Do people over a certain age traumatise you? Even if they just want to be friends

[Grunko]

Someone from a local council made negative remarks about adults/people over a certain age mixing/hanging out with teenagers.
She made comments like “It is not appropriate for someone aged 25+ to hang around teenagers….. Teenagers wouldn’t feel comfortable with someone much older hanging out with them and don’t want someone much older hanging out with them… they won’t be able to be themselves…. It felt like she was saying if someone much older was to behave friendly towards a teenager or wanted to hang out or chat, teenagers would be traumatised and find it harmful but if a random person who was the same age approached a teenager and behaved the same as the older person, they wouldn’t be traumatised.
I want to ask how you feel if someone made these remarks and especially to AAM’s what you think of that?

[John_Doe]

Someone from a local council made negative remarks about adults/people over a certain age mixing/hanging out with teenagers.
She made comments like “It is not appropriate for someone aged 25+ to hang around teenagers….. Teenagers wouldn’t feel comfortable with someone much older hanging out with them and don’t want someone much older hanging out with them… they won’t be able to be themselves…. It felt like she was saying if someone much older was to behave friendly towards a teenager or wanted to hang out or chat, teenagers would be traumatised and find it harmful but if a random person who was the same age approached a teenager and behaved the same as the older person, they wouldn’t be traumatised.
I want to ask how you feel if someone made these remarks and especially to AAM’s what you think of that?

Under natural conditions, people tend to socialize and bond over significant age gaps. Worst case scenario, I don't think there would be a need or justification to create a categorical rule out of what might be circumstantially best. Teenagers often idolize people in their 20s (I vaguely remember being 13; not that my memories of 13 are generally as vague as my memories of being 5, and, maybe delusionally, thinking that I could relate more to men in their 20s than my own age group or at least I aspired to that. Men in their 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond were often my role models).

My father is 74 and he has a friend who is around my age (early 40s). I've never talked to him beyond maybe a quick greeting. My cousin is 29 and he is friendly with my niece who is 13, they seem to relate as 'equals' (he clearly doesn't see me as an 'elder' either so I have no age-related 'power' over him). If you go to any random high school (or at least this was true when I was young) you might find teachers casually talking with their students about some non-subject related topic. It seems to be a completely normal thing for people to relate across age groups.

It's hard to believe that someone could really think this this but I think that a helpful guiding principle in life is to consider possible logically coherent/imaginable experiences or states of affairs (not square triangles, because the very nature of a triangle is to have three sides so we literally can't imagine a 4-sided triangle for that reason, but teenagers who are fine with having older friends, Trump supporters who aren't racist, purple cats, etc.) that are supposedly atypical according to whatever narrative you ascribe to (e.g. white privilege) because a lot of narratives begin to fall apart when you challenge the stereotypes (not just generalizations that may or may not be true in terms of statistical averages) that they are built on. I think people are often overly confident about how things must go and the experiences of others and in realizing that they might still have a false perception of what is the norm, or even the minds of others, but it eases some of the dogma from their position if they're truly open to where they might have gone wrong. The narrative now seems to be that AMSC is necessarily traumatic, even though we can imagine a scenario where it isn't (and unlike green fire or a world where faster-than-light travel was physically doable there are people who claim to not be traumatized by childhood sexual experiences with adults, most antis can remember having sexual feelings at a young age so they can see how it could be pleasurable for children), or that every man who's interested in younger women wants someone to control, doesn't respect or love the women in his own age group, doesn't care about the people he's attracted to, etc. If harm reduction is one's goal, a single exception to the AMSC=trauma rule would show that a desire for AMSC is not inherently immoral (under the belief that there's a moral obligation to minimize suffering).

I don't understand the concept of 'propriety' outside of a concern for suffering. The person you're mentioning seems to be giving a not-entirely-honest 'hedonistic' argument against platonic age-gap friendships but I don't understand the idea of a relationship just being 'inappropriate' when it doesn't cause anyone to suffer (or imply devaluing anyone's happiness which I believe is inherently immoral even when a choice isn't actually harmful or bad. I don't want to get sidetracked but in the long-run we want to live in a world with sympathetic people who value everyone's happiness and certain choices that are directly harmless can still imply not valuing the happiness of other people so the immorality of a choice with negative consequences is still relevant but, again, we're talking about relationships that don't cause the younger party pain or imply the older person not valuing their happiness). There's really not much of a counter to 'it's just an inappropriate relationship' other than pointing out how completely arbitrary of a value judgment that is. If Marty McFly isn't traumatized by hanging out with Doc Brown, I just don't understand the problem someone would have with their relationship; it should be valued as a source of happiness for them.

How do you have a relationship with your own children if they feel uncomfortable around older people as older people?