U.K. Guardian columnist decides that men’s preference for younger women is a sign of “masculinity in crisis”

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U.K. Guardian columnist Arwa Madahwi discovers something else that’s wrong with men:

Men’s fixation on younger women is another sign of masculinity in crisis.

Mmm….

This week’s peer-reviewed portrayal of fragile masculinity comes to you from the journal Science Advances, which recently published a depressing new study about online dating. Researchers looked at nearly 200,000 heterosexual users and found that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women hit their prime at 18. And then it’s all downhill from there apparently. Can I just remind you that 18-year-olds are teenagers, and so this study is basically saying that straight men don’t find women attractive; they like girls.

#NotAllMen, I’m sure. However, this isn’t the first study to find men are fixated on women a lot younger than them. A 2010 study by OKCupid found that “the median 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age”. No doubt Roy Moore might have a thing or two to say about that….

While these studies may focus on sexual relations, they’re yet another reminder that we’re facing a crisis of masculinity that is reverberating across every aspect of our society. The far right is dominated by men, many of whom seem to be searching for a sense of identity. For feminism to get anywhere we must seriously address how we think about masculinity.

All I’ve got to say is: If this is a “crisis of masculinity,” it’s been going on for a awfully long time–like, say 200,000 years.

Poor Arwa Mahdawi seems to be undergoing a crisis of her own. Here’s what she wrote in July:

This alarming information came to me via a profile of Amber Tamblyn in New York magazine, which described the 35-year-old actor as “hurtling towards middle age”. Being 35 myself, I was rather taken aback by this characterisation….

And here’s that darned OkCupid study again:

A few years ago, the dating service OkCupid analysed its mounds of data and found that heterosexual women on the site were largely attracted to men of a similar age to themselves. However, heterosexual men of all ages were attracted to 20-year-old women. “It is kind of terrible,” OkCupid’s co-founder Christian Rudder said while presenting these findings at an event. “From the time you’re 22, you’ll be less hot than a 20-year-old, based on this data. So that’s just a thing.” Which led the Daily Mail to say: “Are you a girl over 22? Then don’t even bother with online dating.”

I hate to be a bearer of unpleasant news, Arwa, but sex and perceptions of sexual attractiveness have something to do with, uh, reproduction.

So you can “seriously address how we think about masculinity” until the cows come home, but you can’t change the fact that the world’s highest-paid supermodel had her first major photography shoot at age 19. You know, maybe your problem isn’t male “fragility” but male virility.

Update: Thanks for the shout-out, Instapundit!

Posted by Charlotte Allen