The 24-year age gap between France’s President-elect Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Trogneux raised eyebrows during the election campaign, which in turn raised the hackles of feminists. They pointed to the double standard involved in United States President Donald Trump’s marriage to Melania Trump causing no controversy despite a similar age gap between the two. I get the feminist argument, but I also get the raised eyebrows.
The marriage of the Trumps is dog bites man to the man bites dog of Trogneux and Macron. The standard feminist interpretation of the relatively greater decline of female sexual market value with advancing age is that it reflects conditioning imposed by a patriarchal society. I wish that were the case, for it would offer hope for the future. The truth, I am afraid, is worse.
The majority of women and men in the modern world partner people who are more or less their age. It’s called assortative mating: humans, like animals, prefer mates similar to themselves in most ways. There is, however, a cross-cultural tendency for males in couples to be older than females. In traditional marriages, the age gap is often pronounced. That’s because parents choosing for girls strongly favour high income spouses, and older men tend to earn more. However, even in in the Americas, Europe and East Asia, where most partners are self-chosen, the age gap persists.
On dating and hook-up sites, the gulf becomes, if anything, worse. That’s because marriages are based on a more complex combination of factors than hook-ups, which foreground physical attractiveness to a far greater degree.
A few years ago, Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OkCupid, wrote a series of articles and a book based on data crunched from the dating site. His analysis of ages when women are most attractive to men and vice versa makes for depressing reading. While women’s perception of the most attractive age for men evolves with their own age, men’s tastes stay stubbornly static. In fact, men in their 20s are keener to be with women in their 20s than men in their 40s to be with women in their 40s. All of which means that many women get far more attention than they want between the ages of 20 and 25 and far less than they want after their mid-30s.
Males also suffer a decline in desirability but their peak is not as high, nor as early, and tails off more gradually. Even as their attractiveness declines, they pathetically lust for women decades younger than themselves, who show no interest in them unless they possess talent or wealth substantial enough to outweigh their physical limitations.
There are less dystopic views than Rudder’s of the shift in sexual market value across age and gender, but even the most optimistic admit to a higher, earlier peak followed by a sharper decline for women than men.
How did we get to this horrid mismatch in desires? Was it an invisible conspiracy that conditions men and women to desire the things they desire? The alternative explanation that there is a biological, or innate, component to this desire working alongside the cultural one is anathema to the Left. I understand why this is the case. If desires are even partially innate, it limits how much we can reform society. As with the debate about climate change versus the debate about the dangers of Genetically Modified Organisms, however, the Left and the Right cherry-pick the science they like and condemn the rest. It is now established dogma on the Left that homosexuality is biologically conditioned. But argue for innate differences between ethnic groups in athletic ability or (much, much worse) suggest that observed differences between ethnic groups in average IQ may have a biological basis and one is immediately tagged a racist, regardless of the quality of one’s argument.
Naked truth
I know I am stepping into a minefield, therefore, by stating my belief in a biological component to the observed gap between males and females in age-related attractiveness. To explain how the gap comes to be, let us turn once again to Macron and Trump, and to one crucial difference between their respective relationships: Barron Trump.
Donald’s youngest son was born in 2006, when Donald was 60 years old. A baby would have been, quite literally, inconceivable for Brigitte Trogneux at that age. That is the first fundamental biological asymmetry upon which the tragic mismatch between male and female desire rests. Men can produce babies for far longer than women.
Let’s set up a thought experiment. Take a thousand heterosexual females and a thousand heterosexual males. Each male and female prefers their partner to be in a fairly specific age range, but these ranges are distributed evenly across the entire human lifespan (for propriety’s sake) from 18 to 80. In other words, a 20-year-old man is as likely to find an 80-year-old woman attractive as a 30-year-old, and a 30-year-old woman is as likely to find a 60-year-old man attractive as an 18-year-old.
Since desirability is distributed evenly this way, everybody finds mates fairly easily across the age spectrum. Twenty-year-old women who mate with 20-year-old men are somewhat more likely to have progeny than those who sleep with 40-year old males, whose fertility is on average a bit lower. The women who mate with 80-year-old men have very few children. Men who mate with 80-year-old women, meanwhile, have no children at all.
At each stage of being attracted to partners older than 30, women fare better than men at producing children. The second generation, therefore, will have slightly more progeny from women who like young men than those who like older men, and considerably more progeny from men who like young women than those attracted to older women.
Let us suppose, now, that sexual desire is heritable to some small degree. Although there is no conclusive proof of this being the case in humans, it is not an unlikely supposition given the proven heritability of numerous other traits. If we allow for sexual preferences to be mildly heritable, the second generation of humans in the above sample will display a slight preference for a younger cohort of the opposite gender. The bias will be more pronounced among males, since those who preferred older women failed to pass on their genes at a higher rate than females who preferred older men. These preferences will get reinforced with each passing generation, and the gap between women and men in sexual market value will continually increase. After thousands of generations, it is not unreasonable to have sexual desires skewed in ways that correspond to today’s data.
The second innate difference between sexes lies in the number of children males and females can produce. Since fertile males can produce far more offspring than fertile females, there is an asymmetry in parental investment in most animals and all mammals that leads to a number of behavioural consequences, such as females being choosier than males. This is a well trodden area of research, but one whose consequences, though reluctantly accepted by most rational humans familiar with the concept, have not been integrated into left-wing political thought or feminist theory.
I recall being dismayed when Jane Fonda, radical feminist and anti-Vietnam war activist, went under the knife to look younger. She said, half-joking and half-ruefully, “Robert Redford’s lines of distinction are my old-age wrinkles.” I now believe that while some societies such as the US might prize youth in women exaggeratedly, the fundamental imbalance between genders is universal and will never go away. Our only hope of retaining our attractiveness is better cosmetic surgery. In the end Robert Redford had it too, and came out looking worse than his erstwhile co-star. Time is unfair to men as well as women, just a little more unfair to the latter.