What if this article were titled: What If Women Stopped Chasing Much Wealthier, Higher Status Men?
I have a strong feeling this is not going to happen anytime soon simply because that’s the way it’s been for almost all of human history across civilizations. Youth implies fertility. Youth also implies sex appeal and we know how important that is for men.
Many women are attracted to successful, powerful, high status men. Those men who tend to have those qualities are often older (mainly because they’ve had time to develop it).
Telling men to stop being attracted to younger women is like telling women to stop being attracted to rich, powerful men. Have we forgotten human nature and how humans have behaved for millions of years?
Read an excerpt from the Atlantic Magazine article by HUGO SCHWYZER:
If there’s one tangible thing that men can do to help end sexism—and create a healthier culture in which young people come of age—it’s to stop chasing after women young enough to be their biological daughters. As hyperbolic as it may sound, there are few more powerful actions that men can take to transform the culture than to date, mate, and stay with their approximate chronological peers. If aging guys would commit to doing this, everyone would benefit: older men and younger men, older women and younger women.
This proposal flies in the face of everything we’re taught is normal and inevitable. Take the case of Johnny Depp, who turns 50 next month. His new girlfriend, actress Amber Heard, just turned 27. Described as acting like a “besotted teenager,” the thoroughly middle-aged Depp is reportedly eager to start a new family with Heard, who wasn’t yet born when he made his film debut in 1984’s Nightmare on Elm Street. Last year, Depp separated from his long-time girlfriend (and mother of his two childen) Vanessa Paradis, shortly before she turned 40.
Life imitates art: as Kyle Buchanan wrote for Vulture last month, Depp is only one of many aging male Hollywood stars whose onscreen love interests remain forever young. Stars like Liam Neeson and Tom Cruise age slowly, if at all, out of sex symbol status. Ours, as Buchanan documented, is a culture which represents men’s sexual desirability as being as enduring as women’s is fleeting.
It’s certainly not just graying celebrities like Depp who rob the cradle. Research on the preferences of users of OK Cupid, one of America’s most popular dating sites,indicates that “men show a decided preference for younger women, especially as the men get older… so, even though men and women are more-or-less proportionately represented on the site, men’s decided preference for younger women makes for many fewer potential dates for women.”
The culturally prescribed response to stories like Depp’s or that of the OK Cupid data is a knowing nod: Older men chasing young women is a tale as old as time. According to that tale, heterosexual men who have the sexual or financial cachet to do so almost invariably leave the partners who aren’t young enough to be their daughters for the women who are. In the popular imagination, men do this because they can—and because they’re presumably answering the call of evolutionary and biological imperatives that push them irresistibly towards younger women.
Read more HERE: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/what-if-men-stopped-chasing-much-younger-women/275916/
