You know when you look at someone and think “they look really young/old”? It’s seems to usually be baselined to about your own chronological age. i.e a college senior looks really young to me as a 40 year old but they looked a lot older when I was a mere freshman.
By the same token, I’m attracted to women in their 30s and 40s now but Miley Cyrus seems really creepy. Where if I were 18, women in their 30s and 40s would seem really old to me and Miley would…ok she would still seem really creepy, but at least in an age-appropriate way.
Anyhow, my question is if there is some sort of mechanism in people’s brain that resets their perception of people being in their own age group? Like if they studied a pedophile’s brain, that mechanism would appear to be out of whack?
I’d be interested in any technical answers to this, but I’ll just add that from my POV, increasing age broadens, as well as shifts, the age of attraction. At age 36, yes I find women of my age, and into their 40s, attractive, but do I still see the attraction of girls half my age. Hell yes! (Not that I would want a relationship with that kind of age gap, though - I might have to hear them speak )
BTW, when I’m 80 and Miley is 64, she’ll still be creepy. That’s just not an age thing.
I think it’s a very slow process that happens as we age, and you are observant to be aware of it. I guess as we slowly age day by day our current age becomes to normal to us. Thinking back, I can’t even imagine or remember what it was like to be a teenager. I remember certain events, but I do not at all remember the way I felt at that time.
FWIW, I remember that throughout my childhood, no matter what age/size I was, the other kids who were my age always looked “normal kid height” to me, while the younger kids looked smaller and the “big kids” always did look big.
If there is such a mechanism, I seem to have been born without it. I never had any age preference whatsoever. For me, an elderly man can be just as hot as a teenager, all other criteria being equal. The only exception would be kids, who I wouldn’t react to as being “hot,” but more like “he’s gonna be hot when he grows up.”
This is one time when I’ll consider some evolutionary mechanism: We are all descended from people who were attracted to people within certain age parameters. If the majority of people were attracted to children or the aged, we may have died out.
I would assume it’s the same mechanism that causes things you see regularly to seem familiar and “normal” to you. When you were ten then other ten year olds probably looked “normal” (that is, not little kids or old people) because you spent a lot of time interacting with ten year olds as social peers, not simply because the face you saw in the mirror was also ten years old. By the time you were in high school you presumably not only didn’t hang out with ten year olds much, but didn’t even see them around in large numbers. Even if you had a ten year old sibling who you saw every day then you would have been seeing far more teenagers around at school. Ten year olds would stop looking “normal” and would instead seem much younger than the “normal” people your own age who you socialized with the most often.
One thing that I’ve found very odd, and I first noticed it in High School Journalism/Yearbook class, is that if you look through old yearbooks it seems that the people our age back then (50’s, 60’s, even 70’s to an extent - this would have been in the 80’s for me) looked much older than kids our age at the time… never have understood that. Even to this day if I find an old yearbook at a used book store or garage sale or whatever, “kids” from those time periods always look to be around 25 or so…
Unattractiveness vs familiarity.
I think overall, people become less attractive as they age (sorry, but as a former model, it’s a fact I’ve had to come to terms with like everyone else).
But things you’re familiar with are less affected by this. For example, wrinkles might be a turn off…but less so if you see them in the mirror every day.
Attraction is goal-oriented, but adaptable
What I mean is, it’s not arbitrary what we find attractive, but it is malleable.
e.g. Bearing in mind point 1), it may follow that more people of approximately your age flirt with you. It doesn’t take long to notice that at some level, and for your attention to be focused on the group where you might get some.
Of course cultural also
Certain combinations are still a little taboo.
Also we can’t help making generalizations such as that older people will want to settle down, younger people won’t etc.
Yes, google own-age effect/bias. The mechanism is adaptation. I would not characterize it as slow. Your own normal age is defined by your own age, as well as those around you; a 30 year old elementary school teacher will be adjusted relatively younger than a 30 year old hospice worker at an old folk’s home.
We define “old” and “young” by what we are currently doing in life, at our current age…
Look at anyone who is doing something that you would never consider appropriate for yourself at your current age: that person is either young or old, but he sure isn’t like you!
That person is simply not in your frame of reference–they live a strange, incomprehensible lifestyle.
My parents are 87. But they are not old! (they are healthy and live in their own house)
They think an “old” person is anyone living in a nursing home. And a young person is anyone who has to set an alarm clock and go to work in the morning. Both those lifestyles are not in their current frame of reference, so it seems like a strange way to live…
In high school, anybody who didn’t wear jeans everyday was “old”. What a strange, incomprehensible lifestyle they had.
etc, etc
So it’s not an issue of age issue as much as it is an issue of cultural and behavioral norms.
Your own lifestyle is always the “correct” , normal lifestyle. And anybody who lives a different lifestyle marks them as too young or too old for you.
There’s a photo of my Nan in her mid 40s where she looks 60 or more to my eyes. We were looking at it when my Mum was about the age that Nan is in that picture. We discovered off you block out her hairstyle and only look at her face, she doesn’t look old after all - dated hair and dated clothes are what give most of the impression that she’s aged.
It’s because of the clothing and hair styles. Even eyebrows and makeup. And if you go really far back, like to the late 1800s to early 1900s, It was considered gauche to smile. Most people didn’t have cameras, so being photographed was something very formal, not a laughing matter.
I thought that the problem was the long exposure times and the impossibility of maintaining a smile. I have see a pincer device that photographers used to keep the sitter’s head still.
When I was a teenager (back in the 1970s; I was born in 1960), I certainly didn’t think that women in their 30s and 40s were “old”. There were quite a number of women in that age range and older (one particular woman in my neighborhood that I am remembering right now was in her 50s at the time, but had TV /movie star good looks) that I found attractive.
But I know what you’re talking about. One of my friends at school had this to say about the stars of the wildly-popular show “Charlie’s Angels”, which debuted in the Fall of 1976 (pic included below) :
He said, “They’re old.”
Farrah, Kate, and Jaclyn were only 10-12 years older than we were. I thought that they were all hot as hell – most guys my age did – but he could look at them and say, “They’re old”. I thought that was funny!
)
