Hollywood's Cradle Robbers

In Hollywood, age is not just a number -- it is also a double standard. One of the most interesting and disturbing phenomena in Hollywood is the pairing of older male stars with much younger female costars. As one article aptly puts it, "Leading men age, but their love interests don’t."

In the article mentioned above, the team at Vulture uses content analysis to explore this age disparity. They decided to focus on a sample of male A-listers, including Denzel Washington, George Clooney, and Johnny Depp. For each subject, they picked "a representative sample of films" where the star had a "notable love interest or wife."

Vulture's findings show a trend: Almost all of the love interests were not even in their mid-thirties while some of these A-listers are already in their sixties. The rare occasions where the age difference dropped a bit were when the partners were also A-listers like Angelina Jolie.

Take Johnny Depp, for instance. Only two of his notable love interests have been in their mid-thirties, and several women whom he kissed onscreen, including Kiera Knightley, Christina Ricci, and Winona Ryder, "would have been carded at the time they swapped spit with the star."

The epitome of this trend is embodied by the James Bond franchise, which features a British secret service agent who changes women more often than Donald Trump makes a stupid comment. Some critics applauded Spectre, the most recent Bond movie, for having the "first age-appropriate Bond girl in as long as we can remember." However, this praise was premature, as Bond's "conquests" in the movie include two women in their late twenties.

Monica Bellucci, age 50, plays the main love
interest of Daniel Craig, age 46.

This age gap in media is an apparent contradiction to reality, where most couples are much closer in age. So, what does this suggest about our media and society? Does it hint that Hollywood is dominated by the male fantasy of dating younger women? Is this phenomenon just ingrained into society due to centuries of older men marrying younger women being the norm?

As Wimmer and Dominick suggested, one of the roles of content analysis is to provide quantitative evidence that makes us more aware of mass media, since this fantasy world influences our daily lives. At the very least, this article's use of numbers was successful enough to merit a follow-up article that followed the same same style but focuses on female actors.

Wimmer and Dominick would probably suggest that Vulture's argument could be solidified by a larger sample size and more data. The study could also be expanded to address potential correlations in mass media. For instance, is there a correlation between the gender of the movie director and the age gap between the costars? Is there a decreasing age gap trend? But overall, this article is a good start at using content analysis to raise awareness of this issue.