I wish age gap discourse hadn't spiraled the way it has because I want there to be a safe space to say "Men in their 40s who date 25 year olds aren't predators, they're just fucking losers"
... honey you just described a predator LOL
No, I said what I said. But thank you for providing an example of how this topic has become insufferable on the internet.
i am honestly burningly curious about how a 40 year old man who fucks around with college grads is not a predator
"College grad" is not a developmental stage, nor is it what I would describe a 25 year old as. I was 4 years out of college at 25. My mother had two children at 25. You can be a fucking congressman at 25.
There's a difference between a man who is immature and buys into misogynistic views of beauty and aging and one who is a predator. Also, many actual predators? Not losers and able to move through society pretty freely being seen as cool and the ideal, so conflating the two isn't helpful.
This is going to be my final response to any attempt at discourse. You're welcome to continue amongst yourselves.
also sometimes a 40 year old and a 25 year old just weirdly find each and it's a perfectly normal relationship - like all human relationships are complex and situational, it's so rarely an either/or thing let alone just one thing only
if a 40 year old dude only dates 25 year olds, DiCaprio style or something adjacent to it, then yeah he's a loser
if a 40 year old dude meets a 25 year old through social event or friends or whatever and they happen to hit it off and make a go of it, and this isn't some sort of reoccurring pattern for the guy, that's just a relationship with an age difference
being predatory means something specific, and man I agree w/ OP and really wish people just stopped ascribing it to any and all relationship dynamics they personally might not like
predator and groomer - two words that need to go up on the "can't use till you learn their meaning" shelf
Something I find really stressful is this seemingly endless creep of infantilisation and removal of autonomy from young people. Like, not to be all โin my dayyyyโ about it, butโฆ at 16, my friends and I were expected to be broadly responsible for our presence in the world. Most of us had jobs, we navigated public transport, looked after younger siblings. We were expected to make informed decisions about our future careers and our sexual partners. We were allowed to leave education and work full time (this was not necessarily good thing - I think increasing the school leaving age to 18 was broadly for the best). Most of us were smoking, or drinking, or both - again, not good things, but just facts - and many of us were sexually active. Many of the AFAB people I knew were on the pill. Legally, we could live independently, or get married with adult consent.
Legally (I live in the UK) we were not minors, although we inhabited an odd legal limbo until we turned 18, and we were certainly not โchildrenโ. Intellectually, socially, though, we were considered (young) adults, or at the most โolder teenagers.โ We were expected to read mostly adult books (rather than middle grade or YA), watch the news/read papers, watch mostly adult television.
And I do think we a bit under-protected, under-supported, and in some cases - neglected and financially exploited - and Iโm not necessarily advocating that. But it did make us feel, I think, in charge of our own lives, capable and competent to make decisions.
At 16-17 my parents knew they could leave me alone overnight/for a couple of nights, and I wouldnโt starve or burn the house down. I felt comfortable getting cross country trains on my own, or booking and staying at a hotel (yes, with my boyfriend.)
Then there was thisโฆ creeping of sentiments that we were all Too Young to trouble our heads about certain things. A lot of it was good - more stringent licensing laws, raising the school leaving age, raising the minimum smoking age(!) - but some of the broader cultural stuff wasโฆ a bit patronising? Eg, the introduction of โNew Adultโ as a category of books aimed at 18-25 year olds, the way cartoons and books written for the 9-12 age group were being marketed as for the 12-15 age group, referring to late teens as โchildren,โ etc etc.
Then, in 2008, there was the big financial crash and suddenly my generation were (broadly) robbed of all the usual markers of adulthood and success, meaning that we got โstuckโ in the lifestyles and modes our late teens/early 20s. And suddenly, all the emphasis shifted from social and legal protections for late teens/ younger adults, to legal restrictions on their freedoms/rights, and strange philosophical protections on the emotional states.
So, OF COURSE a 23 year old canโt buy a beer without carrying an ID card, and a 17 year old canโt have a crush on a 16 year old, but also, because youโre *children* you donโt need to live like adults. So the UK government got to save money by saying โ18 isnโt a proper adult,โ then โ20 isnโt a proper adult,โ and โ25 isnโt a proper adultโ because it meant they could refuse to give single occupancy housing benefit rates to people of those ages (I think theyโve raised it over 30 now.) Or by refusing to clamp down on exploitative temporary/zero hours contracts - because theyโre just โtemp jobs for young people!โ, or by raising the retirement age because โ60 is far too young to retire. Youโre not a real adult until 35.โ
And it means the discursive environment is such that you can claim that a 21 year old trans person is too young to make their own medical decisions, or a 15 year old is too young to consent to the contraceptive pill.
Meanwhile, they are not offering additional *protections* to these newly infantilised adults. 18 year olds are still encouraged to saddle themselves with enormous educational debt, or allowed to have credit cards, or expected to pay rent, or no longer receive child benefits. You still have to *work*. In fact, in the States, theyโre looking to removed child employment restrictions - but thatโs fine, because 20 year olds are being protected from making their own medical decisions, and adults get to say which books their teen kids are reading in school, and kids arenโt allowed to change their name or what they wear without parental consent.
We can see what these people are doing to the rights of children - so why are we being so complacent in expanding the definition of โchildโ?
Regardless - 25 is VERY CLEARLY an adult. At 25 I was married, had two kids, an overdraft, rent to pay, and experience of living in the world for 6 years. I had more in common with someone of 40 than I did with someone of 15. Hell, at*20* I had more in common with someone of 40 than someone of 15. Any sexual or relationship decisions you make at 25 are your own to make.
Of course there are likely to be power imbalances in a 15 year age gap - which is why most 25 year olds donโt date 40somethings - but not actually necessarily. And yeah, a 40 year old who only dates 20somethings is a skeeze - just like a 30 year old who routinely ingratiates themselves with rich 80 year olds is a skeeze.
But if any young people are reading this (doubt it)โฆ your rights are much, much more important than your protections.
Yes, young people should be protected, but if someone claims theyโre protecting you while denying you access to personal autonomy, financial stability, intellectual curiosity, or sexual self-determination because youโre โtoo youngโ to need, or understand those thingsโฆ be very suspicious of their motives.
And if youโre legally an adult, ask yourself why you donโt feel comfortable defining yourself in those terms.
This thread is from 2023, and now with the Cass report we have seen the real, tangible danger that comes from infantilizing adults in their 20s.
the long reply above mentiones this, but I want to emphasize this: many western societies have lost their "rituals of maturity". Young adults don't get to buy a house, starting a family is a lot of stress if all adults in the household have to work fulltime, and it's almost impossible to find a job above minimum wage that offers career options. All of which are things which previous generations enjoyed more broadly, and which were seen as steps into adulthood.
Only a few decades ago, 90% of the people in the region where I live owned their own houses. Granted, they were often shitty ones, but they were their own. Today, not even 50% own the place they live in.
We've removed the milestones of adulthood, it's no wonder we increasingly infantilize adults. And the worst is, this does nothing to prevent real predators from preying on under-protected people! With the removal of the milestones of adulthood, we also removed a lot of the safety net previous generations could rely on.
All of these additions are absolutely spot on, but there's one more thing I want to add, and that is to point out how the "a 40yo dating a 25yo is inherently predatory" type of age gap discourse increasingly treats predation, not as a conscious, specific behaviour, but as an ambient effect of being in proximity to someone younger. Because if, as it's so frequently argued, it's impossible for people of different ages to have anything meaningful in common, such that there's no legitimate grounds even for friendship between (say) a 25yo and a 40yo, let alone something romantic or sexual, then what's being implied is that either that everyone is at all times only a single interaction away from natively turning predator, or that predation is somehow natural, automatic, reflexive - neither of which is true. But believing that it is is incredibly fucking dangerous. Because if there's no good or safe or reasonable way for someone older to interact with someone younger outside of a strict workplace or familial relationship (and sometimes not even then), then what we're doing is saying that it's inherently unsafe or wrong for younger people to learn from older people, or for older people to mentor them, or for (say) twentysomethings and fiftysomethings to exist in the same spaces as equal adults. We're saying that an eighteen-year-old should feel bad and weird about hanging out with a two-years-younger friend they've known since infancy because it's inappropriate for minors and legal adults to be friends. (I truly wish this was a hypothetical example, but no, it's not: I have legitimately seen multiple accounts of teenagers getting stressed out about exactly this type of thing because of this discourse.) And by acting as if the age gap power imbalance can only ever go one way, we're also completely ignoring the reality of things like elder abuse or older people being scammed or exploited by younger people.
But beyond all this, if you assume all older people are inherently dangerous to younger people, you're leaving yourself horrifically vulnerable, not only because you're not putting any effort into learning what actual predatory behaviour looks like, but because age gaps are not the only fucking vector for predation or abuse. If you can't distinguish between a safe adult/older person and a suspicious adult/older person or between trustworthy behaviour and manipulative behaviour because you've trained yourself to screen categories rather than actions, not only will you miss out on many cool friendships, but you'll be vulnerable to exploitation if and when someone, be they older or not, eventually sneaks past your guard, because you won't know to recognise what they're doing. Yes, there are absolutely times when an age gap is, in and of itself, a massive red flag, but if you can't distinguish between "45yo man marrying 18yo girl he's known since she was 12 the very moment she's legal" and, say, "35yo divorcee marrying 50yo widower she met at an art show," or "19yo dating a 17yo from the next school over after meeting at a mutual friend's party," or even "22yo has an extremely fun consensual one night stand with the 38yo they met at the bar," then you're going to be very poorly placed to recognise any abusive dynamics that don't perfectly align with the optics you've internalised as being indistinguishable from abuse, because the optics and the abuse are two different things. The one might indicate the presence of the other, but it doesn't guarantee it, and you can certainly have the abuse without the optics. And particularly in the context of conservatives increasingly insisting that just existing as a queer or trans person around children is an inherently predatory act, it makes me feel absolutely insane, how quickly so many people have conceded to the exact same type of logic (that an older person just existing around a younger person for non-familial, non-work reasons is inherently suspicious), argued for the exact same reasons (think of the children!) without stopping to question it at all.
As someone who was abused and bullied by people my own age, including younger children, and who was protected by adults, when I was a child and teen: This is dangerous for all the reasons mentioned above and because teenage predators will absolutely go after other teens in their own class. With no age gap. Might even be a few months younger. All they need to have is some social advantage. Shower the shy wallflower with positive attention and you can groom her into being a victim of your abuse even if she is technically older than you, because predators go after people they see as weaker, not people who they see as younger.
Your fellow teenager is not unilaterally safe and incapable of abusing you. The adults you know are not unilaterally predatory for being your friends. If you're a 25 year old you are allowed to consent to a relationship with a 40 year old because you are an adult, and that does not make the 40 year old a groomer. (Doesn't even necessarily make them a loser. As someone above pointed out, sometimes a 25 year old and a 40 year old just hit it off. If the 40 year old only dates 25 year olds, yeah, then they're a loser.)
Me personally, I wouldn't have had a sexual relationship with a 25 year old when I was 40, because I would have felt like our places in life were too far apart to be compatible. But I did, in fact, date someone who was 25 when I was 30, and ended up marrying them, and if anything the power dynamic has always been in their favor because of how our personalities work.
And some 40 year olds are not losers so much as they have, either through disability or simply the grind of late stage capitalism, been denied the usual markers of adulthood, and still live with their parents and don't have kids and don't have careers so much as they have jobs, like, they work in retail as a cashier or stocking shelves, and they're basically in the same place in their lives as a 25 year old doing the same things. If that's you, then you may be more mature than a 25 year old who also lives with their parents and has a retail job, but unless you are co-workers and you can use your seniority against them, or you're substantially better off financially, you don't really have a lot more social power than they do. You might have less, because they're seen as a person with potential and you're seen as a loser!
Predators are predators. No adult pursuing a relationship with another grown adult is necessarily a predator. And some people pursuing relationships with minors, who are also minors, are predators themselves. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast metric for "this is a predator". You have to use your wits, be observant, look at how the dynamics are playing out.
If you're young you should avoid dating people so much older than you that they have social power over you, and if you're old you should avoid dating people so much younger that you have power over them, not because those relationships are by definition toxic but because it is easier for them to become so than relationships between closer equals. But if you see people who are in such a relationship, don't make judgements until you actually see how their dynamics are playing out. There are young people with enormous force of personality controlling the lives of much older partners who are more eager to please and less strong-willed. And there are perfectly compatible age-gap couples. As long as they are both adults and you see no evidence of coercion, that isn't predatory -- and declaring that it is, in all cases, makes it a lot harder for you to detect what actually is predatory.
