out with her (20 being that ideal "no longer a teenager but just barely no longer a teenager" age). But not old enough to have a lot of education and experience with the world. Including sexual experience, so they might have had past partners who were better lovers.
And the more insecure the man, the more likely to want someone that age.
Sigh.
I've sometimes gone out with men more than 20 years older than I was. And with men who thought I was 20 years younger than they were. Some seemed disappointed to find out that I had a brain, too.
The graph showing women usually like older men when they're young is accurate, I think.
I'm quite tall and could look older than my age by my midteens, especially with enough makeup, and sometimes on Saturdays I'd head for the university's student union and tell people I was a junior or senior, leaving out that it was in high school. The college men were more interesting than high school boys. By college I was occasionally dating guys as old as their 30s. I'd gone through school spending almost as much time talking to my teachers as my classmates, so chatting with older people seemed perfectly normal. At 20 I discovered health food stores and yoga, which interested me because I wanted to stay healthy and didn't want to age, and I was still getting carded at clubs 20 years later (so I had about a quarter century of looking about 20).
And I was still going out to clubs where most people were younger than I was.
But not all the time. For years I was part of a group of academics, writers, musicians, artists and people who loved the arts who'd meet near the university campus for a few hours of drinking, then go to a favorite local restaurant for dinner (I'd call it a literary salon if it wasn't at a bar with tables pushed together). Most of the people there were older than me; the oldest was about 70. Later in the evening I'd head to a club with live music, either rock or blues, where most of the people were in their 20s. Which did not bother me when the focus was music.
I'd meet guys who'd ask me out at those clubs...and I'd discover that even if they were quite a bit younger than I was, they'd thought they were older. They were not looking for older women. I particularly remember a kid who told me he was 25 when I first met him. I found out later he was only 23. He said he'd added a couple of years to his age because he wanted me to view him as an older man. He'd thought I was in my early 20s, not mid-thirties. He still wanted to go out with me, and we went out once, to another club. He was cute, and nice, but we didn't have much to talk about besides music. He was pretty oblivious to politics.
I wish I could say that the older men at the bar I'd start the evening at didn't seem very attracted to 20-year-olds...but they did. They weren't misogynists. Most of them were married, to intelligent women close to their own age, and spouses were often there, too. But since the bar was near the university, a lot of college kids would be there, too, and those older, very bright men could get very distracted if a particularly hot college girl walked in. To their credit, none of them ever dumped their wives to chase 20-year-olds, at least during the time I knew them.
But I was always aware that for most of the guys I met, a woman in her early 20s was the ideal.
Imagine how those men would feel if they thought women wouldn't be interested in them unless they looked like a hot 20-year-old.
If you think they're insecure now...
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