Attraction to Youth or Attraction to Women? Attraction to youthful characteristics is a component of gynephilic attraction in both men and women. Discussion of mechanisms and implications

Attraction to Youth or Attraction to Women? Attraction to youthful characteristics is a component of gynephilic attraction in both men and women. Discussion of mechanisms and implications

by Cloudfindings

2026

cloudfindings.io/paperpdfs/youthattraction.pdf

In the current times, age gaps, attraction, and gender issues are hot topics of modern discourse. One such topic is the attraction to women and the apparent tendency for heterosexual men to desire young women. Aspects of attraction to women have been incorrectly demonized as being rooted in predatory intentions or pedophilic desire, and falsely labeled as an issue of male depravity. In this paper I show with evidence and direct measurement that attraction to youthful characteristics largely overlaps with female characteristics, and that attraction to neotenous characteristics is mostly an innate part of gynephilic attraction, with gynephilic women showing these same patterns.

Attraction to Youthfulness & Gynephilia

Using data from a previous study (Cloudfindings & Younas 2023) where attraction to Youthfulness, femininity, masculinity, and maturity were reported, a factor analysis of these items was conducted in male participants and female participants separately. 149 participants are included in total, 87 females and 62 males.

Males

	F1	F2
Youthful	0.58	-0.45
Feminine	-0.11	-0.87
Masculine	0.85	-0.01
Mature	0.76	0.34

Females

	F1	F2
Youthful	-0.12	-0.86
Feminine	0.35	-0.67
Masculine	-0.87	0.15
Mature	-0.87	0.00

Both analyses revealed that gynephilia (high loading on feminine) factors also have high loadings in the same direction for youthfulness, and mature had strong loadings on the androphilia factor. This shows that attraction to youthfulness is a component of attraction to women, and this occurs in both men and women attracted to women. Interestingly, youthfulness was an even stronger correlate of attraction to women than in men.

The Overlap between Youth and Women

I argue that attraction to women overlaps with attraction to youthfulness in part because physical female characteristics are more similar to children, for a sample women have higher pitched voices, less body hair, and are shorter - sometimes these are taken as pedophilic preferences, but in reality they reflect preference for women. Other preferences claimed pedophilic are either specific to traditional or other norms or claimed by specific culture, rather than being more universal characteristics of being female, or are false equivalence (e.g., children are not necessarily submissive even though attraction to submissiveness has been depicted as pedophilic for this reason).

Female	Child
High pitch voice	High pitch voice	Karthikeyan & Puts 2023
Less body hair	Less body hair	Motosko et al. 2019
Shorter	Shorter	Koziel et al. 1995
More emotionally expressive	More emotionally expressive

Old age, health, and fertility

Old age is widely thought to be unattractive due to reduction of fertility in old age, however more broadly, indicators of old age indicate poor health (e.g., people with drug addictions and a wide range of diseases display faster physical aging) - old age is itself a form of poor health. There is a common stereotype that men “age like wine”, however there is no evidence of this (McLellan & McKelvie, 1993). In reality, older men that are attractive are mainly ones that have retained youthful characteristics (e.g., hair, a strong sense of humor), and have traits which tend to correlate with age (e.g., wealth, stability). Indeed, this is reflected in the factor analyses, youthful weakly loaded on the androphilia factors while strongly loading on the gynephilia factors but maturity loaded on only androphilia - it is maturity, rather than old age which makes women attracted to older men. Importantly though, there was no loading for maturity on the gynephilia factor, suggesting that people attracted to women don’t want immature women, but women who have matured and retained youthful characteristics (such as smooth skin, or sense of humor). 

Conclusion

Overall, this paper demonstrates that attraction to youth associated characteristics is a part of attraction to the female sex in both straight men and lesbian women. Future papers will elaborate on concepts mentioned in this one

Cloudfindings & Younas (2023) Explaining Paraphilia: A Novel Model Explaining A Wide Range of Sexual Interests Continuous With Normal Sexuality. Cloudfindings.io

Karthikeyan, S., & Puts, D. (2023). Voice Pitch. In Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior (pp. 1-11). Cham: Springer International Publishing

Motosko, C. C., Zakhem, G. A., Pomeranz, M. K., Pomerantz, R., Saadeh, P. B., Gothard, M. D., & Hazen, A. (2019). Effect of testosterone on chests and abdomens of transgender men. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 81(2), 634-636.

Koziel, S. K., Hauspie, R. C., & Susanne, C. (1995). Sex differences in height and sitting height in the Belgian population. International Journal of Anthropology, 10(4), 241-247.

Kanazawa, S., & Reyniers, D. J. (2009). The role of height in the sex difference in intelligence. The American journal of psychology, 122(4), 527-536.

McLellan, B., & McKelvie, S. J. (1993). Effects of age and gender on perceived facial attractiveness. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 25(1), 135.