Are We Allowed To Be Annoyed With Paul Hollywood For Dating A Younger Woman?

Summer Monteys-Fullam is the girlfriend of Bake Off’s Paul Hollywood and people aren’t happy about it. Why? Because, in a classic iteration of the ‘older man meets younger woman and leaves his wife’ genre, she is 22 and he is 52, making him 30 years her senior.

The tabloid press has unearthed a now deleted Instagram post from Monteys-Fullam’saccount in which she thanks her ‘amazing boyfriend’ Hollywood. “You have turned me from a girl to a woman’ she wrote, before adding ‘and to a house woman’ which she then punctuated with a laughing emoji.

The pair are reported to have begun dating last year after he and his wife of 20 years parted ways. It is well documented that he had previously cheated on her with his US Bake Off co-star Marcela Valladolid. Hollywood is alleged to have met Summer while she was working in a pub where, wait for it, his wife was celebrating her birthday.

On social media, the whole thing was described as ‘grim’ by one user, another said ‘the power imbalance’ of Hollywood and Monteys-Fullam’s relationship was ‘seriously gross’ and somebody else wrote ‘OMG this is peak dating one of your dad’s friends from the cycling club’.

You may dislike Hollywood because he followed the Bake Off money to Channel 4 as opposed to ‘doing the right thing’ along with his original co-stars but he hasn’t actually done anything wrong here, not legally anyway. The older man/younger woman conundrum may be hackneyed, cringeworthy and, even, seem unsavoury (sorry), but, it is worth noting that often, as in this case, it involves two consenting adults. Your ick-ometer might go wild as you read about how Hollywood scoped Summer out while at a party with his wife, there is no law against dating somebody younger than you. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that Hollywood is just Summer’s one true dad or shag and we should all respect that.

The mythologising of older men is at once frustrating and intriguing in equal measure: they’re often referred to as ‘silver foxes’ and ‘dad or shags’. An age gap can be good, it can be bad and it can be downright creepy. A young woman dating an older man is often romanticised but it can be very, very problematic too – take Lynn Barber’s story as told in An Education, for instance.

So, what is it about the Hollywood scenario that has irked people so much? The cliché of a midlife crisis aged man buying a sports car and/or courting younger women certainly betrays a serious lack of original thought. Imagine, for a moment, that Hollywood had gone off to spend some time in an Ashram to realign himself as he enters the second half of his life? That would, at least, have been a bit imaginative. Clichés are annoying because of their painful predictability.

More than this, it is undeniable that there is a power imbalance whenever a wealthy older man is involved with a younger woman without similar means of her own. This is something that Monica Lewinsky has reflected on at length in relation to her encounters with Bill Clinton, reframing them through the lens of #MeToo. Hollywood’s case is not helped by the fact that Monteys-Fullam has credited him with turning her ‘from a girl to a woman’ and not just any sort of woman, ‘a house woman’ no less. Maybe that’s one of those indecipherable cutesy private couple jokes or, perhaps, she really does mean that he has, quite literally, turned her into a fully-fledged house wife, we’ll never know. Either way, she is certainly not unhappy and her Instagram post is testament to that. Hollywood is no Clinton and Summer has given no indication that she is anything other than consenting and happy in her relationship.

READ MORE: The Debrief Investigates The 'Dad or Shag' Phenomenon

Perhaps Hollywood, the great villain of TV cookery shows, has something in common with the most hated man in Western democracy - Donald Trump? Trump is 24 years older than his current wife, Melania. Indeed, every time he has married his new wife has been younger than the last. Many people find it hard to believe that Melania could actually love Trump which, of course, is not helped by the fact that she generally looks very uncomfortable. However, as with Summer, she has given the world no indication that she is in her relationship because of anything other than her own free will. Whenever an ageing man – be he a celebrity baker or a politician – partners with a younger womanit’s frustrating because it reinforces the fact that we live in a world where male privilege rules to the extent that there is still a pervasive narrative that women over the age of 40 are ‘on the shelf’ while men can do pretty much whatever they like.

Indeed, only yesterday a study was published in the journal PsyArXivwhich found that older heterosexual men like older women but they would still prefer to be in a relationship with a younger one. The research found that the youngest age of prospective female partner that a man would consider remains the same – a woman in her 20s – no matter how old a man gets. In essence, he just expands his range as he ages. This, said one of the study’s lead authors, is because ‘natural selection has probably shaped men’s sexual strategies to include a particular interest in highly fertile, young women’. However, it’s worth pointing out that this study actually confounds the idea that older men are only interested in younger women.

Professor Madeleine Fugere is the author of The Social Psychology of Attraction and Romantic Relationships. She told The Debrief that her 'gut feeling' is that 'we become uncomfortable when the age difference [between a man and a woman] starts to resemble that which would occur between a father and daughter' and all that implies. However, she also pointed out that the reasons for this 'could also be evolutionary in nature, it may be that if the age difference between a younger woman and an older man is too great, the man may not be able to help care for potential offspring over the long term'.

As a teaching psychologist, Fuegere noted that when she spoke to her students about this issue 'they felt that life stage rather than age might be important; so if women are at a younger age (for example, college students) comfort with a ten year age difference might be reduced because an 18 year old and a 28 year old might at different life stages, whereas the difference between a 40 year old and a 50 year old might not cause so much discomfort because those individuals are likely at more similar life stages'.

Fugere also told The Debrief that there is scientific evidence which suggests that ‘dad or shag’, whereby younger women find older man inexplicably attractive, is both a psychological and evolutionary phenomenon and not just a cultural cliché.

‘The research in this area shows that not only are younger women attracted to older men, but older men are attracted to younger women, a convenient situation for heterosexual couples’ she said. ‘When we ask men and women what aged partner they would prefer, men tend to say that they would like a female partner who is a few years younger and women tend to say that they would like a male partner who is a few years older. This preference exists cross-culturally which suggests that it is nearly universal’. Professor Fugere pointed out that this phenomenon persists throughout our lives, as men age they prefer even younger partners while as women age they continue to prefer older partners until around the age of 70.

In evolutionary terms, Professor Fugere said that for men it is, simply, about ‘ensuring that a prospective partner is fertile’ while women consider the resources an older man might have ‘such as income’. ‘An older partner may be in a better position to provide stability, he may also be more mature which a woman might prefer’, she explained.

We portray older men as more romantic, wiser and kinder. Obviously, this is completely flawed because age doesn’t always prevent you from being a terrible person. It would be reasonable for you to feel that Hollywood is 'sleazy' or 'gross', but that would be your subjective opinion. Like it or not, there is an entire subsection of erotic fiction on Amazon devoted to the ‘Daddy Complex’ which contains titles such as ‘Her Mother’s Boss’ and ‘Her Guardian Neighbour’. Whether the primary consumers of this genre are older men or younger women is up for discussion.

And so, while Hollywood may be on sound legal ground he has undoubtedly stepped on one of a patch of societal moral quicksand. Nobody likes it when a man ‘trades his wife in’ for a younger model as though she is a car. Paul Hollywood has opened up an age-old debate: it might be a cliché, but, regardless of whether older men go for younger women because of nature or nurture, is it sexist for them to do so?

Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.