Cross-generational Desire and the Fallacy of the Father Complex

What’s the adjective for ‘hooking-up-with-a-hot-man-andhis-pal-on-a-Friday-night-and-then-finally-sleeping-with-yourlong time-girl-crush-the-following-week’?

I’m that.  Sexually fluid. Consensually non-monogamous. And proud.

One of my many sexual partners was a man I met at a literary event. The attraction between us was immediate. I was 24. He was 50 and divorced. My heart leapt when I got a notification later that evening to say that he’d followed me on Twitter. We chatted online often. A year went by and we bumped into each other again. Predictably, he was grayer than before. This time round, he asked me out.  We dated.

The chemistry was sizzlin’. The fact that he was more than double my age felt entirely irrelevant – but also, conceptually, quite hot. When it became obvious that we were going to sleep together, he looked me dead in the eye and said, “You’re dying to see my naked body, right?” I nodded.

Typing those words back to myself, all these years later, they now look incredibly sleazy, written out on the page like that. But, honestly, I remember being so turned on, knowing that I was about to see an older body up close.

An older man’s body is not something we come across often enough. While we may obsess about sex in contemporary popular culture, virtually all sex in the media lead us to believe that sex is only for the young. The dalliance described above, which I member with much fondness, hasn’t been my only foray in cross-generational sexual relationships, and over the years I’ve notched up an ever-increasing number of older lovers. This fascinates most people. And I’m often asked to describe the physical aspects of the sexual experiences I’ve had with older men, compared to that of younger partners. Of course, like anything, there are pros and cons:

Embarking on sexual adventures with much older men — pros vs. cons:

Thumbs Up

Less inhibited

Less performative

Less goal-orientated

Less expectant

More sure of what they’re into

 

Thumbs Down

Less willing to be taught new things about cis women’s bodies

Less likely to have explored sexual fluidity

Less stamina

Less mobile

More likely to experience erectile

dysfunction

***

My penchant for making myself available to much older men has been embedded into my psyche by the Hollywood industrial complex and its ubiquitous marketing of ‘Hollywood Hunks.’ In the late ‘90s – before I was 10 years old – I already had crushes on Leonardo Di Caprio (born 1974), Brad Pitt (born 1963), and George Clooney (born 1961), due to the constant media messaging around their desirability. And then a little later, when I discovered that sex appeal wasn’t just confined to Caucasian Americans, Mekhi Phifer (born 1974), Naveen Andrews (born 1969), Daniel Dae Kim (born 1968) and Keanu Reeves (born 1964), populated many of my daydreams – and masturbatory fantasies – too.

Proximity is access and the public figures we first admit to lusting after are prescribed by societal norms. Critically engaging with popular culture is a sure-fire method of proving that youngster’s thirst over whoever is put in front us and that our formative crushes are somewhat dichotomously performative, yet also intrinsically linked to the key tenets of our sexual preferences as adults.

For those such as myself, who chose to date outside of the arbitrarily prescribed generational cohort, societal norms dictate that our sexual preferences must be pathologized, so the Father Complex – the Freudian/Jungian psychoanalytical term for strong unconscious impulses, usually negative, which specifically pertains to the image or archetype of the father – is mapped onto each and every partner who happens to fall above the ‘double-yourage-minus-seven’ rule.

As such, I’ve always been pretty cagey when it comes to divulging the ages of the people I date to my wider social network, with family and friends having to make do with my response, “Oh, a bit older”, over and over. I’m very aware that sharing my personal experiences for titillation could be seen as trivializing the very real problems of grooming, power imbalance and coercion. There’s a very good reason why we have an ‘of age’ of consent. However, what never ceases to fascinate me is that the age of consent varies around the world. In France it’s 15; Germany, 14; Ireland, 17; South Korea, 20; in the UK it’s 16 (or 18, if the other person is in a position of trust or authority), and in the US it’s set on a state-by-state basis, ranging from 16 to 18.  Essentially ‘the age of consent’ is absolutely arbitrary.

***

I’ve always derided the perceived cultural superiority of monogamy and the nuclear family as the most staggeringly unimaginative frameworks in which we can enjoy sexual intimacy. And, collectively, we need to acknowledge, respect and nurture all the other ways we can physically relate to one another as legitimate rather than ‘alternative’.

I’m sexually fluid, consensually non-monogamous, and proud. I seek out similarly explorative partners to discover new sensuous experiences – a shared erotic perspective can be endlessly invigorating.  For example, teaching one another about all our desires has allowed me to lean into my vulnerability and build trust. And I’ve learned that vocalizing my physical boundaries early on ensures that they’re always respected.

Nonetheless, in my experience cis-het men of the Boomer and Gen X cohorts have difficulty in comprehending that women who chose to seek intimate relationships with them, no matter how casual, still deserve to be treated with plenty of respect, and not simply as a sexual plaything. I’ve unwittingly found myself in the latter position far too many times, often not being aware of this until long after I’d stopped seeing him. Protecting myself from the truth. But the sting of realization always hurt no matter how much I tried to shrug it off.

Sadly, the older men I dated during this fraught era of COVID-19, were unable to have honest and open conversations about what they wanted out of the physical relationship we shared, nor where they saw it going. This could, in part, have been the emotional manifestations of attempts at self-perseveration in these traumatic and grief-stricken times.

Older cis-het men are not renowned for their ability to clearly communicate emotional wellbeing. And, during the pandemic, I had let ever increasing touch deprivation and desperation for sexual contact eclipse my usually astute judgement. In accepting highly problematic communication styles in my partners, I was continually inviting behaviors that were far less than I deserved.

The subtle and predictable segues from engaging and regular conversations to only getting in touch to float the idea of a sex date, became all too familiar. This kind of nonchalance began to erode my self-respect and clouded my ability to see toxic emotional traits, until the build-up of unanswered texts I’d sent made me seem desperate and deluded.

I wasn’t acting like I deserved better, and so I never saw basic decency nor honesty. But I was so wrapped up in defining my own sexuality and lifestyle choice – expecting my lovers to simply understand that this is the way I am – that I wasn’t able to acknowledge my own reluctance to address my own deep-seated feelings of inferiority and abject fear of rejection.

We need to foster a culture where the bar isn’t nearly as low – even in the most casual of dalliances we should be able to confidently bring our full and authentic selves to the experience, without feeling trepidation around being perceived as emotionally needy, when simply allowing space for vulnerability.

If you show up as true self to every sexual experience, you also draw out a much more authentic and uncensored version of your partners, too.

To avoid self-destruction, I’m vigorously reaffirming the cognition the only way I can be in a sexually and emotionally fulfilling relationship is by truly believing that, yes, I am worthy of someone great. And by acknowledging that the Father Complex, which, although I’d sworn it off as a duplicitous fallacy, might actually bear some truth.