what does this old guy mean by "take advantage of" a young woman?
October 5, 2012 9:20 PM   Subscribe

An old guy (friend/acquaintance) kindly invited me to sleep at his house when I needed a place to sleep one night. I'm a female in my 20's and he was probably in his 60's. He told me he had a couch and a bed (his bed). He said I can sleep on the bed. So I said "oh, you can sleep on the bed." of course implying that I would sleep on his couch. He misunderstood and apparently thought I meant we would sleep together on the bed. So he says, "Oh no, I don't want to take advantage of you, so you sleep on the bed and I take the couch." I was a little weirded out by him saying this. Is this normal? What do you think he meant by "take advantage of" me? ...umm have sex? No, right? I just have a hard time believing that he would even think of something like that to do with someone that is so much younger than him. Is this creepy or not really? I ended up not going, btw.
posted by MiuMiu to Human Relations (45 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
It is totally possible that this is a perfectly honest miscommunication. I have had this exact conversation in both variants ("you are welcome to share my bed with me" and "you are tall, you take the bed, I'll take the couch") and it is never not confusing and awkward unless you are already on spooning levels of intimacy.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:25 PM on October 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

"Taking advantage of" someone can mean either sexually or not (he may have meant, I don't want to take advantage of your kindness). In this context it's hard to say, and he may have been trying to set you at ease, or making an awkward joke. Who knows.

It is a good idea to trust your intuitions about situations like this - "if you feel creeped out, don't stay" is a good rule. It doesn't mean he is creepy necessarily, but that doesn't matter - you are perfectly entitled to avoid situations that make you feel weird.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:38 PM on October 5, 2012 [5 favorites]


Ummm, yeah. Think about that for a bit.

I don't think he was being creepy, but when you said he could sleep in the bed (in his mind - with you) his mind went straight to sex, and so said that wouldn't be happening.
posted by heyjude at 9:42 PM on October 5, 2012 [15 favorites]

How is it creepy? He thought you were suggesting the two of you sleep together and he declined. We'll probably have the next AskMe from an old guy saying "This youngster was going to stay at my house and she wanted to sleep with me in my bed. I said no, but is that weird or what?"
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 9:44 PM on October 5, 2012 [74 favorites]

He didn't want to put you out. He wanted you to be comfortable - not take advantage of your willingness to share the bed - he thought that was silly, and wanted you to have the bed alone when he slept on the sofa. why do so many people bring their weird sexual hangups to perfectly normal communication?
posted by luriete at 10:00 PM on October 5, 2012 [19 favorites]

Datum: my grandmother routinely says something "turns me on" when she's certainly not talking about sex.
posted by Apropos of Something at 10:04 PM on October 5, 2012 [6 favorites]

"Taking advantage" is sometimes a euphemism for sexual assault but I highly doubt that this man was implying that. IMO, "taking advantage" doesn't necessarily mean sex, even in a sexual context. For instance, if an adult shares a bed with a child and has sexual thoughts, that is considered "taking advantage" even if there is no physical contact. I think that's what he means: if he shared a bed with you, he feared that he would inevitably have sexual thoughts, which would be unfair to you.
posted by acidic at 10:15 PM on October 5, 2012

This sounds like a miscommunication to me.


On preview, others have said it better but I also think he's using it as it is/was used by people of his generation; as a euphamism used in polite company to imply non-consensual sex. In other words, I think he was actually trying to be a gentleman. (Unless he was waggling his eyebrows or or giving you a big wink.)

I'm going to go with not creepy, but the thing that really matters is that your gut said, "" and you listened to it. Keep on doing it and it will serve you well.

I get the ageist sentiments -- I'm almost 50 -- but it's not like this was a job interview. Try telling 20-year old you not to be squicked out by the 60-year old you think might be hitting on you. I'd cut the OP a vary narrow slice of slack on that count.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:16 PM on October 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Seriously, what difference does it make how old he is? You either trust him enough to respect your boundaries that you feel comfortable sleeping at his house, or you don't. If he was 22 that would make him less likely to try to initiate some unwanted behavior with you? Or it would be somehow better if he did it than an older guy?
My guess from reading this is that he did mean "taking advantage of you" in a sexual way, because i cant see any other way he could take advantage of you when you are the one getting a favor from him, and this is a common meaning if the phrase But I also think that he was joking because theres nothing else in your account that indicates that he really expected anything sexual from you and in fact he declined to share the bed with you. Maybe he has some faint hope that you are attracted to him. Yes, older men still have sexual desires even towards younger women. But did he actually expect anything to happen or plan to try something with you? He's your friend so only you can answer that based on the sum of your experience with him.
posted by banishedimmortal at 10:26 PM on October 5, 2012

Sounds pretty innocent to me.
posted by the noob at 10:28 PM on October 5, 2012 [3 favorites]

It sounds to me like he thought you were assuming that he offered you a place to sleep because he wanted to pressure you into sex.

Which has no bearing on whether he really did want to pressure you into sex. (But I'm inclined to think not -- if he did, why would he assure you that he didn't?)

Either way, it sounds like just an awkward moment, and nothing nefarious.
posted by Sara C. at 10:35 PM on October 5, 2012 [4 favorites]

You don't have to read between the lines, he was saying you were implying that sex might be in the picture by sleeping together in the bed. His offer of the bed was from the standpoint of him staying on the couch, and it broke down under an assumption that you wouldn't sleep on the couch in any case. It was just an awkward moment.
posted by rhizome at 10:37 PM on October 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I thought of it six times before I even finished reading the question, and I'm a woman, and I don't even know you. So, yes, he thought of it. But I don't find it creepy. It might be kind of weird to say such a thing in response (i.e. not something I would say, I would laugh and just say I prefer the couch), but I 'm not like, "Wow, so creepy."
posted by amodelcitizen at 11:01 PM on October 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

Just a miscommunication! If you guys were the same age, it would have been weird, too. Except at, say, 35, he would have said, "No, that would be way too intense," and you both would have laughed awkwardly.

Um, sexual interest spans all ages and life stages. I once had a friend ask me about a man about 53 years old: "But, you think he can still...father children?" Not as in did he want to, but as in would one single act do him in. Jesus. Wait till you're his age and then see if you're interested in sex or not.
posted by skbw at 11:03 PM on October 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's creepy, but you did, and you are entitled to feel creeped.
posted by oceanjesse at 11:39 PM on October 5, 2012

I'm throwing in with ThatCanadianGirl. If, as you think, he thought that you were suggesting you two sleep in the same bed, then he was probably feeling that he was the one facing a creepy suggestion, and had to think of the least awkward way of refusing it. In that case, I think that a reference to not "taking advantage" of you (a phrase which, in this context, I generally understand as being sexual) is about the best he could have done.

Look at it this way: I'm a married male. If a woman acquaintance - even one my own age - suggested that she and I sleep in the same bed, and acted like the suggestion was no big deal, I would be enormously taken aback and try to think of the best way to say that it was out of the question.
posted by CustooFintel at 11:50 PM on October 5, 2012 [15 favorites]

Does no one here make speech errors? Especially in awkward little encounters with people you don't know well when there's no cultural script to follow?

It's entirely possible he did mean he didn't want to take advantage of your generosity, in the ordinary modern sense, even though he was the one offering something. You declined half his offer by offering something back, where as host he didn't want to take from you at all. But there's not an obvious script for explaining that. He may simply have grasped at a relevant phrase in what was already an awkward negotiation.

That said, I think the sexual reading is plausible, but in that case, I'd guess he was as surprised as you were that the conversation went there. I mean, in this reading, he declined with a polite euphemism. Seems like a reasonable thing to do in an awkward moment.

If you got creepy vibes from something else, I'd take that a lot more seriously. But just this quick negotiation where he's not at all edging toward the idea, not so much.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 11:57 PM on October 5, 2012 [4 favorites]


I am constantly surprised to find out that men old enough to be my grandfather--or even perhaps great-grandfather-- would be totally happy to have sex with me. It happens. Frequently. Not every older guy, but in this context I think his brain ah, meant that. Or he thought you wanted to. I'm not sure which. But just because he's so young and you're so old doesn't mean he's immune to having those thoughts.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:02 AM on October 6, 2012 [3 favorites]

My interpretation is not that he was actually unable to stop himself having sex with you, but that he was making a subtle joke at the idea that he would be thinking of having sex with you. Coupled with a basic decision not to force a young girl to sleep on his couch while he had a nice comfy bed. This was an awkward misunderstanding, not anything actually threatening.


posted by Jimbob at 1:12 AM on October 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

He probably thought you were propositioning him.

As for your assumption that 60-somethings never ever have sex with, no.
posted by zachawry at 1:31 AM on October 6, 2012 [10 favorites]

Sounds like he was being a pretty decent dude.

In our society, 60-year old men are expected to want nothing BUT sex with 20-year old girls. If he thought that you were suggesting that the two of you sleep together, then his attempt to politely turn you down - by making himself the butt of the joke - was pretty decent of him.

Still, since he might think that you made the first move, you might want to make it clear that you are not interested in him sexually before you "take advantage" of his hospitality in the future.
posted by paperzach at 2:46 AM on October 6, 2012 [10 favorites]

This whole question makes me feel bad.

Here is this nice old dude trying to be nice and letting some stranger take over his own bed, and he's being picked apart for maybe having a sexy thought cross his mind.

And frankly, it wouldn't be all the "creepy" for an older man to be interested in a younger adult woman. It's how he goes about showing his interest. People don't suddenly turn disgusting and creepy after age fifty.
posted by Blisterlips at 2:48 AM on October 6, 2012 [46 favorites]

As an old person - well, old enough to seem old to you, by which I mean that I'm in my mid-late thirties - I'll let you in on a little secret: young people do not magically become totally sexually unattractive once you're out of your twenties. Nor has my subjectivity changed dramatically to the point where I'm all "I am a dignified matron in early middle age who never thinks of sex and the bodies of twenty-somethings all have black bars across them as far as I'm concerned". Indeed, if some twenty-something who was emotionally adult and congenial and into older women was into me, I would go out with her. (This is not as uncommon among queer folks as you might expect.)

You will have the exciting opportunity to find out about this stuff later in life. You're going to be shocked - shocked! - about how much the old are like the young, and how little we like being told that our sexuality and bodies are gross. You'll probably also realize that you still notice cute young people, but that the thought of dating someone at such a different life stage is unappealing regardless of how they look. I myself have grown into my sexuality enough that I can think "that person is really cute" in a comfortable, abstract way without feeling guilty that I Have Sexual Feelings Even Though I Am An Old and without any particular interest in pursuing the situation, which is about twenty million times more healthy than my sexuality when I was a Young Person Who Deserved To Have Sexual Feelings According To Our Culture.

There is nothing wrong with an old person being open to having sex with a young person. Some young people, in fact, are into that. I know one. Propositioning people who have not expressed interest in being propositioned; propositioning people when it is inappropriate; approaching people in a way that is creepy, exploitative and gross; ignoring 'I am not into you that way' signals and propositioning anyway; using money or social power to get sex; treating younger people like objects instead of like real people - those things are gross! There are plenty of old dudes who do those things to young women, but it's not because they're old - it's because they old entitled assholes.

If the dude wasn't giving you any creepy vibes, didn't drop any innuendo and in fact actually turned down what he heard as an offer to sleep with him, well, he's probably writing some other message board saying "this troubled young woman who thought she had to sleep with me as a condition of sleeping over - what can I do to help her? I had no idea!"

It sounds as though the mere idea that an old guy could think of you sexually flips you right out and pushes this into "something must be dangerous here" territory.

It's pretty sad, but I have known people who've had to engage in survival sex - sleeping with people they didn't want to sleep with in order to have a roof over their heads. I've also encountered guys trolling for that kind of arrangement. That stuff can really mess with your head if you have to do it.
posted by Frowner at 4:28 AM on October 6, 2012 [46 favorites]

I don't see why it would be hard to believe that an older man might have a sexual thought about a much younger woman. For one thing, movies, magazines and TV portray sexuality as being exclusively for and about young people, while mainstream porn magazines and movies are full of nothing but 18- to 25-year-old women. You have to go to some effort to find magazines that feature older women naked and provocatively posed (and these are considered "fetish" magazines, and many people would think a guy slightly weird for liking them.) In our culture most models become "over the hill" by their late 20's and regular women start becoming "invisible" to men after the age of 40.

People are hard-wired to find youth sexy because young adults are the most suited for reproduction. We're naturally attracted to people who look the most healthy and fertile. And this is culturally reinforced in the West by our media which celebrates and is obsessed by the sexuality of the young but rarely portrays older women as sexually beings (unless they are going for a laugh.)

Many older people find that their taste in potential sex partners broadens with age to include people much older than they liked when they were young, but that doesn't mean they start finding young people physically repulsive. If the guy is still interested in sex then he almost certainly finds 20 year old women sexy and attractive, even if he actually prefers to sleep with women his own age.

And for the record, I don't think what he said was creepy. I think he misunderstood what you meant and was trying to be a gentleman about turning you down. He was refusing what he thought might be a sexual proposition while being polite enough to avoid implying that YOU wanted it. Or he was worried that you might be thinking he offered to let you spend the night in order to have the opportunity to take advantage of you sexually and wanted to make sure you understood that hanky-panky was not his goal.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 4:38 AM on October 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

Sure, he could've been open to something sexual. Yeah, old guys want younger women, and whether it's creepy or not is cultural.

god knows why they think anyone that age would consider sleeping with them

In Truman Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's Holly Golightly explains how she trained herself to like older guys, because they were the ones with the money. A couple common words about this phenomenon, which may be more meaningful to the OP now because of this thread are gold-digger and Sugar Daddy.
posted by Rash at 5:40 AM on October 6, 2012

[Sorry, unfortunate derail deleted; carry on.]
posted by taz at 5:58 AM on October 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'm 58. When I was a teenager, boys were told not to "take advantage" of girls and girls were told not to let boys "take advantage" of them. The whole thing is based on the notion that boys were only interested in whatever physical contact they could get from the girl. Girls needed to resist to, you know, protect their reputation. Then, as now, most teenagers took parental advice with a grain of salt (plus, we're talking 1960s, the dawn of the "sexual revolution"), but I'm not surprised to hear this phrase from someone who grew up with it, especially considering your age.

In fact, he might be a little weirded out by the thought that, you—a virtual teenager—would make such a suggestion. It may come as a surprise to young folks, but many of us older people aren't the least bit interested in having sex with you. As a male friend of mine put it, if I could get past the inexperience, I would still have to make conversation the next day—and what in god's name could we talk about?
posted by she's not there at 6:44 AM on October 6, 2012 [12 favorites]

I think there are four elements here that are getting conflated.

Sexual Attraction -- Encountering someone you find attractive (which probably, on some level, stems from sexual attraction). It's extremely transient, and there doesn't seem to be much done about it; it affects pretty much everyone regardless or age, gender, sexual attraction, etc.

Sexual Thoughts -- Consciously exploring that moment of attraction. Maybe this is idle fantasy, maybe it's evaluation of someone as a sexual or romantic partner. Again, it happens all the time to all sorts of people and tends to get filtered by appropriateness or further consideration (see she's not there's comment above on why an older person might discount a younger person as a sexual/romantic partner).

Sexual Acts -- Taking it into the real world. The previous two categories take place inside people's heads, and there isn't much anyone can do about it. Most importantly for this question, no one, not the OP and especially not a bunch of aliases on the internet, can know what was going on inside this old guy's mind and how seriously he took any of it. Reading the description, it sounds to me that he did not have intentions in the "Sexual Acts" are and was trying to make that clear to you. It is possible for two people to share a room or even a bed without any sexual intent. Of course, that doesn't mean there wasn't any, which brings us to ---

How the OP Feels about It -- Your feelings are your feelings, and they are valid. Whatever this guy's intent, you are entitled to feel uncomfortable about it and act on those feelings. How I interpret this exchange would depend a lot on physical cues -- how he looked at you, how he presented the idea. Since we can't know those things, you needed to examine how you felt and either take him up on the offer or make other arrangements. Neither was a "bad decision."

It's kind of sad things are like this, and it gets in the way of legitimate friendships (and even romantic/sexual relations, which are possible, although difficult) between older and younger people. I have benefited immensely from my friendships with older people, and I hope my younger friends feel the same way about me.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:14 AM on October 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

How does communication work? Why is it that transmitters and receivers fail to sync? If it's easy for speakers of the same language to mis-connect, imagine how different languages and cultures do when trying to present a concept. The cultural divide here is twofold.... male/female and old/young.

Synchronizing minds means the semaphores and tokens have to not only be received, but contextually interpreted in a compatible fashion.

Who knows what the old guy was thinking? Maybe not even the old guy? Who knows IF you, a 20 something with no place to stay even WAS thinking? I find the process rare in people of any age.

The easiest way to dissolve misunderstanding is to cultivate recognizing the discomfort that happens when you encounter it, and then ACT on that by phrasing a quick clarification. As you age, you get progressively better at the political aspect of doing this, and frankly, it's one of the discriminators of maturity, kind of like planning to have a place to spend the night every night ! Countering that increased skill is a progressively decreasing patience to employ it on the undeserving.

As an adult silverback, I cannot reliably communicate to teens, tweens, and twenties who are my own sex and in whom I have absolutely no sexual interest. Cross-cultural. We are in different time/space. Even simple words like "wrong", or "sick" represent more symbol space to the young than old. At the same time, we have our antiquarian interpretations of lots of other words.

For uncountable decades, old men have offered their hospitality to the weak, the unfortunate, and yes, even the poor planners among us, with no motivation other than being good. I have heard that sometimes, you can even find young men doing this.

It's not always about sex.

posted by FauxScot at 7:27 AM on October 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

To the OP: would your reaction to this simple misunderstanding have been any different had the gentleman in question been in his 20s rather than in his 50s?
posted by runningdogofcapitalism at 7:29 AM on October 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

If you don't have the creeps about this guy (and women usually know these things, I have a sixth sense for fucking creepy dudes and there are older men I would sleep on a curb before I'd stay with them and likewise others that I would unhesitatingly accept this sort of invitation from if necessary), then I'd suggest he meant he wouldn't want to make you sleep on his couch, aka "take advantage of you." Especially if he's old fashioned, I'd consider it a "gentlemanly" gesture.
posted by araisingirl at 7:56 AM on October 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

He could have meant "taking advantage of your kindness/naïveté/embarrassment" at needing a place to stay.
posted by barnone at 8:10 AM on October 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

It's kind of a trope for a creepy guy to offer a place to stay, or a ride, or whatever and then try to turn that into "I let you stay here, so now you have to sleep with me!" My reading of your interaction with this guy is that he was aware of this trope and afraid you thought he was being a creep who was turning an offer of help into a proposition, panicked and responded with the "no, I'm not trying to take advantage of you!" comment.

But I wasn't there, so that's just my best guess -- it's entirely possible he was intending to proposition you and panicked because he thought you'd picked up on it and was trying to cover his tracks with the awkward comment.

Like a lot of other folks have said, whatever his intent, it's good to trust your response and stay away when something freaks you out like that. (Even assuming he didn't try anything, you probably wouldn't have slept well worrying about his comment!)
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:39 AM on October 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

Being 60-something means he has grew up in a time when not everything was about sex. It was innnocent.
posted by dzot at 9:09 AM on October 6, 2012

Not a direct answer to your question, but:
None of us old guys actually are aware we are really old. In our minds we are still all the ages we've ever been. As my parents used to annoy me by saying: "Someday you'll understand."
posted by cccorlew at 10:19 AM on October 6, 2012 [8 favorites]

My read is that he thought YOU were putting the make on him and he wanted to be clear he wasn't interested in sex with you while saving face for you. In short, he was acting very polite and gentlemanly.
posted by saucysault at 10:46 AM on October 6, 2012 [3 favorites]

He sounds like a nice guy trying to do you a favor, and that's it. It's fine that you decided not to take him up on it, but there's no reason to extrapolate that he A) wanted to have sex with you (totally the opposite in fact), or B) was creepy for using the phrase "taking advantage" of you.

After all, you're the one that suggested he take the bed. He could have read that as you suggesting you wanted to share the bed with him and have sex, which he quickly vetoed. How is that creepy?

OR, he could have read it just as you meant it, as him taking the bed while you slept on the couch. The latter would have made him, a man raised in a time when men routinely did things like give up their comfortable seats for women as a gesture of respect, feel uncomfortable. To him, that would feel like he was taking advantage of you.

Even if he did think you were suggesting sex, and considered it, that wouldn't make him a monster. Maybe your comfort zone is to date people your own age, or slightly older/younger, but that doesn't mean everyone else's is.

I'm a 46 year-old woman, and I've been propositioned by men both younger and older than I am*. Whether I take someone up on it or not is going to be much more about the individual than his age. As long as we're talking about two consensual adults, there is no "creepy" cutoff age. It's all about your own personal preferences.

In this case, it sounds like you and the friend/acquaintance were on the same page, so it's all good, right?

Gotta say, though, that if I were the guy and saw this question, I'd feel pretty put out by it. You call him an "old guy" and then pretty much imply that he's a creepy sexual predator.

Doesn't sound like you two are very good "friends".

*Women, too, come to think of it.
posted by misha at 10:57 AM on October 6, 2012 [9 favorites]

It could be a lot of things. He doesn't want to take advantage of your space, leave you up all night with an uncomfortableness because there's A Guy In Bed With You, whatever. Maybe he thought you thought that you staying over meant sex had to be involved. There's no real way of knowing, short of asking the guy.

Given his age I'd say that "take advantage of" doesn't have to be sexual, but maybe a poor choice of words. Though as always, follow your instincts, and if a situation makes you uncomfortable, avoid.

It's usually a good idea to be ridiculously clear about sleeping arrangements, even with people you know well. "I can't kick you out of your own bed! I'll be fine on the couch." That clarifies where everyone is going to go, in a polite way.
posted by cmyk at 1:04 PM on October 6, 2012

Maybe he thought you wanted to have sex with him and he was being a gentleman about it.
posted by wandering_not_lost at 3:59 PM on October 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

I'm a woman in my sixties. I had an online friendship for a year or so with a man in his twenties. When he had to drive through my city in his way elsewhere, I invited him to stop over for coffee or a meal or a night. He thought I wanted to have sex with him. Echoing several posters here who wonder why so many young people think old people 1) want to have sex with them and 2) are creepy and 3) are automatically undesirable. OP, the guy was trying to be nice to you.
posted by melesana at 11:03 PM on October 6, 2012 [4 favorites]

You are friends in the Facebook sense. Acquaintances. He's saying "no, you take the bed and you don't have to have sex with me in exchange for taking the bed." You've read way too much into it. The thread was over-moderated and some useful comments about ageism were removed.
posted by fixedgear at 9:02 AM on October 7, 2012

He didn't think it was appropriate for the two of you to sleep in the same bed, because for his generation, that implies a sexual relationship and that's not what he wants with you. He was just trying to clarify that.

I know a number of decent 60-something guys that take a benevolent interest in younger women without trying to hit on them, and it sounds like this guy is in that category. Does he think you're hot? We have no way of knowing? Is that possible? Of course! Sexuality is a lifelong characteristic of humans. But people don't always choose to act on their impulses.
posted by xenophile at 11:18 AM on October 7, 2012

Absent any weird or creepy subtext, I could totally see this coming from a place of misunderstanding as seems to be the consensus in this thread. HOWEVER, if you're instincts are still telling you that there was something creepy or weird in this interaction, even if it doesn't logically make sense, I would encourage you to trust that instinct.
posted by Blasdelb at 12:28 PM on October 7, 2012

Sure, but sometimes the creepiness is a psychological projection.
posted by rhizome at 3:45 PM on October 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


The implication of that is entirely unclear.

Say "You take the bed, I'll take the couch."
posted by yohko at 4:26 PM on October 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

« Older I want to open an online store...   |  What are some movies that deal... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.