fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6337 ]

[ SECRET POST #6337 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6337 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 33 secrets from Secret Submission Post #906.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

OP

Both

Both IRL and fictional, it feels like more conservative people have less of an issue with bigger age gaps. People who see themselves as more progressive/left leaning seem to make more of an issue out of it.
Also generally, the younger the person the more likely they're going to be to have an issue with it as well. Especially if you're looking at teens/young adults vs people 30+.

I think in fiction, age gaps are a non-issue. It's fiction. Nobody gets hurt.

IRL, I think it's tricky. As I said, people who are 30+ seem to have less of a problem with big age gaps and that's mostly because at that age, a partner who is 10-20 years older can still be pretty much on the same wavelength. However, the issue is that these age gaps don't exist in suspended time, so the older people get, the more apparent the gap gets. I see this with several couples in my parent's circle of friends/with some relatives where one partner is much younger than the other. At a certain point, the relationship will become unbalanced, mostly due to fitness/health reasons. So a relationship that looks perfectly fine and balanced at, say, 30 and 45 respectively, can get more unbalanced with time and that can breed resentment.

Also, irl, huge age gaps where the younger partner is only in their early 20s rarely work out well.

That's a a good point about the fitness/health considerations with large age gaps, and something that I always think about.

I also think people don't appreciate the extent to which there can be a sort of...reversal as we get older. The spread between 19 and 44 is troublesome due to the potential for the 44-year-old to exploit the 19-year-old; the spread between 60 and 85 is troublesome due to the potential for the 60-year-old to exploit the 85-year-old.

Yeah, like, I totally get it, in the moment, when people fall in love, they are unlikely to think about "oh but what about in 30/40 years" when at that moment, the age gap doesn't seem a big deal because they are both consenting adults in similar stages of life.
And yeah, the reversal of vulnerability is definitely an issue worthy of consideration as well.

"Both IRL and fictional, it feels like more conservative people have less of an issue with bigger age gaps."

Well, less of one with older men/younger women anyway.

Yeah, I was thinking exactly this. Conservatives think it's dandy for men (especially if rich and white) to be able to go after whoever gets them hard and might be capable of childbearing, but the idea of older women with much younger men tends to make them really uptight really fast.

True, and it actually creates an interesting double standard sometimes, now that I think about it. Because progressives/liberals who usually condemn big age gaps with male older partners tends to celebrate the switched gender versions. Which... I get why they do it but either a huge age gap is bad or not, stop being a hypocrite (same goes for conservatives the other way around, obviously).

The kind of people who see themselves as left-leaning and have a problem with age gaps in fiction are not, in fact, left-leaning at all. They're the fans who want to censor AO3 and send people to the electric chair for doing wrongthink.

Eh. I mean, plenty of the fandom people who rage against age gaps and are pro-censorship as long as they don't like something absolutely do identify as very leftist/progressive. So to say they're really not is kinda a no true Scotsman argument. They are generally leftist. They also tend to dress up their authoritarian conservative views in certain fields as progressive talking points (which doesn't work outside their echo chambers but still).

Well, I don't know. As you yourself note, these are people whose views are actually conservative, not progressive.

There are people who claim to be of a particular political persuasion while holding positions that are totally contrary to it, and I'm not sure it's correct to call it a No True Scotsman situation when that gets pointed out. To give an extreme example, it's not NTS to say that North Korea isn't really a democracy, despite it identifying as one, right?

Sure, but who is the one to judge how many views contrary to an ideology a person may have before they're not deemed "part of this ideology" anymore? Because in a lot of other areas, the pro-censorship antis are leftists, and radical ones at that quite often.

I would say if the majority of a person's views are contrary to the ideology they claim to have, then they aren't really part of it. I'd further say that, insofar as we're able to identify the core tenets of an ideology, someone who fundamentally disagrees with said tenets does not belong to it, regardless how many overlapping tertiary views they may have.

An ideology with no bounds around it is basically useless as a descriptive category. What does it mean to be a leftist if, say, someone who views taxation as theft and wants to privatize all government services can claim the label just as easily as a person who wants greater socialization of services?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #6337 ]

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question

Re: Age Gap Question