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Notes -
Sailer's Law of Female Journalism also applies to women more generally. Women are gripped by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be more attractive than they are.
Even liberal and progressive people will agree with this when it applies only to teenage girls. So, we get all these articles about how instagram needs to be banned; because, otherwise, teenage girls will inevitably fall into a deep depression from the mere fact they see more attractive and popular girls on their screens. That this fragility only applies to girls and boys are immune to this effect is unnoticed and uninteresting to them.
Funnily enough, I also thought of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism while I was writing the above comment, as I had a permutation in mind. Mainstream lipstick feminism: The haunting fear that somewhere, a Western man might be happy without it benefitting Western women.
Indeed, the socially progressive left often horseshoes with the socially conservative right when it comes to the agency of young women. Hence the "Fight for 25" meme, the semi-ironic notion that if young women can't consent to relationships with older men, nor do they have the agency and accountability to participate in other aspects of adult society.
Of course, older women have ample motivation for applying shaming tactics and maintaining barriers to entry when it comes to men dating younger women. Eighteen or 20-year-old women destroy 28-year-old women on the dating markets, much less 38-year-old women (see, for example, Dataclysm or Bruch and Newman [2018]).
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