Right, we gotta talk about this. Elsewhere on the internet I saw an 18yo asking for advice regarding a man in his forties and his girlfriend in her twenties, who had approached the 18yo on Tinder and were intending on her losing her virginity with them.
I was the only one commenting who did not encourage her to go through with this.
There is a lot to unpack here.
I’m going to start by saying, teenagers of Tumblr, I know you’re not going to like a lot of what I say. I’m 31, but I remember being your age and that’s how I know this stuff. I don’t mean any of it as an insult, simply a fact. I want you to be armed with the information to be able to make informed choices about your life.
I want to quickly point out that because it’s the most common occurrence, I’m going to mostly refer to older men trying to get involved with younger women, but of course people of any gender can be abusers and people of any gender can fall prey to that. If you’re a 17yo boy who has a woman in her fifties chasing you, this definitely all applies to you.
So where to start. In the original post that inspired this one, she said “what’s so wrong with two adults wanting to teach another adult about sex?”
Now, an 18yo is an adult. But there are different kinds of adult.
An 18yo is a BABY adult. Adulthood isn’t achieved in one day; it takes time to become one.
Here is a list of things you generally learn between the ages of 18 and 25, probably the most important growing up stage (you know how they say “you really start to learn to drive once you’ve passed your test”? You’re out on your own now, the real learning begins):
–how to keep a home liveable, clean and stocked up.
–how to support yourself financially
–how to physically pay bills, set up services and organise money
–how to solve financial problems, DIY problems, emotional problems, and other issues without involving a Grownup
–how to cope with illness by yourself
–how to cope with a financial Disaster like losing a job
–how to talk to Adults who are not your peers without subconsciously seeing them as an Authority Figure
–how to have authority figures without subconsciously resorting to obedient child or rebellious child headspace
–how to be independent from your parents
–how you feel about alcohol, and if you want to use it, how to use it moderately
–how to cope with the end of a relationship
–how to tell a partner what you want from them, reinforce boundaries, tell them you’re unhappy with some of their behaviour without being afraid it will end the relationship
Those are the things that separate a young adult from a general adult. A lack of confidence and skill in many of those areas makes a person vulnerable to abuse, especially from someone older with an established career and home. Simply put: if someone has resources and you don’t, you subconsciously feel they are an authority figure, and you are not practised in reinforcing your boundaries in relationships, you are not in a position to consent to a relationship with them.
I get it. Teenage and early twenties boys are crap. They’re morons. They love farting and videogames and they treat women like prizes. I accidentally fell into relationships with men all my adult life, but I didn’t know I was attracted to them until I was in my late twenties, and I suspect before that maybe I wasn’t. But if you’re looking for maturity, you won’t find it in a man past his early twenties who is okay with dating teenagers.
Adult men do not just happen to run into young girls all the time. If you see an older man on any dating website or app: he has deliberately set his preferences to show women of your age. My Tinder range is 24-40, and I tend to go “eurgh” at the under 25s anyway. Because those people are in the same period of their life as me, they have similar knowledge, understanding and experience. I have friends who are in their early twenties and they are awesome people. But they also have extremely poor relationship skills simply due to lack of experience and I would not like to date them. And when I talk to people at work who are that age, (once they realise I’m not the same age as them, I’m really babyfaced): they treat me as if I know things purely by being older than them. I’m not a higher authority than them, but if I give them commands, they do it. They ask me questions on the assumption that I know everything a manager would know. I bet they don’t even realise they do this; I didn’t when I was their age. So we know that any older man finding young girls on dating apps is deliberately seeking them; we know if he meets them in the workplace there is a serious power imbalance. Other than that the most common way these guys meet women is by seeking out hobbies and social groups that attract teenage girls, so guess what? Predatory behaviour.
Some of the reasons adult men seek teenage and early twenties girls and women:
–younger women probably don’t know what good in bed looks like so they won’t call out the fact that he’s lazy and inconsiderate
–they’re easier to groom into putting up with the kind of bad or even abusive behaviour a woman his own age would dump him for
–they fetishize youth and innocence because they’re gross creeps who find the idea of willing consent a huge turnoff
–they’re sexists who think women are prizes and objects that “expire” at 25 and are somehow soiled by having relationships instead of seeing that woman are beautiful, interesting and fascinating people throughout their entire lives
–they are vile people who don’t give a toss about consent or having a relationship with someone who understands what that means and is his equal, and who wish they could date younger but don’t want to go to prison
If anyone dares come to me with some absolute guff about how it’s “just biology” to be attracted to teenage girls no matter your age, consider this:
1) humans can become pregnant up to and including during their forties and they aren’t “most fertile” at 15; they are still GROWING up to 25 and pregnancies in teenagers are dangerous
2) there are millions upon millions of people out there in happy relationships that cannot result in biological pregnancy for a multitude of reasons, and they are attracted to one another anyway
3) if you’re a man who uses Viagra and you’re making this argument I hope you stumble into an unexpected mine shaft.
I think once you get to your late twenties, the gap narrows between you and much older people because you’re experienced at being an adult, and I’m not going to judge a 50yo dating a 30yo unless he only dates 30 and under exclusively. At that point the power difference is minimised and the younger person can hold their own in that relationship. I’m not against age gaps as a concept; I’m just deeply worried about people who are the target of people who are attracted to them BECAUSE they are vulnerable, and don’t realise how unhealthy sexual and romantic relationships with older people are.
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