Lehmiller And Agnew's 'May-December Paradoxes'

Silence. Silence is what the audience awarded to Jerry Lee Lewis in London, the first stop on his European tour. While he sat at the piano--banging his bony fingers onto the keys with all of his strength, his hair flying in front of his face, sweat dripping down his face, putting all of his energy into his music until he simply had to kick the bench to the side and stand because sitting did not do the song justice--the audience refused to engage in his exuberance. Noticing this, he withdrew from his euphoria and said, “Y’all don’t have to jus’ stand there all quiet.” So they listened. Sicko! Pervert! Pedophile! The atmosphere had completely transformed from the uncomfortable tensity of the room earlier. While every cynic’s mouth was dripping …show more content…
People seem to be less offended about age gap relationships when the man is older than when the woman is older (Beam). In “May-December Paradoxes: An Exploration of of Age Gap Relationships in Western Society,” scholars Justin Lehmiller and Christopher Agnew found that men are typically older than women in Western relationships. These relationships typically attract little attention and scrutiny,” while the opposite is true when the woman is older; this demonstrates the double standard concerning women in relationships (Agnew and Lehmiller 2). It is more common for the male to be older, but when the woman is older, she is labeled a cougar or a cradle robber. The only explanation for this is that Western society still has some underlying sexist beliefs. One situation is accepted for men, but the exact same situation is not acceptable for women. Women have been gaining civil rights in Western society throughout the twentieth century, and continue to gain these rights today. With regards to relationships, however, sexists notions have not improved. More focus should be put on social, rather than legislative, reforms to extinguish these discriminatory …show more content…
In the eyes of society, with one member of the relationship being too young for love, “Money and beauty” are the only possible motives to engage in these romances (Beam). Creator of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, is well known for multiple relationships with women significantly younger than him. Society, whether they are aware of it or not, believes that Hugh Hefner’s wives were too young in general, not just too young for him. Many believe they weren’t marrying him for love, but for money. The fact that they would marry someone so much older means that their brains are not fully developed and therefore are not mature enough to be involved in an authentic relationship. Some may even say that Hefner married these women because of his own insecurities, the women he married becoming younger and younger as he aged. His aging is an insecurity for him, so he copes by surrounding himself with younger women. Thus, society is opposed to his involvement with younger women for the wrong reasons, not the age gap itself. This view is also reflected in the fictional movie, The Graduate. In the movie, Mrs. Robinson engages in a relationship with a recently graduated student, Ben. Society finds their relationship to be faulty, as it could definitely be described as “sexual, but goes to the much deeper issues of feeling unloved and