Woody Allen has made his film again.
You know the one. A young woman with metric f**ktonnes of attitude and sexual agency goes after a neurotic man.
In this case the girl in question (though we might as well go full Nabokov and call her a nymphet) is fifteen. And she comes on to Jude Law who is in his fourties. Similarly, Chloe Grace Moretz is starring in the grim looking I Love You, Daddy.
(Yes, they are making a film called that).
The upshot of these films is broadly speaking the same. Beautiful young women striving for relationships with men considerably older than them.
The response to the news that these films are being made is one of disgust. People are asking why, they’re questioning in what world Elle Fanning and Jude Law feels like an appropriate romantic pairing and some people have suggested that it’s unlikely that a woman that young would want to be with a man that old.
That last point is where my issues start.
I might not like it, you might like it, and we might all wish that is wasn’t true, but the thing is, teenage girls do fancy older men. They do desire them.
When we pretend that teenage girls don’t have a sexual identity, or that they don’t ever find older men attractive, we ignore the problem. When we ignore the problem, we allow it to flourish.
I attended an all girl Catholic boarding school where there was, as you can imagine, sweet FA in terms of male attention to be had. I had always assumed that man-drought was the reason that most of us developed a passionate crush on a teacher at some point in our school career.
But having spoken to women who were raised in slightly less bizarre circumstances, I’ve revised that assumption. It’s not just girls who go to school in the middle of nowhere with no boys to flirt with who form passionate romantic obsessions with male teachers.
It happens at every school, in every town, all over the world.
Don’t we all have that friend who dated an ‘older’ guy when she was at school? I have more stories than I can count of sneaking out of school to meet up with men in their twenties and thirties so that we could drive around in his car drinking the alcohol he’d brought us and sneaking an illicit cigarette.
When you’re a teenager it doesn’t take much to make you feel sophisticated. Drinking, smoking and the ability to drive feel like the trifecta of adulthood, and if you’ve got even two of the three, you’re impressive.
Dating a teenager is a particularly intoxicating opportunity for men who struggle with women their own age. The benefit of being an older man is that you’re able to attract more conventionally attractive girls.
A younger woman will look up to you. She’ll listen to you. She’ll see you as wordly, she’ll see you as impressive. If you tell her she’s ‘mature’ for her age, she’ll believe you.
Which is exactly why men have a responsibility not to pursue younger women.
Even a small age gap – mid teens to early twenties, still carries this kind of imbalance. The vast majority of men would never want to accidentally take advantage of a younger woman. When it happens it’s not motivated my malice or designed to be predatory. It’s because they don’t realise that they’re acting from a position of power.
I draw a line in my head between the older men I fancied at a teenager who resolutely refused to engage with it, and those who indulged it or even courted it. There were teachers who let me embarrass myself with clumsy childish flirting but never encouraged me for a second. I feel intensely grateful to them now. I would have done literally anything that they wanted.
There were also people who weren’t so scrupulous. A boss who groped me whenever he could. Older men at parties who made comments about my body or came on to me. I remember them too. And I wish they’d known that I didn’t fancy them because they were interesting or attractive, but because they seemed powerful to me.
They weren’t powerful. They were sad men who were dazzled by youngness and flattered by my attention. They didn’t pause to think about the fact that I would remember how they ran their hands over my body or asked me if I was ‘still a virgin’.
But I remember. Ten years later I remember in technicolour detail, and I judge them.
So Woody Allen isn’t wrong to make his film again, at least not per se. He’s wrong about lots of other things, but the storyline of a young woman falling for an older man is an accurate one.
I just wish that for once the older man would brush her off and encourage her to go off and find someone a little closer to her age to explore with, at least until she reaches the status of a legal adult.
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