The problem in a declining population (low fertility, fewer young people) is that there are more older people per age range than younger people. Now because of biologically caused preferences, "age gap" preferences usually means an older man and a younger woman. Which means that some proportion of young men and old women will no longer find partners. It's especially a problem for young men, since older women usually can find partners when they are still young. And of course the severity of the problem depends on the country's fertility rate. South Korea or China a terrible places to be a young man.
The reverse problem of fertility vs sex difference in age preference exists in some African countries, where the fertility rate is very high. Which means there are more young people, which means some fraction of young women will not find a partner.
The whole problem wouldn't exist if people preferred (or society strongly encouraged) partners of their own age. Unfortunately puff pieces like the one above only focus on advertising empathy for the individual cases but ignore the societal problems they cause.
Another such example is polygamy, which mostly results in polygyny because of biological preferences. Which means many men (including older men this time) can no longer find a partner.
It's not just "a few". Small to medium sized age gaps are the norm. Most men prefer women of the same to younger age, most women prefer men or the same to older age. In societies with changing fertility, this leads to dating pools being of non-matching size.
Historically, it has never been uncommon for older men to marry (<20yr) age gap women. Browsing the marriage records (ie ancestry.com) reveals just how common.
> Another such example is polygamy, which mostly results in polygyny because of biological preferences.
I have about 10yr of exposure to friend groups with nonmonogamous lifestyles, and it’s by a long shot the women who are having multiple regular partners and the men who have an occasional fling. And I find just as many women as men choose to adopt that kind of lifestyle. Obviously there are exceptions, but this has been an extremely stable general trend I’ve observed. This is of course caveated by having a small sample size.
That said I think the trope that women only want one sexual partner while men want many is—in my experience—nothing more than that: an outdated, overused trope.
I’d love to see some actual numbers. But what numbers I have seen seem to be easily skewed by the reality that it’s more socially acceptable for men to have more partners (though that stigma is quickly changing).
Polygyny is much, much more common than polyandry.
> Of the 1,231 societies listed in the 1980 Ethnographic Atlas, 186 were found to be monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny; and 4 had polyandry.
Of course it has been that way historically, because men have been disproportionately favored by the power structures in those societies. Not to mention the lack of available and effective contraceptives before recent times.
Remove that power imbalance, as we’re getting closer to today, and you see a lot more women choosing multiple partners.
> The reverse problem of fertility vs sex difference in age preference exists in some African countries, where the fertility rate is very high. Which means there are more young people, which means some fraction of young women will not find a partner.
Maybe I’m dumb. I don’t understand how young women will have trouble finding a partner.
It makes little sense. Naturally, there are about 1.07 males born for every 1 female, so there's usually an excess of young men. The OP's statement only makes sense if the young women all insist on finding older, monogamous partners.
Women prefer men of a similar to older age, men prefer women of a similar to younger age. In countries with high fertility, the latter pool is larger than the former. And even when women lower their standards in response, this doesn't solve the problem, as it doesn't cause men to lower their standards.
It's the exact reverse in low fertility countries.
I still don’t get it. The fact that women prefer men of similar age or older … there are plenty of young men of similar age for young women, in fact it’s nearly one to one, then you add in the older men. For young women their suitors outnumber them.
Seems to be young men and elder women will always have a shortage of suitors no matter the population ratio between young and older people. It’s just that the shortage worsens for young men if the ratio leans towards more older people and the shortage worsens for older women when the ratio leans towards more young people.
We are speaking of a society with more younger than older people. For example, there are fewer people aged 30 to 40 than there are people aged 20 to 30. 30 year old men have therefore more choice than 30 year old women.
Because age is the one feature you can still be discriminatory about and nobody will give a fuck.
> Over the past several years, age-gap relationships have been obsessively scrutinized on Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, and X. No attempt to trace the history of the trend would be complete without a discussion of a viral 2019 post about Leonardo DiCaprio. That year, a redditor made a graph tracking DiCaprio’s age alongside the ages of his successive girlfriends; as DiCaprio moved through his 30s into middle age, the age range of his girlfriends never topped 25. The phenomenon was given a name (“Leo’s Law”) and generated a great deal of ribbing along with many think pieces attributing DiCaprio’s dating record, variously, to the devaluation of aging women or Hollywood’s sexism problem or basic evolutionary psychology. One take that would set the tone for much of the age-gap discourse, if you will, was that DiCaprio wasn’t attracted to these women just because they were hot but because, though they were old enough to vote, their youth meant he could easily manipulate them. As the love-and-relationship website YourTango laid it out, “Given that DiCaprio’s cut-off point is exactly around the time that neuroscientists say our brains are finished developing, there is certainly a case to be made that a desire to date younger partners comes from a desire to have control.” Some tweets took it further; as one contended, “Leonardo DiCaprio is a nearly 50yo predator.”
Bullshit logic. If 25 is the age "exactly around the time that neuroscientists say our brains are finished developing," DiCaprio is the opposite of a predator-- he's consistently waiting for maturity to set in. The social media smear campaign is applying the Kuleshov effect to reframe what appears to be a very transparent, above-board situation into one with an undertone of malevolence.
> In posts like these, the author will often reveal that she herself was a victim of abuse at the hands of an older man. When Alice was 14 and a junior-high-school student in Calgary, a teacher molested her. As reported in an investigative story last year, the detective looking into the teacher’s alleged crimes estimated that he had sexually, emotionally, or physically abused as many as 200 students. After months of grooming her, Alice said, the teacher invited her on an unofficial school camping trip where he forcibly removed her top and exposed her breasts in front of several other students. Nothing else happened between them, but she remained close to the teacher for years and continued to visit his classroom after she’d graduated. Years later, in the midst of the Me Too movement, she and another of the teacher’s victims went to the police. In February 2021, he was arrested, but a few days later he committed suicide. Some victims were relieved they’d never have to face their abuser in court, but Alice was devastated. “I was very much looking forward to looking him in the eye as an adult woman,” she said. She began making the TikTok videos six months later. “If I can’t call out the man that directly abused me, I’m going to call out other ones,” she told me.
"Some victims were relieved they'd never have to face their abuser in court" is a huge red flag of people either testifying against fucking El Chapo or making shit up. Facing your abuser is what separates the judicial system from the Milgram experience.
I believe Alice's story, and there's a case to be made for statutory rape (hence the suicide), but the rest of it is bullshit. This only became "abuse" once her own efforts to groom him into exclusivity failed, hence her repeat visits for years after the fact. The last line is hilarious-- “If I can’t call out the man that directly abused me, I’m going to call out other ones.”
She's transferring her anger from a target beyond her grasp (dead men don't file defamation claims) to literally anybody else. She&#x...
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 43.3 ms ] threadThe reverse problem of fertility vs sex difference in age preference exists in some African countries, where the fertility rate is very high. Which means there are more young people, which means some fraction of young women will not find a partner.
The whole problem wouldn't exist if people preferred (or society strongly encouraged) partners of their own age. Unfortunately puff pieces like the one above only focus on advertising empathy for the individual cases but ignore the societal problems they cause.
Another such example is polygamy, which mostly results in polygyny because of biological preferences. Which means many men (including older men this time) can no longer find a partner.
I have about 10yr of exposure to friend groups with nonmonogamous lifestyles, and it’s by a long shot the women who are having multiple regular partners and the men who have an occasional fling. And I find just as many women as men choose to adopt that kind of lifestyle. Obviously there are exceptions, but this has been an extremely stable general trend I’ve observed. This is of course caveated by having a small sample size.
That said I think the trope that women only want one sexual partner while men want many is—in my experience—nothing more than that: an outdated, overused trope.
I’d love to see some actual numbers. But what numbers I have seen seem to be easily skewed by the reality that it’s more socially acceptable for men to have more partners (though that stigma is quickly changing).
> Of the 1,231 societies listed in the 1980 Ethnographic Atlas, 186 were found to be monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny; and 4 had polyandry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygyny#Findings
Remove that power imbalance, as we’re getting closer to today, and you see a lot more women choosing multiple partners.
Maybe I’m dumb. I don’t understand how young women will have trouble finding a partner.
It's the exact reverse in low fertility countries.
Seems to be young men and elder women will always have a shortage of suitors no matter the population ratio between young and older people. It’s just that the shortage worsens for young men if the ratio leans towards more older people and the shortage worsens for older women when the ratio leans towards more young people.
Because age is the one feature you can still be discriminatory about and nobody will give a fuck.
> Over the past several years, age-gap relationships have been obsessively scrutinized on Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, and X. No attempt to trace the history of the trend would be complete without a discussion of a viral 2019 post about Leonardo DiCaprio. That year, a redditor made a graph tracking DiCaprio’s age alongside the ages of his successive girlfriends; as DiCaprio moved through his 30s into middle age, the age range of his girlfriends never topped 25. The phenomenon was given a name (“Leo’s Law”) and generated a great deal of ribbing along with many think pieces attributing DiCaprio’s dating record, variously, to the devaluation of aging women or Hollywood’s sexism problem or basic evolutionary psychology. One take that would set the tone for much of the age-gap discourse, if you will, was that DiCaprio wasn’t attracted to these women just because they were hot but because, though they were old enough to vote, their youth meant he could easily manipulate them. As the love-and-relationship website YourTango laid it out, “Given that DiCaprio’s cut-off point is exactly around the time that neuroscientists say our brains are finished developing, there is certainly a case to be made that a desire to date younger partners comes from a desire to have control.” Some tweets took it further; as one contended, “Leonardo DiCaprio is a nearly 50yo predator.”
Bullshit logic. If 25 is the age "exactly around the time that neuroscientists say our brains are finished developing," DiCaprio is the opposite of a predator-- he's consistently waiting for maturity to set in. The social media smear campaign is applying the Kuleshov effect to reframe what appears to be a very transparent, above-board situation into one with an undertone of malevolence.
> In posts like these, the author will often reveal that she herself was a victim of abuse at the hands of an older man. When Alice was 14 and a junior-high-school student in Calgary, a teacher molested her. As reported in an investigative story last year, the detective looking into the teacher’s alleged crimes estimated that he had sexually, emotionally, or physically abused as many as 200 students. After months of grooming her, Alice said, the teacher invited her on an unofficial school camping trip where he forcibly removed her top and exposed her breasts in front of several other students. Nothing else happened between them, but she remained close to the teacher for years and continued to visit his classroom after she’d graduated. Years later, in the midst of the Me Too movement, she and another of the teacher’s victims went to the police. In February 2021, he was arrested, but a few days later he committed suicide. Some victims were relieved they’d never have to face their abuser in court, but Alice was devastated. “I was very much looking forward to looking him in the eye as an adult woman,” she said. She began making the TikTok videos six months later. “If I can’t call out the man that directly abused me, I’m going to call out other ones,” she told me.
"Some victims were relieved they'd never have to face their abuser in court" is a huge red flag of people either testifying against fucking El Chapo or making shit up. Facing your abuser is what separates the judicial system from the Milgram experience.
I believe Alice's story, and there's a case to be made for statutory rape (hence the suicide), but the rest of it is bullshit. This only became "abuse" once her own efforts to groom him into exclusivity failed, hence her repeat visits for years after the fact. The last line is hilarious-- “If I can’t call out the man that directly abused me, I’m going to call out other ones.”
She's transferring her anger from a target beyond her grasp (dead men don't file defamation claims) to literally anybody else. She&#x...
Because people are often too full of their own emotional reaction to the situation to care about the reality.
Also check the reactions of many 21-year-olds to the idea of their 90-year-old great-grandparents trying to have a sex life in their nursing home.