BIKINI WARS: Eric Olsen disagrees with Den Beste. There’s merit to some of what Olsen says, but this part is dubious:

There is a problem if a middle-aged man finds young women in their late-teens and early-20s to be the height of sexual attractiveness. Sexual attraction can never be based purely upon looks alone: there is no real person who consists of only looks, therefore it is counterproducive, at best, to find most-attractive women with whom there is no hope of actual interaction.

Middle-aged men should feel protective, avuncular, even paternal (not paternalistic) toward young women – toward young people – in their late-teens and early-20s: people who are young enough to be their children. They shouldn’t see them as sexual objects. There is just no way a real romantic relationship is possible at 20+ years age difference: too many cultural divides, too many differences of perspective, attitudes, interests, place in life. ALL such relationships are imbalanced, are exploitative one way or another. There just isn’t all that much to talk about, and if you don’t talk, then it’s not the real thing. It’s fantasy, just marking time, avoiding the real issues, and keeping life at arm’s length rather than dealing with it head-on.

The women most attractive to a middle-aged man should be those with whom he could have an actual relationship. Beauty isn’t only found in the very young, and the combination of physical beauty with some actual life experience is vastly more sexy than the callow beauty of youth alone – that is if you find actual living, breathing women more sexy than stereotypical abstractions.

Actually, one of the loveliest marriages I’ve known was between a middle-aged man (one of my law professors) and his (originally 19-year-old) student wife. She went on to become the Dean of Columbia Law School and a successful scholar in her own right. They had several kids and a long happy marriage. Had they listened to this advice, they wouldn’t have.

And what’s all this should stuff? I can’t help noticing that although it’s politically incorrect to tell women what they should want in a relationship, everyone feels happy to hector men on the same subject. Which goes to the other part: men are genetically programmed to find young women appealing, just as women are genetically programmed to like men of higher status. It’s perfectly natural for men to feel that way. It may or may not lead to successful relationships, but hell, most relationships are unsuccessful. I find women in their teens and early 20s to be (usually) rather immature for my taste; I felt that way when I was in my teens and early 20s myself, and my opinion hasn’t changed with age. But so what? What I find appealing shouldn’t be the standard for everyone else.

I can only conclude that offering unsolicited opinions about other people’s sex lives must be genetically programmed too — I guess I just missed that gene.

UPDATE: Den Beste replies here. I think he’s carried the day, personally.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Uh oh. Now Eric’s getting fact-checked by his wife. Run up the white flag now, Eric. While you still can.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Moore chimes in. But he, like a lot of people, takes it for granted that everyone finds the idea of his/her parents having sex gross. I don’t. Neither does my wife. We were wondering about that the other day, in fact: do people hate the idea of their parents having sex out of self-hatred (“ugh, that led to me”), or out of narcissism (“now that I’m here, what’s the point?”) or out of something else? That’s just another one of those things that I don’t get.

There are a lot of things about other people’s attitudes toward sex that I don’t get (strippers, for example — what’s the point?). That’s why I’m not so quick to tell people what they should want.