Why don’t men go for younger women?
What? They do. (My father is eight years older than my mother.) And maybe it'd be better if they didn't.
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.
Indeed, I've often witnessed women apparently suddenly lose all interest in a man as soon as they found out he was younger than them, whereas I've never seen the reverse (except in an “I don't think she would ever get with me since she found out I'm this young, so I won't even try” fashion) -- the men I know (incl. myself) don't seem to care how old a woman actually is, so long as she looks attractive. BTW, “you look younger” (“older”) is usually taken to be a compliment (an insult) here in Italy.
If that OKCupid author isn't being wilfully dishonest, then he is just an awful thinker. Just as an example, he cites the higher frequency at which old female OKCupid users get tested for STDs as an example of why young guys should be more open to dating them.
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?