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I don't really like the age gap discourse. I think it is attempting to use identity politics to explain structural peobelms. Why is an age gap bad? Because cis het relationships are inherently bad and without sufficient experience to navigate them younger partners are likely to be hurt? Or because they are unlikely to lead to a successful marriage and kids? That's awfully partirarchy pilled. Let's imagine the converse. Which is better a boomer? Or a boomer that has stayed socially adaptable enough to be able to prosocially enguage with the younger generations? I get you don't want boomers being predatory in other spaces but that is a failure to develop the tools to exclude predatory people. Something about this discourse and skill based match making discourse is kicking around in my head and ai haven't figured out a dialectic answer to all this.
90% of age gap discourse is just violent cattle looking for someone to antagonize
either you're a pedophile or you're not a pedophile
if you raise the consent-age two more years people will just adjust the ages and call you a creep for that
I dont think about it enough to make it a real coherent thought but im 99% sure that hookup culture and the age gap discourse stuff is linked.
That might have legs. I think hookup. Culture and the orgasim gap might be factors here
Its hard for me to really know cuz i dont honestly know much of anything about how heterosexual relationships work but id guess it plays into how people view relationships in general.
All I get from the discourse:
Basic premises: -Abusive relationships exist and are bad (correct, agreed)
-Age gaps, which can represent differences in brain development and life experience, can produce / facilitate abusive relationships (correct, agreed)
My takes: -most of the fuckery of this discourse comes from people wanting to hash out specific and mostly arbitrary age gap limits and numbers, rather than the fundamental causes of abusive relationships (analogous to liberal class as income, vs marxist class as relationship to means of production)
-as I see it, the core of abusive relationships is not being able to leave when things get bad. Most relationships, particularly heterosexual ones, will have various "power imbalances" that are kind of unavoidable, but as long as people can leave if things get bad, that's not inherently a problem. In relationships, the power to safely terminate the relationship is kind of like ultimate power.
The issue with age gap discourse is that it often devolves into conflating the (visible) potential for abuse with abuse itself. There's nothing you can say about an age gap in a relationship between two consenting adults that wouldn't equally apply to a relationship between two people who make drastically different incomes, or who have different levels of social aptitude with their friends and family, or differences in physical size/strength. It also starts to feel like invalidating abuse that isn't immediately clear just from looking at the people involved.
Because cis het relationships are inherently bad
No they aren't, that's a very essentialist viewpoint to hold. It's much more accurate to say that cishet relationships are inherently imbalanced due to patriarchy. As bell hooks says in The Will to Change, that doesn't mean such a relationship can't be healthy and loving, it just means the people involved have to be aware of the inequalities and actively working against them within the relationship.
True, but then the odds of that in the wild are low no? So in this way we are using age gap as a proxy for this patriarchal instinct and doing no work to address the underlying issue. Yeah?
I misread your comment hence why I deleted, my bad
Oh, sorry. It was a good point about me being reductive so I dig it though