Bob Greene Redux

Posted on September 18, 2002    Posted by John Scalzi

Interesting feedback from the Bob Greene thing the other day. Aside from the journalistic schadenfreude of watching Bob Greene fall — which is considerable, so that’s a warning to all of you who wish you had his career up until last weekend — the largest spate of e-mail I got about it came from 40-plus-year-old men who wanted me to know that they don’t like 18-year-old girls. Not at all. My universal response to these fellows was: Good for you. I’m sure your wives are proud.

As it happens, I’m not so keen on 18-year-olds myself; in the grand scheme of things, procuring one today would be more trouble than it’s worth. This has nothing to do with their physical charms (about which I’ll comment in a minute) and pretty much everything to do with the fact that at the age of 33, the only two things I have in common with the typical 18-year-old girl are that we are both human and speak the same language, plus or minus a couple dozen words of slang. To be terribly male about it, I suppose I could have sex with an 18-year-old if I had to. I just wouldn’t enjoy the post-coital conversation very much. So if it’s all the same I’ll pass. Fortunately for me, there are not great throngs of 18-year-old hotties at my door, licking the window panes to entice me to let them come up for a romp. You can imagine my relief.

Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus begs to differ about my point concerning Greene’s encroaching mortality being a consideration for his boinking a teenage woman; Kaus writes:

“Why do men — like Scalzi here, or Warren Beatty in Shampoo (or whoever wrote Warren Beatty’s lines in Shampoo) — have to explain their desire to have sex with attractive women in terms of a struggle against mortality (“middle-age-death-denying” in Scalzi’s words)? You mean they wouldn’t have sex with young women if they were in good shape and knew they were going to live to be 300? They didn’t want to have sex with young women when they were young themselves? It’s sex! Millions of years of evolution have designed men to want it and enjoy it.. It’s stupid to try to explain this urge in some highfalutin’ literary or spiritual way — and revealing that even relatively no-BS men like Scalzi (or Nick Hornby in High Fidelity, to name another) feel that they have to.”

Let’s separate this out. There’s the first point, on which Kaus is entirely correct, which is that boinking hot young women is really its own excuse. You all know the drill concerning the genetic and cultural reasons for this, so let’s pretend I’ve made all those points so we can move on. There is the point to be made here that (some) men are turned off by the yawning chasm in life experience between themselves and the average 18-year-old, and therefore prefer the company of women nearer their own age. As I mentioned earlier: Good for them.

On the other hand: Provide a man with the brain of a 45-year-old woman (yes, he’ll suddenly become smarter, ha ha ha, thank you very much) and tell him he can put it either into the body of a fit, attractive 45-year-old woman, or into the body of a fit, attractive 18-year-old woman. Let’s all not pretend that the 45-year-old body is going to do anything but sit there with a blinking neon “vacancy” sign flashing over its head. In a perfect world (for men) women would hover around age 23 forever (In a perfect world for women, I expect you’d see a lot more variation in age, from a Heath Ledger 22 to a Pierce Brosnan 49, with the median being a Brad Pitt 38).

Still, conceding this point, which I readily do, doesn’t mean that middle-age dudes still don’t actually see (or at least rationalize) porking the young as a fist in the snout of death. It’s not especially highfalutin’ to point it out, it’s actually pretty sad and common. If you’re thinking about death, or how you’ve squandered your potential in middle management or wherever, you want to do things that make you feel alive. Having sex with young women is the male mid-life crisis version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It doesn’t keep you from dying, but at least you get to go to the Magic Kingdom one more time.

Whether this is the particular case with Bob Greene is another matter entirely. As journalist Nancy Nall notes on her site, Greene has had a reputation as a skirt-chaser for a while now, so if these scandalous rumors are true, he’s merely pursuing a modus operandi honed over decades (eeeeew). In which case Kaus carries the day. This encounter really is less about middle-aged angst than it is just about making a fast and easy booty call on the Youth of America: Dinner and dessert. Let’s hope it was at least an expensive dinner. Taking the girl out to Harold’s Chicken Shack before slipping her the drumstick would just be chintzy and sad.

***

Moving away from the realm of horndog newspaper columnists and the teenage girls they cavort with, let me take a minute to bow down to my own superfabulous wife, who as you may know started a new full-time job on Monday. She was at the job roughly six hours before she got a promotion into another department; the department had an opening, saw her resume and made a (barely) internal hire. This is a testament both to Krissy’s fabulousness and her new company’s ability to judge talent. I’m pleased because at this rate of ascent, Krissy will be able to support us all on her income alone by about this time next week. Which means I can retire and spend more time on the important things, which are, of course, video games. Yes, I’m aware that this last statement means that if anyone in this relationship is going to be traded away for a new hot and young plaything, it’s going to me. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.