#equal opportunity objectification

1) Unsettling focus on youth. That's the one I actually kinda get. I would also prefer any hypothetical SO to have celebrity crushes on women rather than girls. Maybe because youth has also a connotation of weakness, and what does it mean if my SO's attracted to that? Or maybe because whatever he admires in a woman might be something I could strive for myself, but I'll never be a girl again.

Alas, whenever I venture that theory, I immediately get shot down, because it's clearly absurd to consider that some women might just be attracted to signifiers of youth for the same reasons some men are (the charms of the fresh-faced ingenue, evoking a sense of protectiveness; a lack of jadedness, a sense of renewal by association); obviously it's just because those girls can't handle real masculinity. (And in a way that's true - some people are attracted to boys, because they feel they couldn't handle grown up men, just as some people are attracted to girls, because they can't handle grown-up women. Which, if those people in question are rather young themselves - and with the typical boygroup fangirl that's usually the case - makes perfect sense and should be applauded rather than mocked. Sometimes an obsession with youth is merely age appropriate.*)

(*Cue all the evo-psych enthusiasts falling over themselves to explain to me why it's perfectly natural for men to be attracted to youth and completely non-sensical for women, because procreation or something. Never mind that potency also declines with age and younger guys just last longer.**

**Which admittedly can be a bug rather than a feature if they're not particuarly skilled yet; but then again, you might expect the young buck to be more trainable; at least he won't have much to unlearn yet, which is often the hardest part of the battle, or so I've been told.)