Sex, relationships and the weird world of Liz Jones

The taboo on relationships between older women and younger men is one of the stranger and more persistent ones in modern Britain. No one seems to think much of Rod Stewart being married to a woman 26 years his junior, but the love lives of Sam Taylor-Wood and Iris Robinson are the focus of a kind of fascinated horror. In the latter case, there’s been a kind of depressing predictability about the way that the juicy details of Robinson’s affair with the then-19-year-old Kirk McCambley garnered far more attention than Robinson and her husband’s alleged financial misdeeds.

The weirdest example of this disgust at relationships where women are older – at least of the stuff I’ve read – has to be this Liz Jones column from today’s Mail on Sunday. The general gist of it seems to be that when men have relationships with younger women it’s perfectly acceptable because men are entirely motivated by sex, (and everyone knows that nubile twenty-somethings with huge tits are the only attractive women in the universe). Women, on the other hand, don’t really like sex, so if they enter into a relationship with young  (and presumably libidinous) men, they must have some other dark, underhand reason for doing so. More specifically:

A woman embarks on a relationship with someone much younger than her because she believes she can manipulate him, boss him, steal his sperm and then nurture him as she would a child or a pet.

In return for these (doubtful) benefits, Jones suggests, the woman in the partnership provides financial and career assistance to her young lover – a leading film role in the case of Aaron Johnson, Taylor-Wood’s boyfriend (he plays John Lennon in recent biopic Nowhere Boy), and a dubious £50,000 loan in the case of Robinson and McCambley. In arriving at these conclusions, Jones also claims to be drawing on her own (apparently somewhat disastrous) experience of being married to a man 15 years her junior.

Finally, by way of a parting shot, Jones insinuates that Robinson’s affair is a sign of something far worse than ‘a trendy, cougarish predilection for toy boys’, on the grounds that she was  willing to risk her marriage and political career over it, though she isn’t very specific as to what this might be. She mentions Humbert Humbert (the protagonist in Lolita), but that isn’t particularly helpful. It doesn’t seem very fair to equate having a romantic relationship with a 12-year-old (as in Lolita) and having one with a 19-year-old (as Robinson did). And even if it was, that still doesn’t really provide any sort of insight into what drove Robinson to put herself in such professional and personal jeopardy. Perhaps more bizarrely, Jones also seems to be suggesting that relationships between older women and younger men are almost totally devoid of sexual desire, since according to her younger men only pretend to find their older partners attractive, while the women simply don’t enjoy sex at all.

More than anything, this column makes me feel deeply sorry for Liz Jones. By her own admission, she’s basing her arguments on her own experiences, which rather strongly suggests that it’s Jones, not Robinson, Taylor-Wood or any other older woman, who hasn’t enjoyed sex since her ‘teenage crush period’, who sees younger men as willing suppliers of sperm who are easy to manipulate, and relationships with them as a kind of cold commercial transaction. I hope that isn’t true – it doesn’t sound like a very happy existence – but it looks fairly plausible.

I’m not denying that there are many reasons to dislike and criticise Iris Robinson (her homophobia, for starters), but tenuous armchair psychoanalysis based on your own experiences seems a pretty flimsy basis for that. I don’t know – any more than Jones does – what Robinson or Taylor-Wood’s precise motives were when they started their respective relationships. But I really can’t see what grounds we have to suppose that there was anything more Machiavellian going on than there is when older men have relationships with younger women. It’s almost as if the Mail has some sort of agenda against women who step outside its narrow Victorian vision of acceptable female behaviour, but I’m sure that’s just crazy talk.