Yesterday, while scrolling Threads, I came across a photo that someone shared from the New York Post (all the caveats about what a horrible publication it is).
The photo was of former NFL coach, Bill Belichick and his girlfriend, former cheerleader Jordon Hudson.
He is 72. She is 23.
(Note: It’s not clear if Hudson is 23 or 24; most reports say 23.)
I shared the post with my own commentary: “What is wrong with cis het men? Seriously. They need help.”
Several people shared my disgust with Belichick for being in a relationship with someone five decades his junior.
I was (probably naively) surprised, however, by how many people rushed to comment some version of, “she’s just as disgusting as him.”
Most of the “her, too” comments came from what appear to be cis het men, but even a few women shared the sentiment.
At the end of this, I’ll share why I’m so angry about those rushing to lay blame on Hudson. First, let’s talk about men.
To be clear, I don’t really care about Belichick.
He could as easily be replaced by Al Pacino, who is 54 years older than his girlfriend (and they had a baby last year when he was 82), or Dennis Quaid and Steven Tyler, each of whom are 39 years older than their partners.
What I care about is that these relationships highlight a problem of patriarchy.
Cis het men have a thing for much younger women.
The relationships above are icky, but seem to have started after the women were adults. Yet there’s no shortage of famous men—predators—seeking out teenage girls.
Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones was 47 when he began “dating” 13-year-old Mandy Smith.
Jerry Seinfeld was 38 when began “dating” 17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein.
Paul Walker was 33 when he began “dating” 16-year-old Jasmine Pilchard-Gosnell.
Wilmer Valderrama was 29 when he began “dating” 17-year-old Demi Lovato, in his mid-20s when he “dated” 16-year-old Mandy Moore, and 24 when he “dated” 17-year-old Lindsay Lohan.
Milo Ventimiglia was 28 when he began “dating” 17-year-old Hayden Panettiere.
Don Johnson was 22 when began “dating” 14-year-old Melanie Griffifth.
I could give you many, many more examples. It’s terrifying.
It may seem that I’m conflating two issues—rape and consenting adults of wildly different ages dating. Perhaps, yet I wonder if these two issues aren’t closely related.
Men like Belichick, who date decades-younger adult women, aren’t doing anything wrong … legally. But does that make it right?
Hudson’s previous boyfriend, who was in his 60s when they dated, called her “wise beyond her years.” It’s the same line of reasoning that predators use to justify their attraction to girls.
No matter how “wise” she may be, what does anyone in Gen Z have in common with a Baby Boomer? They lack shared collective memories (she was, at best, an infant when Sept. 11th happened), likely have different interests (other than perhaps football?), and undoubtedly have different energy levels.
Belichick could be Hudson’s father’s age, and even plausibly her grandfather’s age. His own children are 40, 37, and 26.
So what is the attraction?
Again, this isn’t about Belichick and Hudson specifically, but the broader issue of older men seeking out and dating younger women. The statistics are telling.
Men are more likely than women (46% vs. 33%) to list physical attractiveness as a benefit of dating younger.
Men of any age are most attracted to 20-year-old women (women, on the other hand, tend to be most attracted to men of their own age).
While that’s legal, additional studies provide scarier context. One from 2014 discovered that heterosexual men ages 25-31 found pubescent girls (14-15 years old) sexually attractive, but only admitted to it when the girls were identified as being “of consenting age” (16-17 years old).
A survey just last year of Australian men found that 15% had sexual feelings for a child or teen younger than 18 years.
It begs the question: Are men most attracted to 20 year olds, or do they know they can’t say or be with younger without being deemed a predator?
If that feels like a leap too far, consider this terrifying statistic: Girls ages 16 to 19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault; 88% of their abusers are men.
Or how about this disgusting fact: Of the 71% of US women who have experienced street harassment (or “cat calling”), almost 70% said they were 13 years old or younger the first time it happened; 18% said the first incident was before age 10. In 55% of the cases, the harasser was 30 or older.
Or how about the fact that “teen” averaged #4 in category rankings on Pornhub for 10 years (until the site stopped reporting on that search word in the face of public criticism)?
Not all men. But too many men.
Study after study shows that men prefer to date younger women. Not all of them do, but their desires raise a red flag. How young would these men date if it were legal and didn’t risk their reputations?
I could pen an entire piece on the age of consent, which is arbitrary and varies widely across the globe (from 12 to 21). Instead, I’m going to focus on old men dating much younger but “legal” women.
Men often argue that their attraction to younger women is natural. It’s a biological imperative, they say, to desire women who are able to bear children.
That claim is debatable. I’ve yet to see convincing science to back it up that isn’t conflating cultural “truths” as facts. Also, women can bear children well beyond 20, and men needn’t be having children well into their 70s and 80s.
Even if it were true, however, I don’t believe it’s the entire puzzle (or even more than one small piece). I believe that men’s attraction to youth is largely rooted in cultural (aka, white supremacist patriarchal) conditioning.
We receive the message throughout our lives that beauty is youthful (more specifically, it equals white, female, small, and youthful). It’s reiterated everywhere from pop culture to pornography.
This messaging is harmful to all involved. A woman’s worth is judged, in large part, by how well she preserves her youthful beauty. A man’s worth is judged, to a much lesser degree, by whether he can attract a youthful woman.
With all of us swimming in these waters, the Belichicks of the world are less surprising, though no less troublesome.
And why does this programming exist? The short answer is to keep power in the hands of men.
If a woman’s window of desirability (aka worth) is small while a man’s never closes, it immediately puts her in the subordinate position. Her opportunities are limited, so she becomes disposable and replaceable.
In that dynamic, a woman who “secures” a man must worry about keeping him because, as she ages, she’ll be less desirable to anyone else. Women become beholden to men.
This explains “coverture,” which held that no female person had a legal identity. In short, a woman couldn’t have anything unless a man (usually her father or husband) said she could.
The practice is no longer legal, but its vestiges remain. It’s why a woman couldn’t get a credit card or buy a home in her own name until the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act. And it’s why even today many folks still list a man first on co-signed contracts.
All of this brings me to why I’m furious about the “she’s just as gross” comments.
And what about her?
Women have far more opportunities today than we did 100 years ago. We can vote, get an education, work, and amass our own wealth.
Even so, we are nowhere near parity.
Although narrowing, a pay gap remains between men and women.
Women hold only 11.8% of C-suite positions.
The average working woman in the US spends 18% more on healthcare costs than a man.
In heterosexual relationships where both partners work full time, women spend 40% more time caregiving than their partner.
Single fathers have 8x more wealth than single mothers.
In almost all areas of work and life, women endure painful gender gaps. And almost universally, those gaps are far wider and more challenging for women of the global majority.
If anyone should be aware of all of this information, it’s a historian of gender who is writing about the making of American feminism.
And yet, she was one of the women who jumped into my Threads replies to shift the focus from Belichick to his young girlfriend.
Rather than asking what’s wrong with men, she wants to talk about why a woman like Hudson might date an old man like Belichick.
I hope by now that it’s obvious.
This world is rigged in favor of men. It conditions men to preserve that advantage by reducing women’s value and options. And it conditions women to fight for their own self-preservation in whatever ways they can.
Belichick is believed to have a net worth of $70 million. That puts him in the category of “ultra wealthy” (those worth $30 million or more). Only 11% of the world’s ultra wealthy are women and, of those, only 45% have created their own wealth (ie, not inherited from a father or spouse).
Belichick is a man with unbelievable resources and power. Hudson, like every other woman, has been conditioned to trade on whatever advantage she has to gain more security within her oppression (this is known as the patriarchal bargain). In this case, that may look like being with someone 50 years older than her.*
[*I don’t know Hudson, and she likely feels quite differently about her relationship. Again, this is meant to illustrate a larger point than anything specific to her.]
While most of us choose not to participate in the patriarchal bargain in the same way, it’s disingenuous to pretend that we don’t all do it in different ways throughout our lives. It’s how we survive.
I’ve done it with revealing clothing that earned me more tips as a cocktail waitress and flirting that likely helped me land a job. I’ve also done the opposite, hiding my looks to avoid harassment.
The gender historian rightfully retorted that “it takes both men and women for patriarchy to work.” But it’s asinine and harmful to perpetuate the idea that it takes both men and women in equal measure to preserve patriarchy.
Let’s not blame the oppressed for participating in their own oppression.
Whether its accurate that young women don’t have to date old men doesn’t change that we live inside a system that advantages them when they do. Rather than feeling righteous about making different choices than her, find empathy for how we all have to make painful choices inside of a system designed to disadvantage us.
Let’s put our anger where it belongs—on the system and those who built it and continue to receive the most advantage from it.
Finally, I’m sure this begs the question, “how big of an age gap is too big?” I have no better rule than most folks. All I know is that I, like most women, can tell when it doesn’t pass the “sniff” test. And Belichick and every other man-slash-predator I mentioned above most definitely fail that test.
Gross.
Becky Mollenkamp (she/they) is a feminist business coach for entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses without all the capitalist BS that has the edging toward burnout. She’s the host of Feminist Founders podcast and the editor-in-chief of this newsletter. Website | Instagram | Threads
I agree 100% about (white) patriarchal programming being a huge part of the problem. I also kept thinking of the parallel phenomenon where men rely on women for their social and emotional connections yet us more enlightened (read older / experienced) women are unwilling to do the physical and emotional labor for them anymore. I sometimes feel that the older humans that are attracted to and pair up with significantly younger partners are showcasing their unwillingness to grow as humans.
I’m so creeped out by this, and as I am just past my mid thirties with kids, my eyes are wide open to how much predatory behaviour I witnessed towards myself and my peers growing up. I’m genuinely terrified for my children 😭