Why Modern Masculinity Fears the Adult Woman
What is it? What is it that engenders this apparently uncontrollable predilection among adult human males towards very young girls? Is it evolutionary predisposition – the idea that younger females are more likely to be more fertile than older, and for a longer time, therefore increasing men’s chances of being able to reproduce more versions of themselves?
And that would be a comprehensible reason, actually, but for the fact that in many many cases, the girl is too young to reproduce, so “having his children” could not possibly be the reason.
So what is it? Why do human males “go after” girl children with such alacrity and insistence?
And, more specifically, what is it that has men in so many diverse parts of our world, resist the raising of the age of consent to sex and to marriage?
I’m Shirley Osborne and this is The Power Table. Thank you for joining our conversations about women, power and the patriarchy. Welcome.
To understand why laws protecting young girls from child marriage face systemic resistance globally, or why modern beauty standards increasingly demand that adult women modify their bodies to mimic pre-pubescence, we are going to have to look past individual pathology and examine what appears to be a structural, collective psychological defence mechanism.
The question we need to ask is straightforward but uncomfortable: What are men afraid of when they look at a fully mature, autonomous adult woman?
In the United States and in Somalia, men resist, vehemently and with tears, no less, when legislators seek to make it unlawful for men to marry girl children, or to raise the age of consent for sex. In the parliaments of states as diverse as Alaska, California and Oklahoma, bills that would raise the age of consent have repeatedly failed to pass the vote. In Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, men protested so vehemently against raising the marriage age, that the governments caved and abandoned the cause, or repealed legislation they had already managed to get passed.
So, when we connect the global resistance against raising the age of marriage to the cultural obsession with physical smallness and female hairlessness for example, in the westernised countries, a clear pattern emerges.
We come to realise that this is not only about sexual desire, but indubitably, about the maintenance of dominance. It points to a deep-seated aversion among traditional and modern men alike toward adult female peerhood – the reality of engaging with an equal partner who possesses physical maturity, full agency, and socio-economic leverage; in other words, those men specifically want women they can control, overpower and dominate. Children with no skills, education, money or physical capcity, and skinny, weak women fit the bill.
The Weaponization of Biology: From Neoteny to the Supernormal Stimulus
Now, to analyze this logically, we must first separate basic evolutionary biology from cultural exploitation. Let’s look at the biological baseline.
Evolutionary psychology tells us that human males naturally look for markers of youth and fertility, a concept known as neoteny. Neoteny is an evolutionary phenomenon where an organism slows its physical development, causing it to retain juvenile or infantile traits into adulthood. Also referred to as juvenilization or paedomorphosis, it is a key driver in the evolutionary history of several species. In humans it includes smooth skin, bright eyes, lack of facial and pubic hair. In a primitive context - in days when we were all ignorant, uneducated, unscientific and beastlike - these were all the available indicators of reproductive health. They say she’s likely to be able to bear many children over a long period of time.
Human evolution and the development of science have brought us to a stage where there are, or ought to be, consideration of factors other than apparent fitness to reproduce the species however, so one would expect, for example, that civility, reason and the science of human childhood would be weighty factors.
What we see today, though, particularly in the Western societal expectation for adult women is a modern distortion. Some groups of women routinely starve themselves into thinness, surgically reshape themselves into Barbie forms, dress like teenagers and completely eradicate pubic and body hair via practices like Brazilian waxing in order to meet these male expectations. That is not a natural biological preference. It is what is called a supernormal stimulus.
In biology, a supernormal stimulus is an exaggerated version of a natural cue that triggers an amplified, unnatural response. By demanding that adult women strip away the physical markers of sexual maturity, the culture creates a hyper-real aesthetic that blurs the line between adult womanhood and pre-pubescence, aka childhood. This physical appearance minimizes the visual and physical reality of the woman’s adulthood, making her appear less formidable and therefore, more easily placed in the category of controllable.
It is critical to note that, this re-categorising of women towards childhood, has the effect of placing children in the same category of “desirability” as the women who look like them, and therefore at increased exposure to, or risk of, the sexual attentions of adult males.
The Mechanics of Control: Size Asymmetry and the Fear of Peerhood
Science, and physical appearance, tell us that human beings are moderately sexually dimorphic, which means that men are generally physically larger and stronger than women. Historically, patriarchal structures have used this physical asymmetry to justify institutional dominance … bigger is better; might beats right; the “I’m larger so, of course, I get to be in charge,” kind of thinking.
However, as women achieve greater economic, social, and legal equality, physical size becomes a less effective tool for control, because when a woman has her own bank account, her own education, and her own legal protection, she becomes an absolute peer and is not bound to “obey”; she has options and she can use them.
For a masculinity built entirely on the premise of dominance and submission, this equality feels like a threat. The preference for smaller, hyper-youthful, or submissive women, therefore acts as a psychological buffer, minimizing risk of rejection and preserving the hierarchy, the power imbalance.
A smaller, younger, or less experienced partner lowers the risk of rejection or peer-level criticism for the man and allows a fragile ego to maintain an illusion of authority, based purely on age, size, or societal leverage, rather than by earning respect through mutual vulnerability and competence.
The Global Resistance to Age-of-Consent Laws
When we scale this psychological framework up to a geopolitical level, we can see exactly why men around the world resist laws that outlaw child marriage.
In societies where men fight to keep the marriage age low, the objective is rarely purely hedonic; it is structural. Marrying a child ensures that the woman enters the union before she has developed independent identity, critical thinking skills, or economic options. It guarantees a longer window of total dependence.
This resistance to raising the age of consent is a desperate attempt to retain total resource and lineage control. It is an acknowledgment by the men in these cultures that they cannot, or will not, compete or negotiate with a woman who has reached full psychological and legal maturity – which is another way of saying that these men are not willing, or able, to expand themselves and level up to the age of reason, science and human capacity. It also says that they are ignorant or uninterested in national development and the improvement of conditions in their countries – health, education, living standards quality of life…and so on.
Studies consistently show, conclusively because quantitatively, that is mathematically, that to the extent that women are included in the workings of the country, the national economy improves, the quality of life, government and governance, health and education all improve, and people live longer and better – men women and children. The maintenance of child marriage militates against national development. The research is clear.
If we are to have a reasoned, quantitative, and honest discussion about global gender dynamics, therefore, we must stop treating these issues as isolated cultural quirks or fringe pathologies. They are not fringe, they are not unusual and they are all connected.
The modern insistence on nubile, hairless, minimized female bodies in the West and the legislative pushback against protecting young girls in the East are two sides of the same coin. They are both system infrastructure; they are tools designed to avoid the presumed “challenge” of the adult female peer.
The questions we must pose to the data, and to the culture, therefore, are these:
How much of what we classify as "male preference" is actually a systemic psychological defence mechanism? Why, truly, does modern masculinity require the physical, economic, or age-based minimization of women in order to function? What is it about the fully realized, autonomous adult woman that terrifies men so deeply?
Get full access to Wisdom, Folly & Fabulous Shoes at shirleyosborne.substack.com/subscribe
