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I'm reading it at the moment and so far I find nothing to disagree with in it. It's refreshing to get back to the rigorously analytical Freddie I know and love, rather than this defensive, evasive, why-do-you-care-it's-none-of-our-business posture he's been adopting for awhile.
I also do not disagree with his argument in itself. I just found it very ironic that he spent so much time making it clear that he totally isn't one of those evpsych bros who wants to fuck younger women, they're gross... before making what was basically a long, disclaimer-padded evpsych argument about how it's natural that men are going to fuck younger women. Of course he emphasizes repeatedly how unfair and sexist it is, but hey, nature, bro.
That's fair.
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Probably this one:
Freddie tries to eat its cake and have it, too. Both "internet creepers" and "a horde of screaming zealots" agree on the motivation of older men preferentially dating legal teens, and he insists both are wrong. He even says himself that "the male preference for younger women comes in dominant majorities", that this preference is a spectrum with a convenient peak in mid-20s, but some way the right slope is perfectly normal and the left slope is creepy.
If someone preferentially dates 18-year-olds because he's attracted to their bodies, it is more likely that the peak of his attraction curve is somewhere to the left of 18. It's simple statistics. If someone dates 18-year-olds because they are much more easily impressed by him having a job, disposable income, a car and ability to buy alcohol with impunity than women of his age, he's a creepy loser.
He plays the same game in his achievement gaps post. Yes, IQ is heritable, yes, IQ is an important indicator of achievement, and thus different IQ inherited from their parents explains gaps in achievement between individuals. Ergo, achievement gaps between groups that exhibit many other different heritable traits can be explained by... other reasons, no, not inherent differences in their IQ, never!
DeBoer's ultimate conclusions about age gaps are generally fine and sensible, though.
I was really disappointed that he didn't draw the world's most obvious parallel: female slut shaming is union workers getting angry at scabs. Given how leftist and worker-oriented Freddie claims to be, the parallel just strikes me as too simple to miss.
Women shame young women who get talked into a bad deal because when young women get talked into a bad deal it undermines the negotiating power of other women. In the same way that if scabs are willing to work unlimited overtime, it makes it hard for an honest worker to ask for an honest wage.
I don't think this is as obvious to someone within Freddie's (presumed) social circles as you might think. The idea that the dating market could even be thought of as a market of any sort, much less one with parallels to the employment market, would be, at most, a joke. And the idea that slut shaming could have any cause other than or with more complexity than some sort of brainwashing performed by the patriarchy - "internalized misogyny" is an often used term - would be nearly unthinkable.
At least, that's my speculation based on my own experience with my social circle of East Coast college educated liberals, which is what I think mostly describes Freddie's social circle too. Freddie's rather unorthodox in those circles, but even then, I think it'd be expecting too much that he'd perceive this kind of parallel as anything close to "obvious." There's just too much social conditioning that automatically shut down such thoughts that overcoming them would be extraordinary, rather than expected.
It just feels so right to me, I don't see how others don't see it.
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Fair point, it's a little bit weaselly, but nothing compared to the 50-foot-tall ferret of his arguments about trans stuff.
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