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.