I'm not sure where exactly I want to go with this, and it applies a little less to people who don't prefer relatively young people, but I've never understood the idea of outgrowing attraction to people of a certain age category or sexuality itself. A man's libido declines with age but it doesn't disappear entirely (I'd rather not focus on men but I'm not sure how many women lose sexual interest entirely after menopause or for whom it just declines to a lesser degree. My intuition tells me it would just decline without completely disappearing in most cases, I'd be interest in hearing more about people's experience with menopause). Again, I'm mostly posting this because I planned to when I was hungry for some topic to engage in and there was little activity on the board. If a man in his 50s wants to start a family, for example (and I'm leaving aside the general ethics of procreation. I also hope it's obvious that I'm talking about having biological children and not suggesting that adopted children aren't one's 'real' family); or at least this is something that ties into my point, he would probably have to do so with a woman in her 20s or 30s (male fertility declines even more significantly after 50 and an older man's age already puts his partner and their baby at an increased risk in various ways), with a woman in her early 40s (or even late 30s to a lesser degree) there would be the combined risk of both their ages and she'd be even less likely to conceive within one year, his absolute best chance would be with someone in her late teens/early 20s (as I said in my last post, the ideal pairing for a healthy pregnancy/child would be between a man in his early 30s and a woman in her late teens/early twenties). At 45, even presumably pre-menopausal women have only a 5% chance of getting pregnant within one year (my understanding is that researchers often consider something to be deviant or abnormal if it occurs within 5% or less of the population), at 40; even though menopause before 45 is considered early, only a large minority of women in that age group will successfully conceive within one year. What I'm getting at is that, depending on who you ask (I think leftists and feminists of both genders are more likely to be really strict about this than are conservative men, or maybe even conservative women to a lesser extent depending on how young the woman is), it's fine that he wants to start a family but, at the same time, he's supposed to view the only people he's capable of starting a family with as fundamentally non-sexual (in terms of his feelings about them) and lack romantic interest in them (or the idea might be that he's not capable of actually feeling genuine romantic interest in them because he can't relate to younger people).
It is bizarre to me because, even though men's preferences vary greatly (some men prefer older women, some men might not have a very strong or exclusive preference one way or the other. Personally, I wish that I had no preference one way or the other and I do occasionally come across middle-aged women that I am just as attracted to as I am to younger women but generally I'm not as attracted to women over 40 as I am to girls/women in their teens, twenties and thirties and the ones I find exceptionally attractive look as though they could still be in their 30s) we should expect that most men will prefer women who look as though they can reproduce (so pubescent/post-pubescent but also pre-menopausal). We should also expect most women to prefer men under 35 but as arrogant and callous as this might sound (and evolutionary psychology is always theoretical) average men will probably have a stronger preference for younger partners since most 50+ men can still father children even if they're not the ideal (I don't know what percentage are clinically infertile; as in they can't father a child with a woman within one year, but generally pregnancies where the father is 50 or older go fine even despite the increased risks). To me, if you're asking men over a certain age to not be attracted to women under 40 (or to not act on their attraction to women under 40, I don't think I've come across anti-age gap people who make a distinction) you're almost effectively asking them to not be sexual anymore, to just pretend that that's no longer a part of who they are and to treat an attraction to girls/women in their teens/twenties/thirties as some childish trait that they're supposed to mature out of (except that the attraction is considered malicious or unethical and not merely juvenile and I'm going to resist the urge to address normative age roles in general).
I don't want to make an appeal to nature fallacy (and my only concern is ultimately with happiness and emotional distress but the actual nature of sex, which is inherently tied to reproduction, accounts for some of what actually makes people happy; sexual satisfaction is a basic need that virtually all animals have, even the asexually reproducing ones) but the taboo is strange to me because a man's body is adapted to fertilize women's egg cells. This is the single only reason why men produce sperm and they typically produce sperm until their dying day. If you're 60 years old and expected to only pursue the women of your age group you literally cannot fulfill this function since, at 60, 99% of women have gone through menopause (at 55 it's 90%, at 45 it's 5%, at 40 it's 1%). I don't think that stigmatizing an adult attraction to girls or women in their teens, twenties and thirties is morally worse than stigmatizing true pedophilia (both involve the devaluing of happiness which I believe is inherently immoral. The only thing that we should, on principle, not want to be a source of happiness for people is suffering or the absence of happiness per se. We should celebrate all sexual/romantic relationships regardless of the gender, age, ethnicity, etc. of the people involved insofar as they are a source of happiness for them) but it's built on this strange game that we seem to play where we pretend that there's something 'deviant' about older men being attracted to people they're capable of reproducing with which is what, from an evolutionary standpoint, sex is 'for' (again, I only care about happiness/suffering but I can matter-of-factly acknowledge the nature of sex as being tied to reproduction in some sense). We're just pretending that 'human nature' isn't what it is.
It would bother me less if the attitude was that older men shouldn't act on their attraction to younger women only because the women will suffer as a result without the stigmatization of the attraction itself, as ad hoc and pretentious as that might be. It's not as though I personally would be having sex with teens/twenty-something-year olds/thirty-something-year-olds in a society with no age-gap stigma anyway. This is rushed, I don't know how I wasted the day.