Men Are Hardwired To Desire Women In Their 20s, Study Finds

In a survey of 12,656 men and women aged 18 to 49, the study’s authors aimed to uncover whether people really do have age preferences in romantic and sexual partners. All respondents were asked what age group they were most sexually attracted to in the previous year.

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They were also asked which age group they’d been most sexually intimate with during the same period.

By and large, the female participants preferred men their own age or slightly older. For instance, those in their twenties are looking for guys around four years older than themselves, though this decreased as the women got older.

As for the men, they were all pretty much on the same page: They want women in their mid-20s. This was true whether the man was himself in his late teens or 20s or older, in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Talk about predictable!

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The researchers further noted that both male and female age preferences have roots in evolutionary biology.

They hypothesised that women go for older men due to the “resources” they can offer, including the ability to help with offspring.

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“Men mature later than woman and in our evolutionary past, raising human offspring to nutritional independence necessitated bi-parental care.”

Some people claim that this type of relationship occurs so often because ‘men are biologically ‘hardwired’ to pursue younger women, since they are more fertile, and because of the good old ‘men are more visual than women.’

Nice guy seduction

"The highest fertility has been estimated to occur in the mid-twenties, with a decline after the age of 35," the researchers explain. "Especially for short-term mating, men show a high interest in fertile women, that is, women in their twenties."

The claim that men “naturally” prefer younger women is an assertion of power cloaked in the language of evolutionary psychology. It implies that a woman’s accomplishments, power, money, intelligence, and ambition are, at best, secondary commodities on the marriage market.

Woody Allen began dating Soon-Yi Previn when he was 56 and Previn was around 19. Reuters

Men, in this formulation, only get better with age. (Which isn’t true: their fertility declines every year after age 20, as with women. It takes a 40-year-old man nearly two years to achieve a pregnancy with a woman at peak fertility.)

Again, it’s a myth that men remain fertile all of their lives and can parent children as long as they perform sexually.

Hugh Hefner married Crystal Harris when he was 86 and she was 26. Reuters

So, no — you can’t really use biology as a driving force behind men’s attraction towards younger women. There just isn’t enough evidence to support this argument.

But one thing is clear: scientific myths about men’s sexuality tend to stick around because they make sense in light of traditional social roles and gender ideology.