Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (left) and his wife, Rama Duwaji (stock photo)

Let’s start with this reality: no serious commentator cares about the six-year age gap between Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji. The objections, which gained brief modish attention on social media last week, appear largely invented by a pseudonymous columnist for online gossip rag Nicki Swift. Yet it bothers me because it reflects a larger pattern I’ve seen developing in online sexual discourse.

The columnist claims Mamdani’s “marriage is full of glaringly obvious red flags,” but lists only two: the fact that Mamdani and Duwaji met on a dating app, and their age difference. Considering that apps have become perhaps the most common way couples meet, supplanting the previous favorite, introduced through mutual friends, this complaint seems disingenuous. But it also bears mention, because it bespeaks the author’s preconceptions.

Strictly anecdotally, I’ve observed a rising tide of moral panic around sexual mores. While American society has become increasingly accepting of the alphabet soup of Queer identities, we’ve become more puritanical, more prescriptive, about others. Age gaps in particular cause many armchair commentators extreme panic. Again, I’ve observed this purely through anecdote, but the paranoia about “groomers” and age-based abuse has become volatile.

Some weeks ago, another pseudonymous poster asked readers to settle a debate with her husband. A couple of their acquaintance had an age gap: he was 40, she was 30. The poster said her husband claimed this made the man in that relationship a “pedophile.” That reminded me of an older post I’d read, a woman claiming her girlfriends had called her boyfriend a “groomer” because he was 37, and she was 30.

Words like “pedophile” and “groomer” have specific meanings. In strict psychological language, a pedophile has a pathological desire to have sex with a partner who hasn’t yet experienced puberty. More generally, we use the word to describe someone who desires to have sex with a partner deemed too young to consent, regardless of biological maturity. And a groomer systematically coaches someone underage to regard “bad touch” as acceptable behavior.

These accusations share one theme: the capacity to consent. We deem minors to lack the moral capacity to consent to sex, even when their bodies are developed enough to have sex. And we deem minors’ moral development to be malleable, subject to being distorted by malignant influence. These considerations are real. Children, by dint of being children, don’t understand what it means to consent, especially to somebody who’s charming, influential, or dangerous.

My problem arises when we broaden the definition of minority. When we accuse somebody of “pedophilia” for having a relationship with a 30-year-old woman, we’re declaring that grown women are incapable of making moral decisions. We literally infantilize adult women, reducing them to the moral incapacity of a child. We take a serious concern, that manipulative adults will abuse children, and apply that in ways it doesn’t apply.

Our Nicki Swift columnist quotes a Twitter user saying, of the Mamdani marriage: “When he was 18, she would've been 12. Can I get a YIKES??” I respond with the counterquestion: so what? Had they known one another at that age, it would’ve been skeevy, and potentially actionable, depending on their relationship. But they didn’t, so the comparison is immaterial. They didn’t meet until their twenties, when both were adults.

The reasonable desire to protect children from predatory adults, has morphed into a belief that we must protect adults from each other. In so doing, we reduce adults, mostly grown women, to the stunted moral agency of overgrown adolescents. Please don’t misunderstand: I say “we” do this, but it’s in the hands of online moral scolds who mean well, but reduced the issue into caricature.

British sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” to describe this distortion. A social concern, usually grounded in a kernel of truth, confounds people with media access. But those people perceive the problem as more pervasive than it actually is, and sell their audience on the imminent crisis. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s is a good example. So is QAnon, the accusation of sexual predation among America’s elites.

Social media puts more people in positions to start, or amplify, moral panics. That’s what the Nicki Swift article does: it takes a realistic concern about sexual abuse, and applies it in a slapdash way. But social media also gives more people the opportunity to stand in the way of cascading panic. That’s the point we’re at now: we need to refuse to lose our composure about made-up problems.