Why Young Women Love Older Men

Men must become. Women just are.

Therefore, it is fitting for the women to be married at about the age of eighteen and the men at thirty-seven or a little before—for that will give long enough for the union to take place with their bodily vigor at its prime and for it to arrive with a convenient coincidence of dates at the time when procreation ceases. — Aristotle, Politics, Book 7, section 1335a

After I published my now-infamous sexual market value graph in an essay titled Final Exam—Navigating the Sexual Marketplace, several commenters on my blog, The Rational Male, quoted this stanza. This (admittedly rough) bell curve infographic, which has been one of the most virally reposted and harshly criticized explanations of the modern sexual marketplace, sparked a heated debate in the Manosphere and the mainstream. For twelve years, I was both lauded and lambasted for making a couple of simple pink and blue bell curves to express my instinctual grasp of the mismatch between women’s and men’s sexual market value peak years in the average person’s lifetime. That is 23 for women and 37 for men. 

Mind you, I had no prior knowledge of Aristotle’s quote before writing the essay and creating the graphic. Critics hate it because it exposes the rapidly perishable nature of women’s sexual agency (i.e., Power) while simultaneously implying I thought older men were more sexually desirable than younger men.

Haters brigaded my comments, “Where’s your proof?! Sources, studies, hello?!!”

You see, I’d been unwittingly bold enough to declare in 2012 what Aristotle thought obvious in 350 B.C. 

Since I published this graphic in 2012, sources have slowly confirmed over the years what my instincts led me to then. In 2014, the now-ubiquitous data sets collected by Match.com and OkayCupid in the book Dataclysm were published. This was my first real inclination my anecdotal graph was correct. The average age at which men of all age cohorts found women most attractive was 23. It’s not what Aristotle would’ve predicted, but it’s close enough. For women, the age at which they found men the most attractive trended upwards of 2-5 years older than a woman’s present age. Women aged 25 reported they found men aged 28-29 most attractive. At 30, women found men of 33-35 most attractive.