who benefits from this norm [older women]
Tsk, tsk. The norms were set up by a culture of powerful men, in order to benefit powerful men. Who benefits from the changing norm? Anyone who isn't a powerful man.
Did you ever watch that film A Beautiful Mind? Spreading out romantic advances is the pareto optimum. If nobody is sleeping with the older women, then also nobody is sleeping with the non-powerful men. Changes in sexual patterns can be thought of as victory for the average human.
And it's certainly not all sunshine and roses for the young women. Power imbalances in relationships are a risk factor for things like marital rape, controlling behavior, and general bad stuff. Oh and there's the whole "treated like property for large chunks of history" part. And as we go a bit younger, do you know what a fistula is? Yeah, just... I'm really glad the sexual norms have changed.
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Why don’t men go for younger women? That’s not quite accurate, because they do, but we seem to have a cultural norm against girls who have recently exited puberty, even though they are highly fertile. Some time in the last few hundred years, we reached a cultural norm that as a man gets older, it’s increasingly less appropriate for him to be with a sixteen year old. That’s not long enough to override thousands of years of evolution, so what could have contributed to it?
The best solution I’ve heard started by looking at who benefits from this norm [older women] and wondering whether they could have contributed to it. After all, the strength of this norm has been increased in the last sixty years or so, which coincides with the period in which women’s power has increased.
One alternative I heard recently is that it doesn’t make sense biologically to go for women who are recently post-pubescent, as they don’t make the best mothers. Instead, a slightly older woman [mid-twenties] makes sense to be the best mother. This is perfectly plausible.
Another, less plausible, suggestion I’ve heard is that it’s to do with mental capacity. I find this unconvincing because we have few objections to a high-status man dating a beautiful but low-intellect woman.
Thoughts?