This is a response to a thread not far below to Hieronymus. I figured it may warrant its own post and thread, rather than being "lost" in the middle of a previous thread.

It concerns the latest incarnation of the witch hunts and moral panics that we've been discussing on the board. And largely in response to Hieronymus's statement: "And now, we are witnessing the rise of yet another spectacular witch hunt: someone who propositioned 14 and 15 year olds is now a "child predator". Ah, brave new world.." [Btw, I totally picked up on Hieronymus's reference to Aldous Huxley's classic work!]

The latest version of the moral panic has men in their 40s demonized as "creepy old men" even if they politely proposition a younger woman of legal age, say, in her early 20s. Why? Because society finds it disgusting, and wants to keep the age groups as segregated as possible, even when the younger party involved is old enough to legally make their own decisions. The moralizing arguments behind this usually amounts to four popular rationalizations:

1. Even a legal adult of 19 lacks emotional agency when confronted by the superior "worldliness" of the older man.

No concern for the possible wildly varying quality of life experiences between the two need be considered, as the universal assumption is that the older person always "knows more" and thus has some type of "upper hand" socially and emotionally. Hence, the older person (usually a man) is rationalized to have sinister intentions related to a desire for control, and the younger person (usually a woman) is assumed to be submissive or have "issues" that cause them to eroticize a faux father figure whom they are only having sex with to keep him in their life, not because they could possibly have a genuine romantic interest on all levels. The fact that they can is just too unthinkable or "creepy" to the common biases of the time period.

2. The bold assumption that the two couldn't possibly have anything in common. This, of course, is entirely inferred from the age difference rather than actually considering what the specific emotional & physical preferences, life circumstances, social interests, life goals/priorities, etc., may be. In other words, treat the two not as individuals, but as generalized representatives of a specific demographic that are both considered to be homogeneous.

3. The concern that if older men date younger women, that will encourage virtually all others to do the same, and this would effectively leave older women with few opportunities for romantic partners; and hence, causing these older men to misguidedly fail to see how wonderful and superlatively compatible with all of their assumed needs an older women could be if only they gave them a chance, and to allow younger women to have the opportunities to discover how much more compatible they are with younger men in their own age group.

As if somehow using a combination of society-wide shaming and demonization to get older men to date only older women is actually a legitimate and fair way to get them to discover the wonderful-ness of older women. That is not only unfair to men whose natural emotional and physical attractions do not swing in that direction, or who happen to meet a much younger women that they sincerely fall in love with. But, it's also unfair to older women who find themselves in relationships with men who are only with them to "settle" due to fear of public scorn, but are not actually able to give them the romantic type of relationship that they want and deserve. Many older women are wonderful, but they need partners (whether in their own age group or younger) who actually have a natural preference or at least strong attraction for them on all levels to "realize" that. Older women who are genuinely good catches rarely have too much difficulty meeting a man (or woman) with a natural attraction for older women on all levels, and finding a terrific life partner who is capable of giving them what they need on all levels. But that is not all older men (or women, for that matter).

If you give the dating world enough scrutiny, you will notice that the great majority of older women who cannot find a consistent partner are those who have long-standing resentment issues against men, have serious attitude problems, are domineering, are SJW's enmeshed in graduate Women's Studies departments at academic institutions who are only seeking men with low esteem of their own gender, have mental illness issues that they are either not getting treatment for or not responding well to treatment (sometimes due to a natural egoistic resistance), or are saddled with an unusual amount of emotional, social, and financial baggage from previous relationships or other types of poor life decisions that would be a strain on the patience and sanity of even a romantic partner who was a veritable saint.

It is also not true that all older men would prefer a younger woman. It all depends on the individual, and what their preferences and needs on all levels happen to be. Using forms of emotional and societal duress to get men from Age Group A to only date women from Age Group A is only going to cause resentments on both sides, which is part of the reason you see so much antipathy between MAPs/Kind folks and older women in general, since society pits the two against each other due to its biases and standardized expectations. The fact of the matter is, women from Age Group A need to accept that some men from Age Group A are not going to have a preference for them, much as not all people from Gender Group A are going to have a preference for people from Gender Group B.

The now burgeoning LGBTQ community has not resulted in mass numbers of men and women abandoning relationships with partners of the opposite gender (despite the pressure by certain elements of the SJW crowd to actually push things in that direction). Instead, society has come to the realization that diversity is the rule, and homogeneity can never be "forced." Diversity has to be accepted, because attempting to force a square peg into a round hole isn't going to result in a good fit for either the peg or the hole. Hence, once age disparate relationships become as accepted and mainstream as same-gender relationships, older women will quickly learn that most of them will still be able to find fulfilling romantic relationships with individuals of both Age Group A and Age Group B (mesophiles) who have a natural preference for them on all levels.

4. It's just freakin' disgusting to society's pre-conditioned sensibilities, because some of these men are the same age or older than the fathers of the younger women they are dating.

And this makes us, as a culture, uncomfortable... why, exactly? What difference does that possibly make? A younger woman could date a younger man who has the same hair color, eye color, general body type, and even similar tastes in food, TV viewing habits, etc., as her father, but does that actually make him a doppelganger of her father in some way? No, they are separate individuals, who relate to her on two completely different levels despite any arbitrary similarities they may have. This is especially the case if her older love interest has absolutely no similarities whatsoever to her father other than age.

This new type of witch hunt, which is disproportionately targeting men, is an extension of the same moral panic that has been plaguing the MAP/Kind community, and which is responsible for our heavily age segregated society in the first place. Moral panics and the draconian measures they act as catalysts for never stop at a certain point, as some well-intentioned folks on both the Right and the Left hope they will. They always continue to spread from one societal institution to another, much as cancer cells inevitably spread from one organ system to another in the human body. Comparing the political mechanics of a moral panic to the biological processes of cancer is extremely apt in many ways.

The connotation is also quite apropos, since moral panics always result in the exponential degradation of civil rights and democratic framework of a supposedly free society under the guise of fighting for some emotionally appealing form of "justice," much as cancer cells gradually (or sometimes rapidly) destroy the biological body under the guise of its own natural cellular mitosis. Moral panics are an extremist form of "justice" that ultimately destroys the democratic foundation of civil liberties for all, much as metastasis is an extreme form of mitosis that ultimately kills the organism as a whole.