The Half Your Age Plus 7 Calculator

The Problem

Personally, I'm disgusted when I see middle-aged men slobbering over barely-legal women and actresses. It just plain bothers me that men in this culture are allowed and encouraged to covet females despite any logic about age differences. Would you like it if you were Natalie Portman's father and your beer-swilling buddies were joking about what they'd like to do to her with their light sabre? Doesn't it creep you out when a thirty-five year old guy makes sexual remarks about the Olsen twins? Woody Allen, the incestuous cradle-robber was finally caught with nude pictures of Soon-Yi when she was 21 and he was 54.

It's not just the seedy aspect of all this that gets me. I certainly think that this youth-centered/obsessed culture comes strikingly close to legitimizing pedophilia, but theres something else. What can an 80 year old and a 20 year old possibly have in common, except a bank account and a fondness for spending money? Watershed events in culture and history aren't shared by people of radically different generations. This was amplified in the extreme on a national commercial: Britney Spears wasn't alive when Jimmy Carter was president, or when Reagan was elected, so when Bob Dole had a Viagra-induced hard-on as part of a Pepsi commercial, it was like seeing a grandpa slobbering over his granddaughter's friend. It's just disgusting, even if it isn't illegal.

When the twenty-year old Drew Barrymore got up on Dave Letterman's desk and flashed him on his 48th birthday, he could barely keep his mouth closed. As a spectator, I was embarrassed that this man was so obviously turned on by her antics. He already had his late night show when she was the child star in E.T.

But it isn't just a male-centered problem. Women are also sinking down to the level of males. Even before How Stella Got Her Groove Back, older women were diddling themselves thinking about the Ambercrombie and Fitch models. At 46 years old, Cher made a laughing stock out of herself with her "boy toy" (Rob Camilletti) who was 27 at the time. Joan Collins met Percy Gibson when she was 68 and he was a mere 36. Movies like Tadpole, the Graduate, and Lovely & Amazing center on older women having illicit, often illegal affairs with minors.

We risk turning our culture into one filled with leering, unsavory, charactatures when people indulge in sexual fantasies or realities centered around partners who are obviously too young. Rich men can still have "trophy" wives and women can still have "boy toys" just don't look like an ass while doing it. Part of the reason that people had a problem with Monica Lewinsky was that she was too young for him: she was a mere 23 year old, while Bill Clinton was over 50. Had Clinton had an affair with Courtney Cox or Liz Hurley we wouldn't have thought him nearly as skeezy as we we thought of him for fooling around with a woman who was only a few years older than his daughter.

The Solution

The solution is for everyone to adopt some reasonable limits. The best idea is for a sliding scale since it keeps the adolescents, teenagers, and twenty-somethings in close-knit groups, but allows older people to date in a wider range without looking totally ridiculous.

So here's the simple rule: HALF YOUR AGE PLUS SEVEN is the youngest you should date. This rule has been variously attributed to the French, and Muslims, and Jewish matchmakers; but who cares about it's origins, it works.

Think about it. It works all the way up and down the sliding scale. You probably wouldn't want your 17 year old son or daughter dating a 25 year old, but a 20 year old dating a 25 year old is just fine. And you probably wouldn't want your 70 year old grandparent dating anyone younger than about 42, right? That makes sense.

Text by Lura, Calculator by MAS