Suzanne Harrington: The issue with Leonardo DiCaprio dating younger people has nothing to do with age
'Leonardo DiCaprio, born in 1974, gets older every year, but his girlfriends do not'
By the end of the three-hour long film premiere, joked Ricky Gervais at the 2020 Golden Globes, Leonardo Dicaprio’s date would have already been too old for him: “Even Prince Andrew’s like, come on mate, you’re nearly 50, son.”
DiCaprio, born in 1974, gets older every year, but his girlfriends do not — when they reach 25, they are replaced by a new one. Someone on Reddit did an actual graph — the Leonardo DiCaprio Girlfriend Chart — showing this mathematically. The internet has long been fascinated with the actor’s refusal to date anyone with a fully developed pre-frontal cortex — the bit that regulates decision-making, problem-solving and emotional regulation. The bit that cognitively makes you an adult.
The most recent rumours involve a 19-year-old model called Eden Polani, although TMZ has already quashed this as nothing more than a rumour; they were merely sitting next to each other at a do. However, the fact that sitting next to a female teenager can cause the world to think you’re sexually involved with them illustrates DiCaprio’s predilection for dating people younger than his t-shirts. People younger than Facebook.
An unknown model who shags LDC becomes a known model overnight; quid pro quo. Clever girls. It’s old Leo himself who ends up looking a bit juvenile.
But would it be fun? I ask an actual middle-aged man, who I will call Ashley because that’s his name, his thoughts on dating someone three decades younger. (He is in a relationship with another middle-aged person — me). Excitement, hope, terror, despair, resignation all flash across his face. He says he’d love it for the collagen, but what would they talk about afterwards? TikTok?
I try imagining, as a midlife woman, what it might be like to date a man under 25. All the explaining about music and films and life before the internet. All that sexual energy. A wave of exhaustion washes over me just thinking about it. But hey. If a middle-aged person wants to wear themselves out with someone who still needs to carry ID to get into places, that’s up to the two people involved. It’s not so much the ick factor which is the problem — although age gaps do produce an abundance of ick in those on the outside looking in — as the gender double standard.
What if Leo DiCaprio were Lia DiCaprio, and the youth involved a string of young men? Would a middle-aged star — or a middle-aged nobody — be afforded the same indulgent eye-rolls for consistently dating people 30 years their junior if that star/nobody were a woman?
I’m sticking my neck out here, but I’d hazard a no. A big fat screaming, banner-headline, outraged, Piers Morgan-sized no. And that’s what’s messed up, rather than dating people with underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes.
