When girls first started screaming for Frank Sinatra and later on The Ed Sullivan Show for Elvis and The Beatles, older women must have heard those screams and thought “I’ve wasted my life.” No married woman screams for her husband. What would be the point? What other woman in her right mind wants your husband?
Children want to be who their parents want to be
In her book The Death Of The Grown-Up, Diana West documents how the category of “teenager” was born in the years immediately following WWII. It was not so much some new need for an intermediary category between “child” and “adult” due to the increasing complexity of modern education or post-industrial society. The creation of the teenager was specifically due to a reversal of the aspirations between children and adults. Hitherto children had envied and aspired to become adults as soon as they possibly could. When adults began to envy and aspire to be children, children sensed this change and ceased aspiring to be adults. Instead, they aspired to remain children long after they were physically mature. The longer children remained children, they more they physically resembled adults, and the easier it was for adults to convince themselves they were still children too. Chubby Checker’s hit single “The Twist” went to the top of the charts in 1960 when teenagers bought it, and then again two years later... when their parents bought it. Ever since then, adults’ discovery of anything is a reliable cue to children that it’s not cool anymore.
Since its creation three quarters of a century ago, teenhood has extended well past the age of twenty and even thirty. The word “teen” no longer accurately describes it. We might call this time of life “The teen plus twen plus early-thir years,” or perhaps simply “The Wonder Years.” But why do The Wonder Years not go on forever? No one wants to become an adult. And why do they end precisely when they end? To be a teenager is to be sexy, but in a non-adult way. This means first and foremost not being married, seemingly free of all consequences. The parameters of The Wonder Years are set by women. In particular, The Wonder Years end when women feel they can no longer behave as teenagers without inviting ridicule from women younger than themselves. This age has crept up as social norms have been pushed back to accommodate ostentatiously juvenile sexual behavior by increasingly older women, but it has a certain hard ceiling. This happens when older women are no longer able to compete with younger women sexually in what is essentially a young woman’s game. Then the ridicule is guaranteed regardless of social norms. This is clearly a woman’s timetable. Men are not subject to this particular timetable because most of them are not competitive to begin with and the ones that are remain competitive for far longer in life than women their own age.
Marriage now marks the end of a woman’s sexual career, to be put off until the last possible moment. Humans now breed in the manner of insects, waiting until the very end of their season in the sun to lay some eggs and then die. A wedding is now something like a sexual retirement party. It is increasingly common to see wedding pictures in which the bride is actively recoiling from her groom’s kiss, at her own wedding. She is not marrying her stud. Her racing days are over. She is marrying a gelding to put out to pasture with.
It is doubtful if women can really be happy spawning in their thirties and then remaining celibate for the rest of their lives. It is just the next best strategy when it becomes clear they will not secure commitment from the men they desire and time is running out for having children. Presumably they feel that if they are forced to mate with lesser men, they are at least owed more commitment and investment than they would have asked of greater men. But even if everything goes according to plan, such women will still attempt to have affairs with old flames or bosses or younger coworkers or itinerant celebrities or exotic foreigners when the opportunity presents itself. In any case, they will still dream about such men.
How the other half lives The Wonder Years
Men don’t really have Wonder Years. This will come as a surprise to a lot of women. As far as a woman can tell, “the man” gets to be king of the world. He not only has sex with her, but with all of her girlfriends, too. And he seems to be having the time of his life. She estimates, correctly, that he has a higher number of sexual partners than she does and she also estimates, also correctly, that he is happier than she is. This may motivate a large part of why she seeks to emulate his behavior and accumulate a likewise impressive number of partners.
This may all be true of the abovementioned “the man,” but it is not true of all the other men. Most men spend these years masturbating to porn. They spend most of the rest of their lives this way, too. On average, men remain virgins far longer than women and have far fewer lifetime sex partners than women. Increasing numbers of men have none at all. But women never think about average men and look right through them when they see them. When women talk about “men,” these are not the men they have in mind.
Women who seek happiness through promiscuity when they are still young and fertile are playing to the female advantage, since all women are attractive in their youth in a way that men are not. Men are fertile throughout a much longer period of their lives, but it doesn’t make them attractive to anyone. But just as career women misunderstand why achievement makes men happy, promiscuous women misunderstand why promiscuity makes men happy. A woman can give birth maybe several dozen times in her life. She will find it progressively more difficult to get pregnant once she turns thirty and she will stop ovulating completely by around the time she is fifty. From the moment a man commits to a woman, he is limiting his future children to her future children, which is an increasingly small number the older she gets. This is why youth is such an outsized factor in women’s attractiveness to men. But even a young woman can only have a very small total number of children relative to the number of children a man could have with multiple women. What makes men amenable to marriage is that most women don’t want anything to do with them. When a man marries, he trades a theoretically large number of children for an actual small number of children. But any extra children he can have outside of marriage are sort of bonus children. This is why promiscuity, whether before, during, or after marriage, will make him happy, if he can get away with it.
A man greatly increases his potential number of children by being promiscuous, but a woman will not increase her potential number of children by even one no matter how promiscuous she is. There is nothing she can do to increase that number. All she can do is to try to have better quality children by restricting sex to men she deems of higher quality. What makes a woman happy then is not promiscuity, but attaining higher quality genes for each one of her limited number of births. This is why women swoon to celebrities, prominent and exciting men, and other proven winners, even older ones, but are cold to the prospect of a roomful of horny losers. Men, on the other hand, swoon at the prospect of a roomful of horny sluts, even ugly ones, and especially young ones, but are not necessarily aroused by prominent or successful women. From a male point of view, an obscure young woman can have more children than an old famous woman. From a female point of view, an older male celebrity can have just as many children as a younger male nobody, and more importantly, the celebrity’s children will presumably be higher quality children.
Wild Oats
The expression “sowing his wild oats” used to refer to the pre-marital promiscuity which made men happy. Women noticed this happiness and envied it, and eventually attempted to emulate it. The problem is you cannot sow wild eggs. To stay within the confines of the metaphor, a woman farmer does not sow oats, she reaps oats. She might be able to surreptitiously collect oats from wild fields or forbidden fields, if she thinks they are of higher quality than the oats she can get at home. But she’d better make sure they really are high-quality. The appeal “wild oats” have to men is simply that they are wild. It doesn’t matter if they are low quality or if they fall in the wrong place. But women collecting oats cannot afford to be carefree. Oats that turn out to be of low quality are a wasted opportunity. A man is sowing wild oats in a time of his life he can afford to lose, reproductively speaking. Any success his wild oats find is bonus success. But a woman is collecting her oat samples during her peak opportunity window and each failure is a net subtraction from a predetermined limited lifetime total. Thus, a woman is not seeking “wild oats” at all, but “super oats.” Perhaps in the prime of their lives many women have no trouble obtaining all the “super” quality men they want, so they might not realize until later just how selective they’re actually being and how high the standards they’re setting for themselves really are.
Although men do feel gratified later in life if they discover that their “wild oats” resulted in some extra children they didn’t know they had, they will still enjoy having sown those oats just as much even if no children resulted from it. Sexual pleasure is mostly in the perception anyway. Men experience the thrill of fulfilling a sexual imperative by scattering oats in all that wild soil for which they paid no title deed or property taxes and did no field work.
But to women the prospect of bearing the offspring of random sex is not a gratifying thought at all, it is depressing. This is why abortion on demand is such a vital need. But truly “wild oats” are not a pleasant experience for women even if no pregnancy results. Only the prospect of pregnancy of guaranteed high-quality can bring about this satisfaction. A woman might conceive high-quality children on the sly while married to someone else, like Cosima Wagner did while still married to Hans von Bülow. Other women might bear these super children out of wedlock and later exercise such sexual leverage over a fiancé that he agrees to adopt them. But even if a woman’s super flings result in no children at all and she is forced to bear her low-quality husband’s children instead, she will still enjoy having realized her sexual potential by having obtained the high quality super seed when she had the chance.
Not all men get to sow “wild oats.” The ones that haven’t will certainly view their marriages as the more important part of their lives. But interestingly, so will the ones that have. This is because marriage is where men make more of an investment and seek higher quality. This was the whole point of the “wild oats” metaphor when it was originally coined: that it would not make a man any less of a husband when he did marry. It had not been an important time in his life. It certainly was not mandatory. Young men were never told they had wasted their lives if they failed to sow every last wild oat before getting married. But young women are increasing being given precisely this kind of message. For women who harvest such male sexual attention before marriage, The Wonder Years have displaced marriage as the most important time in their lives. That is now precisely where women make their investment and seek their quality.
It’s educational
Few men can ever attain the multiplicity of female sexual partners they would like. Most women, on the other hand, can obtain sex with the high-quality men they would like, they just can’t get those men to stick around. This is why women must insist on living The Wonder Years before marriage. But that is never how they rationalize it. This may be for fear of offending future husbands or for fear of admitting to themselves or to others that they can no longer get what they really want.
There is often a claim to educational value. Sex with a lot of different men will help a girl learn about herself and what kind of man she wants. Once she learns, she can marry that man. If she is denied this pre-marital “education”, the reasoning goes, she will likely marry the wrong man. This is about as credible as an alcoholic claiming he goes to bars to learn what kinds of drinks he really likes. When he finds his favorite drink, he’ll leave. In fact, he only ever leaves when they throw him out. There’s a suspicious sour-grapes-like pattern in how such “education” is always abandoned just before it would come to an abrupt end anyway. It seems staying in this “school” until “graduation” is not advised.
The whole idea of The Wonder Years as education is patently silly because this is actually the opposite of how education normally works. No one spends years practicing the piano every day and traveling all over the world studying with famous piano teachers just to discover that what she really and truly wants is to spend the rest of her life playing “chopsticks” once a month on a toy electric keyboard.
Most kinds of education are bragged about later in life, but this kind of “education” is usually kept secret as much as possible. Only when it can no longer be hidden are its supposed benefits touted. It’s like a former heroin addict denying he was ever an addict, but then, when his past is revealed, claiming his addiction taught him many valuable lessons about himself that he’s so glad he learned.
Another rationalization for The Wonder Years is the accumulation of memories. As articulated by the character Marsha Zelenko in the novel Marjorie Morningstar:
“I tell you, you’re the fool of fools, Marjorie. You’ll die screaming curses at yourself. That is, if you’re not too withered and stupid by then to realize what you did to yourself when you were young and alive and pretty and had your chance —”
Marsha is not talking about Marjorie’s attempts to become an actress. She’s talking about sex with Noel Airman. Marjorie asks if she should “sleep with him like all his other trollops? And then let him kick me out when he’s had all he wants?” Marsha replies:
“YES, God damn you, YES! If you’re not woman enough to hold him, all you deserve is to be kicked out. What do you think he is, one of your puking little temple dates? He’s a MAN... Nothing will happen to you, except you’ll pile up a thousand memories to warm you when you’re an old crock. All right, don’t listen to me. Do as you damn please. What do I care? Go to your temple dances and marry Sammy Lefkowitz, the brassiere manufacturer’s son. He’s probably all you deserve.”
For anyone who has not read the book: there is no character named “Sammy Lefkowitz.” This is Marsha’s way of expressing advance contempt for any man who would marry Marjorie as well as for Marjorie herself if she fails to have casual sex with a “MAN.” This was probably considered provocative when the book was first published in 1955. Today, this kind of advice permeates popular culture, drips from every type of advice column, and is particularly reinforced in higher education. In fact, now it often rings a lot harsher. Older women, especially the more accomplished among them, pile derision that is surprisingly vitriolic onto younger women who dare express a wish to marry their sweethearts or remain virgins until marriage.
Why are older women today so adamant about this? All addictions provide pleasure that is simply not available to the non-addict. Everything else in life is boring by comparison. It’s the same for heroin or gambling addicts as for women who chase exciting men. The difference is that every other kind of reformed addict will advise younger people to not start using. But older women will pretty much uniformly insist that younger women play the field and not get married too soon. You never see a young person scathingly belittled like this for being reluctant to use heroin. We can only deduce that the pleasure of securing sex with desirable men is far greater than that of a heroin high. The older women really seem to believe a woman will have wasted her life. And the younger women usually don’t need much encouragement. This is the course they tend to want to pursue anyway unless they are actively dissuaded from it.
Note that to this way of thinking, happiness in marriage is all but impossible. Any man who would actually marry you is by definition a puking little Sammy Lefkowitz. The important thing is that you pile up a thousand memories of all the premarital sex you had with Real Men.
I don’t think there’s anything unique about the physical quality of the sex women can have during The Wonder Years with the men who will be unobtainable later on. It’s who the women believe these men are. The thrill of getting such a man to go through the motions of impregnating you even if no children result is greater than anything else you might experience in your life and is worth paying any price for. And it’s not men saying this. It’s not religious conservatives trying to herd young women into some kind of Handmaid’s Tale scenario. It’s the most educated, sophisticated, independent, mature secular women who are preaching this.
Another rationalization that is sometimes heard holds that The Wonder Years are some kind of low-stakes training for marriage. There are several reasons it isn’t. Women’s initial experiences of sex are not of the same nature as what would make them happy in marriage. This is unavoidable. But extending adolescence actually makes it harder to ever develop an adult sexuality. A series of short-term non-committal experiences can only, at best, make one better at short-term non-committal experiences. At worst, it retards or suppresses the learning process necessary for married life. Marriage is a high-stakes enterprise. That’s why people still seek it, but also why people are afraid of it. It is where the big lifetime psychic rewards can be obtained, but it’s also where souls can get trampled. Premarital experience is not only not high-stakes, it’s also not shared-stakes. No matter how “long-term,” you can still end it whenever you like. The shared-stakes nature of marriage makes it powerful, and qualitatively different than dating life. The result of serial dating is not that dating relations serve as practice for marriage, but that marriage ends up getting treated like a bigger longer version of a dating relationship. If your life is a history of failed short-term low stakes self-centered mini-marriages, you will do even worse in the shared, long-term, high-stakes real version. The only thing dating life can prepare you for is dating, and it corrupts you into thinking that’s all there is.
Children who are too young to ride a bike are sometimes given small wheels that attach to either side of the bike’s rear axle to stabilize it. These side wheels are known euphemistically as “training wheels” so the kid can pretend this is helping her to eventually ride the bike without them. In fact, the opposite is true. All the “training wheels” really mean is that the kid still lacks the motor co-ordination to balance on a real bike. But the more accustomed you get to the “training wheels,” the harder it will be to ever learn to balance on a real bike without them. As soon as developmentally possible, you need to bite the bullet, get rid of the “training wheels” and commit to riding the real bike, getting back on again each time you take a spill. And the sooner the better. If you ever saw an adult riding a bike with “training wheels,” you would be somewhat taken aback. You would instinctively know that this person was neurologically damaged in some way that made it impossible for her to ever ride a regular bike. And yet sexually, we see an entire population of adult women riding full-size bikes with training wheels who all say they’re in training to win the Tour de France. Maybe they believe this, but you should not.
Triumph of the will
Women often experience the onset of the Wonder Years as an act of their own free will. In Marjorie Morningstar (the book not the movie!), Marjorie invents the new last name for herself when she is seventeen, on the day she decides to become an actress, which is the day after she realizes she is competitive in the upper-class Manhattan dating scene. As Noel Airman explains it later in the novel:
Nature gives most of you girls a burst of charm around seventeen, lasting a few years, so you can attract some man and keep the process going. It’s the flower and the bee; it’s that simple and obvious. But do you ever ascribe your new charms to Nature? Of course not. What’s happened is that you’ve suddenly become a brilliant, gifted, sage individual. You’ve assumed a role, complete with makeup, costumes, and dialogue. And you’ve dressed and painted yourself with amazing cleverness, and you keep inventing fantastically witty dialogue, and there’s no end to your graceful ways and arts. THAT’S how it happens that boys are starting to fall all over you. It’s got nothing to do with your fresh pointy breasts and new round thighs and perky behind. It follows that you have some extraordinary talent for this kind of thing.
But if the rise of The Wonder Years is a choice, then so is their fall. When Marjorie meets Muriel, Noel’s flame of ten years earlier, she is incredulous: “It’s just that you described her as such a beauty, and — well, she’s just another one of those dressed-up mamas from the suburbs.” Noel replies: “Didn’t you feel a chill? You’ve just spoken your own epitaph.” Marjorie says: “Oh, shut up. I’ll die before I live anywhere but in Manhattan.”
The Joni Mitchell album The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a lyrical attack on women who end their own Wonder Years by moving to the suburbs. It seems this is not a biological necessity at all but a geographical choice a woman makes, and it is the wrong choice: “Under neon signs a girl was in bloom and a woman was fading in a suburban room.” Presumably, if the woman had just stayed under the neon signs instead of moving to the suburban room, she wouldn’t be fading. “Gail and Louise in those push-up brassieres, tight dresses and rhinestone rings drinking up the band's beers.” If only the fading woman had continued wearing a push-up brassiere and a tight dress, the band would still be just as happy to let her drink their beers instead of Gail and Louise. But the hissing is not coming from the young girls, or from the summer lawns. The hissing is coming from Joni Mitchell. She was 32 at the time. She was hissing at the fading women who are making all this happen with their bad lifestyle choices, and also at “paper-minded males” like the hated Harry who lure girls out of their urban bloom with promises of summer lawns and rooms full of Chippendale. The album should have been called Hissing at Summer Lawns. Take it from Joni, fellas, you can’t make a woman love you by marrying her and buying her stuff.
It is not The Patriarchy that proposes women are only good for sex with the sexiest of men and might as well be dead when they’re no longer young and attractive. It is women who believe this, especially modern, secular, educated, western women. Patriarchy is actually far more respectful. The sheikh’s first wife will always be a respected woman no matter how many younger wives her husband takes. But to western women, the end of The Wonder Years is an unconscionable tragedy. Often, a culprit must be found. Either the woman brought it on herself by moving to the suburbs, or bad men tricked her into it by buying her expensive furniture. There is an immense desire to believe it never had to end at all. Elizabeth Gilbert has managed to acquire an astounding amount of wealth by convincing her readers that she’s managed to extend her Wonder Years indefinitely.
The hardest double standard of all
The downfall of woman at the end of The Wonder Years is an unhealable trauma. This is true for all women. Age at time of marriage or amount of pre-marital sexual experience will not make the suffering any easier or any harder. The killer double standard arises from the effect these two parameters have on the challenges of marriage in the post-Wonder Years. Long-term happiness in marriage requires that a woman form a new sexual persona by means of which she can form a new bond with her husband to the exclusion of all else, including her friends, family, and previous experiences. This can usually only take place after several years of marriage and the odds of success are poor to begin with. Even younger virginal brides will likely fail. More “experienced” older women start the marriage learning curve from a position of higher expectations while also facing a lower quality pool of potential husbands. This pushes already bad odds that much closer to the brink of impossibility.
Men are acutely aware of all this and consequently, as far as they have a choice, prefer to marry younger, less “experienced” women. And herein lies one of the most painful double-standards for any fair-minded person to accept. Women do not similarly penalize prospective husbands for their advanced age or past youthful dalliances. If anything, it is excessive youth and inexperience that are something of a liability for men in the marriage market.
Unfortunately, like most sexual double standards, this is not something that is just “socially constructed” or that can be eliminated in the future through “education” or candlelight vigils. The reason women do not disprefer older more “experienced” men is not that women are generous or kind-hearted. It is because they can still expect to get the lion’s share of such a man’s desirability, fertility, and sexual interest. Most men don’t have much sex appeal to begin with, but the little they do have doesn’t decline all that rapidly. Their fertility hardly declines at all. Consequently, the women a man can attract later in life are about as attractive to him as the ones he attracted earlier in his sexual career. All else being equal, a woman can realistically expect an older more experienced husband to treat her no less affectionately than a younger less experienced one.
Even in the extremely unlikely scenario where a man does find himself with only lower quality marriage options later in life, this will likely not impair his ability to be attracted to these lesser women. This is due to men’s physical ability to father large numbers of children continuously throughout their adult lives. They have preferences, but they draw the cut-off line quite low and can become excited about just about any woman. Sexual attraction is the ability to imagine oneself having children with someone, regardless of whether one actually has the child or not. Women are physically limited in their lifetime number of births, so they tend to be much more selective about who they are attracted to. Throughout a woman’s life, she attracts her highest quality men when she is young. And of these, the highest quality of all are those who will not marry her. A woman who is promiscuous in her youth is setting for herself the highest possible standard of acceptable male attractiveness. As she ages, she attracts only lower quality men even as her potential for future births becomes more limited, so she will tend to become even more selective about who she “spends” attraction on.
An older and more “experienced” bride is not only giving her husband the short end of her beauty and fertility, but the dregs of her sexual interest in and respect for him. And he will likely be resented for wanting even those. She is likely as good a woman as he could ever get. But she will know that she once could get better men. No matter how good a liar a woman is, she can rarely fake desire and respect for a man for very long. Such a husband will always remain for his wife something of an insulting consolation prize. He will tell her: “But I love you more than those guys did.” And she will think: “A one-way ticket to Palookaville. I could’ve had class. I could’ve been a contender! I could’ve been somebody...”
There are exceptions. Widows and widowers who have both had long first marriages often have happy second marriages together. In the book From Here to Eternity (not the movie!), Pruitt muses that a prostitute is the perfect wife for a soldier, since neither have any illusions about the other.
The problem with marriages to late age “experienced” brides is that there are usually a lot of illusions on both sides. The husband will assume that because he is providing more commitment, he is due at least as much intimacy and devotion than his wife’s prior “acquaintances.” But his wife is bound to feel he is obligated to provide more of everything and is due less of anything because he is a lesser man. And he is by definition in her eyes a lesser man. Such wives often say things like: “But that part of my life is over.” The husband may think: “Can’t you just bring it back once in a while for me?” But what his wife means is: “The part of my life when I could attract men I like is over. How can you expect me to be enthusiastic for you when you’re not one of those men?” Such a husband may not exactly have been “cheated on,” but he is going to end up feeling cheated just the same.