Like this 44 –year-old trying to chat up a 22-year-old on OkCupid: The “sweet girl” thing, by the way, is a creepy internet man standard. It's because you start your creepy messages with salutations like “Hey sweet girl.” No, girls say nasty things to you because they were raised by their parents to abide by overly-Puritanical norms.
(Of course, not all May-December romances, nor all older guys, are creepy! There are plenty of couples whose generational differences don't come with power imbalances or perviness.)īut take this guy here, who sent this message to a woman young enough to be his daughter: And for those creepy old dudes, the attraction to young women stems from perceived vulnerability and lack of power. When older men make a concerted and repeated effort to go after substantially younger women and emphasize that their attraction is primarily age-related, that's gross - because the draw isn't the woman's interests or her intelligence, it's her youth. The problem with older guys who are in fact dirty old men is that they rarely realize they’re dirty old men - even as they act creepy and inappropriately toward younger women, they think they’re simply attractive older gentlemen who are just frowned upon by “society.” They show up to bars and clubs accosting ladies dozens of years their junior. One thing all young women know: Dirty old men are everywhere.
