I believe age gaps in Hollywood raise a question that gets rarely asked in reverse. You may hear several reasonings of why a young, heterosexual, woman might want to date an older man. He’s “mature, stable, more established”. If you were to turn the question around, what is the reasoning behind why an older man wants to date or be with a younger woman? When it comes to a man’s side, there’s less need for explanation. It may be given, he may say he loves her, simple. Now it doesn’t have to be interrogated further. This can get especially complicated around marriage and pregnancy in a heteronormative relationship where the physical and social differences between both partners are built into the power dynamic. Yet continuously this issue can get put down, more notably on the internet because they are “both consenting adults”.
You can see this justification in visible patterns for celebrities who have “pretty privilege”. They can exist outside and above this scrutiny. They are free to date women barely out of their teens, and in the past, it could go largely unquestioned. This while there’s a constant quiet expectation that the woman be held to a higher standard than her counterpart. Through a Hollywood lens being with a younger woman lets the older man’s own image become “youthful, playful” by association, his body, his relevance, are refreshed through the woman. Now the label as a “young woman” stop being categorized as young at all. She is now re-contextualized as being the “girlfriend”, which gets rid of the age difference rather than giving a name to it.
Meanwhile, what role does the male celebrity fit in this? He still has the luxury to rarely have to account for any of it. This is because the explanation is already pre-loaded. “He’s dating a gorgeous model, that’s why,” “they like each other, that’s why” The reasoning is now circular and self-justifying. Then the standard “it was different back then”, now accountability is absolved. The conversation now gets epistemically pushed back before it even starts. This is close to what Iris Marion Young describes in Throwing like a Girl, she talks about bodily contortment. Her argument is that the feminine embodiment under patriarchal conditioning, involves “ambiguous transcendence”. This meaning, that a woman’s body is always simultaneously a “thing” doing something and an “object” being under someone else’s observation or perception. Another concept like “inhibited intentionality” can be applicable to this too. And that because a part of oneself is always being watched the action can never be fully committed. The “younger woman” in these relationships aren’t allowed to just be her age in some cases. That can look different given who you ask as well as societal expectations of how young women are “supposed” to behave. I do believe it’s important not to generalize the experiences of what one woman’s experience is supposed to look like, especially given the hyper sexualization of women Hollywood. And if you’re of an intersectional identity it can be viewed with even more scrutiny. Youth in these relationships is now “maturity “. So that it stops being uncomfortable for everyone looking at the relationship from the outside.
So, to bring this back around, what exactly is wrong with the “they’re both consenting adults” response? Consent matters. No question. But it’s the way this response treats consent as a simple yes or no rather than something shaped by conditions. It’s worth asking what conditions shape how consent gets given, and not just whether it was given in the first place. Another contrast is the public image of the older more established partner tends to stay fairly stable no matter what, before, during, and after the relationship. The younger partners identify by comparison is now folded into the relationship and how the public views them. She may now be braced for how she’ll be read, in a way he doesn’t have to. There can be a similar connection from how Linda Martin Alcoff uses body schema, the body’s own sense of itself in the world and how the world sees it.
Side note
-It is important to note that this is not limited to older men and younger woman as it can happen in other relationships, that shouldn’t be discredited, also these age gaps happen very frequently with casting in shows and movies as well
Unruly Bodies 