Confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon where things that we agree with are considered true simply because they confirm our already established ideas. It’s the opposite of cognitive dissonance, where we simply ignore or refuse to accept things that we disagree with. Both concepts are dangerous traps, often times because we don’t recognise them as factors. Things that we agree with are normal, things we don’t agree with are weird.
Which is why, when I saw a headline from the NY Post which read, “Gen Z Women are Choosing Older Men Over Guys Their Own Age—and It’s Not Because They’re Sugar Daddies”, I suspected that the only reason I was going to click on this link was because the article would tell me something that I wanted to believe.
Let me caveat this: I have been married for 16 years and have no personal interest in this story. It is not about my dating or romantic preferences. Hi, honey! My motivation is more schadenfreude – I want to be happy at other people’s misery. Not just any other person, but the people that have essentially tanked my country in the last 100 days. It’s not a noble motivation, but it’s there and I feel compelled to be honest.
The headline references a somewhat sexist stereotype that younger women would only prefer to date older men for resources and security. The “hook” of the article is that this tired stereotype isn’t actually the reason that Gen Z (defined as women in their 20s) are pursuing men a generation older (30-40) – it argues that it’s not about money, but rather if they dial that birth year back so that it begins with a “19” rather than a “20” the man is less likely to have been sucked into the Rogan/Tate/Petersen worldview.
In other words, these women are more likely to find someone who doesn’t despise them because they’re women.
This headline caught my eye because, in the United States, things seem very bleak. If you know an American, understand that our despair is not just because we have a president who seems to decide policy on whims, a feckless legislature branch unwilling to stop him, and a judicial system that lacks teeth. That would be bad enough, but there is an older generation that cheers all of his actions on, despite having pretended former president Obama was acting like a tyrant because he wanted to break the filibuster rule. Even that is bad enough, but it’s also being cheered on by a younger crowd who believe in some platonic ideal of masculinity that is hyper-competitive and can be “won.” If you’re an American and even vaguely liberal, it seems like you are in enemy territory. This headline told me that while they may be numerous, they are being rejected by the women that they pursue.
It makes me think of the Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ play where the women of Athens and Sparta withhold sex from the men until they end the Peloponnesian war. I support this entirely and wish I could do something more. Why should these women “reward” the type of male who has voted to remove their rights, who views them as less equal, and thinks of them only as a collection of parts.
So, it’s confirmation bias, the article tells me something I want to hear, but as a good skeptic I can’t just swallow this. I must check on it… and one look at the source made me very skeptical. The NY Post – despite being created by an original founder of my country (and terrific rapper), Alexander Hamilton – is now a tabloid. My suspicion was that this article was some clickbait, possibly generated by AI, and would end up trying to sell me a membership to a dating site. The Post article was dated 18 April 2025 and it references an article in the Independent from the 16th. The two articles are so similar that the authors should be sharing credit. They both follow the same structure, both reference the HBO series “White Lotus,” and both have an internet user making a comment that Walton Goggins’ older character probably doesn’t listen to Joe Rogan.
I also discovered an article on Medium, which has the same first six paragraphs, but then ends with a three-paragraph warning that sometimes age-gap relationships also have a power imbalance. Publishing on Medium requires nothing more than an account, so a cut/paste job here isn’t surprising. Like “The Skeptic”, the other two sources have editors to approve stories and help with writing, such as adding an unnecessary “u” to words like “color” and “flavor.”
The story got stranger when I found a link to the same story on LinkedIn, dated the same as the first Independent article. I was surprised when I clicked on the link, because it let me know that I had a LinkedIn account I don’t remember signing up for. It was also the same article as the other two. This fourth version of the story followed the same pattern as the others, but lacked the wordy summary of the White Lotus, or the list of Spring-Summer celebrity romances.
Having been fooled by James Vanderper, I decided to contact ‘James Aaron Brown Dr. Strategic Leadership’ (this is how his name appeared on the LinkedIn profile), expecting nothing. Based on that title, there was no way this was a real person. All I wanted was the justification for the percentage of women dating older men because of their socio-political views. I actually didn’t want this. I wanted to see what would happen if I asked. As an academic I love talking about my research, it’s a thing that we like to do. Asking a specific question like this would either get no response, or it would get the information I wanted.
However, James Aaron Brown Dr. Strategic Leadership, did respond. He thanked me for my email and interest in his writing and provided a list of sources. There were two problems with the list: the first was that no research appeared, not even a link to the alleged Bumble survey. The second problem was that the list of links was a series of articles that told me the younger generation doesn’t view age differences as that important, there is a divide in Americans as women gravitate more to the left while men are basically running to the right, resulting in men having trouble finding dates, and then a Buzzfeed article. Also included as a source was the NY Post article published two days after his LinkedIn version.
At this point, I felt like the James Aaron Brown Dr. Strategic Leadership was a sock puppet using AI to generate articles. I found a James Aaron Brown, a business instructor at National University. National University (NU) is an online only university with a regional accreditation from the WASC. I took this at face value, because trying to understand the accreditation process sent me to a strange, alien, and incomprehensible land. I emailed him again, and then I emailed the writers of the Independent and NY Post.
Brown responded again and, surprisingly, he admitted that the article was AI generated, that he was irresponsible in posting it, and that he was going to pull it down. He did, as well as deleting his LinkedIn profile, which I thought was extreme (between drafts the profile has returned). Something about this whole thing seemed odd, and I don’t like making assumptions. His Instagram link on his email signature went nowhere, a podcast he hosted stopped making episodes in 2023, even his faculty page for the college that employs him has very little actual information other than the most generic business buzzwords.
At the end of all this, my conclusion is the same as my initial suspicion: this was an AI-generated article that appealed to an existing bias. I don’t want to say that I should know better, because I did know better and I still clicked on it. As my cynicism grows, I am starting to view every headline that has some good news in it as dubious. I clicked on this link because I wanted to believe it and because I knew that it was probably bollocks. To repeat from the beginning: the headline makes sense since, in America, conservatism is more extreme and contains a current of hetero-normative patriarchal misogyny. Women, as a population, are becoming more liberal and are turned off by this social movement. This would compel them to seek out populations more amenable to their views – whether that’s an older generation isn’t guaranteed.
The article attempts to capitalise on the popularity of this White Lotus show and two “age-gapped” characters getting together at the end. I’m not one to criticise a pop-culture tie-in to make a point; that’s fine, but the article must succeed in making the point. This article fails in that regard. As I’ve written a few times before, and any honest skeptic will also say, skepticism is hard, and it’s even harder when we have to turn it toward something that we want to believe.
