@knightkamia:
With regards to hard numbers and age gaps: To my recollection, there has been ample work done on what age partners men and women prefer (it looks like you can just google "age preferences by gender," if you want to find the studies); the pithy upshot is that women
tend to prefer men around their age, whereas men tend to always prefer youngish women no matter what age they are. There's bar graphs and they're kind of darkly hilarious in some cases.
We have some guesses as to the (kind of unfortunate) evolutionary reasons behind this, but I do believe that older-male/younger-female consequentially ends up happening more often as a fairly straightforward result of that.
@Eresta:
For me that's partially because the primary issue of too-young age-gaps is not "ick factor", but fundamentally the power-imbalance that opens the door to (not even necessarily intentional) abuse. Since there's also a fundamental male/female power imbalance—though it's not all exactly in the same dimensions—I'm
extra concerned about older-men/younger-women couples, and a little less concerned about younger-man/older-women couples, and will allow for slightly larger age-gaps there accordingly (gay couples being somewhere in-between).
Which is to say, yes, I'm totally holding a double-standard here. (I believe it's justified, though I'm aware that that's something to be very careful about, and as such I will not profess absolute confidence about my judgement on that front.)
There's a bunch of extra dimensions to this, too, because this isn't even real-world stuff but fictional. And so for instance I'm even more forgiving of younger-male relationships in something
aimed at a male audience (as this appears to be to me), partially because that's not providing fuel to exacerbate any common real-world issue in, say, the way that encouraging younger-female/older-male relationships would
(Note: If necessary, see above discussion of hard data backing up the statement, that one of these issues is notably more pronounced. I'm not pulling that declaration out of my ass.).
And similarly but as a quite separate consideration, I also consider men to have a
little more right to put
themselves in a compromising situation in fiction they consume for entertainment purposes.
Basically the considerations due here do not exist in a vacuum. To be clear, I'm not saying you'd be wrong to complain about the age gap, here. And an argument that men and women should be held to the same standards here, for the sake of simple fairness, has some intrinsic merit. But nonetheless: The differences in the zeitgeist here are not without reason.