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.
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I was unsure as to why you kept referring to evolution. I think the advantages of an older mate exist only within certain cultures. I was trying to say that what is socially advantageous is not always biologically so.
It seems weird to expect that men are sexually attracted to traits that are desirable from a evolutionary point of view, but that women aren't. Being attracted to older men is a fetish, not the norm, in our society, so there's probably a more optimal group for young women to be attracted to. In a way I buy the "looking at the group which benefits most" solution, but paying attention to young women, not older ones - most young women are either with hot boys their age, or have strong opposition to sex before marriage/love/whatever at all, so they're mostly not available to older men.
Furthermore, I suspect that a more relevant question is of how birth control has changed the concept of sexual fitness. If a man's trying to reproduce, he's got a vastly better shot with a woman his age, regardless of whether a younger woman's willing to have sex with him - what few sixteen-year-olds who are willing to be mothers in the modern day are much less prepared for the task than their nineteenth-century counterparts, because that's not a thing we teach young women, because the default action in a woman's life is to be in school until she's twenty-two or twenty-four.
TL;DR birth control makes it feasible for women to not reproduce indefinitely long, and most of them would rather be in school attaining their own status and banging hot young men than obtaining status from men and taking care of babies.
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?