It seems that beautiful young women are at it again — making dupes of older men, mostly recently Maria Butina. The alleged Russian spy recently pled guilty to trying to influence U. S. policy by cozying up to powerful Republican people and organizations, including the National Rifle Association and President Trump. And how’d she do that? By basic-vanilla seduction — flattery and flirtation, which played into the desires of older men who must have believed she, then a nubile 25 year old, was really into them.
Poor guys.
As Amanda Marcotte writes in Salon:
To be clear, Butina wasn’t some world-class seductress. She didn’t need to be. Such was the thirst of her targets that some ham-handed eyelash-batting seemed to have done it. Any woman under 30 with a pulse and a lack of shame, it appears, could have pulled this off.”
Not quite “any woman” … but perhaps. Still, there’s a real danger if men in power can so easily fall sway to a young thing who may have ulterior motives, she perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek notes:
The moral of this story should be obvious: The patriarchy is a threat to national security. There are all sorts of moral reasons why it’s wrong that our society treats aging women like old hags and flatters men with lies about how they’re like fine wines. But this is about more than lofty philosophical arguments about gender justice. This is about the immediate and hopefully obvious dangers of giving so much power over to a group of people who are ready to hand over the car keys and the deed to the farmhouse the second a young lady makes goo-goo eyes at them.”
There’s no end of women attracted to men with power, and men with egos that need to be stroked. Think former CIA director David Petraeus, former presidential hopeful John Edwards, Bill Clinton, former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford … it goes on and on.
So many powerful men with so much to lose — why do they do it? Just to have a hot babe on their arm, and in their bed?
I am reminded of a study indicating that men get kind of stupid when interacting with beautiful women. OK, but it can’t be just their fuzzy brains or ego — or can it?
Aging women, ageless men
I think Marcotte touches on the real issue when she mentions how “our society treats aging women like old hags and flatters men with lies about how they’re like fine wines,” that “offers undue flattery to powerful and wealthy men so often that they start to buy it.” If, as a guy, you think you can and should be able to have access to young hotties, and sometimes you do, you probably aren’t questioning why you have access to them — although if you’re smart, you’ll recognize that it’s most likely transactional and not true love. I have nothing against transactional relationships when everyone is honest about it and aware of who gets what for what.
That’s not quite how older women think, perhaps because we are led to believe, and thus often do, that we are past our prime. Even when we aren’t.
Older women are “perpetually fed a line that we’re looking for love in a market that doesn’t value us,” my friend Marina Adshade, an economics professor in Canada and author of Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love, says. If that were true, older women looking for love would be lowering their standards, but that has not been the case. In fact, older women are a lot more selective than older men and younger women are when it comes to picking a partner, she notes. That’s certainly been my experience.
There always seem to be men — younger, older and similarly aged — who are interested in dating and mating with middle-aged women, and some who outright prefer them, er, us.
That said, middle-aged women are not immune to being scammed by younger men. But they’re typically not women with a sense of their own self-worth. I have no idea why middle-aged men of means, with all the privilege and power of being a middle-aged men of means are much more vulnerable.
I just can’t see many women in positions of power having such a “thirst” that any man “under 30 with a pulse and a lack of shame” could play them. Do you?
Interested in learning about a safety marriage? ReadThe New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press). You can support your local indie bookstore or order it on Amazon.
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