The Quagmire of Older Women, Part II
December 28, 2003
by Bernard Chapin
There
certainly is no shortage of self-help and advice booklets for females,
but I have found that many of the guide books for men are not much
different from their feminine counterparts. This is not the way it
should be if the authors who penned them truly wished to help men.
These publications are intentionally or inadvertently premised on the notion that male sexual desire is something for which an apology is owed or something that has to be prefaced with disclaimers. Within our popular culture, the unshakeable conclusion appears to be that men are the “shallow sex.”
I will not deviate from the oath that I made in the introduction stating that this work will be a “Straight Talk Express.” That is why, despite the convictions of the sisterhood and particularly its older members, it is clear to me that there is nothing superficial about male sexuality and nowhere is this more evident than in our preference for young, attractive mates.
Indeed, a man’s desire for feminine youth and beauty is thorough proof of depth. This preference is intrinsic to our biology and independently is the reason why our species has survived into twenty-first century.
In my own case, had my father, a man of forty in 1968, married a woman his own age rather than my 24 year old mother, the chances are very good that I would not be here to write this piece at all. For me to call into question my father’s selection bias is equivalent to me calling into question my own right to exist. I will not do so.
We know indisputably that youth correlates with fertility and that beauty correlates with health. Rather than attack men, women and the media should be grateful that ancient males coveted who they did.
Robert Wright, in his masterpiece, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, clearly identifies that a man’s concern for a female’s age is both essential and universal:
“Just as women have special reason to focus on a man’s ability to provide resources, men have special reason to focus on the ability to produce babies. That means, among other things, caring greatly about the age of a potential mate, since fertility declines until menopause, when it falls off abruptly. The last thing evolutionary psychologists would expect to find is that a plainly postmenopausal women is sexually attractive to the average . They don’t find it. (According to Bronislaw Malinowski, Trobriand Islanders considered sex with an old woman ‘indecorous, ludicrous, and unaesthetic.’) Even before menopause, age matters, especially in a long-term mate; the younger a woman, the more children she can bear. In every one of Buss’s thirty-seven cultures, males preferred younger mates (and females preferred older mates).” [p.65]
Every word in Wright’s paragraph resonates as truth, and that’s the basically why men became the first and most enduring targets of political correctness. Without PC mores it would be impossible to condemn the male members of our population as oppressors because logic and human nature alone would vindicate us from any guilt.
Inherent to PC ideology, people like me who wish to clear the names of ourselves and our brothers are branded as sexists or chauvinists seconds after we speak. This is done in the hopes of turning us into outcastes to whom no one will listen.
It’s a sad reality that many of those who use the word “chauvinist” know as little about its derivation as they do about the inner-workings of the automobiles they drive or the computers they use. Defending oneself is not an act of chauvinism; however, insisting that those who differ from you are morally inferior or superficial is chauvinistic, and this insistence is integral to those who publicly demean the sexuality of men.
Calling males who unabashedly stick up for themselves sexist is simply preposterous. The sexists are the ones who regard the female perspective as being the only legitimate one.
Yet, given how obvious and intuitive all of this is, why do men allow lies about us to proliferate? Part of the reason is that political correctness is now the law. Our stiff resistance to the notion that “men are shallow” creates the type of friction that could result in our professional dismissal (as in the case of those who work in universities) or cause women to avoid our company altogether.
The default position of our society is that, through our physical desires, we are the inferior gender. To combat this, many of us have to pretend that our attraction to women stems from characteristics which actually mean little to us.
Think of this the next time you, or a buddy of yours, goes to great lengths to compliment a girl on their confident personalities or their interesting careers or their independence. Who cares? Most of us do not, but we attempt to fill the needs of the markets we service. In this way, we are so deeply conditioned to express trivialities that we might even surprise ourselves if we examine the emptiness of many of our compliments.
Overall, the circumstances of having to refute the importance of our girlfriends being young or attractive is sick and profane but we won’t stop doing it. I recall a girl back in 2000 asking me if I would stay with her were she suddenly to gain 30 pounds. I told her I wouldn’t. At first she was shocked but laughed about it later. Sadly, had it been our second or third date as opposed to our thirtieth, I am sure that I would have avoided answering the question.
Another time, while entertaining two girls from Atlanta at a bar we used to call “Electric Oldladyland”, I had one of them suddenly turn against me and storm out after I took issue with her saying that Chicago, unlike the south, was devoid “of the double standard about men liking younger women and women not liking younger men.”
She then confided that she liked younger men (perhaps as a message to me or anybody else under forty listening in). At the time, I was high as three kites at a kite convention so, as I was very weary of their conversation, I decided to have some fun by telling her the truth about our feelings for older women.
I agreed with her that “older women definitely had their purpose” because they were often quite easy and even easier to blow off without conscience after relations finished. I said that this was an upside she should tell other southerners about. Of course, despite my laughter, she went ballistic and nearly battered me. Yet I was a good sport about it and, as a way to ease her pain, I told her that I would have never spoken to her in such a fashion had she not an older woman.
The irony about sexual preferences, is that the same women are every bit as deep– or every bit as shallow by their own standards– as men in their preferences for the opposite sex. While they publicly claim the importance of finding that perfect person or soul mate they are (oh, let’s go ahead and use the word) chauvinistically devoted to finding a man who has status and wealth.
I spoke to a former single female neighbor about this and, after initially denying that someone’s wealth or status meant anything to her, she eventually admitted that she’d never go out with an unemployed man. She related to me a story about once being asked out in an internet café by a “cute” guy sitting next to her. She said yes but after noticing his computer screen displaying the monster job board, she made inquiries and discovered that he was “between positions.” She never did return his call.
I will not judge these women unfavorably regarding their mating preferences but I can honestly state that most of them would never extend to me the same courtesy. Matt Ridley in his The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, found that the very same feminists who defame men at every turn for our biological lusts display innate wiring through their own romantic cravings:
“Even a survey of fifteen powerful leaders of the feminist movement revealed that they wanted still more powerful men. As Buss’s colleague Bruce Ellis put it, ‘Women’s sexual tastes become more, rather than less discriminatory as their wealth, power, and social status increase.” [Ridley, p.268]
One wonders what they would say when confronted with such evidence. My guess is that they would continue their own war on diversity by trying to encourage us to become attracted to older, nihilistic specimens like themselves. We should respond to this by asking out their daughters or younger sisters instead, but, humor aside, the fact that anyone would attempt to convince someone else of what they should be attracted too discounts their opinion altogether.
Yet, what feminists and others may admit to on questionnaires is far from what they profess in public. Ridley again:
“As Nancy Thornhill put it, ‘Surely no one has ever seriously doubted that men desire young, beautiful women and that women desire wealthy, high-status men.’ The answer to her question is that sociologists do doubt it. Judging by their reaction to a recent study, only the most rigorous evidence will convince them.” [p.267]
That no one in their right mind would believe most of the stuff passed off as conventional wisdom does not change the fact that it is still passed off as conventional wisdom.
In late October of 2003, I asked a group of teachers I was instructing whether male and female behavior was largely learned, largely innate or a balanced combination of learned and innate traits. They all answered that our behavior was largely learned. I asked them again eagerly hunting around the room for dissenters. I found none so I offered my own extremely diplomatic dissent. They argued with me and, although without saying it directly, thought my views unsophisticated and shallow.
Yet, that’s the whole point. Biology is not something one has to think about. Shortly I’ll be going to bed for some much needed sleep, and, even if fourteen unwashed French post-modernist masturbationalists deny that I have a physical need for it, my snoring will resoundingly refute their– oh so educated– opinions.
To be continued.
Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.
