Is an 18-year-old dating a 25-year-old problematic? Some Gen Zers think so.
Is a five-year age gap in a relationship a little untoward? What about a three-year gap?
On social media, Gen Zers ― at least those who are chronically online ― are constantly debating the ethics of age gaps. Even if some relationships are perfectly legal, that doesn't necessarily make them ethical, many say.
It's little wonder then that age-disparate relationships are cause for so much conversation: Having grown up alongside the #MeToo movement, Generation Z is well versed in unbalanced power dynamics and the language of consent. And lately, there's been plenty of celebrity pairings to interrogate.
There's the obviously icky examples, like the recent, short-lived romance between Aoki Lee Simmons - Russell and Kimora Lee Simmons' 21-year-old daughter - and restaurateur Vittorio Assaf, 65. Earlier this month, viral photos showed the pair flouncing around on vacation in St. Barts.
Yes, they're both consenting adults, but it was still unseemly, critics said. If anything, the argument that they're both of age is "something groomers cling to," as one young woman on Threads put it.
"Adulthood was meant to signify voting/draft age," she wrote. "But everyone knows your prefrontal cortex is not fully formed at this age." (This difference between so-called brain age and chronological age ― you might be 21 but your brain is undeveloped! ― often gets brought up in these kinds of conversations.)
The anti-age-gap sentiment held by many plays into the "puriteen" narrative that's been inescapable lately. Online, there's a lot of hand-wringing over Gen Zers' seeming aversion to sex: Studies show that they're having less of it than earlier generations and that they don't want sex scenes in their movies.
Though Amelia overall disagrees with age-gap critics ― she feels like their arguments rob women of their agency, she said ― she gets where those in her peer group are coming from.
"The majority of us had unsupervised internet access from a young age. We were in chatrooms, on Tumblr, and other various corners of the internet that we probably should not have been on at that age," she said. "It was easy for grown men on the internet to reach us if they wanted to."
If you've been oversexualized at a young age ― or seen others in your age bracket be oversexualized ― that experience is understandably going to shape how you perceive these kinds of things, Amelia said.
But the reality is, there are likely just as many happy May-December unions as there are disappointing ones. "Believe it or not, we often see more ― not less ― equity in these relationships," Lehmiller noted.
Comments