I feel like most people ITT are mixing up two concepts. I find it pretty implausible that a 50-year-old and a 20-year-old (or a 25-year-old, actually. Or a 30-year-old…) are going to have a genuine life-partner-type relationship. I don’t find it implausible at all that people in those age groups could have a mutually consensual and satisfying FWB-type relationship.
If you’re OK with casual sexual relationships, then the question is whether the older party is tricking the younger party into thinking that the relationship is more than just sexual in order to get sex (or otherwise using their wiles to manipulate them), which is obviously seriously wrong. If they’re just screwing and everyone knows and is fine with that, then I don’t see how it’s worse than any other casual sexual relationship?
An added layer is that people in society generally have an obligation to treat younger adults with extra care, which applies to sexual partners especially, but assuming that obligation is respected, it’s a bit incoherent to say that a dumb 20-year-old can screw another dumb 20-year-old, but not a 40-year-old. I’d actually wager that the 40-year-old is a lot less likely to get pregnant or transmit an STD.
Did not feel taken advantage of or that anything was wrong with her. She wanted to date though, and I did not. Ended up being the asshole in the situation, somehow.
Sure, but when we see this, typically in famous people, it’s not as though it’s presented as a FWB-type thing. I don’t know what, if anything, Jerry Seinfeld was saying in interviews when he was dating that 17-yo in his late thirties, but if he was saying anything, it probably wasn’t to the effect that it was just a real casual thing with no strings attached. I doubt it was what he was saying to her, either.
Older people are definitely less likely to mistake something casual for something more serious, if nothing else. Just saying “campsite rules” doesn’t make young people magically less fragile.
Yeah. The thing that’s socially unsavory is to admit that you’re having casual sex with a younger person outside of a “meaningful” relationship. The thing that’s unambiguously morally wrong is using a delusion of a meaningful relationship (or other forms of trickery or coercion) to get sex from a younger person. I’m quite a bit more skeptical of the rich dude paying the hot pool boy to screw his wife than I am of some 50-year-old who purports to be in love with a 25-year-old. I’m guessing the pool boy had a pretty good read on what the lay of the land was.
No one is disputing that newly-minted adults generally have less capacity to navigate social situations than much older people. The question is how that disparity in capacity should be handled in a way that is respectful of the agency of the younger person while also being appropriately protective of their vulnerabilities…
I may not be clear enough but I would never doubt there are abusive and predatory age disparate relationships. Same thing for prostitution. Of course there are abused sex workers. In fact as a group they are among the most abused populations.
My point all along is that while both are true, neither should lead to the generalization “all age disparate relationships are predatory” or “all sex work is exploitation”
It’s in the generalization that the sexism and other issues arise.
Just like racism it’s the generalization that is toxic. It’s fine to say this black woman is terrible. It’s not ok to say all black women are terrible.
Generalization based on perceived behaviour is in some ways more problematic than something like racism because it is so much more difficult to define. It’s easy to say you shouldn’t discriminate based on skin colour. It’s harder to say you shouldn’t discriminate based on the fact that some Ill defined subset of the population, based on poorly understood selection criteria, tends to do X this percentage of the time therefore X should be disincentivized.
This is why norms around sexuality are so terrible. You say there is always a power dynamic but what is that assertion based on? You can’t think of a scenario where a 23 year old woman can have the power dynamic over a 55 year old man?
Don’t know the movie so I can’t tell if that’s an incisive, insightful comment (agreeing with me) or a repulsively dishonest strawman (disagreeing with me).
