Screen Media Films

Portrayals of relationships between older women and younger men have showed up in pop culture time and again, from The Graduate to American Pie. But it seems like more have been cropping up lately. Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, published in July, is about a 26-year-old woman who builds her entire life as a teacher around her attraction to 14-year-old boys. The Lifeguard, which opened in theaters last weekend, stars Kristen Bell as a 29-year-old who returns to her hometown and has an affair with a teenager. And this week sees the theatrical release of Adore, starring Robin Wright and Naomi Watts as two best friends who fall for each other’s 18-year-old sons, and A Teacher, the story of a young woman’s undoing as her relationship with one of her high-school students comes to an end.

While these works vary from one another greatly, taken together they show how society tends to treat these kinds of relationships: as not all that big a deal.

The differing attitudes towards woman/boy relationships versus man/girl ones was, until recently, codified by the government. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that all 50 states had gender-neutral statutory rape laws. Until then, laws tended to punish the woman participant less harshly or not at all, even if she was the perpetrator. According to Carolyn E. Cocca, the author of Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States, the role of women sex offenders is routinely downplayed. In a 2002 article in which she reviews the language used to describe statutory rapists Mary Kay LeTourneau, Stephen Simmons, and Sean O'Neill, Cocca found that:

…while much of the discourse still categorizes statutory rape with a male victim as abuse, the "older woman" perpetrator is more often described as a manipulative or mentally ill seductress while the "older man" perpetrator is usually likened to an abusive predator. […] Such language maintains the boundaries of traditional gender roles: the older woman is constructed as an almost sympathetic aberration of her gender who tries to obtain love by seducing a young male, while the older man is seen simply as a sexual aggressor and is therefore more universally excoriated for his behavior.

This attitude also seeps into pop culture and its depictions of statutory rape. In the latest season of AMC’s Mad Men, a teenage Don Draper loses his virginity to an older woman—and, as Abigail Rine noted in The Atlantic, totally against his will. “To my surprise and dismay, I found that the vast majority of responses (including The Atlantic’s) glossed over the encounter, benignly describing Dick as ‘losing his virginity’ or having his virginity ‘taken’ by Aimee,” Rine wrote.