On women’s age

Question: Does your involvement with other women (real life and cyber) include women in their 40s like you, or are you mostly drawn to younger women? (asked by a female reader, in her 40s)

I like women.

I like women who are my age. (I’m in my 40s.)

I like women in their 30s.

I like women in their 20s.

Fortunately, I’m mostly repelled, other than visually, by women in their teens. (Notwithstanding what I wrote here, almost a year ago.)

I haven’t had more than incidental experience with women in their 50s or 60s (just a couple of interactions at Le Trapeze), but I certainly don’t have a visceral reaction against them.

There’s a certain je ne sais quoi associated with youth. Younger women (no younger than, say, 23 or so) excite me visually, to be sure. Most porn features women between the ages of 18 and 25 or so and this is mostly fine with me. Though on porn sites featuring a little more of the performers’ real-life (or ostensibly real-life) personalities – AmateurAllure, and FTV, for example – I would welcome a shift up in average age by ten or more years.

As women age, the mix of visual and emotional/intellectual in what attracts me shifts toward the emotional/intellectual. It’s no coincidence that, with the exception of V, my closest/longest-standing ongoing extramarital relationships have been with women closer to my age (L, who’s within spitting distance of my age; the Historian, who’s younger, but not in her 20s; and a woman or two who about whom you haven’t read).

But I suppose it’s also no coincidence that my most successful distant buddy relationships (particularly Sofia, whom I recently showed you) have been with women in their 20s. Distant buddy relationships feature two aspects which play to my tastes when it comes to younger women: first, there’s the simple fact of nubile young flesh. A 25-year-old is generally more likely to have a body that excites me in 2-D than is a 45-year-old. (This is not at all true in 3-D.) And second, there’s the way remote control dominance plays out: I like being something of a “daddy figure,” being wise, knowledgeable, etc., and/but I tolerate that better over the long haul when I don’t have to sustain it in person. Not because I’m not, but because while I want to dominate you in the bedroom, I think I actually go more for an egalitarian relationship in person, one that resists that more two-dimensional form of dominance. Incidentally, with Sofia, I’m fortunate enough not to have to settle for this. Our relationship is fully three-dimensional, featuring detailed and relatively deep discussions of sex, attraction, dominance, submission, how we feel about things. As I said to her, “My relationship with you features an appreciation not just for your lithe, hot body, and your unending compliance, but also for your brains, your personality, and your perspective. But those last three are things I’m lucky to get from you, but not things I need from you to sustain a distant buddy relationship. And people of your age are far less frequently able to offer me those things. Which you are.”

I don’t know – this all is gestural. But it’s a start. Thanks, H, for asking the question.