Have been googling about academic studies on sexual attraction, and while finding lots of interesting material did not find anything about age. The reason I was looking is because this site has made me think about a trait that I took for granted for most of my life: attraction towards men (and women) within ten years of my own age. At 20, I found over-30s unappealing; at 30, 20-year-olds looked pubescent, 40-year-olds over the hill. Through my 40s and into my 50s my epitome of hotness has been a fit man of the babyboomer generation. When seeing a survey question here about hottest celebs to have a threesome with, I picked Woody Harrelson and Christopher Meloni without thinking about their ages, then looked them up and found they were both born in 1961. Younger hunks and even twinks can arouse me in an abstract way as j/o fodder, but that weak-in-the-knees feeling of being overwhelmed by lust can only be evoked by daddy types. And when it comes to women in porn, I’d rather see those daddies fucking buxom milfs than cheerleaders. None of this feels like a preference so much as an orientation, a basic predisposition to see same-generation as attractive. While to me this feels normal and natural, when I look around I wonder if it’s average or typical. Most guys my age seem to find it normal and natural to have little interest in over-40s and focus their libido on images of youth, judging by porn consumption patterns and pop culture.
I’m intrigued by varieties of the same question: why are we turned on by the things we are, in terms of individual biology and psychology, but also culturally and as a species? So would like to invite comment on how members feel about attraction to people their own age vs. older or younger, both from personal experience and as a question about cultural and biological factors. Is your libido’s focus mainly inter- or intra-generational? How wide are your margins of age acceptability between the unacceptably young and the creepily decrepit? How have they changed over time?
I’m intrigued by varieties of the same question: why are we turned on by the things we are, in terms of individual biology and psychology, but also culturally and as a species? So would like to invite comment on how members feel about attraction to people their own age vs. older or younger, both from personal experience and as a question about cultural and biological factors. Is your libido’s focus mainly inter- or intra-generational? How wide are your margins of age acceptability between the unacceptably young and the creepily decrepit? How have they changed over time?