Pluraly Girly here 🌈

Stocking Anarchy Cosplay for Anime Boston

"i think wide age gaps are problematic" is framed as if it's a general concern. but if you ask for an example they will ALWAYS reach first for the case of an older man and a younger woman. this is meant to read as being self-evidently in favor of their point of view, but it only works that way if you fail to ask why it is self-evident that an older man would hold such disproportionate power.

why? is it perhaps the case that men tend in general to accrue more power & wealth & influence & position as they age? does that phenomenon arise naturally or are we perhaps talking around some other set of explicable social phenomena? is there some reason why, as is heavily implied by your argument, women do not accrue the aforementioned advantages as they age in the same way? without arguing that the relationship you describe either is or is not "problematic," can we examine whether we are framing correctly what exactly might be problematic about it? in this example, age is used as a convenient synecdoche that stands in for all the privilege that typically accrues to men as time goes on and as they advance within the patriarchal hierarchies woven into their personal and professional lives: a youth becomes a family patriarch, a bachelor becomes head of a household, a junior clerk becomes a C-suite suit. a woman, in the equivalent time, does not accrue patriarchal privilege as she ages -- in fact, absent other factors, her power (& value, since her only power under patriarchy is her value) decline the older she gets. lumping all this under "age gap" is not just simplistic, it's wrong.

this is illustrated in counterexample by the fact that when people who are fixated on "age gaps" give an example with an older woman and a younger man, they never fail to get more specific and make her his teacher, or his babysitter (current or ex-), or to specify this time that she is wealthy and he is destitute. it becomes obvious that once again, age is a stand-in in each case for some other differential of power -- structural power within the institution of the school for the teacher, the dyadic mentor/mentee carer/cared-for dynamic for the babysitter, and the simple familiar gulf between wealth and poverty for the rich woman.

the people fixated on "age gaps" either won't mention queer relationships at all because they raise inconvenient questions, or they'll actually come out and say "well it's kinda different for queer people and i can't weigh in uwu," or they'll go mask-off reactionary and invoke the specter of queer grooming to drive their point home. it makes little difference.

every statistic shows that people who own horses have excellent health outcomes. thinking about this for even two seconds should make clear that this is because only rich people own horses and rich people get excellent healthcare; the horses have nothing to do with it. the people who are worried about "age gaps" aren't even always wrong that there's a problematic power difference in a relationship, but their analysis of why that is makes about as much sense as "a horse every day keeps the doctor away" makes as medical advice.

of words.

I work hard to keep things prefect,

keep things even

and logical.

I do the calculations,

find the mean and standard deviation,

and always examine the outliers.

But nothing is quite as comfortable

as a cloudy sky,

a cup of tea,

let me guess.

since women's rights have expanded over time, and women have gained more autonomy, generations of women slowly realize they can take care of themselves and don't feel like they have to stay in unhappy marriages with shitty men that mistreat them.