G'day Yoshie,
Haven't made you cross for a while, so here goes ...
Whilst I agree with Katha and Kelley's points, I beg to differ on how decisive they are. Which brings me closer to Brett's point.
Our sexual preferences are not entirely the product of historical social power/media manipulation. I reckon they might have something to do with procreation, too. Call it a hunch.
A younger woman is a much more likely candidate to help a man's genes project themselves into the future than a woman over 50. A man of 50 is generally still a reliable source of fertile sperms, and the woman's genes do not have as dramatically a lessened chance of making it into the future with him. Even if we're all parented out, or don't want children at all, our selfish genes would still have a say in our preferences, no?
The culture/nature thing is not an either/or here, is it?
While I'm at it, I reckon there's a little inequity at the other end of reproductive life, too (albeit one not nearly so enduring). I was a priapismic youngster once. Lovely erections and fetchingly tight buns (well, okay, as compared to me now). But as superficial, clumsy, callow, inarticulate, gangly and downright uninteresting as most of my youthful comrades-in-lonely-onanism. I had just enough nous to spot the fact that my female classmates were not just painfully gorgeous, but had typically acquired the necessary depth, poise and social skills of sexual maturity well ahead of us. Everyone was sixteen, but the females were women and the males were boys. We squirmed in our agonised self-loathing and oppressive want - and the females (who were better at hiding their doubts and hurts than us - part of 'maturity', I s'pose - certainly I'd not have believed then they were the slightest troubled by anything, anyway) just gazed idly in the general direction of the matriculation college.
Some boys just played lots of very energetic sports and waited their turn. Others found it easier to blame the unwitting females for their discomfort (for this cohort, every girl doing her homework, tying her shoelace, opening her locker was being mischievously provocative) - and misogyny acquired an enduring new dimension - perhaps the one that brought our canon the likes of Eve, the Sirens, and Hollywood's femme fatale. Didn't Samuel Johnson (or was it Pepys?) say something about the woman's body affording her so much power, the law very wisely afforded her none?
Cheers, Rob.