Do young men like sex/relationship with older women?
October 27th 2006 05:57
Do young men like sex/relationship with older women? I read somewhere that men are at their sexual peak at 15-16 years and thereafter, their sexual prowess goes downhill whereas women attain their sexual prime as they grow older. I do not know how true this is but the trope of a younger man falling in love with an older woman haunts literature, I think, at certain periods of time.
I read at least two turn-of-the century novels which seriously deal with this issue. One is Henry James's The Ambassadors and the other is Colette's Cheri, followed up by The Last of Cheri.
In the former, an American young man sent to Paris falls in love with an older French woman. His family is duly alarmed and sends an old friend of the family to intercede. The novel is told from the perspective of this ambassador and is mostly about his proclivity to read less or more in the situation.
Colette's Cheri is completely different. Cheri is a young man whose mother has no time for him and is instead brought by her mother's glamourous friend. She is his quasi-mother, a friend and a lover all rolled in one. The crunch comes when Cheri grows up and has to be married somewhere else; both Cheri and his mentor understand the situation perfectly but cannot let go of each other easily. When they do, their lives are ruined, in different ways.
What is important to note is that both the novels are set in a time of change, a loosening of morals or charcter of a people. The Ambassadors is set in a time when America is increasingly shedding its Puritan background( one depicted in Nathaniel Hawthorne) to the decadent America familiar to us(Fitzgerald and others). Colette's novels are set in a Fance that will be swamped by the coming war.
That's what led me to think whether this older woman-younger man romance might not be symbolic of a certain kind of idealism, or a desire for idealism that haunts people caught in the middle of a change.
I noticed that Bollywood produced a rash of movies with this theme starting in 2001 when India itself was transforming significantly. More recently, this trope has re-appeared in the West, pared down to a more basic level. Consider Hanif Kureishi's The Mother where a seventy-year old grandmother seduces the thirty-year old boyfriend of her granddaughter. True to its beliefs, our age stripped the veneer of romance and taken this centuries old trope to its logical conclusion.
I read at least two turn-of-the century novels which seriously deal with this issue. One is Henry James's The Ambassadors and the other is Colette's Cheri, followed up by The Last of Cheri.
In the former, an American young man sent to Paris falls in love with an older French woman. His family is duly alarmed and sends an old friend of the family to intercede. The novel is told from the perspective of this ambassador and is mostly about his proclivity to read less or more in the situation.
Colette's Cheri is completely different. Cheri is a young man whose mother has no time for him and is instead brought by her mother's glamourous friend. She is his quasi-mother, a friend and a lover all rolled in one. The crunch comes when Cheri grows up and has to be married somewhere else; both Cheri and his mentor understand the situation perfectly but cannot let go of each other easily. When they do, their lives are ruined, in different ways.
What is important to note is that both the novels are set in a time of change, a loosening of morals or charcter of a people. The Ambassadors is set in a time when America is increasingly shedding its Puritan background( one depicted in Nathaniel Hawthorne) to the decadent America familiar to us(Fitzgerald and others). Colette's novels are set in a Fance that will be swamped by the coming war.
That's what led me to think whether this older woman-younger man romance might not be symbolic of a certain kind of idealism, or a desire for idealism that haunts people caught in the middle of a change.
I noticed that Bollywood produced a rash of movies with this theme starting in 2001 when India itself was transforming significantly. More recently, this trope has re-appeared in the West, pared down to a more basic level. Consider Hanif Kureishi's The Mother where a seventy-year old grandmother seduces the thirty-year old boyfriend of her granddaughter. True to its beliefs, our age stripped the veneer of romance and taken this centuries old trope to its logical conclusion.
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Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop
Ithink you may be onto something here...
L.
Comment by nagster
Cenacle