Have you ever heard of Bill Belichick? I hadn’t, but apparently he is one of America’s leading football coaches (‘football’ here meaning the mutant form of rugby they play over there, not the real thing we play with a round ball over here). He’s a dour and harsh control-freak who spent 24 years serving as manager of the New England Patriots team: their rough equivalent of Sir Alex Ferguson, but less Scottish and red-nosed. Suddenly, however, Sir Alex has transformed into David Beckham, with photos of him now filling tabloid gossip columns, rather than the sports pages. This is because, just like Fergie with his famous ‘Class of ‘92’, Belichick has publicly demonstrated his commitment towards blooding talented youth – in his case, a 24-year-old former cheerleader and beauty queen named Jordon Hudson, who is almost exactly half a century younger than he is.
Now described as “America’s Most Hated Girlfriend”, Hudson has become the target of much ridicule and disapproval amongst the US public, as has her new Dirty Grandpa. According to the Guardian, the couple “hard-launched [in public] at the American Museum of Natural History Gala in 2024”, which is an impressive feat for a man of that age to achieve. That’s the kind of cheap sex-joke the comedians on America’s biggest TV comedy sketch-show Saturday Night Live were eager to crack themselves, mocking the age-gap duo relentlessly once news of their union broke. In the relevant skit, Donald Trump signed yet another Executive Order named “The Belichick Law”, which would “make it socially acceptable for a man in his 70s to date a 24-year-old”.
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Not going to lie, I find these partnerships that have massive age gaps pretty creepy, regardless of them being straight or gay couples. And we are not stupid or naive enough to believe these relationships are based on love, at least that’s my view. Because what common ground do these couples have? What do they talk about, when they come from two completely different eras? There will be something that both partners benefit from in such an arrangement. I’d say it’s rather obvious the younger half ( and we can look at people such as Ian McKellan and Stephen Fry for examples of equivalent gay relationships ) are in it for financial gains, increased exposure, benefits to their own image and career, as well as other advantages and perks. It always seems to be the younger person who’s the non-famous, non-rich one, too.
The reason I’ll always think ”gold-digger”, when I see somebody decades younger with somebody old enough to be their dad/grandad, is because where are all the young 20/30-something women shacked up with 70-odd year old working class men, living off their old-age pension in a bungalow or assisted-living apartment? We’d see a whole lot more of this if it was a genuine relationship based on love. It’s amazing how much more attractive an elderly person can be to a 20-odd year old when they’re a household name with millions in the bank. But hasn’t it always been the way?
I recommend watching the old “Mrs Merton” interview with Debbie McGee (available on YouTube).
This includes one of the best ever TV jokes when Caroline Aherne asks Debbie “What first attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels?”
All very entertaining and Debbie (both then and afterwards) comes across as a really nice person.
If Our Beloved Leaders have genuine concerns about teaching kids about relationships, this might be more usefully instructive than “Adolescence.”
Of course, big age differences can be and often are challenging, particularly if the”junior” partner is not even adult.
I remember that one. Classic, lol. Bless her..
If both parties get something they really want in exchange for something they’re readily willing to give, what’s wrong with that?
I’ve never said there’s anything wrong with it. I’m making the observation that you’d have to be very naive indeed to think these pairings are based on love, which would be the norm in the vast majority of relationships. This set-up is as old as the hills. But, same as with arseholes, everyone has an opinion on such issues.
Well, if she loves his money and he loves her body, there’s love all around, innit?
It’s generally naive to assume that certain-person making a habit of sometimes having sex with certain-other-person has anything to do with love and not, say, chance and inertia. (Human) male wooing rituals, insofar these are known to me from observation, certainly don’t involve any ‘love’, they’re an essentially mechanic keep-trying-everywhere-until-success procedure¹. And I think that women are ‘spiritually’ exactly equal to the men happen to end up up with here: Both fully deserve each other.
¹ And one which apparently never ends. I recently had the mispleasure of accidentally getting caught in three guys terror-flirting with three young slavic women (certainly all below 25 and probably quite some years). The youngest of them might have been my age (52), the other two were considerably older and seriously ugly. I noticed this when I had stopped at a so far empty table to roll a cigarette and an unpleasant looking grey-haired smallish guy with a big, cancerous-looking wart in his face made of show of pointedly sitting down there without even the custom politeness of asking me something. I then noticed the arrangement I hadn’t cared for so far and as I had no desire to partake, absented myself. Two of the guys were doing the usual talking-and-touching and the one who had just driven me away from this valuable prize did nothing but stare at the youngest of the three women (who wore the least amount of clothing) in a way I had really preferred to avoid noticing.
It’s like if you go to countries such as Thailand or the Dominican Republic. Always older white men with much younger native women. It’s almost like a business arrangement and I guess both parties are exploiting one another, just in different ways. It’s a mutually beneficial set-up and they’re adults making informed decisions about their lives, most of the time*.
*It becomes more of an ethical issue when typically these young local girls are trying to get themselves out of poverty and they see ‘rich’ ( by their standards ) Western men as a ticket out of their deprived situation. Basically this then morphs into a form of prostitution, in my opinion, and it’s arguably not coming from a place of ‘informed decisions’, but of necessity. Sadly when you’re dirt poor you don’t have the luxury of having many options, as we know from throughout British ( and elsewhere ) history, where destitute women ( and children ) had to resort to ‘the world’s oldest profession’ as a means of survival as opposed to choice.
Nowadays in the West, in these times of state benefits and human rights, if we take sex-trafficking out of the equation, I’m wondering just how much of prostitution is actually a choice. Probably more than I care to think about, because they’re not all funding drug habits.
Similar pairings reportedly exist with older white women and young black men in Africa. But what I was really trying to get at is that men, like the mammals they are, are apparently hardwired to “jump up and down and wag their tails” whenever the opportunity arises, even if there’s absolutely no chance of success and that quite a few of them really do regard this as the be-all and and-all of their existence (and – from a civilized standpoint – the outcome is anything but pretty).
NB: This is not a statement about the relative merits of men vs women, I just know one group much better than the other. Drunk middle-aged office woman hunting young black guys (they do actually do that) on a night out are in no way qualitatively different, just more successful (as far as I can tell).
Saved me the bother.
Thanks.
Telly series, “May to December”. It happens. Whatever the reasons it happens.
It happens as it has happened for centuries. Nothing to see here, move on.
Toy boy (boy toy in the US), sugar daddy, catamite.
I don’t have the impression that wide age difference was any more negative for hetero v homo orientation couples. The latter in any case until the last couple of decades were not widely publicised or even widely known at all.
Usually the snide remarks were about the younger partner only in it for the money.
Oh I am laughing. Instead of writing about headline news regarding the gentleman who allegedly set fire to kier’s home, you choose to write about some old football coach in the USA. How weird is that. Can you tell the readers if it is true the media is gagged? Because to be honest I don’t think one person is interested in some old football coa h’s private life, but they just may be interested in the private life of your pm. By the way there are probably only a handful of people in the USA who even know who Kier is. Americans seem to be fixated on your royal family for some reason. Nobody knows why.
I’ve never heard of Belichick or Hudson until now and I hope that I’m going to forget them very quickly. I’m pretty disappointed in this article and in the author. It seems that the old American and his squeeze are here for no other purpose than to be a hook on which Mr Tucker can display his prejudice against gay men and tie in an unrelated story but probably, to be fair, one more in the public interest about NML and the nonsense going on there (and in most of the country’s other museums). But the three parts aren’t related, despite what he says.
Betrayal of the nature of the beast.
Being gay and in a relationship with an ‘older’ man (age difference is 10 years), I object to someone’s statement that it can’t be love. In fact, a fairly big age gap between gay men is very common. Not 20-30 years but most of us have an age gap of between 5-12 years.
as per the above article re Alan Bennett:- the men were young! In their prime! As they grow older together the age gap seems to be an issue, but it’s not. Not at all!