News Flash: Women Prefer Older Men
There are a lot of critics of Game out there. Most of them really are blinded by ideology, to an extent that brings to mind Galileo and the church. But I like to approach the world with a scientific mindset, and the scientific method requires always being critical of any idea, not matter how well established.
[As an aside: One of the reasons I gave Game a whirl is because as near as I can tell it's quite possibly the best peer reviewed concept in the modern body of knowledge. Unlike most modern scientific tests which are typically run by one team, and then maybe reproduced by a small handful of other researchers, Game has been tested by thousands of "field researchers" in perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual "experiments." That's an awful lot of supporting data.]
Sadly, I seldom see Game criticized on anything like legitimate issues, even though there is one that’s always been bothering me: the “Cougar” phenomenon. Game tells us that women prefer status and give low priority to looks. A natural consequence is that women should prefer older men, generally, as a proxy for status. It’s admittedly an imperfect proxy, but usually a rather decent one. Also, Game tells us that men generally prefer younger, hotter women.
Yet supposedly there’s a huge Cougar/Cub phenomenon going on all around us. What gives?
Roissy explains it typically as a bunch of used up older women settling for the young men who will have them. Sometimes, the reasoning goes, these are just very beta guys who can’t get girls their own age or younger. Sometimes they’re very alpha guys just getting started and “learning the ropes.” Makes sense, as far as it goes.
Before I learned about Game, I’d always thought women were adjusting to a higher preference for looks as they can afford to. In the modern world, the typical beta-provider status that women would have sought after before is less important than ever. Women don’t need a provider; they can typically pull in decent salaries on their own. So the superficial qualities take a higher preference. I was right, but I misunderstood the female version of superficial qualities to mean “looks” rather than what we call “Game”. In hindsight, this seems like it might play a tiny part (looking good is a small part of Game), but not a very big one.
So what’s going on?
What if it’s simpler than any of us thought? What if the whole Cougar phenomenon is just bullshit? It looks like that may be the case. A researcher in Wales did a study of online dating forums to try and find out just how widespread the phenomenon is.
After examining the age preferences expressed in 22,400 singles ads on popular dating websites in North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, he found no sizable cohort of women seeking younger men. To the contrary, the share of lionesses wanted men their own age or older. Nor did he find evidence for the proliferation of cubs: the overwhelming majority of men displayed their eons-old preference for younger women.
Women prefer older men and men prefer younger women. Who knew?
I think the Cougar thing is pretty hyped up. It’s one thing for Hollywood starlets with plastic surgery etc to do a movie with a younger guy, but the reality is most 40s women simply aren’t as hot as younger ones.
The ‘Cougar’ hype is what aging, old women WISH general society was like. Unfortunately for them, life isn’t a Sex And The City episode where men of looks, status and wealth prefer entitled, old wrinkled women at/past their expiration date.
This study is flawed from the very beginning because he examines what people say they want, not what actually happens in the real world. These are two very different things.
Of course men want playboy bunnies and women want princes on white horses but the reality is that young men will f*ck anything, and women losing their attractiveness panic and they look for ways to feel desired again.
That makes the study imperfect. I’m not convinced that it makes it worthless. Especially in this particular case, as he’s not just studying what people say they want but what people are actively seeking out. The difference is subtle, but important.
I have some personal experience of the cougar thing, though long before it went by that name. I wouldn’t be surprised if the current fad is over-stated, but the thing is, women still get their status elevation from having a younger lover. It was pretty clear to me that my older women’s biggest kick was showing off the younger guy to her friends. She absolutely purred with that feline-like pleasure that is unmistakable in women when they think other women envy them.
The cougar basks in the status of having something other women don’t have, and in order to keep him, she pays a younger man a kind of attention that no younger woman ever would. She is the most magnificent of women. When I walked about 6 months later, the insanity was as intense in its horror as the prior pleasure was in its seeming serenity. For any young man eager for knowledge of the world and of women, the cougar is a fast-track, must-have experience. But one is enough for a life-time.