LKL wrote:
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
I say it's just instinctive. Younger women tend to be more fertile and produce healthier offspring, so as a result men are sort of pre-dispositioned to be attracted to them. As well, up until relatively recently, people had much shorter average lifespans, so people tended to "grow up" and take on adult responsibilities more quickly, such as producing offspring.
Human society may have changed a lot in the last few hundred years, but evolution progresses at a much, much slower pace. It's sort of like the reason why we're having so many problems with obesity nowadays; humans are pre-dispositioned to crave foods rich in fats and other nutrients, but since it's become so much easier to obtain food without putting any work into it, we eat more while exercising less, and as a result we get fat.
Like it or not, human beings are nothing more than highly-intelligent animals. We like to think of ourselves as not even being in the same category as other animals, but in the big picture, we're still just mammals, just like dolphins and chimpanzees.
Eeyeahh, that totally discounts anything the "young women" in question might think about the issue.
Speaking from an evolutionary perspective, the thoughts of the "young women" may not coincide with those of males. From a female perspective (regarding mammals in general) females make a much more heavy personal investment in the birth and rearing of young, hence they need to be more selective in their choice of mate. A man could father hundreds of children in a year if he was some sort of tribal chief with a harem; but a woman is limited to one child in that time. It is in the woman's interests (for the successful perpetuation of her genes) to have a mate who is fit and healthy (which means young / same age) and one who is able to provide for her and her offspring and form a lasting mutually supporting bond. That provision may historically be hunting skills and the ability to keep other males from raping her; in more modern times this may translate into having money and power in which case age becomes less of an issue. Wealthy men with power seem to have no difficulty finding young women as their mates.
So the bottom line is that from a hard-wired evolutionary point of view, men and women have different agendas when it comes to seeking a mate. Sure, modern day lifestyles bear little in common with our hunter gatherer past, but these hard wired attitudes don't change as fast as society and the rules of society.
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I've left WP indefinitely.