Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

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082349872349872

In the line I've been able (most just showed up in the New World from somewhere or other...) to trace back to 7 generations, it was a little less, but they were in the colonies before the US was a thing, so more than 35, less than 40 years per generation?

My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe they'd also be on the longer side.

(NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)

* Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — not that anyone in this august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of OnlyFans worked.

I do get frustrated when I hear people saying negative or unfounded things about couples with relatively small age gaps 7-15 years. It’s the norm, not the exception.

And I say that as someone who has only dated people my own age.

Many things were historical norms, with current practices being the exception.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39851970

(it turns out my wife's family took more generations to get back into the XVIII, so that line runs ~30 years per generation)

I am shocked, shocked that Josephine Mutzenbacher didn’t reflect reality

Wait, given the age differences described here, the book very much reflected reality, no?

No, what I took away from Zweig is that 19 yo men were very much interested in 19 yo women, but (although some were for rent) they couldn't successfully date them due to competition from men "of substance".

EDIT: hmm, was it really a change in mores, or did WWI just kill off enough 20-40 yos to reset this dynamic?

Isn't that how it was in the Mutzenbacher as well? I mostly recall her having sex with much older men even before she enters prostitution

I wonder how much this change was due to the modern idea of romantic love taking over rather than older men becoming unavailable

Good question! It's on my slush list, but atm I have a lot of physical things which need to be rearranged at or near the surface of the earth, so unlikely I'll dig into this before it's slid well out of HN's attention span.

> in the Mutzenbacher

Familienname, eh? I've yet to read her, but given her reputation I'm glad that makes at least two of us who are not already per Du.

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