The last taboo: toy boys

By Celia Walden Published: 9:00PM GMT 03 March 2010

Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, and Aaron Johnson, twenty-two Photo: MARTIN POPE

On the red runner at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards last month, one integrate drew some-more courtesy than most. The pointed bloat of her belly denoting early pregnancy, a prime lady in white reached instinctively for the immature man at her side. He, fixation a protecting palm on her reduce back, stood silently by as she gave interviews. They competence have been mom and son but they were lovers, soon-to-be father and wife: they were the 42-year-old movie executive Sam Taylor-Wood and her 22-year-old singer fianc Aaron Johnson. "Yikes," one camera-woman winced, "here comes the cradle-snatcher."

The view competence have been some-more eloquently expressed, positively by a piece of of Taylor-Wood"s own sex, but comparison women and their child toys have a bent to prompt happy even wanton reactions. As the movie executive worked her approach down the red carpet, birch-haired masculine management team with 19-year-old models on their arms ambled past, but the stupidity of those couplings passes unnoticed. Only the Older Woman, it seems, is banned in a universe where changed couple of remain.

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Despite marrying her immature boyfriend, singer Ashton Kutcher, five years ago, singer Demi Moore still provokes tip headlines for the 15-year age gap. Madonna is at large derided for her attribute with 22-year-old indication Jesus Luz, as was engineer Sadie Frost, who antiquated a period of immature men after her separate from Jude Law.

Then there is 52-year-old Kim Cattrall, who was indicted of personification up to her Sex and the City change ego, Samantha, when she began a attribute with a 28-year-old chef, Alan Wyse, that surprise, surprise, snarl the cynics didn"t last the course. In the luminary universe a fondle child competence be de rigeur, but in reality, the pairing stays as singular as it is controversial.

Literature and movie would have us hold otherwise. Bergman"s Torment, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Last Picture Show, Sunset Boulevard, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone and, of course, The Graduate, have kept immature masculine cinema-goers titillated by the thought for years. Byron did the same in Don Juan, as did Stendhal in Scarlet and Black, and Bernard Schlink in The Reader. The energetic has regularly desirous the inventive imagination, but no created comment goes in to as majority abyss as Stephen Vizinczey"s era-transcending, In Praise of Older Women, re-released this week as a Penguin Classic.

The best-selling book, that was creatively published in 1965 and has sole some-more than five million copies worldwide, contingency have annoyed a undoubted bolt of misalliances after the narrator, Andras Vajda, described in lively item his find that the embraces of comparison women are forever preferable to those of younger girls.

"One of my arch irritations at the time was the blankness of the faces of my immature lady friends," says the immature Vajda of one tied together lover, Maya. "But Maya"s face, with the excellent lines of her 40 a small years, voiced all the shades of her thoughts and emotions."

Forty-five years after penning those lines, the Hungarian-born Vizinczey, right away 76, stays fervent on the subject. "To be a immature man and have a grown lady as your partner is not usually sexy, it is paradise," he says. "That"s what my novel is about. Women begin at thirty and usually get better."

Putting any defamation of the pairing down to "people hating to see alternative people happy," Vizinczey lambasts the thought that women with immature kids should no longer be passionate beings.

"If anything, a lady who has had immature kids can be even sexier than before, since birth gives her a surpassing experience. The sexiest thing about a lady is her intelligence. The comparison women in the book were smart sufficient to clarity from their experiences. An comparison lady who is an simpleton is obviously defective to an smart 20-year-old, but the smart 20-year-old will be even some-more engaging and sparkling when she"s 40 or 60."

Our complicated day aggrandisement of girl competence pull an augmenting volume of immature men in to the arms of comparison women, he feels. "The sex interest of a lady has really small to do with the kind of things magazines speak about. It doesn"t have majority to do with big breasts, small breasts, figure the majority critical piece of sex interest is humanity, an passionate nature, intelligence. Allure positively has really small to do with clothes. Isn"t a lady most appropriate ready to go when she is naked?"

"If you take the evolutionary argument," agrees clergyman Oliver James, writer of Affluenza, "there is a good understanding some-more clarity in a younger man being with an comparison lady than the alternative approach around, since a younger man can be some-more powerful and utilitarian to the woman."

It is a speculation Germaine Greer upheld in her quarrelsome book, The Boy, a topic on "why boys have regularly been the world"s pin-ups". "Historically," the writer of The Female Eunuch explained, "older women were approaching to deliver boys to the excellence and fad of sex. They were lovers, but they were additionally teachers."

Besides sex, Greer maintains, "older men lay in judgment, but boys don"t do that. They are means to admire a lady for what she has achieved." Thirty years ago, Paul Theroux put his love of comparison women down to their capability to give men "something that is really scarcely incomparable, the possibility to finish in adult hold up what was unfit to finish as a child, a unassailable present of enterprise that combines the most appropriate of youth, a maturity, romance, and realism in next to parts".

But if the interest from the immature man"s viewpoint is obvious, so are the pitfalls. Writer Oscar Humphries, the son of stand up comic Barry Humphries who enjoyed a attribute with Jimmy Choo owner Tamara Mellon when he was twenty-two and she was 40, remembers presumption a cooperative purpose in the relationship. "The initial time we had cooking together in London," he wrote at the time, "I half-heartedly reached for my overburdened Switch label when the check arrived. I pretentious harm when she brushed it in reserve with her corporate Amex… Can there be equivalence in the relationship? Well, there is passionate equality, but, I have to admit, small else."

A jointly beguiling diversion of prevalence and acquiescence is what drives the dynamic, adds James. "But possibly it is love or sex spurring on the people involved, there will regularly be a large magnitude of enterprise on the piece of the comparison chairman for the younger, that is where the "older woman" energetic is not straightforward, since women, on the whole, are not captivated by nubility in younger members of the conflicting sex since men are."

So are these comparison women released or damaged? Where the luminary fortuitous are concerned, James believes, complacency and the poke for almighty girl competence fool around a big part, shortening the fondle child to a pick-me-up not distinct a new handbag. "There probably is something wrong with women who endure in going for really large age gaps," he claims. "The genuine complaint starts when the younger chairman grows up."

Women in the open eye, Vizinczey shrugs, "are financially eccentric and thus can challenge convention, but women who cannot means to challenge gathering have to do it in tip or be marked down predators, even put in jail, interjection to the righteous laws. Predatory relations exist, but they can exist even in between people of the same age."

So prolonged as the relations are fictional, it seems, we are means to suffer them. We all bewail Benjamin"s preference not to run away with Mrs Robinson, but how prolonged would such a coupling have lasted? Not long, according to Theroux, that should meant no good dolour for possibly party. "The classical incident is zero long-term; indeed, she competence not quite wish to see you afterwards. The preliminaries, the half-truths, the confidences, the courtship all these are dispensed with. There isn"t time; she comes true to the point and afterwards goes behind to her life. She is you do what comparison men do to younger women."

Vizinczey vehemently disagrees. "Most relations don"t last, in any case of the age of the couples. Enduring relations rely not usually on the ages of the couples, but possibly or not they are people on the same wavelength, that is because I think cave will go on lasting." Because his sold comparison woman...? She"s Canadian, she"s called Gloria and he"s been tied together to her for 45 years.

* "In Praise of Older Women" by Stephen Vizinczey (Penguin Modern paperback) is accessible fromBooks at �9.99 + 99p p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or revisit books.telegraph.co.uk