Half A Million Likes For The Notice Of Our Impending Death

On Monday evening over the phone, I asked this man who had shared my bed for three nights running why we had not made love. “Your body is too wrinkly,” he said without a pause. “I have spoiled myself over the years with young woman. I just can’t get excited with you. I love your energy and your laughter. I like your head and your heart. But, I just can’t deal with your body.”

Well, that’s what they call “keeping it real”, isn’t it?

In the space of two days, Robin Korth’s screech of lament has picked up over 495,000 FB Likes. Seventy-three thousand shares. 1,901 Tweets. One hundred and six LinkedIn shares, which is odd by contrast because if ever there was a story for the LinkedIn demographic, it’s this one. That’s a lot of social-media sharing; I get pretty excited when something I write for R&T gets five thousand Likes. Why’s it so popular?

Well, the manosphere likes it, and indeed I found it through the all-knowing Chateau Heartiste, because it serves them as proof positive of “The Wall” that women hit at some point in their lives. Since it’s a given that very few of the Chateau’s readers are actively trying to date fifty-five-year-old women, however, why is the article so satisfying to them? I’d suggest that it’s because it represents a sort of justice. Sure, that gorgeous woman in your PoliSci class might have failed to respond to your text because she was busy getting Eiffel Towered at the Sigma Chi house, but in just thirty-two short years you’ll be able to hit her with a solid diss track, yo. It’s something to which you can look forward as you spend your evenings between now and then playing Titanfall. Some day, you’ll be just like “Dave”, spoiling yourself with “younger woman” and carelessly crushing the dreams of a successful international speaker and author or whatever Robin Korth is.

Of course, that reading skips over a few daunting facts. To begin with, “Dave” isn’t just swiping her to the left on Tinder; he went through a lot of trouble to go out with her several times. He was clearly hoping for something besides three days of resisting the advances of a woman who, based on her photo in the article, probably resembles Skeletor when she’s naked. This might be one of those cases where a little less running and a little more eating might do some good, although I could just as easily be wrong about that.

The second problem is that although he might have spoiled himself with younger women in the past, he’s not doing it at the moment. Which means he ran out of money, status, hydraulic pressure, or shamelessness. I’m thinking the latter. Dave has to be conscious of the fact that although younger women often find older men extremely interesting and sexy and whatnot, when it’s actually time to get down to brass tacks none of them (us!) are exactly going to compete with a twenty-two-year-old athlete. Even Hugh Jackman, with all his cash and his free time and his HGH and his admirable workout ethic, looks a little, shall we say, grizzled in his forties.

Thus, he gave Robin a shot. It felt right, as my future ex-wife Este Haim would sing, but he fumbled it when he came down to the wire. (Incidentally, my son sings it as “I fumbled it when I came down to the water.” I haven’t corrected that yet.) But because he still liked this woman and enjoyed her company, he tried to just exclude the physical part.

The HuffPo commenters aren’t inclined to treat this guy with any kindness, suggesting everything from general erectile dysfunction to porn addiction to an unusually deep closet as the actual cause of his problem. Some of the comments are just staggering in their hall-of-mirrors distance from reality:

Wow. What an ass. What he doesn’t realize is that he has a fetish. We normally think of fetishes as pertaining to inanimate objects, but that isn’t the case. One can have a tickling fetish, or a foot fetish, or in the case of this sad man, he has a fetish for young female bodies.

As much as we’d like to blame this guy for not being more self-aware and evolved, his fetish is probably not uncommon and has been entirely supported by our culture which also has a fetish for young female bodies. The reason he’s so obtuse is because he’s been raised to think it is obvious that men want younger women and older women should pretzel themselves into that if they want male companionship.

Just like a guy who gets turned on by whips and chains or wearing diapers, his fetish says nothing whatsoever about you. It’s all about him. He’s all about him, apparently. So much that he can’t even comprehend that what he said was rude and cruel. In his crazy mind he’s only asking that you just slip on a younger body the way a BDSM aficionado can slip on a corset and a collar. But it don’t work that way.

I deeply appreciate what you’ve written here. I confess that I have had a hard time with my own aging body. I liked my young one, thankyouverymuch. A few years back I did the same exercise in front of a mirror. My goal was to look at every inch of myself and not say or think one negative thought, but instead to tell myself how beautiful I am. It’s an exercise I wholeheartedly endorse for everyone, young and old.

A fetish for young female bodies! Imagine the kind of mental gymnastics required to convince one’s self that a male interest in young female bodies is a fetish! And the only solution is to stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself that you are beautiful! Even if it isn’t true!

I probably only read about five hundred of the nearly three thousand comments, but let me tell you the one comment that was obvious by its absence, to me anyway: one suggesting that it might be possible or reasonable for Dave and Robin to have a permanent, lasting relationship that was not built on sexuality. Think about that for a minute. Robin is fifty-five years old, which is to say she’s made it farther than the majority of humans in recorded history. Who’s to say that sex is a necessary component of her life? Will it be necessary when she is sixty? Sixty-five? Ninety? At some point it has to stop being a focal point, right? But when?

Another comment I didn’t see: anything that suggested that being beautiful was anything other than a proper pursuit and goal for Robin. Plenty of people reassured her that she was still beautiful. But nobody dared to suggest that she didn’t need to be. Seriously. I need you to focus on the hand the magician doesn’t want you to watch. The media occasionally redefines “beautiful” to include the fat, the chinless, the cross-eyed, and the frankly deformed, but they will never permit you to put the goalposts anywhere but “beautiful”. It’s not enough for Robin to be accomplished and interesting. She has to be beautiful, even if that beauty is a lie so simple that a child could see through it.

We don’t do that to men, by the way. It’s perfectly okay for a man to be ugly and worthwhile at the same time. Nobody ever suggests that Bill Gates is handsome, or that Isaac Asimov was. Look at Chelsea Clinton. She’s never been pretty and never will be, but the DailyKos crew treats her like she’s a Ladyhawke-era Michelle Pfeiffer. The only acceptable compliment for a woman, ever, is “You’re beautiful” or some such variant.

Instead of redefining “beautiful” to include everyone in some bizarre Harrison Bergeron-esque feat of industrial-strength doublethink, perhaps we should accept instead that it is merely a word like “tall” that applies to some people but not to others. Doing that would strip the word of some power, I think. And it would be comforting, because none of us will be beautiful forever unless we can arrange to both be born beautiful and to die young.

Robin’s enemy here wasn’t Dave. It was a society and a media that told her the lie that she could be beautiful at fifty-five. Very few people manage that. I sure as hell won’t. Come back in thirteen years and see what I look like. I’ll be lucky if I manage to look like Setright and not Orson Welles. If I based my self-worth on being beautiful, I would be well-advised to make an appointment with a bottle of sleeping pills, pronto.

It’s always better to live in reality. Reality says this: every man has a young woman fetish the same way every woman has a fetish for men who aren’t begging at freeway exits. Reality says that every year more of us drop out of the dating pool due to age and wrinkles and poverty and depression and disaffection and disillusionment and we rarely get a say in the matter. Reality says that no successful society in human history has knowingly permitted situations where significant numbers of fifty-five-year-old women or homeless men are out there looking for fun dating lives.

Reality says that your own death will arrive in a geologically and historically insignificant interval from right now and you will be forgotten shortly after that death, assuming you’re remembered now. Reality says take what you can and hold what you can take. Reality says that the true tragedy of the story isn’t that Robin is unfuckable; it’s that both Robin and Dave are unfuckable and nobody bothered to tell them until they’d finished building the edifices of their lives and self-images on that not being the case.

Some of the Likes on that article are for Robin’s honestly, some are in support of her quixotic quest to be desirable at an age when only Stratocasters and Les Pauls really have it over their younger counterparts, but I think most of them are simply showing their support for Reality, whether the Like-button-clickers in question are conscious of it or not. But here’s the thing about Reality: it doesn’t need your click.