It is not the "not getting sex" that is traumatic, it is that that experience equates to "I am not lovable" for many men. It's particularly harmful when you see proof that other people are "lovable" and you're not. You feel like there is this world that you're permanently shut out from. Talk about it with adults and successful kids you get told "not to worry about it", "be yourself". You have a problem shared with many other people but you feel alone because (until recently) this problem hasn't been acknowledged.

These negative emotions persist into your college years, 20s, and even longer and sabotage your success with women and domestic life not to mention work and all areas of your life. Even when something good happens your are inclined not to believe it because of what you have internally and the resulting effect is self-reinforcing.

Sure but that’s still bullshit. Teenagers are not feeling they’re unloveable because all of the local teen girls are being swooped up by 30 year old dudes. They may suffer those crises including being unlucky with love and suffering self confidence issues, but 30 year old dudes specifically are a tiny tiny effect on this.

The median teen is interested in teens.

People always get confused with "different people who are different ages at the same time" with "the same cohort which changes in age at different times". Also my explanation was not the best even if it caught some essential features.

I'm not saying that those boys are in competition with 30 year old men, but that those same boys are going to be in a materially better situation when they are 30 years old -- yet they might not be able to take advantage of it because they will still have that deprived and resentful little boy inside.

> Teenagers? How many teenage women do you know of that are fucking 30+ year old men.

Not many teenage women go for 30+ year old men. But many women do prefer men who are sufficiently older than them that the combined effect for young guys is noticeable.

Anecdotally as someone who is now 46, I feel like the attention from much younger women has kept increasing. Additionally the attention has shifted. If a 20-something woman shows interest in me it's almost always sexual rather than a woman looking for a relationship. My dating life is so much easier today than it was when I was 18-20. Heck, it's still easier to find dates today than it was in my 30's.

Wait until you get a wedding ring. The signal of another women's approval increases interest.

It is really fun when you have a seduction going on and your wife understands her role in that is to provide social proof of your desirability.

With hookups through the internet young women are easily preyed on by older men that know the right words and have the resources to carry it out. Traditionally women would be married to older men, if anything their families found it fortunate to have a "stable man". Only recently has it become more taboo but also the easiest to execute.

Great. But the average teenage girl is still more interested in a teenage boy

Unless things have changes since I was a teenage boy (and they might have, that was 30 years ago!), teenage girls are interested in a very, very small subset of available teenage boys while being visibly, publicly disgusted by the rest.

"interested" or "has access to"? most teenagers meet other teenagers in or through school, where they are rigidly separated by year in most activities. it's not surprising they date people exactly their age when that is the majority of people they encounter day-to-day. by college, it seemed to me that the guy was often at least one to two years older in hetero couples. of course, same year was not uncommon, but I can't remember a single case where the woman was more than one year older than the man.

Sure, that’s believable as a casual reason.

I seem to recall a plotline to a movie where everyone takes a pledge to lose their virginity before end of high school.

It's exactly similar to the scenario in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reviving_Ophelia

in which young people experience "narcissistic injury" except it is the boy version instead of the girl version.

> I also think it’s hardly traumatic

This sounds to me like people who tell people with clinical depression to "just cheer up, it worked for me!"

> Teenagers? How many teenage women do you know of that are fucking 30+ year old men.

Plenty. Try seekingarrangement.com