From playboy to playgeriatric; why some men grow old disgracefully

Shares in Pfizer, manufacturers of Viagra, dropped this week when it was announced 85-year-old Hugh Hefner's marriage to 25-year-old Crystal Harris is off.

Shareholders' losses were the world's gain as we will be spared the stomach churning spectacle of creepy Heff taking the blonde bunny up the aisle. Why someone so ancient is getting married is a mystery to me — he's had more intimate encounters than the whole of the Premier League combined.

Way back in his 1960s heyday Heff admitted to be involved with around 11 out of the 12 calendar bunnies a year and was often 'dating' around seven women at once, and why not? He was young, rich, single and was living a hypocrisy free lifestyle which he espoused in the pages of his magazine.

Heff was no smut peddler either because back then the cliché about buying Playboy for the articles was actually true, as the roster of writing talent contributing to Heff's organ was truly awesome, including Arthur C. Clarke, Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Margaret Atwood and Gore Vidal. So he was managing to propagate great art to the masses between the covers of a nudie mag.

That's why it's slightly sad that Heff's turned into such a revolting old fossil. Speaking of which, there is a 29 year age gap between recently knighted Sir Bruce Forsyth and his third missus - a relationship which puts him among the Hollywood elite of James Woods, Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford who are respectively 39, 25 and 22 years older than their wives. The only woman notably older than her man is Demi Moore, a mere 15 years the senior of Ashton Kutcher.

The age disparities among the rich and famous are particularly exaggerated but, as everyone knows, the tendency for males to be older than females is totally normal. In August 2010, Dr. Michael Dunn of the University of Wales Institute, concluded that: "Not once across all ages and countries...did females show a preference for males that were younger than male preferences for females." In other words, women never actually want a significantly younger man on their arms.

The tendency for women to prefer older partners and for men to be pretty happy about this preference is explained in terms of sex-roles specifying that men must be older and more powerful than their female partners in order to protect and provide for their offspring, whereas men look for women who are younger due to their higher levels of fertility, which is not an issue for women looking to reproduce with pensioners (the world's oldest father 'Randy' Ramjeet Raghav has nine years on Heff and according to The Sun is a 'three-times-a-night' man.)

Like many elements of gender relations the age gap is in flux. A study released in 2003 by the Office for National Statistics concluded that the proportion of women in England and Wales marrying younger men rose from 15% to 26% between 1963 and 1998.

The shift in this direction is attributed to women's increasing economic and social power, meaning that younger men are attracted to older partners because they can provide the sort of stability older men were offering to young females.

Despite the evolutionary reasons for these rules of attraction hardwired into us it would be less stomach churning if people didn't break the age old formula of 'half the man's age plus seven' meaning the new Mrs Heff would be 50.