October 22, 2008

Pretty young things: higher highs, lower lows

To put some data behind a remark in the previous post about young girls' intolerable flakiness, and to temper the enthusiasm on this blog for young girls, here's a study that Jason Malloy of GNXP.com pointed me to: Wife killing: Risk to women as a function of age (PDF). Scroll down to PDF p.4 and see Figure 1, which shows rates of wife killing by the wife's age. No surprise there: a wife's risk of being killed declines geometrically as she ages. Since killing your wife is like "going postal" on your boss, this makes sense -- the rejected person is more likely to get enraged if they've become accustomed to high quality rather than low quality.

Next, go to PDF p.7, Table 1, which shows rates of wife killing by both her and his age. As per usual, I'm only concerned with young females, so we're just looking at the first column, wives under 25. It makes no real difference to her if the husband is in her age group or if he's 25 to 34. However, her chance of being killed by him doubles if he's 35 to 44, and is nearly two-and-a-half times as large if he's 45 to 54. Still, on an absolute level, we're talking about a 4 to 8 in 100,000 chance in most cases.

This also makes sense -- the 45 to 54 guy has proven that he can get a much younger wife, but it surely was a lot tougher for him than for a guy her own age, and the search for a suitable replacement will be just as tough or tougher. When two employees are fired from a high quality firm, the one who faces far greater difficulty in getting hired by a similar firm is the one who will come back to blow up his workplace.

Anyone who's been around, dated, or been with young girls knows that the highs are much higher than for older women -- by leaps and bounds. At the same time, because they're so valuable, the sting of grief is greater after losing them -- even a simple blow-off after the first date -- compared to losing a lower-value woman.



Perhaps this is part of the greater uxoricide rate for younger wives: to get over an older woman, you can effortlessly brush her aside as a deluded old hag, but the young babe is so adorably disarming that to get over her, you really have to demonize and dehumanize her. Otherwise, it's hard to avoid the fact that you just lost big time, regardless of your prospects. And that demonization makes it easier to go through with violence if the thought enters your head.

Again, murdering your wife is extremely rare even in the worst cases, so you -- and she -- probably don't have to worry about that happening. Still, it represents the tail of a distribution of behavioral responses to relationship downs, so on average you probably will have more pronounced lows with a younger girlfriend or wife.

Is this extra grief worth the higher highs? It depends on how much of a risk-taker and excitement-seeker you are. So I'll officially add a "your mileage may vary" disclaimer to my praise of young girls, but I doubt that any play-it-safe guys were seriously thinking about chasing them anyway. Indeed, a recent study found that a man's preference for super-girly faces was positively associated with his testosterone level, and this will pick out the more risk-taking men.

10 comments:

  1. It would be helpful to see an ethnic breakdown of these cases. My suspicion is that some of the older husband/younger wife murders occur in more masculine-oriented immigrant communities. In some of these communities killing an unfaithful wife isn't even considered wrong, though of course the law begs to differ.

    Another thing to consider is that most of these older husbands are likely to be on their second or even subsequent marriages. Having been divorced from one spouse probably makes it more likely that a man would be violent toward a new spouse, though with the caution that the overall numbers are very low.

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  2. Looking at the pictures you posted sure does re-enforce the precept of women losing value with age.


    .....the only chick on Sex and the City that I'd bother to even attempt to seduce would be Kristen Davis. I bet Davis was a baby doll 15 years ago. The rest of them are now hags and have been for a decade, even when the show was new...


    It really is a shame that so many urban women of the educated variety are "sold" on waiting until after college and grad school and beginning the career to seriously look for a man. A woman just isn't as attractive at 25 as she was at 19 or 20. They just begin "losing it" earlier than a man does. Many men "maintain" their prime years so much longer than women do to the extent that a 7 male and a 7 female at 25, might be a 6.5 male at 38 and a 5 female at 38, him clearly surpassing her. She'd be wise to move on him while she was still his equal, because she will usually fall faster than him, especially if she is a "delicate" beauty whose glow is largely dependent on adipose tissue which is gonna go in anyone.


    When I see pictures of middle aged colleages that are OK looking (my company has been cruel enough in some newsletters to reprint many of our old photos for us to laugh at), Im always amazed at how fresh faced and quite pretty some of them WERE back in the day. I forgot that some of them were once quite babe-esque.....but not anymore. Another thing on ageing women.....the weight gain. They usually are thicker as the years go by, and if they dont get thicker, their faces age kinda harshly. The really thin older chicks (late 30's and 40's) have a hard, haggard, unfeminine visage---made much worse if they are smokers.


    The lower lows that Agnostic writes about are certainly true. Ive been "in love" twice in my life. Ive let 5 different women live with me right off the top of my head, and was "in love" with none of them, but was willing to settle for them at the time. I cared for them, but was not "in love" with them. I never think about any of the chicks I "cared" for, but once and a while your mind does settle on the one's you were "in love" with. The first one, with both of us at 17-18, was the one that really makes you sigh and wish you could be young again. You never feel that kind of intensity of emotion and stimulis of the senses again. It would be impossible to feel this for a 37 year old woman who was well-educated with a successful career, but you can feel it for a bunny in her beautific, precious, precocious, baby-doll, honey-voiced, uber-ripe prime. You dont give a shit about her professional and cultural and social credentials. She's "ripe" and it pulls all the primality out of your loins and chest. Women out of their 20's can no longer do this. You may "love" them, but you will not be bewildered with them.

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  3. Yeah, either you or she, or both, have to be able to get butterflies in the stomach. That seems to decline for guys and girls starting around 25.

    I prefer things as they are now, where I don't really get vulnerable around girls like when I was a teenager, but where she does due to her youth. It's cute to see someone be so head-over-heels for you, while you're keeping your cool.

    That girl in the pic was 17 at the time. I met her when she was 15 - 16, and when I was 25, almost 26. She had a huge crush on me, asking me to be her Valentine, etc. Such a sweetie. But circumstances wouldn't allow a relationship (not the first time that happened). Now I'm out of those circumstances, but I come into less frequent contact with them. It should still work out, though.

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  4. By 'the girl in the pic' you mean the girl in the bikini?

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  5. Yeah, the girl in the bikini.

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  6. Wow, what a gorgeous lower half. Where did you meet her?

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  7. I've probably already said enough, so I'll decline further comment. I'll just note that she has a very cute face too, and likely always will, as her mother has aged unbelievably well -- perhaps the best I've ever seen in real life.

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  8. is she persian or indian agnostic?

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  9. She's one of those, but I won't say which.

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