Men prefer younger women

The argument

Whatever a man's age, he will always be most attracted to women in their twenties. According to data from the matchmaking site OkCupid, women aged 24 are universally seen as the most desirable. The evidence is behavioural rather than self-reported opinion: it comes from what users of the site actually did, across a large population, which makes it harder to attribute to what people think they are supposed to say. Christian Rudder, the site's founder, summarised the findings: "a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile, his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age." The asymmetry in that description is what the argument turns on. The preferred age does not travel with the man; the gap between his age and the age he seeks simply widens as he gets older, which is the pattern a fixed preference would produce rather than a shifting one. Heterosexual men are predisposed to prefer younger women. It is therefore inevitable that as their partners age, men become less interested in them — not through any judgement about the particular partner, on this account, but because the preference was never indexed to her. The same study revealed that women remain most attracted to people their own age throughout their lives. That contrast is what makes the claim a sexed one rather than a general observation about ageing: the same data, gathered in the same way, shows one pattern for men and a different one for women. The male predisposition preferring younger women might also explain why men cheat as they get older, yet the opposite is true of women — which is why this argument holds that in this respect men are born to cheat.

Context

Men of any age are most attracted to younger women. If this is a scientific fact and cheating is predicated on sexual desire, this explanation holds.

Premises

Counter-arguments

As Outline reporter Rebecca Stoner explains, "the claim that men “naturally” prefer younger women is an assertion of power cloaked in the language of evolutionary psychology. It implies that a woman’s accomplishments, power, money, intelligence, and ambition are, at best, secondary commodities on the marriage market. Men, in this formulation, only get better with age." Both men and women deteriorate with age. Studies show that both find people in their twenties objectively more attractive than during other points in their lives. The idea has become so gendered, reducing the value of women to their appearance, is where we should be focusing attention. Using this defence to excuse infidelity suggests that men cannot stop themselves from having a sexual relationship with any younger woman that they see. This is untrue. There is also a further layer to the OkCupid study. As Business Insider reporter Pamela Engel notes, Rudder also found that "But there's another layer to this data. Although men at every age seem to be attracted to very young women, they most often message women who are closer to their own age." This exposes the difference between attraction and intent to act on that attraction. The two are not obviously linked. If this were the conclusive reason that people cheat, infidelity would exclusively take place between older men and younger women. This is not the case.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Cheating does not exclusively take place between older men and younger women