every metric, I suspect that people over estimate how much they give and underestimate how much their partner does. It's just so much easier to think of times you've compromised because you experience the compromise while your partner may not realize you didn't actually want to do the thing. (In this respect, I'm open to the idea that, while I've experienced being the more accommodating one in most of my relationships, my significant others have experienced the opposite).
And again, there’s always a rough equivalent. In the relationships that I see, women do more of the day to day housework, men have a “honeydew” list (look it up if not familiar), handle emergencies and repairs.
I’m sure it happens, but in marriages between men and women, I have never seen a woman on top of or under a house. I’ve never seen a woman with a chainsaw, cutting up the tree that fell on a fence during a recent storm. Men take on plumbing, wiring issues etc, and any man who doesn’t is held in low esteem, and not just by his wife.
Women do more of the day to day with the expectation that men will take care of the type of work that men traditionally do, even if it’s a matter of finding someone else to do the work and make sure that it’s done properly. Also: anything to do with the car. That’s all yours, gentlemen, and woe betide you if you don’t look after it.
What's wonderful about living in a relatively tolerant society is the flexibility to go against the norm. I don't know any other woman besides myself who uses a chainsaw. BUT I don't split wood! I prefer to cut up (green) logs of the size that will fit in wood stove.
I'm more likely to handle emergencies and repairs, especially on the roof.
However, my husband is the income earner.
Aha, a woman after my own heart. Where were you when I was single; alas, probably in diapers. My 75 year old neighbor-lady has a collection of chain saws, mostly going towards electric, as she has problems pulling the cord anymore.
My mother roofed our house while 8 months pregnant with me, if she is to be believed!
I don't mind the typical male chores, or most construction, but my arthritic spine detests most plumbing with a passion.
Plumbing is the worst of all projects. It just...never seems to be one thing. It's always this weird chain of failed things. "I'll just replace the stem in this faucet to stop that leak..." an entire day later, I've replaced every pipe, supply line, and valve there. Oh, and the entire faucet. (Maybe that's just living in a house built in the 60s that the last owner did not care for particularly well.)
May I never have to dig up tiles ever again (no longer permitted anymore anyway...)
Plumbing is always one or more of: difficult to access, stinks to hell, still leaks. Turning a valve to perform a fix has an equal chance of breaking it... Although I will say flexible piping may just be the greatest invention of my lifetime for the DIY homeowner.
Best thing I ever did was hire my best friend to re-plumb the entire house: my father's work of 4 decades and 3 piping systems, as we gradually grew from one toilet and sink to today's 10+ fixtures. My how easily the conversion joints used to like to freeze!
Once I armoured and spiked the exit sewage pipe, so it didn't get broken by trespassing snowmobiles, all has been good!
Random person: "You're handy!" A: "No, I've just owned a house for long time".
`young men who overextend themselves on cars, clothes etc that they can’t really afford.'
Young women also can't afford many things. They don't use it as an excuse to dress like slobs or ignore the affect their appearance has on others.
It doesn't actually take that much time or effort for men to learn how to dress, and it can be done quite cheaply.
>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.
I think the idea is more that as a young woman the only value you're reliably perceived to have is on the sexual marketplace, and when you age out of that you have no value beyond what you're assumed to provide to a family.
I suppose this is true if you plan to be a stay at home mom. If you used your beauty as a tool to advance in your career (as some people, both male and female do), then you will find this diminishes as you age. Women who were never particularly beautiful to begin, or didn't bank on youthful flirtation to get by, don't suddenly feel invisible as they reach middle age (where I am now).
"If you used your beauty as a tool to ... "
I took this as the cause of the fall of Snead O'Connor. Cute in youthful feminity;
she lacked enduring grace. A nasty attitude didn't hold water when not supported by youthful countenance.
I don't think that had anything at all to do with Sinead O' Connor's "fall".
She had depression, psychological issues, and trauma. She was also alienated from the "business" and could not easily play along (she was perhaps autistic or bpd). So she fell by the wayside.
Nothing at all to do with their cuteness or hotness factor "fading out". She fell by the wayside in the industry when she was still very young and cute anyway.
Besides, there are tons of "nasty" singers, of both sexes, with much nastier attitudes (confrontational, divas, or even downright criminal), that are worse looking, and had fine long careers anyway.
"lacked enduring grace" is a funny complaint from someone who obviously has none. Hopefully you never have to carry what she did--a lifetime of severe mental illness, losing your own child to suicide. What's that expression for when someone should be ashamed of what they've just said--ah, yes. Bite your tongue.
And she's an absolutely wild person to cite as someone who cared about being cute and leveraging her femininity. The fact that she's seen through this lens despite obviously not fitting the framework, when other explanations loom large, is telling to the larger point--to some, it doesn't matter what you do, how accomplished you are, or how conspicuously you don't fit the mold. Sexual object first, piece of garbage second.
Ok, let me edit my comment:
Finally, the idea that the great tragedy of my life, the ultimate raw deal, is that, at 41, homeless men don’t catcall me and guys at the gym don’t bother me because they no longer see me as having value on the sexual marketplace and see me as having no value beyond what they assume I provide to a family doesn’t make any sense to me.
Well, the thing is that most people want to be seen as socially valuable. If you don't then I can imagine how this wouldn't make any sense to you. If you do, then I think you're just being flip and haven't actually considered what I wrote. Moreover, "The great tragedy of my life, the ultimate raw deal" are words that you wrote about this circumstance, not somebody else. It can regrettable and frustrating and in need of amelioration without being "the ultimate raw deal;" that's just straw rhetoric.
I don't think the idea is about missing the homeless and gym bros catcalling. It's more about missing a kind of power (the power of hotness) that worked for romantic, social, and business advancement, and starts working less and less. Like "hey, I had all the top picks, why they ignore me now?". Or "I was the *it* girl at work, guys listened to me, why I'm just another coworker now, and younger hires get all the attention and kudos?".
Of course this mainly happens if one has based their esteem of such treatment. This might not always be conscious though, as the effects of such power can be taken for granted, even if not it's something someone actively yields, and then there's a sadness and a realization when it's gone.
No, that's not even a little bit what the idea is! It's surreal that I'm still explaining this.
The idea is that regardless how a woman conducts herself and irrespective of what she achieves, she will be treated first like a sexual object, and then like a mostly irrelevant baker of cookies.
And the idea is wrong. On its face. I work in an office full of women who are neither sexual objects nor irrelevant bakers of cookies. They are getting shit done: designing software, running projects, running teams, solving problems. We are not an abnormal office.
Yes, this certainly happens within some communities and / or families. It's simply nowhere near universal. This weirdly dystopic idea of female existence in the western world is overblown.
I don't defend the strongest version of this claim myself. It's obviously not true de jure, as it was in the past. Women are allowed to vote and have jobs, as you say. The ideal of equality in written into the law. But in some venues and for some people it's still de rigueur. And pretty much all women are aware of the undercurrents of the strong version in the culture, even if few will cop to such attitudes overtly. Women feel pressure to treat themselves like sexual objects (to spend undue money and time on their wardrobes and hair and makeup) because they know they will often be judged first and foremost on their appearance, whether or not they have productive jobs or other qualities of note. If you decline to participate in that arm's race, there are social costs to pay. Women often feel their opinions are worth less than men's and struggle to be taken as seriously--this is one thing that I've heard multiple trans people opine about. Or just consider the Karen meme, which evolved into a straightforward way to punish (middle-age, white) women for complaining about things. Maybe you've also seen a woman preface a reasonable complaint or concern with "I don't want to be a Karen, but..."? If it's about the ostensible bad behavior it's pretty strange that it's never, ever applied to men. Discouraging 'older' (post reproductive age) women from having and expressing opinions communicates that they aren't worth very much. There are plenty of tendrils of affecting sexism that can darken a woman's experience, and many of them connect to the core idea that women aren't useful for much except being pretty, making babies, and taking care of said babies. And you can hold that idea (in competition with other ideas in your head) and treat women differently (in ways you might not perceive) on account of it, while also sharing a workplace with them and espousing conventional ideas of equality. I catch myself harboring related thoughts all the time--not in the big lumbering conscious thinky parts of my mind, where I interrogate ideas directly, but in the quiet fast reacty parts, gone before the moment is. That I absorbed these inclinations passively from the culture (I don't remember reasoning myself into them) is to me satisfactory evidence that they are in fact in the culture--which means they are in other people's minds, too.
That would be true if you don't pursue any other value - and many don't. But one could purse values and achievements, and to value themselves not based on their "sexual attraction rating".
`I am absolutely gobsmacked at how much money women have to spend and how much time they have to waste to look hot'
I am absolutely gobsmacked at how little money men spend and how little time they put into making themselves look attractive.
https://twitter.com/CHAPOTRAPHOUSE/status/893271690704281600
fr, how is it that in “the discourse” I’m somehow the sad sack for getting professional haircuts and wearing clothing that could be considered an “outfit”
Whatever happened to "half your age plus seven"?
I believe it's mentioned explicitly in point number four in the post?
Yeah, this rule makes sense until the lower age becomes 18, I think, at least for legal ramifications.
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?
My gut instinct is the type of people (let's be honest, men) who like to coerce/pressure their partners into sex start young. As they age, they may continue to "date" younger partners because people their own age "wise up" over time.
Of course, there's another big reason why older dudes pick younger partners - to help them live in denial about their aging. Being with someone decades younger means you're exposed to things the current crop of youth are into, you go out to clubs and concerts in your 40s (or whatever) and you can start thinking of yourself as the "cool old guy" - or maybe, forget about your age entirely, for a blessed moment.
Denial about aging, convincing themselves they are cooler and smarter than they are, hiding their insecurities/bad personality with a naive partner (until they grow wiser), etc. The man child is very real. He’s everywhere.
Also, youth is usually associated with hotness. I guess men tend to be more visual, as the saying goes, though this is unsurprisingly one of those hotly contested things.
This topic makes me feel sick
Body parts with greater surface area/volume ratios than feet:
-Hands (feet with longer toes)
-Ears (nothing but folds)
-Genitals (hard to say which is flappier/foldier)
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.
This roughly describes my marriage (and prior dating life) as well. My wife and I joke that, because men die earlier, the 11 year age gap probably means we will die around the same time.
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.
But what lesson does a failed cancelation hold? There's any number of May December romances where everyone essentially turns a blind eye--thus article specifically mentions Leonardo Dicaprio. What's the message when there js no uniformity?
By failed cancellation, you mean the fact that so many people maintained social and business ties to Epstein, even after he was convicted of trafficking young women?
Now that the Miami Herald and subsequent stories exposed his trafficking *and* the sweetheart deal he got from authorities, public opinion went strongly against him––with a lot of residual disgust for the men who turned a blind eye. Those who had admired or accepted Epstein's behavior before came out and denounced it (whether or not they were still telling their buddies behind closed doors that they believed this was just the quid-pro-quo that rich men have always arranged with poor or naive young women).
So collectively, our ethical judgments can have an influence (albeit sometimes in ways I might not always like when it comes to other issues––for instance, the market for young women to sell their eggs, which seems to now be accepted as ethical).
To me, DiCaprio doesn't seem at all comparable to Epstein. He dates many young women who consent to be his date or girlfriend, many of them actresses or models when their own (low-level) fame––i.e. an old-fashioned "playboy." Whereas Epstein had scouts who went out to find vulnerable girls, to bring them to his homes under the pretense of giving massages, groomed them to perform sex acts, and then sent them home. A smaller cadre would trail him into appointments and meetings, but these weren't "dates" in any sense, either.
If people claim DiCaprio is a "predator" who "grooms" girls (I haven't heard that), I think it's nonsense and not a judgment shared by the public. In fact, the question of judgment I raised is exactly the capacity to make those kinds of distinctions (Epstein versus DiCaprio).
I mean that social censure is far less dependable than actual criminal charges. Anybody facing rape charges is probably concerned primarily with prison time while reputational damage is a distant second.
With unsavory behavior that is not illegal there is no uniformity when it comes to popular condemnation, as this article points out.
"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.
Talk to Matt Rife, he’ll back you up
As to why this issue has (arguendo) so captured a non-trivial part of the Gen Z discourse, I think your last intuition (i.e., that Gen Z is just terrified of sex in general) really serves to animate a lot of your previous ones.
On one hand, that people younger than 30 find sex terrifying isn't entirely surprising or even unusual. Sexuality is humanity's most powerful driving force. Anything powerful enough to be useful is, necessarily, powerful enough to be dangerous. But on the other hand, that never really seemed to prevent young people from going at it anyway. . . until the 1990s. Things have only gotten worse since then.
Why that might be is an interesting question, but I think it has a lot to do with the infantilization of society in general, and its emasculation in particular. Society used to encourage people to grow up. Attempts were made to orient incentives in that direction. These days, all of the incentives run the other direction, and there seems to be a concerted effort to prevent young people from stepping into positions of responsibility and authority.
I think one reason that Gen Z might find the age gap idea so fixating is that it ties in with that forcible delay in coming of age, particularly for men. It's bad enough that many young women are naturally attracted to older, more established men for the reasons you describe. That's always been a thing. Historically, this has likely incentivized a lot of young men to go out and make something of themselves. But when the generation(s) ahead are both at an advantage in terms of attracting female attention and seem to be actively preventing one from becoming established in one's own right. . . it's difficult to see how that wouldn't result in a lot of generational resentment.
It does raise an interesting question. Today the lack of the ability of a lot of younger men to secure female partners of any sort is seen as because of their lack of ambition - how many of them seem content (at least in popular culture) to come home from work (if they work) and just play MMOs with their friends all night (or whatever).
But what if it's the inverse? What if the anti-sex, dating averse culture has convinced a lot of guys it's just not worth striving to impress a woman, because the odds are fairly long regardless, so they might as well just do what seems enjoyable in the moment.
Oh, I'm definitely convinced that it is the inverse, but I think that the "anti-sex, dating averse culture" is itself a symptom, not a cause. The cause is Boomers refusing to allow their children, especially their sons, to grow up. It's not that young men have no ambition. It's not even that they have ambition, but that the risk-reward situation is so screwed up that young men make the rational decision that it's not worth it. It's that Boomers actively encouraging young people to delay taking on the kind of responsibility that turns people into functional adults. Indeed, I'd argue that many Boomers are actively preventing younger people from doing this, only to turn around and complain that their successors have no ambition or responsibility.
I don't think using "Boomer" in this sense is quite right. I'm a child of boomers, and I'm 44. The average child of boomers is likely younger, but still probably a 30something millennial. Gen Z are the kids of Gen X, and some elder millennials. Indeed, my daughter is 14 and firmly in Gen Z (My 10-year old son is probably part of the next, undefined generation).
So, basically, the Boomers have been at it long enough that they're screwing with their grandkids, not just their kids.
No, assuming the priors of this debate, it's gen X screwing with their kids.
I think it's mostly fears of school shootings and predators from shows like SVU combined with video games and porn that let kids/young adults isolate in unhealthy ways.
Look at the spike in high school boys describing themselves as conservative after 2020. Our conventional definition of generations doesn't match up to reality--there's a split between older and younger zoomers.
Is this true? It wouldn't surprise me, I was a moron in high school. You have to get out in the world to put yourself in others' shoes well.
Yeah, the Hill among some other outlets covered it.
Jean Twenge said something like "The future of liberalism is female and the future of conservatism is male".
I think you're placing far too much emphasis on the influence of personal psychology imparted by the individual family unit as opposed to macro scale cultural and economic structures that no longer incentivize the type of risk-taking/ambition in question. Low wages and slow wage growth, exploding housing costs, centralization of major commerce away from small business, and an unprecedented ubiquity of marketing aimed at creating dependent consumers (and plenty more large scale forces we barely understand) are all exerting far greater force on both family rearing unit and individual decision-maker than the advice a parent gives.
We're actually on the same page there. See some of the rest of my comments.
Oh, neat. Ya, spot on about lack of advancement opportunities, older leadership, etc.
What exactly would an ambitious man do differently from the man who comes home from work and then does something fun and worthwhile? Work so hard to advance himself that he is always working late and brings his work home with him? Why would that impress a woman? I thought men never having time to spend with their wife and/or kids because they were always working was bad. It seems like when I was a kid there were a ton of movies about men who neglected their family and friends because they were so ambitious at work and had to learn to care less about work to mend their relationships (just off the top of my head, "Hook," "Jingle All the Way," "Jungle 2 Jungle," "Liar Liar," and "Jack Frost").
Is it some kind of foot-in-the-door thing, where a woman is impressed by the man's career success when they start dating and aren't really relying on each other yet and only later, after they are in a committed relationship, realizes what a raw deal she signed up for? I guess I can see some women being short-sighted like that, but it seems like lots of others would know better.
Personally, those movies made a big impression on me. I concluded that ambitious men were jerks and vowed to not grow up to be one. As an adult I have succeeded in that goal. When I'm done with work I spend my time hanging out with my wife and taking care of my daughter, and don't give my job another thought for the rest of the day. Honestly this isn't hard, I can't imagine having a job that's more interesting than playing with an adorable baby or watching an old sitcom with one's spouse.
Is it that parents try to keep their children from growing up, or is it that 20,30,40 year olds choose to remain children?
I have a friend with a 40 year old child who has three children. My friend has taken on the responsibility for all of them. Of course, my friend has no authority over the daughter and grandkids.
It's hard to chuck out kids and tell them to sink or swim, especially when it looks like they're drowning. I get it. Been there done that. But I refuse to take on the responsibility when I'm not granted the authority. Sometimes you've got to hand over the tent, camping stuff, a bicycle, rice and beans. Therapy is good if you can afford it.
You work and support yourself.
Millennial here. My boomer mother absolutely worked as hard as she could to keep me any my brother from growing up. She was terrified of her kids becoming adults because we would leave her. And, to her mind, end up resenting her the way she resented her parents. (A fate she very nicely engineered by her sabotage).
Granted, as I've found out since, the lengths that she went to infantalize us were unusual, but I can absolutely believe that boomer parents worked to keep their kids from maturing. My parents didn't spring from Zeus's forehead, you know?
I think Boomer parents were the first to experience the hard core pressure that everything your kids do is up to you. There is definitely a message out there that your kids are what you make them. I know I bought that for a long time. So, when my oldest had some real difficulties making the kid to adult transition, we had to learn that it was up to him, not me. It got scary and ugly for awhile. It was frightening to watch him seriously struggle and not know if he'd make it. He did and is quite successful now.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think a lot of parents have trouble letting their kids fail or suffer the consequences of their stupid choices.
Obviously there's a huge "both/and" bit going on here, but I'm not just talking about individual Boomers and their individual children. I'm talking about the Boomer generation and all generations thereafter. So parents and children, yes, but really, leadership roles across the board.
Take politicians, for example. Almost the exact same set of people have been running the political scene at all levels--federal, state, and local--since at least the early 1980s. 77 of 100 U.S. Senators, about half of U.S. Representatives, and 29 of 50 state governors were born before 1965. Many of them entered politics in their 20s. Today, that's basically unheard of.
I'd bet money you could say the same thing about leadership roles in any organization one might care to name. Academics (the average age of university professors and presidents is something like 20 years older than it was a hundred years ago). Professionals (e.g., lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc.). Business executives.
Not just white collar jobs, either. Skilled trades too. It's one thing to go into a skilled trade knowing that yeah, you'll have to spend half a dozen years doing scut work to both learn the skills and establish yourself as a reliable tradesman before taking on more desirable positions with more responsibility. It's another thing to know that it's going to be ten, fifteen, even twenty years stuck at the entry level before there's any opportunity to move up.
Agree on politicians. I wonder why there isn't more new talent moving up. Could it be that politics has such a bad reputation and not that many people want to go into it?
People definitely live longer.
There's plenty of new talent. Most of it hasn't been given a chance to "move up," as most of the offices/positions that would represent an upward move aren't being vacated on the sort of timescale that would allow such moves.
we need some guillotines to move things along
It's perfectly normal to be scared of sex. The solution has always been to actually engage in the act. For some reason that's not happening with younger generations and so I conclude that humanity is doomed.
But are they scared or just tired of growing up in a country/culture/etc where sex seems to be the all-consuming force? Like I’m not scared of sex at all and I honestly grew up feeling exhausted with how Americans seemed so pathologically obsessed with it. Whether it’s engaging with or denying their lust and all the other nuanced stuff inbetween, it just felt ever so present. I mean, on one hand, I get why, sex is a huge component of life…but, like, there’s other beautiful things out there.
If you want to be a priest, fine. But it looks to me like the change is involuntary and that the lives of a lot of young people these days are filled with porn and loneliness. That is not an improvement.
What does being a priest have anything to do with appreciating other beautiful things? You can just be cool with sex and not overly preoccupied with it and be excited by life in many other ways.
Maybe they just prefer a slower pace or the language of desire/lust/intimacy has become a bit more sophisticated/complicated these days. I mean, who really knows, but not everything has to boiled down to the physical act itself.
Priests don't eschew just sex, they also swear off marriage and relationships.
As far as I can tell the switch to sexlessness is a) also correlated with falling rates of dating/being in a relationship and b) it's involuntary. There is a sense in the commentariat that young men filling up their days with porn, video games and loneliness. That is a problem and I suspect it's going to play out in very ugly ways.
Right. Since religion is also declining in the US, I don’t think we gotta worry about that one. I think maybe putting young and old men through some EQ training or whatever might help everyone out a little. Half joking. Half.
Normal to be apprehensive, but not until 30.
The former norm by 30 was to be well established, by necessity.
People under 30 finding sex terrifying is *not* the historical norm. Many places and times, an expectation was to have children by 20, so no.
I think you misunderstand me.
All I'm staying is that for people who have never had sex before, regardless of age, the first time is a big deal, attended by powerful emotions and apprehensions.
Yes, granted, historically that never stopped people from getting it on. Of course, a large part of that arguably had to do with well-established, community-based traditions that helped smooth the transition from, let's be real here, childhood to adulthood. Sex is, and always has been, a big deal. Traditional societies have ways of embodying that fact that provide support and guidance. Contemporary, atomized, deracinated society, very much does not.
I read somewhere recently that sex is the gasoline of civilization. Powerful, useful, and essential when used responsibility, which requires strong, well-engineered, well-maintained equipment. Infrastructure, even. Gasoline is the kind of thing you let young, immature, irresponsible people (but I repeat myself) play around with. Unless you're trying to kill them, in which case covering them with napalm is an incredibly effective way of going about it.
video games ugh