‘Cause Girls Your Age Know Better
age gap relationships, Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire,’ and some bell hooks to boot
I have this weird thing with pop albums from artists I love where I simply won’t listen to them when they first come out. I guess I’m afraid they might be bad, maybe I’m waiting to savor the experience, I don’t know, but GUTS was no exception. This week I was driving through Hollywood when ‘Vampire,’ the album’s lead single, finally came on over my car speakers and my blood ran cold with brutal (ha) recognition. If you’ve ever been a girl between the ages of 15-25 the below lyrics hit.
And every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news
You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called them crazy too
You're so convincing
How do you lie without flinching?Ooh, what a mesmerizing, paralyzing, fucked-up little thrill
Can't figure out just how you do it, and God knows I never will
Went for me, and not her
'Cause girls your age know betterI've made some real big mistakes
But you make the worst one look fine
I should've known it was strange
You only come out at night
I used to think I was smart
But you made me look so naive
The way you sold me for parts
As you sunk your teeth into me, oh
Bloodsucker, fame fucker
Bleedin' me dry, like a goddamn vampire
Rodrigo’s characterization of a relationship she had when she was either eighteen or nineteen is a savage and apt characterization of this particular kind of relationship power imbalance. She thought she was in a fantasy and woke up to the fact that she was being used. She thought only meeting up with the guy at night meant they had something elusive and mysterious, not the makings of a red flag. She felt like she was in control but really she was sold for parts. In these kinds of older man/younger woman relationships, the older man leverages the younger woman’s naïveté to make her feel like she alone is special, like she alone “gets him,” when in reality he can’t relate to women his age because there’s something wrong with him.
The song’s intensity (and heart-achingly beautiful vocals) reminds me of the special kind of innocence only a teen fresh out of a bad relationship can have — this man, to Olivia, was a vampire with glamorous powers of seduction, capable of sinister levels of harm. Exactly the kind of guy one looks back on from the luxury of one’s late-twenties only to realize he was just a loser. Don’t get me wrong, losers can do harm, but they are losers nonetheless.
Fans have done some digging into which recent boyfriend of hers may have caused the pain behind this song (google them, they’re both clowns), but what’s more interesting to me is the way the tweets quoted in the article unflinchingly frame these relationships as fishy:
When I was a sophomore in high school in 2007, I had a classmate named Chloe who was a peripheral friend, slightly too edgy to vibe well with my extremely anal, honor roll persona, so we bumped into each other here and there but were never close. Chloe smoked cigarettes, she went to AA meetings weekly because her uptight suburban parents caught her drinking one time and labeled her an alcoholic, she did shots at parties and got into cars with boys. Basically everything I had decided would deter me from my college aspirations and avoided like the plague. Another thing Chloe pioneered, besides wearing low rise jeans so low her pubes were in danger of popping out (Gen-Z, take heed), was date an older guy before it was cool.
“Where did they even meet each other?” we’d ask ourselves whenever we spotted him picking her up from the back parking lot of our high school. He was a caricature of this type of guy: he was gangly tall with a wispy goatee, he drove a ratty ten year old car, he absolutely would have been a heavy vaper if that had existed then. Instead he smoked blunts he rolled with flavored swishers he probably got from a gas station many freeway exits away from our sanitary suburb. He was at community college and could buy alcohol. She was fifteen.
Here’s the thing, in the early two-thousands, the only narrative available to us was that Chloe was kinda slutty and this guy was confirmation of her edgy cool factor. If we were worried about her we would look like prudes or uncool babies. Remember, we were a generation who largely watched the below scene and thought the pregnant teenager was in control of her choices and this middle aged man’s wife was just a wet blanket who couldn’t hang:
Gen-Z has rightly slingshotted in the opposite direction. They think these men dating younger women are creepy, and when the girls and women are in their teens I unreservedly agree with them. I especially appreciated this tweet implying that Edward was taking advantage of Bella (a take I heard expressed exactly zero times during the initial Twilight craze):

But pivoting slightly from the question of a twenty-six-year old dating an eighteen-year-old, which we can all agree is weird, I want to carefully pull apart the strands of how we talk about age gap relationships between consenting adults. This is a topic I’ve avoided as long as possible because trying to disentangle said threads genuinely feels like defusing a bomb, like my hands are trembling and dropping the pliers and the clock is at three seconds left and the movie score is swelling all around me, because this is one topic where certain people are very, very convinced of their moral high ground that all age gap relationships between an older man and a younger woman are exploitative and wrong.
I met my husband a month after my twenty-fifth birthday. He was thirty-four at the time. By puriteen twitter math, I am in a coercive voiceless situation where any mirage of respect between us is just Stockholm syndrome on my part. In fact, I must be typing this through shackles.
But what I’d like to gently tell the puriteens (and twenty somethings who have metabolized this message as well) is that the more rigid your construct of what is morally acceptable, the more your sexual desire will play tricks on you to break it all down.
At twenty-five I’d recently come out of a relationship that was very equal down to our ages, and while it wasn’t abusive, it was aggressively boring and I was miserable. When I downloaded the dating apps I set my age range to begin at twenty-nine with no upper limit. I was done with being classmates with my sex partners. I wanted someone seasoned, someone with life experience. I wanted a Daddy.
And I’m not alone. It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone is sick of male immaturity, which is why the Daddy has emerged as a treasured archetype. It is a simplistic idea that age equivalency in a relationship means safety while age disparity means someone is being taken advantage of. Many, many harms can befall you with men (and boys) your own age. In some cases, choosing an older partner may spare you the grievances of dealing with a product of patriarchy who hasn’t yet taken advantage of his time on this earth to do a soupçon of self inquiry; other times going for an older man just turns into babysitting with new problems. But regardless of whether you’re going after a seasoned Daddy, an older bad boy, or just a guy who happens to be older, women deserve to fuck around!! We deserve to try things and see what happens! And bad things can happen regardless of who we’re with.
But circling back to the idea of seeking out an older man to remedy our exhaustion with male immaturity, a lot of folks may look at the desire to date someone older and dismiss it as “Daddy issues.” And you know what? Yes! None of us steer our little rowboats through the sea of patriarchy without some Daddy Issues barnacles attaching themselves to our hulls. Because we have all been raised in a love economy from which men have been conditioned to retreat. I’ll let bell hooks writing in The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love explain:
We live in a culture where emotionally-starved, deprived people are desperately seeking male love. Our collective hunger is so intense it rends us, and yet we dare not speak it for fear we will be mocked, pitied, shamed. To speak our hunger for male love would demand that we name the intensity of our lack and our loss.
No one hungers for male love more than the little girl or boy who rightfully needs and seeks love from dad. He may be absent, dead, present in body yet emotionally not there, but the girl or boy hungers to be acknowledged, recognized, respected, cared for… Because patriarchal culture has already taught girls and boys that dad’s love is more valuable than mother love, it is unlikely that maternal affection will heal the lack of fatherly love. No wonder then that these girls and boys grow up angry with men, angry that they have been denied the love they need to feel whole, worthy, accepted.
Heterosexual girls and homosexual boys can and do become the women and men who make romantic bonds the place where they quest to find and know male love, but that quest is rarely satisfied. Usually rage, grief, and unrelenting disappointment lead women and men to close off the part of themselves that was hoping to be touched and healed by male love. They learn then to settle for whatever positive attention men are able to give. They learn to overvalue it. They learn to pretend that it is love. They learn how not to speak the truth about men and love. They learn to live the lie.
So during those “six months of torture” was Olivia living the lie? I think that’s the paradox at the heart of this: we crave male love, and certain men leverage that craving into coercive, or unfulfilling, or just plain shitty situations. It’s not exactly the ages at play, although that certainly doesn’t help matters, but the love scarcity fostered by patriarchy and our collective abandonment wound. Individual men can pour salt right into it, or be a needed balm. Depends on their level of inner work, depends on the day. Overall, I think a lot of the “men” in Olivia’s dating pool are the entitled products of boy mom parenting and look like they just drank a glass of milk (I’m quoting a fire tweet about the Jonas Brothers here), so their ability to rise to the occasion of this collective pain is limited. Therefore we seek the older men. Therefore we are sometimes disappointed.
But again the issue isn’t always the age gap itself. Adult women are allowed to take risks when they date. Hemming them in by age brackets is infantilizing and ignores the sex appeal of the taboo. Further, it limits the beneficial gender work for both parties when they meet across an age gap in good faith. Maybe this whole thing is a straw man argument against a take most who hold it will grow out of (Gaby Abrão recently made an excellent point about how our current relationship discourse stems from sharing online space with teens, and I think this topic is a prime example), but I’ve simmered long enough at these broad brush takes and just had to add my voice into the mix.
So what do I have to say to adults in these kinds of relationships? I guess I would share that my own Dom/sub dynamic has come attached with its share of privilege disparities both in gender and age and sexual orientation. But rather than writing this off as a doomed dynamic, I actually think the conscious negotiation of these factors has made our relationship a haven where I could sort out my craving for male love, and heal that scarcity in myself. The wound is wide open and we’ve made it a collective project to tend it together. Maybe we don’t want to fully close these gaps. Maybe we want to use whatever chasms exist between ourselves and our partners to build a vernacular of care.
That said, don’t date a twenty-six year old DJ no matter who you are.
Kidding.
Kind of.
I love this, thank you for sharing!!
It’s hard for me to pick favourites off the album but randomly, I love ballad of a homeschooled girl, vampire, and pretty isn’t pretty
Love this piece! Has given me some stuff to think about and a desire to read the belle hooks book you quoted!
Also my favourite song on the album is probably ballad of a homeschooled girl :^)