It's not jealousy

When I was a teen I wonder if I'm older if I would still be attracted to teens. I was training a coworker a few years ago, and she's fresh out of highschool. As soon as we diviated from work conversations I can feel any miniscule amount of attraction I had drain out from my body.

I experience this too, what happened in that conversation that drained you?
- For me it's social media. I'm old enough that I don't do social media. But 95% of teenagers' lives revolve around it. I can't relate and have no desire to.
  
  I’m old enough that I don’t do social media.
  -@Cryophilia@lemmy.world on social media Lemmy
  Edit: Or perhaps I am wrong
  Social media is defined as a website or application that enables us to create and share content. A social network is alternatively a website or application that enables us to communicate with one another by posting information, comments, and messages.
  Source
  So I guess Lemmy would be considered social network instead. I didn't even know there was a difference.
  Edit 2: OK, it seems most people consider Reddit a social media, but others debate it. And Lemmy is fairly similar.
  I guess I made a comment only to bamboozle myself.
  
  Reddit is not social media because it's not about social interaction, because it's anonymous. It's not social if it's anonymous.
  
  That’s how I think about it. I avoided social media my entire life, even though I was the perfect age all along: xanga/MySpace in middle school, Facebook opened to everyone when I was in high school, Instagram came about when I was traveling/living my adult life in my 20s…but I’m glad I avoided it. Reddit, when I used it, struck me as very different. It’s not about you. It’s about anonymity and news/memes. If that’s social media, all of the internet is social media.
  
  Huge difference between an anonymous social network and one where your real identity is out there.
  
  By that definition literally any website with user-generated content is social media.
  Are Steam Community pages social media?
  
  Lemmy is all the social media I have nowadays. I wouldn't change it.
  
  Alot of adults now too unfortunately. I was at the bar recently with a friend and was chatting with some girls, they asked for our Facebook and their interest was immediately gone when I told them I didn't have one.
  Fine by me if it's that much of a no for you I didn't want to be your fb photographer anyway 😛

There is a big difference between sex and a relationship.

If I werent married I'd absolutely screw a woman half my age, but dating one... I see complications.

But that's... not the issue here? Men are much more attractive when they are 20 compared to 40 as well.
That doesn't make me creep around university trying to get into their pants. It also doesn't inspire me to write sexist stuff online, etc.
- Im saying that its biologically healthy to look at a young attractive person (of your preferred gender) and go "Yep, I would really like to do things with that person" It is however societaly problematic to be a perv in trying to make it happen and does raise some awkward questions about what a guy is really looking for if he wants to be with someone half his age.
  As for the sexist stuff online. You ever seen some womens wishlists on dating sites? Now I aint saying shes a gold digger... but you know the rest of it.
- There's a lot of women after young studs. A lot don't see issues with that. Young people are generally seen as hotter.
Please be at least 36
- Turning 40 this year.

But how about 22? 24? 21 maybe?

Most of the males between 27-32yo I know would definetely do an 18yo girl given the chance, but none of them are actively looking for one because it is weird.

I guess it is more like a fantasy kind of deal. If I had to guess the reason is that young women are more sexually active than 30yo women. Friends with gfs always complain that it's pretty hard to get them in the mood, like they have to beg. Men are just more sexual than women in general.

Just had a friend break up with his gf because she would use sex as a manipulation tool.

Young women are not more sexually active. There's a ton of research that younger people are less and less sexual. So maybe stop making things up and posting them online.
- I mean technically since you have not provided any of this research you are also just making things up and posting them online. Regardless of whether or not you're correct giving no source, and if asked saying "do your own research" (which you haven't done I'm just doing an inb4) just makes you sound like one of those crazy conspiracy theorists or something
  
  It’s a fairly well known stat for awhile now: Teens are having less sex.
  https://www.livenowfox.com/news/teens-are-having-less-sexual-intercourse-but-are-they-really-having-less-sex
  
  But that says nothing about the male/female split, or the age split. This is just comparing teenagers of today with teenagers of yesterday.
- "If I had to guess". I was guessing, followed by personal experiences... I never said "here's the absolute truth".
  You know it is possible to correct someone without being a total ass? Plus, I wasn't talking about facts but instead about what males think. If you asked 1000 males who they think is more sexually active between a 20yo or a 40yo, what do you think the results would be.
- Some confidently incorrect shit here lol.
  undefined
  
  Older faces are rated as less attractive than younger faces and treated like a category when making aesthetic judgments. Older perceivers are less influenced by the age of the viewed face than younger and middle-aged perceivers. Men, more than women, distinguish more clearly between faces when judging attractiveness, especially in female faces. Aging has less of an effect on judgments of elegance than beauty and gorgeousness.
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691821001359
  Previous research examining stereotypes of the elderly also found that older adults were judged to be less attractive (Ebner, 2008; Löckenhoff et al., 2009), and other research has shown that age stereotypes are linked not simply to chronological age, but also to physical appearance. Specifically, unattractive physical qualities, such as wrinkling, gray hair, and baldness, are associated with more negative impressions of elderly faces (Hummert, 1994; Muscarella and Cunningham, 1996; Hummert et al., 1997). In addition, Zebrowitz et al. (2003) found that, compared with younger faces, older faces showed greater resemblance to faces with genetic anomalies and this contributed not only to impressions of older faces as less attractive, but also to impressions of them as less healthy, sociable, and intelligent than younger faces. More generally, the well documented attractiveness halo effect (Eagly et al., 1991) provides reason to believe that the lower attractiveness of older faces would augment negative stereotoypes, like incompetence, and weaken positive stereotypes, like warmth. Older and younger faces differ in many ways besides attractiveness. One that will be examined in the present research is a possible difference in their resemblance to emotion expressions. Research has documented an influence of emotion resemblance on impressions of warmth and competence (Zebrowitz et al., 2007, 2010) and, as discussed more fully below, there is reason to expect differences between younger and older faces.
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5627340/
  Like YA, OA showed both the attractiveness halo effect and the babyface stereotype. However, OA showed weaker effects of attractiveness on impressions of untrustworthiness, and only OA associated higher babyfaceness with greater competence. There also was own-age accentuation, with both OA and YA showing stronger face stereotypes for faces closer to their own age. Age differences in the strength of the stereotypes reflected an OA positivity effect shown in more influence of positive facial qualities on impressions or less influence of negative ones, rather than vice versa.
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4020290/
  
  lol. Try reading the comment you replied to. They didn't say anything about attraction.
  
  Young women are not more sexually active. There's a ton of research that younger people are less and less sexual. So maybe stop making things up and posting them online.
  Less sexually active and less sexual are very different statements to me. I was addressing the second portion.
  Not only that but a large portion of this entire threads argument is based on how people find each other attractive. Being promiscuous isn't really relevant when the topic is about people in relationships with large age differences.
  I suppose you could argue sexual promiscuity heightens your chance of getting into relationships with larger age differences, but I don't have data to back that up. I doubt it'd be true if that's what they're contending but I wouldn't care either way lol.
  
  Less sexual still doesn't mean less attractive though... ? I have no idea what you're on about. Just rewind to the comment that person was replying to and the context is very clear:
  If had to guess the reason is that young women are more sexually active than 30yo women. Friends with gfs always complain that it's pretty hard to get them in the mood, like they have to beg.
  Young women are not more sexually active. There's a ton of research that younger people are less and less sexual [with each other as of late]
  added that last bit because it was clearly referring to the studies coming out in the last few years or so that show that young people are having less sex today than previous generations did at similar ages.
  
  Again, less sex has nothing to do with age differences. It sounds like everyone is just arguing about different things tangentially related to the meme lol.
  Apparently y'all think people having less/more sex matters with age differences. I'm arguing 18 year olds are absolutely sexual regardless of how much more or less they're having sex. And 18-25 are the peak years of attractiveness for nearly everyone.
  They're also the best time to have children even if our society makes it nearly impossible to have them between 18-25. That's a sliding scale which basically gets worse every year after 25, not even 35.
  Good luck telling people at 26 they're already putting themselves and their children at risk though lol. After 35 has always been a stretch but our government refuses to help while the working class is so under the boot they can barely unionize.
  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm
  
  you're just shadowboxing at this point and honestly it's really weird that you're so hyper focused on trying to make people debate you on points they didn't even bring up, so you can make the case that all women need to give birth before the age of 25.
  Idk if you're not a native speaker or something but nobody uses the term 'sexual' in the way that you are using it right now and this reply thread is a total non-sequitur from the thread it stemmed from. I'm not debating you, I'm just letting you know.
  
  Homie we're on what essentially amounts to a communist socialist forum, not a Debate Team. It's how conversation works lol. That shit doesn't change whether it be Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook, or anywhere else. The thread literally went from meme, arguing that's not what they meant, arguing that's not what they meant, arguing that's not they meant, to then saying no this is what I'm talking about, why are you talking about this?
  It's all being talked about lol. It's all mildly relevant. The points and truth behind them didn't change. It's all corrections here and there with misunderstandings everywhere. Turns out people aren't all seeing all knowing. Lemmy leans heavily ND to boot so it just exacerbates all of that.
- A lot of of younger women/girls are, in fact, much more sexually active. Especially these days because hormonal birth control is known to permanently lower libido. Also, hormones.
This is just false. Women, on average, are most sexually active in their 30s. We have known this for ever... And somehow this garbage thought that young women are more sexual keeps showing up in male focused narratives.