In the last few days, news has filtered across web and print about the pregnancy of 42-year-old artist and director Sam Taylor-Wood, who is engaged to the father, star of her new John Lennon bio-pic Nowhere Boy.
Nothing controversial about that, you might think. Except that her partner, Aaron Johnson, is 19-years-old.
Comment streams are seething across the web. How dare a woman of 42 find herself in a committed relationship with someone 23 years younger than her?! On Sky News, a commenter inferred that Taylor-Wood was irresponsible to bring a child into the world after recovering from cancer – twice – because of the risk of being ill again. Charming.
My first response is to say “what business is it of yours?”. It’s legal, they’re happy, end of. And yet I find myself slightly personally discomfited by the idea of an age gap so vast, particularly when one participant is, though technically an adult, still in their teens.
I know I’m not alone in this feeling. Cast your mind back to the '90s and that Friends episode where Monica discovers her boyfriend’s real youthful age. There’s nothing wrong with him, she explains. But “it’s… icky.”
Some commenters have suggested it’s gender related. That we don’t bat an eyelash when some grizzled older fellow is seen with his latest bit of eye candy on his arm. But we do – and the double standard is not that we think it’s okay for men, but that the common opinion is (rather insultingly) that men are just like that.
I do think there is a gender difference in the way we treat age-gap relationships; the general public just doesn’t seem to like it either way round. The difference is that men are treated with eye-rolling contempt and women with wincing pity. Why? I believe it all lies in perceived motivation.
When we see [insert tubby billionaire’s name here] with his lissom young wife, we don’t see an equal couple. We see a rich old fart and his much more conventionally attractive partner. That leads to certain judgments about the motivation on both sides.
What sticks in the craw here isn’t the age gap per se but the idea that women are only worthwhile while they’re young, slim and pretty, while the man can look like he eats a lard-stuffed swan every day and has a dead pigeon sprouting from his scalp yet still be respected. There’s a strong suspicion that the wife lasts as long as the cellulite is kept at bay before getting her million-dollar payoff. She’s written off as a gold-digger, he as a sad old sugar daddy.
Unfair? Yup. It’s making a massive assumption about them based on the pattern of rich older men and the odd confessed millionaire-hunter who’s made all the wives around her look equally shallow. It’s patronising men and looking down on other women for daring to make choices we wouldn’t. But, at the very least, we can see where the assumption comes from, which is the first stage in training ourselves to stop being so judgmental.
With women, it’s not so clear cut.
The vast majority of women well known for their ‘toy boys’ - what a hideous term, and ‘boy toy’ isn’t any better - are in pretty good condition themselves. Think Joan Collins and Demi Moore; they’re carefully groomed, fit and active. So, the commenters spit, they must be ‘desperate’. But why would someone successful, attractive, independent and well turned out by desperate for anything at all?
For many, I think there might be a helping of good old-fashioned envy involved. A feeling that it’s not enough to be gorgeous and desirable at 20; good heavens, now you can’t even let yourself go at 60, let alone 40! Bloody (gorgeous) Jane Fonda! The pressure is artificial - we know, secretly, that we can always look exactly how we want to look at any age if we feel like it - but no less corrosive for that.
Then there’s the mock-concern: but think aof the children! I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. This isn’t Octomom we’re talking about here. It’s so reminiscent of fat-haters on talk shows that shoehorn in a reference to fitness as if the real reason they’re tormenting their relative is concern for their health and not terrified, ignorant rage.
For myself, I suspect the answer to my discomfort is that I am a scaredy-cat. I need the odds weighted in my favour, and can’t imagine getting to the stage where I was so much older I needed to be looked after by my partner – in the rather less dignified, nursing-home sense. But for some that is probably not in issue; in fact, that was precisely one of the attractions that Allegra Mostyn-Own, ex-wife of Boris Johnson, mentioned in a piece this week in the Evening Standard about her current, 23-year-old husband.
In the end, Sam Taylor-Wood’s relationships and pregnancies are nothing to do with us, and anyone with an ounce of decency would wish her well with everything. But she’s done us – or at least, me - a favour, and forced an examination of an ugly side of our judgmental society.