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?
The word 'evolutionarily' seems to be doing no work here. Either women tend to be more drawn to high-status than youth and virility, or they don't. Trying to say what a woman does "because of evolution" seems pointless. There are genetic traits and there are social traits, but there aren't "evolutionary" traits, unless you somehow believe that evolution is affecting something other than the genetic traits the woman has.
Further, considering issues such as epigenetic gene modulation and expression, not to mention neurological concerns that while the result of genetics don't provide a clear map from "mate selection" to "DNA," it is entirely possible that any genetic preferences among women are naturally set to vary depending on the circumstances of their environment. In fact, this seems like a highly probable thesis for human beings in general, given the complexity of brains and the long development term for "attraction" in the human life cycle in men and women.