The Globe and Mail has a feminist boiler plate article up implying that women over 65 are in the SMP power position: The new reality of dating over 65: Men want to live together; women don’t.

For more than a decade, D’Alfonso, a Montreal writer, has been dating a Toronto widow. The two see each other every couple of months. D’Alfonso wanted more: He proposed five times, only to be rebuffed with every try. The older woman refused to live with him, D’Alfonso said, because she wanted to travel and be free. “I have to ask, and I always ask, so what do you want from me?” he said. The pair took a two-year hiatus, during which D’Alfonso tried dating other senior-age women only to find that they, too, were reluctant to share a home – this even as D’Alfonso said he cooks and keeps a tidy house. “I really believe that women no longer need men, whatsoever,” D’Alfonso said. “I’m totally irrelevant.”

Subtly nested in this quote is evidence of the absurdity of the premise. While D’Alfonso is no doubt a great guy, he is quite obviously very low in the sexual marketplace (SMP); from the bit offered by the Globe and Mail, he clearly couldn’t generate a tingle with an electric chair. Yet in the over 65 SMP, multiple women have been interested in claiming him as their boyfriend, so long as they don’t have to actually be around him. These women aren’t rejecting him outright, they just want to avoid being around him (emphasis mine):

For more than a decade, D’Alfonso, a Montreal writer, has been dating a Toronto widow. The two see each other every couple of months.

Note that not only has she stayed with a man for ten years she only sees every couple of months, he broke it off with her for two years to date other women, and she took him back. This isn’t proof that the women dating him have all the options, it is proof that they desperately want the status that comes with being part of a couple, even if that status is mostly or entirely fictional. If they were really done with men, or at least with relationships, they wouldn’t be rooting around in the bottom of the SMP barrel.

The article offers up another hilarious anecdote, of 77 year old Rhoda Nadell who (in her mind) is surrounded by men who desperately want to marry her:

When a guy chats up 77-year-old Montrealer Rhoda Nadell at her tennis club, her brain quickly fast forwards: Dinner dates will turn into a relationship, which will inevitably find Nadell cooking, cleaning and eventually caregiving for the elderly gentleman.

For an idea of the kind of RPMs Nadell’s rationalization hamster is sustaining, see the picture of her at the top of the article.

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