Age-gap relationships cause a brouhaha for a good reason

Nothing gets the group chat going quite like an age gap. Whether it’s a balding politician wheeling out his second 25-year-old girlfriend of the year, or a divorced mother of two canoodling with a man half her age, people with partners significantly younger or older than them are a perpetual conversation starter.

- OLIVIA PETTER

Men who date younger women are cast as predators, while the women become gold diggers. And in the reverse scenario, the older women are sad Havisham-types, while the younger men are... well, actually, I think they’re doing just fine. Funny, that.

My point is that we love to talk about an age gap, as the internet reminded us this weekend when a first-person essay on the subject went viral. Written by Grazie Sophia Christie, 27, for The Cut, the piece has polarised online opinion. Fifty per cent of readers have hailed Christie as a new-age feminist icon, while the other – arguably significantly louder – half have decried her as a terrible writer and malignant narcissist who has set women’s rights back by several decades.

So venomous is the hatred, in fact, that people have gone beyond the usual antagonism and started digging up titbits of personal information about Christie, like what her parents do and where she went to school. All this says a lot about how we respond to female storytellers – the kinds of voices we accept, and those we wilfully tear apart.