wow, ruf - you really have a bee in your bonnet on this one dontcha?
i've always thought bruce willis was freaking hot, regardless of the fact that he's always had 20+ years on me, and even though he's my dad's age, you gotta admit that guy looks good
for his age. Your honesty is refreshing though - i admit that i, too, find i have far more respect for the old guys who in passing tweak my nose and come at me with an if "I were younger," and then back off, as opposed to ones who come at me with a "lets."
My friends dad (who once said the above to me), is a firm believer in the 10-year gap rule. His theory (and he counsels an awful lot of people), is that at the 10-year gap, you do start to have sexual difficulty, and with the older-man/younger-woman gap, a serious probability of sexual frustration on the part of the woman, or outright cheating. Its interesting, because i actually do know a lot of people in relationship with gaps larger than 10 years, and so far, it hasnt been pretty. One of the ladies was my friends mom. Sweetest lady you know. When we were younger, she remarried to a man 15+ years her senior, and as far as we know he doted upon her and they loved each other. He died within years of their marriage. It was quite disturbing - and she was single again before she was 50 years old. Another, more stark example was a girl I knew a few years ago that was my exact age at the time (27yrs). I was blown away to discover that she was dating a 60 year old man. Worse, he was married, had children older than her, was seriously "connected," and she was very firmly kept, though I spent many working hours musing on how "kept" did "kept" mean, and the various intricacies of this. When, after much study, I discarded the idea that she was a high-class escort/prostitute, I found myself unable to discard the question that repeatedly floated to my mind:
where / how / when was she getting any???
Im not gay, but I am also not at all threatened by other women nor afraid to to acknowledge their beauty, and in the words of the guys we knew, she was "freaking hot." It was like watching a bad movie - it became painfully obvious that she was sleeping around with other guys on her Sugar Daddy, and there was always a veneer of terror (or alternately, recklessness) about her that accompanied it, because the wilder she got, the more present Mr. Connected became. It was very self-destructive behavior, and was quite horrifying to watch. Many of us honestly believed that she might simply turn up missing one day.
I share these two examples because i think that:
(a) you can have two people who have an age gap that
really do care about one another - but this does not mean that there is not a power imbalance, and that they wont be presented with physical challenges. i have yet to see an old/young relationship actually work, save in the romance novels.
(b) having said that, i do think that there are women out there who arent necessarily looking to be "equal" with their spouses, and are willing to take on a more child-like role; by the same token, there are probably men out there who wouldnt mind having a woman who couldnt tie her shoes without their help. Im being catty, but Im trying to convey that I think there is a definite power imbalance in these old/young relationships, but I imagine that as long as both parties are aware of and WANT that power imbalance, it might work.
(c) then they have to get over the "who is she going to have sex with?" hurdle. she either slowly dies inside, or has sex with someone else, and he's either ok with that, or he's not. Im just not convinced that all older men are so evolved and cosmopolitan that they'd be ok with their young, freaking hot wife cuckolding them. I remain skeptical.
(e) then they have to consider the power imbalance in its own context. is she a gold-digger? is the love real? is she there for him, or is she there for what he offers (money, power, status). there is an adage that
men age into power, and if that's so, a pretty young thing can simply choose to bypass all the suffering that young men go through in that pursuit of power, and just pick up an older model that comes with all the bells and whistles. a lot of bitterness that older women have is that the added benefit of getting an older man is that some other woman has already housebroken him. so yes. he probably also has the kindness and consideration attendant of having been a husband and father before. there is a calculation in this, because
women age away from beauty, so a marriage of beauty & power would be an older man and younger woman.
its why people hesitate to applaud such unions - because one cannot help but view it as having been intentionally orchestrated as the mercenary machinations of a social climber. I, however, do not feel sorry for Bruce Willis or guys like him, because if it turns out they got a lemon - hey. You get what you pay for. And they have truly paid for these women. Because if younger women just naturally romantically loved old men, you would see more younger women walking hand in hand down the boulevard with old men, regardless of the social status of the man. Im interested to know - seriously. If the love is so natural and so real - how come it didnt alight upon the other kindly older men weve all come in contact with?
Now. I've said a lot, and I havent even gotten started on the travesty of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, or how Will Smith plays into all of this. We see a lot more Older Women / Younger Men unions, and they seem to be lauded by feminists and in the media these days, but I find them just as predatory. However, in the case of older women, i imagine the predation is actually
really about sex. With older men, its about image, power, and the idea of sex (because if Ruf is correct, they arent really able to get the job done), but with women, the sex is real. And frankly, im not knocking your numbers Ruf, but I've read otherwhere that a woman's sexual prime stretches
much further than 35 years of age. In otherwords, hubby's winding down, and wifey's winding up.
There's probably far more shagging going on in Moore's household than Willis'.