Older Men, Younger Women #4: a response to Louise

Carnival of the Feminists #24 is up at F-Words. 

As I wrote in yesterday's post, I've had several e-mails lately from women who find themselves profoundly attracted to older men.  As always, folks google the topic "older men, younger women" and find this post, this post, this post.  I'm going to do a fourth and fifth post on the topic.  This is the fourth.

The first email came from Louise, who wrote:

Logically, everything you said makes absolute perfect sense.  Logically, yes I can recognize that I am (even at 27) a young women "eager for attention and validation from older men” and that it is not him that I really want… "what they (I) really want is to be noticed, to be seen, to be validated as good and worthy and an interesting individual.”  And this man that I’m writing about is indeed much of what you talked about: an older man who respects and cares about me, who isn't my father or brother but who isn't a prospective lover, either; in essence “safe” as you put it; never did he make any sort of sexual pass at me or indicate in any way he such a thought ever crossed his mind. 

I admire him for his professional accomplishments, for being respected not only for his expertise but also for his character, for his stress- and time-management skills, for his close-knit family life, for his intelligence, for his discipline, amicable nature, I could go on and on.   I seek his advice often, respect his opinion, and take his praise and encouragement to heart.  He is one of those people I look to for guidance on a number of issues, but also enjoy as a person as well (we talk about current events, trade books, music, etc.)

My dilemma is this: why is it that after everything I’ve told you, and defying all logic, I still have a “school-girl crush” on him?  Why is the line between admiration for “appropriate” reasons and sexual/romantic feelings and fantasies so blurred?  Why do women idealize and idolize older men in this way? Even those that give them no reason to?

Bold emphasis is mine.  That section I've highlighted is the crux of the question, as far as I can see.   I've spoken elsewhere about the real meaning of crushes on teachers.  But "Louise" is not writing about a teacher, at least not in the formal sense.  What she's writing about is a profoundly influential cultural narrative: that of the older man who will act as a guide and a mentor as well as a lover.  It's part of an old, troubling discourse that teaches young women to eroticize knowledge, wisdom, and authority in others rather than developing it within themselves.  In books and movies and popular folklore, young women are often taught that a sexual and romantic relationship with an older man will be a wonderful transaction: she will offer her youth, her sexual desirability, and her love; he will offer wisdom, insight, and guidance as she navigates the tricky waters into adulthood.   It would be hard to deny that that exchange is immensely appealing for some!  Louise describes the line between mentoring and erotic attraction as "blurred", and she's right to do so.  We live in a culture where an extraordinary variety of forces seek to blur that line!

(In ancient Athens, this "exchange" was a celebrated one. Of course, it was an exchange between two males, where an older man offered wisdom and power and knowledge to a youth who gave his body and his sexual desirability in return.  But the Athenians were wrong about many things, particularly on the subject of women!)

Ultimately, I acknowledge that some age-disparate relationships can be healthy and loving.  As anyone who has been married a long time knows, the terms of the relationship can change.  What was once a relationship characterized by an asymmetric power exchange can, in the best cases, become far more rich and egalitarian over time.  I honor that possibility.

But the fact that some of these "exchanges" "turn out well" doesn't mitigate the essential problem.  And the essential problem is that the eroticizing of a power imbalance is, I believe, fundamentally unhealthy.  It teaches the lesson that for young women, their sexuality becomes a vehicle not only for their own pleasure but also for accessing those things they feel that they lack in themselves: stability, safety, wisdom.  While sexual experience can be a great teacher, it comes with a high price.  And the price is that it reinforces the notion that for women, it is necessary to offer one's sexuality in order to get the most desirable of prizes, be they status, wealth, intellectual fulfillment or a deeper understanding of the world.

I say this not to judge the younger women who engage in these age-disparate, transactional love affairs.  My compassion for the older men is less, not because they are men but because they are older.  Eroticizing the teaching experience -- in or out of the classroom -- is not us at our best!  But there's no denying that, as Louise and so many others have pointed out, knowing all of this in one's head doesn't always mean that the heart and the body will follow.  As Millay said

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn

In the end, Louise, I believe that particularly when we are young, we are often drawn to others who clearly manifest what we want in ourselves. You list the things you admire about this man, and they seem to be the things you long for as well. Perhaps a man like him could give you these things, perhaps not.  But the harder way, the better way, the ultimately more fulfilling way is to learn from this crush that you want him less than the things he represents and embodies.  And once you are clear on what those things are, go out and get 'em.  On your own. Easier said than done, I know.

Comments

[CJ]

Dude, you are a world-class Puritan and killjoy. Is everything about suffering, effort, and self-denial with you?

[BubbaHoTep]

I am interested, knowing your academic background, if you have any comments on Rev. Susan Russell's monkey-bishop pictures:

http://inchatatime.blogspot.com/2006/10/speaking-of-primates.html

http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/article/1289/

http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/article/1275/

[Hugo]

Quick answer, Bubba:

I wouldn't have done it, but I'm not Susan. (She's ENFJ, I am ENFP.) But offensive? Hardly. Everyone needs to sit back, have a banana, and find more important issue to debate.

Let's make sure this tender thread is on topic.

[kate]

I was 28 when I married a 54 year old man. He is very different than me, but I don't revere him for his knowledge or wisdom (I'm better with details, money, patience, and getting along with people than he is). I married him because we mesh exceptionally well, and he treats me as an equal, something I didn't run into in men my age. I am not a thing, an accessory, a status symbol, a convenient source of sex or validation for him. I am a partner, with my own strengths and weaknesses. His age was not an attractor or a turn on for me. We got involved in spite of the age difference, not because of it. He was hesitant to get involved with me because I was so much younger than him.

I really do believe that different things make different people happy. I am wary of the idea that all age disparate relationships are a bad deal, or exploitative of one or both partners. When I read your post, it made me feel like here is one more person telling me what I should want, what is acceptable to want, and why what I want is not good for me (because silly young female, you just don't understand what you want/need like someone else does). I'm 34 now, we've been married for 5 years, going on six, and involved for 8. I have never regretted my choice, and I made it well aware that I would not be spending my golden years with my first husband. There are down sides to my choice, but I could have married someone exactly my age who had an aneurysm and died a year into our marriage. There are no formulas that guarantee a happy marriage, and I think it's a mistake to invest too much in proscriptions about what kinds of relationships are acceptable.

Are some age disparate relationships exactly as you describe? Of course. And those people need to work out their lives and sort their mess. I, of course, get to live my life and sort my own mess.

[Makeesha]

You make a very good point - that culturally, women have been conditioned to sexualize older men. That's so true.

I also find it abhorant that the Church continues to speak of women almost exclusively in sexual terms...which I think is relevant to this discourse. I think when women are viewed through a sexual lense (everything a woman is supposed to do in a traditionalists world is sexual - wife and mother), older men are also going to be conditioned to be sexually attracted to young women of a more fertile age and those young women are going to equate sexual attraction with the strong, wise and able to guide. When complimentarians and patriarchists (2 sides of the same coin really) speak of marriage, it almost always sounds as if they're speaking of a daughter and father when they speak of husband and wife.

[Hugo]

Kate, my reply was to Louise, not you. I was replying to a young woman who acknowledged that what I had said in the past was true, and that she was struggling with the line between admiration and desire. If that's not true for you, then no worries.

[JoieB]

Once upon a time, I made a list. In this list was a list of attributes and characteristics that I wanted in the person I would share my life with. I was lucky. I found the person who fit the list but also fit into my life and vice versa. Finding a person attractive or even beautiful is not the same as the intimacy and commitment that a relationship has.

I hope there are men who are capable of seeing the young men and women he teaches as students and not as sexual beings is a trend that grows. It is too often that young women, young girls find themselves unable to find a male figure to esteem.

[Kip Watson]

I think you're over-analysing, Hugo.

In fact I think you're applying a moral filter that gets uncomfortably close to mirroring the sexual objectification of our depraved culture.

"Love's not Time's fool..."

You could be 50, your beloved 15. If it's true love, and you're both faithful to it and each other, who dares to criticise.

True love is of the soul. The mountains are old -- all our souls are young.

[Makeesha]

Kip: "true love" is often deceitful. I as a married woman might feel "true love" for another man (thankfully I have not). Those feelings might very well be "real" but to act on them would be folly. 50 and 15?! are you serious?

[Kip Watson]

Yep, I'm perfectly serious.

But unless your marriage is a sham, I don't think you can feel 'true love' for another.

I don't think our generation even knows what True Love is. It's not 'the hots', that's for darn sure...

[Kip Watson]

By the way, if it really is True Love. Then *not* to act on it would be folly.

True Love doesn't just spring up after every rain shower.

(...and by 'act on it', I mean marry, not jump in the sack)

[Makeesha]

I agree, true love is a choice, or a bunch of choices really. Which means that you can recognize the potential pit falls, as a 50 year old man, of marrying a 15 year old GIRL...which is not legal anyway...at least not in America.

[Douglas, Friend of Osho]

Hugo, I'd like to date this guy and I'm a straight man. And while I agree that socializing women to believe their sexuality should be exercised only in a transactional context is socialization at its most repugnant, there is little or nothing about relationships with older men that make the transactionality, if you will, any more repugnant than in other situations. Granted, teachers shouldn't get involved with their students (including female teachers), but I'll remind you and others that Charlie Chaplin was hardly Oona O'Neill's teacher, nor was I teacher to my daughter's mother, who is considerably younger than myself. Frankly, I think a certain set of women mistook palaver for real communication, lost the men in their lives to women who happen to be younger because of the aforementioned palaver and rather than do what they counsel men to do, which is to look at themselves, self-medicate by droning about how it was all down to the younger, firmer corpus. You, Hugo, are too good to carry water for that sort.

[Hugo]

Douglas, I'm not carrying water for anyone. If a marriage between two forty-somethings comes to an end, and the fella marries a second wife who is age appropriate but with whom he is more compatible, no worries. But if he says to himself "Women my own age can see through my bullshit, let me find someone barely out of college who will still believe my crap", then we've got a problem.

And frankly, the desire for a much younger mate is often much less about sex than it is about fear of being unmasked. No matter how savvy she is, an experienced 25 year-old knows less about men than an experienced 45 year-old, most of the time.

[Oriscus]

In my own case, I entered into an affair with my major professor when i was 23 and she was 38. We married a couple of years later. Now, while that marriage ended in divorce, it wasn't because of the age difference, and we are still among one another's most trusted friends.

I learned a great deal from her (plus everything on the syllabus, too), which I *might have learnt elsewhere, or from women my own age.
Problem was, where I was shy, older women weren't.
I am grateful for that relationship. I suspect that others might not have been so fortunate, but as with everything else in life, ymmv.

I wonder if, in protecting some from potential abuse, we prevent others from having the relationships they actually need? Just wondering.

Curiously enough, one of my customers here lately is a young man of 22, presently involved with a woman of about 40. He seems pleasantly dazzled. He confides in me a little (he was a little guarded about it at first, trying to sound me out on a gift for an older woman - I work in a wine shop - but when I let him know I'd "been there," he opened up). Apparently his buddies have a hard time getting it. I wonder...

hpb
Austin, TX

[Hugo]

I wonder if, in protecting some from potential abuse, we prevent others from having the relationships they actually need?

Well, no one, including me, is advocating protecting 22 year-olds from anything. I'm advocating a very high degree of caution about age-disparate relationships, particularly those that are explicitly or implicitly transactional.

[mythago]

the potential pit falls, as a 50 year old man, of marrying a 15 year old GIRL...which is not legal anyway...at least not in America

That's completely false.

[Lynn Gazis-Sax]

Depending, of course, on what state you're in. I understand, if he picks his state properly, that a 50 year old man can marry a 14 year old girl (but I don't believe he can do this in my own state, where the age of consent is 18). It may also depend on whether he can get her parents' permission.

[Kip Watson]

I think you missed the point with all this talk of 15 and 50 year olds.

My point was that people should look for true love, which can come in any form and bridge even the most extreme differences.

All this talk about 'compatibility', 'validation', 'needs' and 'getting' this and that from a 'relationship'.

I didn't notice the word Love come up very often.

You seem like nice people. You should know the ways of our world and not the True Ways.

There's only one question you need to ask (and this from a man's perspective, so apologies to you gals) - 'Is she your Juliet, or she just another Rosaline?'

[mythago]

Rosaline ended up alive, so she really came out ahead in the whole mess.

[Kip Watson]

Interesting reply.

It suggests you find the idea of True Love too dangerous?

Perhaps it is...

[Solar]

I loved this piece. I think that it's true that often in older partners we see who we would like to become.

[Solar]

I loved this piece. I think that it's true that often in older partners we see who we would like to become.