Off screen, Elvis Presley (aged 24 at the time) met his future wife Priscilla when she was 14 years old, although he waited until she was 21 to marry her. Michael Douglas, 77, and wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, 52, also followed that Hollywood tradition.
Contemporaries like Leonardo DiCaprio (age 47) and Camila Morrone (age 24), Johnny Depp (58) and one-time spouse Amber Heard (35),
and Tyga, who famously began dating Kylie Jenner when he was 25 and she was 17, are nowhere close to an exhaustive list of famous Hollywood men dating much younger women.
Hollywood’s influence on Gen Z
Gen Z began just the same. Peak Tumblr, a generation of young adults fuelled by the
manic pixie dream girl trope — Red Bull, checkered flannels and Aria and Ezra’s “love” story on Pretty Little Liars — found themselves on a quest to discover what Lana Del Rey would call a “Million Dollar Man.”
In ripped jeans and heavy eyeliner, this generation was at first mesmerized by a
Lolita-esque love story in which girls and young women chased maturity and independence through relationships with older men. The young women, often accused of being “gold diggers,” endured societal judgment. Their side of the coupling was often sexualized and made them out to be materialistic or somehow predatory. Meanwhile, the older men were celebrated as being young at heart, praised for their masculinity or even talked about like victims.
That is, until the conversation eventually shifted.
Changing the critique
Once the chatter moved on to men, these sorts of age gaps were less frequently considered normal. Questions about why an older man would want to be with someone a lot younger were posed in lockstep with the #MeToo movement and conversations around men abusing senior positions of power.
When
Taylor Swift re-released her album Red (Taylor’s Version) with the addition of a new 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” many fans assumed the song was about Swift’s 2010 relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal. In the process, the music — through the lyric, “I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age” — reversed the view on the formerly romanticized notion of dating older men and instead placed the critique on older men who pursue younger women. At the time of their relationship, Swift was 20, while Gyllenhaal was 29.
In Hollywood, celebrities like Scott Disick,
Drake and Leonardo DiCaprio have also faced backlash and had their characters called into question for dating much younger women.
Within the eyes of the law, an 18-year-old (who is still a teenager) can purchase a lottery ticket, join the army, be called to jury duty and consent to a sexual relationship with someone older — all things that are not the case the day before their 18th birthday.
Grooming the next generation
Still, the #MeToo movement paved the way for conversations about “grooming,” a form of gaining the trust of someone with less power to manipulate them into inappropriate relationships. These conversations included the realization that someone can still groom another person who is legally considered an adult.
Gen Z was groomed to want to date older men by the media they consumed. The most notable example stems from the hit Freeform television series
Pretty Little Liars, in which high school student Aria Montgomery dates her teacher, Ezra Fitz, and the two eventually even get married. The relationship, marketed as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, established what for audiences? That the relationship was ethical because the storyline made it out to be a love story?
Distribution of power
“The power is not distributed equally between the two parties because someone always knows more,” Veronica Demarco, a Southern California marriage and family therapist, told me. “The man knows he has more power.”
However, power does not just stem from the older man typically having more money or fame than the younger woman, as shown by Swift, who possessed wealth and influence from a young age. Power also comes in the form of knowledge gained through lived experience.
An older man can (and usually does) have more experience in all aspects of life — relationships, career, sex, etc. — than a partner who may be fresh out of high school. Therein lies the power imbalance.
With the hindsight provided by past relationships, the older party may have the upper hand in terms of emotional intelligence and use that as a tool of manipulation, too.
According to modern science, it takes anywhere up to 30 years for the human brain to become fully developed. Psychologically, that means an older man always has an advantage over a teen or twenty-something-year-old woman.
Life experience matters
Of course, there are surely examples of this dynamic within couplings of older women with younger men, older men with younger men and older women with younger women. However, because we live in a male-dominated, heteronormative society, the highest-profile examples focus on heterosexual relationships where the older party is a male.
Is a man who constantly pursues younger women doing so because of her lack of life experiences and the control that may give him over her? Not all relationships with wide age gaps are wrong or based on taking advantage of someone younger. The truth is, those on the outside looking in can never honestly know the intimate details of another’s relationship. However, to guarantee the protection of younger women, it’s fair to ask why these older men insist on initiating these kinds of relationships.
Regardless, the automatic acceptance of older male celebs in pairing with women half their age has changed, and so has the level of discourse. Even though it continues in Hollywood circles, the men engaged in these activities are critiqued differently from those in the old days.
We know that maturity comes with looking back on past relationships and recognizing controlling, manipulative or just creepy behaviour. As in Taylor Swift’s case, the young women calling out this behaviour — some with their own experiences dating older men — appear to have seen the whole truth “All Too Well.”
This article’s cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.
