Absolutely, but since empirically most young (18-22) women don't get with older men, they either prefer the tradeoff (valuing status in the "little pool" of college social life more than global status, in return for being with an attractive young man) or there's something else at work here.
Your framework says that men are mostly attracted to reproductive fitness, and women are mostly attracted to status. This appears basically true, but it seems to me like women have much more interest in reproductive fitness in their partners, than men do in status. Nearly all of the straight men I know are neutral to or anti-interested in status in a mate, whereas evo-psych seems to consistently under-predict for women's sexual interest in physical attractiveness.
evo-psych seems to consistently under-predict for women's sexual interest in physical attractiveness
I suspect this might be a societal effect (akin to the now-widespread evolutionarily nonsensical male preference for very thin women). Does anyone have data on whether women in pre-industrial (or even just pre-mass media) societies cared about men's looks less than they today?
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?