Like all discourse there’s yappers who are sometimes a little too extra, but obviously in the case of a teenager (who just graduated highschool) and someone who is in their late twenties (brain fully developed for years now) there is a major gap in terms of maturity and understanding.
Now obviously things are malleable and I’m not saying get the pitchforks out for a gap of 22 and 26 necessarily, but it’s fairly well established that brains aren’t fully developed until about the mid 20s, so I think we should consider that carefully when discussing.
And if you are dating around the legal age (18, 19, 20) and you aren’t also like college age at most, imo that always screams “I would go lower but the law won’t let me”.
Once someone is in their mid to late 20s, there’s definitely still the possibility of power dynamics at play with someone significantly older for money, connections, or experience reasons, but I think at that point you are basically universally considered a fully matured adult and probably have the wits to go around and do whatever you like.
“How can you tell maturity from age”.
I said it above with the brain development but, but I think that’s crazy to just leave that out there with no conditionals. Like it’s universally accepted that a 5 y/o is less mature and less equipped to understand shit than a 10 y/o and so on and so forth. Like again obviously it’s a spectrum a bit, but peoples brains are literally not finished developed until they are years into adult hood and they (mostly young women) regularly get taken advantage of by older people who know how to take advantage of younger people.
There’s like a million cases of 18 - early twenties women who spend years with an older partner building a life and then grow into realizing that they were taken advantage of and manipulated.
In my experience, a lot of these dudes are also incredibly aware of how their politics are perceived in general and don’t espouse them as blatantly as someone from an older generation might.
Being someone masc presenting at work, I’ve had several instances where I ended up alone with other young male coworkers and was subjected to outpouring of misogynistic nonsense when they thought they have someone who was on their side and wouldnt report them.
And whats more crazy is I’ve never been close to any of these people outside of a work environment and never discussed anything remotely personal at all. They genuinely just thought “here’s another male, they’ll agree with me”. Mostly millennial more than gen-z if that matters to anyone.
For more personal anecdotes about the older generation thing. I’ve had two older like gen-z bosses who just blatantly pointed out women’s bodies they were eyeing while we were walking into work with like a crowd of people. Boss dynamics make it also different but it just also feels like younger dudes wouldn’t be as blatant idk.