The Illusionist. The Heartbreak Kid. The Band’s Visit. Sideways. You, Me and Dupree. No Country for Old Men. What do they all have in common?

Like oh so many works of fiction, they feature a romantic pairing between a man, and a much younger (and arguably much hotter) woman. In The Heartbreak Kid, we get forty-three year-old Ben Stiller paired, first with thirty-year old Malin Akerman, then with thirty-two year-old Michelle Monaghan. In The Band’s Visit, the lovely Ronit Elkabetz, forty-two, pursues a romantic encounter with the much older Sasson Gabai. Sideways sort of makes up for its pairing of Thomas Haden Church, forty-eight, and Sandra Oh, thirty-seven, with its love match between Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen who is (gasp!) six years his senior, though let’s face it, those six years haven’t done much to level the playing field between the two in the looks department, have they?

The Illusionist is in a category all by itself, because it gives us a story about childhood sweethearts who are the same age, yet when they grow up, the man is played by thirty-nine year-old Edward Norton, while the woman is played by Jessica Biel, who’s thirteen years younger. One effect of such casting is to give the illusion that, while it’s quite all right for a thirty-nine year-old man to look his age, his thirty-nine year-old lover should of course look like she’s twenty-six.

The other films, with their pairings of older men and younger women, simply feed the already rampant assumption that every average schmuck can reasonably expect to shag, marry, and be eagerly sought by women far younger and hotter than he, while implying to all us women that, however svelte our bodies, however glossy our hair and toned our skin may be, we should be content to snuggle up to, spread our legs for, kneel down and give blowjobs to craggy, flabby, droopy guys ten or twenty years older than us.

Thanks.

Now, before you start throwing rocks and castigating the superficiality rampant in my critique (Age and beauty don’t matter! It’s what’s inside that counts!), I’ll head you off and agree.

I’d be perfectly content if there were any kind of balance, if for every film where an aging, thickening beauty like Matt Dillon was paired up with a fresh and willowy Kate Hudson, we got a romance between Emma Thomson and Justin Timberlake, a fuckfest featuring Carrie Ann Moss and Gael Garcia Bernal, a film where Cillian Murphy desperately pursues a romance with, say, Meryl Streep. And of course, such films exist (Young Adam and Shadowboxer are two examples), but they’re comparatively rare.

And I’ll readily concede that the trope of the older man and the younger woman reflects history and reality, to a degree. All over the world, in all periods of history, including our own, young girls have been married off to men two, three, four times their age, and in many socioeconomic environments, it’s been typical for men who’ve been out in the world long enough to establish economic stability to take to wife a young woman just as she’s ready to leave the nest.

But that’s not the world being portrayed in any of these films. And it’s certainly not my world. Films that portray couples where the man does all the financial heavy lifting while his partner coifs her hair and arranges their social engagements, thereby cultivating an expectation in women that a man should take care of them, are as irritating as those that encourage every pasty cubicle slave in slacks and a button-up to comb the earth for his very own Keira Knightley.

I hope that now that women have joined not only the ranks of authors and artists, but of filmmakers, as well, portrayals of love and sex will more often be egalitarian, or, failing that, cater to the fantasies of women as well as men.