I don’t understand this at all. If an 18 year old girl happens to be interested in dating an older guy, well, then, in order to date an older guy she needs to actually date an older guy.
Not at all. Because I suspect you are fooling yourself.
Consider this situation: Suppose that a a nerdy 18-year old guy who is a bit below average in looks hits on an 18 year old girl who is very good looking. She may very well have the same mental reaction you described earlier, i.e. something like “ewwww! does he really think he has any kind of chance with me? What a total waste of time!!”
Would this situation bother you the same way it would bother you if the guy were 40?
But it isn’t 1 in 50, you just made that number up. I’d be surprised if 1 in 1000 18 year old girls had a genuine preference for 40-50 year old men. A particular older man, say Johnny Depp, would probably do pretty well if he decided to go after college freshmen, but the average middle aged guy is not going to be appealing to anywhere near 2% of 18 year old girls.
Which you don’t appear to be backing up with any kind of non-made-up figure either; but since you agree that some older men may be attractive to 18yo’s if they figure he has fame, status and money enough, we’re agreed on what kind of girl you are, and it seems harsh to disqualify us from discussing the price.
This intrigues me, beyond me smiling at you shoehorning in the old punchline.
Why else do you think any 18 year old girl would or should be interested in a 40 year old man? We all know what the older man is getting out of it - sex with a young firm body. Good for him, I wish him the best of luck in his quest, but really, what else can he really think she wants from him?
I’m a whore because I believe that there are 18 year old girls who would be willing to sleep with Johnny Depp? I realize this is the Pit, but I don’t think this was called for.
You were to understand that the reference was figurative. Since there are considerations which might admit of some teens being willing to sleep with some quadragenarians, it’s surely not unreasonable to want to find out where the boundary might lie. As I say: arguing about the price.
I concede that such women are unlikely to have a specific preference that their partner be 40 years old. However, if they have a general preference for men who are (emotionally) mature and financially secure; and that preference is signficantly stronger than a preference to date a man in their age range, then they may very well be happier with a guy who is 40 years old.
Now, it’s true that my 1 in 50 number is not based on scientific study, however I do have my own experiences to draw on and I’m pretty confident in that 1 in 50 is a low estimate.
Anyway, I’m sorry if I said anything to suggest that 1 in 50 college coeds have a specific preference for (much) older guys. Because I don’t think that’s the case.
Johnny Depp has lots more going for him than money. Your profile photo indicates you lack those characteristics. Your calling someone a whore just because she appreciates Johnny Depp indicates you lack the good qualities that don’t come across in a picture.
The same thing a woman might want from any other man she dates.
One difference between men and women is that men place a higher value on physical appearance / youthfulness than do women. Generally speaking, of course.
Look, you’re absolutely right. There are 18-year-old girls that would sleep with Johnny Depp (who is 45 years old). There are probably not any 18-year-old girls who would sleep with my fictional 45-year-old hypothetical uncle, Captain Creepy McSTD, who has boils on his face and only the one remaining tooth and lives in a refrigerator box in a van down by the river.
The point is that there are lots of 45-year-old men who fall somewhere in between Captain McSTD and Johnny Depp. Lots and lots. Somewhere along that continuum is a point where “ew” turns into “maybe” turns into “do me harder, Captain Sparrow.” For this reason, the simple contention that the typical 45-year-old man has no chance with the typical 18-year-old woman is ill-founded; there’s no way for any given older man to know where he, personally, falls on the McSTD-Depp Continuum without, you know, giving it the old college try.
I’m pretty sure - and he can correct me if I’m wrong - that Malacandra was trying to make the point that saying “18-year-old girls won’t sleep with 45-year-old men” when you concede that “18-year-old girls would sleep with particular man X” is just as silly as saying “I’m not a whore” would be if you were willing to have sex for X amount of dollars.
You didn’t say you knew what kind of girl these hypothetical Johnny Depp fans were and wanted to argue about their price. You said, in reference to me, “we’re agreed on what kind of girl you are, and it seems harsh to disqualify us from discussing the price”.
A gentleman would apologize at this point, but a gentleman would not have called me a whore on account of my belief that some 18 year old girls think Johnny Depp is hot in the first place. You clearly have no idea what kind of woman I am, but I’m getting a pretty good sense of what kind of man you are.
You are wrong. Having worked at a Borders with a coffee shop, I can tell you, that we had no problem at all with customers loitering. Note I said “customers” which assumes thay have bought stuff and aren’t simply homeless dudes. All we asked is :
You don’t make a big mess- don’t spill coffee on the books, and don’t leave us a HUGE fucking pile to take back.
You are a customer.
Annoyances like MP3 players so loud that a dude two tables over complains are turned down.
Having our seats full is a GOOD thing, we like that. It means we have customers and the percieved busyness draws more customers.
We even ordered a few more chairs just so we could have more space for LT sitters.
We had college kids come in and stay the whole freaken day- no problemo. Do you know the profit margin on those cups of coffee?
When I worked at the smaller Borders with no coffee shop we still had easy chairs and encouraged customers to come in and drink their Starbucks there. We often had a dozen college kids sitting on 3 chairs and the other 7-8* on the floor in the Manga/Anime section, sipping lattes and chatting about Manga, going through the stacks. After 4 hours, we’d sell $50 each to 3 or 4 of them, and $10 to a couple of them, and we were happy, even though half of them bought nothing. But they came back, week after week, that adds up very nicely.
Sure, slopping coffee on the books, or being a smelly bum could get you kicked out. I was usually delegated the job of kicking out the smelly homeless guy. (We had a policy on that- if a customer complained, we could toss 'em, but otherwise not, so if there is a smelly homeless guy stinking up the store- please complain!)
yeah I know, that doesn’t add up, until you think some chairs would often have two kids.
Father figure. Or she likes older men, knowing how shallow younger men are*. Or she’s attracted to Gravitas or power, not nessesarily wealth. But yes, money is one of the attractants for younger women. But there’s a difference between a girl wanting a sugar-daddy and one that just prefers the Opera to TV-on-the-couch.
Some younger girls like an experienced lover, one who both knows the tricks but also has no problem using a condom. One who isn’t a “Minute-man”, even if he isn’t so studly looking. One with “slow hands”.
However, I am now 50-something. When I was just a bit younger, I had two (not at the same time) much younger, very attractive GF, who’d even call me for a booty call. One did like a date at Arcadia as opposed to Micky-D’s, but the other just said I was a superior lover. Note that I am not weathly.
What’s that, Skippy? You say I might not stack up in the attractiveness stakes against a guy whose face is his professional fortune and who has coaching, wardrobe, make-up, photography and post-production on his side? I’m wounded - wounded, I tell you. If I’d known I was to be matched against the Deppster or assessed on my fitness to attract eighteen-year-olds, I’d have had a shave and a haircut at the very least, and maybe a photographer who didn’t cut off the top of my head.
As to calling someone a whore because she appreciates Johnny Depp, I didn’t. I’m sorry if the metaphor was too deep for some, but it evidently wasn’t too deep for all, and perhaps you could, you know, go play in traffic or something instead of playing Ms Buttinski when the adults are talking.
But the line about paying for it was a spot-on character assessment - at least it was if “generally” means the same as “never in all my born days” where you come from. Otherwise, not so much.
Well, let’s go over this slowly, then, since you have Bridget Burke on your side to attest to the difficulty of the metaphor. “You”, in this connection, personified the eighteen-year-old and “us” was the hopeful fortysomethings. Neither the actual you nor the actual I are involved as interested parties. “Discussing the price” was a metaphor for the process of negotiation that accompanies the discovery that the situation is not an absolute, objective one but a subjective, negotiable one. We are agreed that some fraction of eighteen-year-olds might sleep with Johnny Depp, his age notwithstanding; it therefore seems reasonable to argue that some (doubtless smaller!) fraction might be willing to sleep with a forty-year-old of less overall attractiveness; it further seems reasonable that the hopeful forty-year-old might be acting within the bounds of decorum to learn where any particular eighteen-year-old’s boundary would lie.
Rather than obliging you to form your own impressions of the kind of man I am, I’ll give you this tip for free: it’s really, really hard to get me to go out of my way for the sake of playing No True Gentleman with a near-stranger on the internet. I regret any distress you have suffered, but when I clarify what I mean, you should not insist that, actually, your first impression of what I said was the one true interpretation, and insofar as you contribute to your own distress, I decline to accept the responsibility.
Whether or not you think you are wealthy is not really the point, though. In the general scheme of things, what a forty year old considers to be wealthy is not the same as what an 18 year old considers as wealthy, is it? When I was 18, I was at university. Anyone who had any sort of a job at all would have been wealthier than me. Now as I’m forty odd, wealth has a very different definition.
By the way, when I was college age, I was hit on occasionally by middle-aged men. Even though I find the thought of sexual relations with another guy to be pretty gross, the actual experience of being hit on was not particularly annoying.
Of course, those men never had a chance with me but they had no way of knowing it in advance. So as long as they aren’t too aggressive, I forgive them for interrupting my day.
I’m going to hypothesize that there are two big categories of people who are really disturbed by the idea of a 40 year old guy hitting on an 18 year old girl:
(1) older guys who don’t have the cojones to do it themselves;
(2) older women who resent the fact that so many men in their age group are chasing younger women rather than women of their own age.
The first two times the word “you” appear in this sentence it is obviously in reference to me, as it was me and not a hypothetical 18-year old girl who made the statements you are referring to. (I am, for the record, well past the age of 18.) But somehow the third time this same pronoun appears in the same sentence it does NOT refer to me, but to the hypothetical Johnny Depp fan? I think not. If you meant some third party you should have said “she”, not “you”.
Either this is some of the most pathetic backpedaling I’ve ever seen on these boards, or you are a truly inept writer.
*Look, if you can’t say what you mean then that’s not my fault. I would apologize if I had insulted someone by accident. If you are unwilling to do this then that’s your right, but it makes you a jerk.
I don’t understand this at all. If an 18 year old girl happens to be interested in dating an older guy, well, then, in order to date an older guy she needs to actually date an older guy.
