Originally Posted by
Alleya
It is a double standard, and I don't think you can really dismiss it. Going on the responses in this thread and the logic of this post we can break it down this way:
Guys in these relationships just want sex and are not affected by the relationship, therefore it's ok.
Girls in these relationships are coerced or are dumb enough to be convinced and don't really want sex, therefore it is bad.
These rest on two very large assumptions about the nature of gender differences that are at their core sexist, much as people hate that word.
Neither my view nor the view of people in this thread take into account the immense complexity of these sorts of relationships. There's the potential for all kinds of shit to be going on in both parties involved, no matter if it's an older woman or an older man, hetero or homosexual. These kind of relationships are frowned on for exactly this reason. Typically, the older person in the relationship is exercising a lot of power over the younger person, which is often emotionally damaging or even abusive, and the potential consequences are dire. This is not an issue of maturity, it's an issue of statistics.
If we're to take the argument of maturity and desire seriously, then it should be ok for a girl to have sex with an older man, as long as she's emotionally mature and sex is what she wants. But it's clear from the responses here that people do not actually allow women to have that exception that is so readily given to men. It is only OK for boys to have sex with older women, because we can safely assume that they only want sex because after all, men are the promiscuous gender right? I think I pointed out earlier that this assumption is faulty because girls want sex just as much as guys do on average, and this conception of them as sexually neutral beings is just wrong and, yes, sexist. I am not trying to argue about the nature of the relationships here, but rather the justifications some have given for why some are wrong and some aren't based purely on the genders of the people involved. Read that last sentence again, that's the important one.
This also raises the original question of why an older man with a younger boy is automatically a bad gross thing when you are talking about essentially the same dynamic. The boy just wants sex, so why is it a problem? After all, men are just like that, right? It's fascinating to me how the moment you change something so arbitrary as the gender of the older person, suddenly the assumptions made about the nature of the relationship pull a total 180.