This article is written entirely from a male perspective.
Wait... Is it? I've read it again and I can't see anything making the author's gender obvious, other than the last three letters of his username. (I had taken “we” to refer to society in general.) If I hadn't noticed his username and hadn't been primed by reading your comment (on Top Comments Today) before reading the article, I might have guessed the author was a teenage girl disappointed by the fact that older men wouldn't date her.
The article only examines the issue in terms of what "makes biological sense" for men. It discusses the fertility of women and advantages of "going for" women of different ages but neglects to highlight any of the biological advantages from a female perspective. It ignores the fact that to ensure the highest rates of evolutionary success it doesn't make sense for 16 year olds to procreate with much older, less fertile males. It questions why men aren't sleeping with 16 year olds, ignoring the fact that 16 year olds choose who they sleep with.
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?