All The Old Dudes
It's the stuff of manosphere fantasy: thirty-year-old fashion model (shown above) gets side-bitched by thirty-eight-year-old Manhattan architect because said architect is busy dating a hotter twenty-three-year-old named Anouk. Model then achieves satori and comes to understand that she has become worthless because of her age. "My career successes, my triumphs as a human being, are trumped by the fact my looks—and my ovaries—have a shelf life," she moans, and a million neckbearded forever-alones tip their fedoras at once in triumph at her degradation.
I'm not convinced.
The article is called 30 Is The New 50 and like approximately 96.3% of the dating and lifestyle articles on Salon, HuffPo, XOJane, and elsewhere, it follows the standard format:
Female writer has something happen to her.
Extrapolation from the specific to the general happens at breathtaking speed.
We're all doomed.
You can think of Ms. Bahn's article as a bookend to Robin Korth's rant on the same subject, except she is almost exactly half Ms. Korth's age. The difference between the two articles is in the conclusions: while Korth believes that her failure to inspire erections in men is society's problem, Bahn pegs it as simple supply and demand.
At 40, a man is well into hitting his stride, something the guy I’m arguing with is all too aware of, as evidenced when he professes on multiple occasions, “I’m an amazing guy.” “We’re killing it. KILLING IT,” he tells me, while explaining that he’s been caught up in his rapidly expanding architecture firm.
Alex sees his stock rising. For a man, age brings success, wisdom and the Hollywood-approved wrinkles of Robert Redford. And, while I too find that my career is on the up, it doesn’t matter, because time, for a woman, is hardly as kind as it is to a man.
I don't think it's possible to argue that she's wrong. There is no man out there who would not prefer a younger woman to the one he has now. Even if he is thoroughly and deeply in love with that person, he'd still rather have that same person but younger. That's just biology and nature talking, your subconscious telling you that the lovely forty-two-year-old woman in front of you can maybe have one of your children but her nineteen-year-old daughter could have ten of them.
The thing is, we don't just feel this way about women. We feel this way about ourselves. I'd rather wake up in my fourteen-year-old skin tomorrow and then sleep with the same person with whom I'm sleeping now. She'd be happier for it, trust me. I haven't "hit my stride" in the past twenty-eight years. It's been a long slide downwards. I'm not as tall, not as durable, not as brilliant, not even as good at conversation as I was back then.
So what does Ms. Bahn mean by "At 40, a man is well into hitting his stride"? Because the fourteen-year-old me would have whipped the shit out of the forty-year-old me in everything from a straight fistfight to a game of "Name That Quote From Classical Antiquity." If I saw the fourteen-year-old me walking towards me in a crowded mall, I'd move over.
Could it be that women don't value in men what we value in ourselves? That the thirty-second refractory period and bicycle-chain-snapping quadriceps I had as a child aren't important to them? That they would rather have a man who is worn smooth and confident and unique by time? Or is it just that the fourteen-year-old me earned $2.45 an hour and rode a Redline 600c bicycle, as opposed to the adult me who will reserve the top floor suite at the Kimpton Palomar and pick you up in a Porsche? How did Ms. Bahn come to be dating a 38-year-old anyway? Could it be that she prefers older men? And did she prefer older men when she was 23?
I would suggest that we're all driven by reproductive fitness at some level. This is ground I've covered before, and it still applies. In Ms. Bahn's story, the 38-year-old successful architect and the 23-year-old ingenue are actually a good pair from a reproductive standpoint. As a thirty-year-old single woman with no children, Ms. Bahn is an oddity from a paleological perspective, as modern and frightening and weird to our ancestors as the Bugatti Veyron or the iPhone. She shouldn't exist and until recently she just didn't, not in any numbers.
But before every /b/tard and manosphere veteran nods too hard at this, consider that in a world where every woman played this game, we'd all go unlaid until we made money and experienced career triumph. "That's okay," some of you will say, "that's what's happening to me anyway." But I'm not sure that everybody wants that. In that world, nobody ever marries their high school sweetheart, because their high school sweetheart is under a 38-year-old architect. The girls you'd fall in love with in college are all busy on SeekingArrangement with older men in the big city. You've basically become one of the "lost boys" of the Mormon polygamous societies, waiting fifteen years for a chance at a girl just like the one sitting next to you in Econ class.
Maybe that's the way it should be. I don't know. The always-amusing Chateau Heartiste likes to suggest that young men in this society are basically lottery winners, surrounded by the youngest and hottest sex partners they'll ever have but completely unable to appreciate that fact. That when you are twenty-one you're experiencing things for free and with ease that will cost you tremendous effort to achieve later in life. That basically there's a misappropriation of resources going on here. Or, to coin a phrase, youth is wasted on the young.
Still, as I read Ms. Bahn's article, something nagged at me and it took me am minute to figure it out. This isn't some frumpy thirty-year-old single mother with two kids, complaining that she can't land a sucker to feed her rugrats. This is a woman who remains extremely attractive and compelling. A fashion model who can actually write with self-awareness and conviction. How rare is that? I'll tell you that it's rarer than 23-year-olds named Anouk. Youth is important but some things transcend youth and if you don't believe me ask a high school student if he'd dump his girlfriend for Kate Upton.
It didn't click for me until I noticed two things:
0. She hadn't slept with him after four dates. I'll assume she's telling the truth about this.
1. She has written a well-received book that details the fuck-filled lives of twentysomethings in Brooklyn.
2. She was, until very recently, a twentysomething in Brooklyn.
Could it be that Alex The Architect read her book, took from it the important fact that she's been raw-dog railed by fifty or a hundred dudes over the course of the past decade, and just decided that he wasn't up for being Dude #101, particularly when the price of being Dude #101 is far higher than the price of being Dudes #1 through #100? Could it be that the carefree anti-slut-shaming fuck-buddy lifestyle of which she's written with such carefree abandon turned him off? Could it be that what Alex wants to buy with his architect career and money and credibility and stride-hitting is not a battle-hardened veteran of a hundred sexual trench battles but someone innocent and sweet to whom he'll actually be something besides an Appendix in a very long book?
It’s this logic that has most of my 30-something guy friends dating girls fresh out of college. Girls who, in my experience, are less impressive, less striving, less volatile, less successful, less intimidating, less questioning, less pressing, less complex, less damaged, less opinionated, less powerful, less womanly. They are less, and, to a guy not ready for anything—like most of the guys I have dated in New York—less is more.
A 30-year-old woman is an undertaking, and it’s the real reason Alex has been putting me on the back burner for the past two months, telling me that I’m amazing and that he’s interested and then disappearing to hang out with a 23-year-old instead. Age ain’t nothing but a number, until it’s a number someone else doesn’t want to deal with.
I'd suggest that
0. when you're talking about "damaged and complex", less is always more.
1. Maybe thirty isn't the number that's the problem here.