This is really interesting. I uneasily realise that my feminist credentials to speak on this subject are so poor that I am not currently wearing a single item of clothing which I have either bought, washed or ironed myself, but here goes .....
>> Daniel, you aren't asking the important question: why do male profs
prefer grad students as their dating >pool?
Now this is an easy one. A random sample of my girlfriend's brother (a vaguely prominent male gender studies academic, and a buyer of your books, so don't knock him) reveals that grad students are the dating pool because:
a) they don't argue with you, as people who aren't dependent on you tend to do. b) they often hero-worship you, which is nice. c) you have a guaranteed date with them once every month or so, where you are allowed to talk about yourself as much as you like, and they have to tell you how intelligent you are.
gawd, if I knew people like that, I'd hang around them all the time . . ..
I would submit that it's at least as much a grad student thing as an age thing. And (although I have no information on this whatsoever), I'd guess that the powerful attractiveness of grad students would probably imply a higher proportion of older woman/younger man relationships in academia too.
>there are lots of unattached women their own age on campus --they could
date each other's ex wives.
Hmmm, but the stationary-process argument would suggest that, so long as the average tenure in a job was longer than the relationship half-life, the ex-wives would be younger than them too. And do ex-wives of academics hang round uni's? I suppose a lot of ex-wives of academics, are academics, but the rest?
> I agree academia is egregious for the youth preference of its men.
>don;t know why that is? sheer abundance of youthful possibilities?
>childishness of academic men? lack of other status symbols?
Nahh, lack of other status symbols manifests itself in extreme viciousness toward colleagues, I think
>I think a
>lot of academic men are depressed and feel sidelined by life--they don't
>make a lot of money, they often have to live in isolated places where
>there's nothing to do but get in trouble.
My guess is that it's the graduate student effect again -- it must be hard to be told how wonderful you are every week, then come back to the realities of bills, overdrafts, car repairs etc. Far better to have a job where every day you get called a useless parasite who can't pick stocks; then real life comes as a blessed release.
> Maybe financial professionals
>are a happier bunch. Zipping around the world making tons of money. they
>probably have plenty of affairs, just stay married.
GAWD! no! I can at least clear up this misapprehension, having been sent this year to Denmark, France, Sweden, the USA, Canada, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark again, the States again, Japan, Spain again (next week) on business trips. "Zipping round the world" really, really, sucks. You're tired all the time, your clothes get wrinkled, you have to sit in meetings, you get a sore throat from doing six presentations a day, and you end up spending every eveninggetting drunk in crappy hotel bars in a show of team solidarity. And the trips always start with a flight out on Sunday, which knackers your weekend. Aside from the inevitable tiresome tossers who try to drag you out to strip clubs, sex is pretty much the furthest thing from your mind when you're on the road, and I'd question the sanity of any woman who was attracted to a stockbroker who was not only old and fat but also crumpled, half-cut and grumpy. By the end of the year, Flemings are reduced to holding conferences at beach resorts in Thailand in an attempt to persuade us to do any more travelling (literally -- I'm fighting a battle at the moment to land our newest team member with being sent to one instead of me). oooh [shudder]
cheers
dd
PS: as should be clear, I do not presume to speak for the general case. But I think the particular psychopathologies of the broking and teaching professions are interesting too.
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