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In the line I've been able (most just showed up in the New World from somewhere or other...) to trace back to 7 generations, it was a little less, but they were
by 082349872349872 3y ago
In the line I've been able (most just showed up in the New World from somewhere or other...) to trace back to 7 generations, it was a little less, but they were in the colonies before the US was a thing, so more than 35, less than 40 years per generation?
My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe they'd also be on the longer side.
(NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)
* Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — not that anyone in this august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of OnlyFans worked.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoI do get frustrated when I hear people saying negative or unfounded things about couples with relatively small age gaps 7-15 years. It’s the norm, not the exception. And I say that as someone who has only dated people my own age.
- 082349872349872 3y agosee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39851970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39851970
- rdlw 3y agoMany things were historical norms, with current practices being the exception.
- selimthegrim 3y agoI am shocked, shocked that Josephine Mutzenbacher didn’t reflect reality
- ajmurmann 3y agoWait, given the age differences described here, the book very much reflected reality, no?
- 082349872349872 3y agoNo, what I took away from Zweig is that 19 yo men were very much interested in 19 yo women, but (although some were for rent) they couldn't successfully date them due to competition from men "of substance". EDIT: hmm, was it really a change in mores, or did WWI just kill off enough 20-40 yos to reset this dynamic?
- ajmurmann 3y agoIsn't that how it was in the Mutzenbacher as well? I mostly recall her having sex with much older men even before she enters prostitution I wonder how much this change was due to the modern idea of romantic love taking over rather than older men becoming unavailable
- 082349872349872 3y agoGood question! It's on my slush list, but atm I have a lot of physical things which need to be rearranged at or near the surface of the earth, so unlikely I'll dig into this before it's slid well out of HN's attention span. > in the Mutzenbacher Familienname, eh? I've yet to read her, but given her reputation I'm glad that makes at least two of us who are not already per Du.
- 082349872349872 3y ago(it turns out my wife's family took more generations to get back into the XVIII, so that line runs ~30 years per generation)