We’ve long had to swallow the lie that women’s worth is limited to their child-bearing years. It’s a tale as old as Hollywood, an inevitable consequence of an industry that fetishizes youth and writes women off as grandmas in waiting when they turn 30. There’s a weary predictability about seeing a 40-something famous dude settle down with a younger woman. After all, it’s not as though Evans' fans were especially kind to Jenny Slate when they dated. This is how you get Club Chalamet-style antics, with so-called fans asserting their moral dominance over total strangers to justify baseless anger and casual sexism. One of the most insidious tools of delusional fandom is to infantilize their subjects, to invalidate the choices of adults by stripping them of their agency on all matters. We saw how thoroughly the latter was applied to Olivia Wilde when she dated Harry Styles, wherein she was labeled a predator for dating a multimillionaire who was pushing 30. Either the woman is a powerless child who isn't mentally mature enough to consent or she’s an aged harpy preying on the essence of young men. It’s tough to ignore how much of this supposed concern is a mere shield for the same glut of garden variety misogyny we see directed at the spouses of the internet's favorite male celebrities every day. Some of it has come from a caring and reasonable place, but when two consenting adults face cries of grooming because one is in their mid-20s, it feels like something has gone very wrong in our wider understanding of consent. This particular strain of exaggerated panic over couples with any sort of age gap over, in general, 15 years has exploded in visibility across fandom. Some started to scream about how our brains don’t fully develop until we’re in our mid-20s, so by that logic, Baptista isn’t mentally capable of consenting to dating a fellow adult. In the case of Evans and Baptista, it’s led to people calling Baptista a “child bride” and Evans being labeled predatory. Very real questions about power dynamics and the historical mistreatment of younger women at the hands of older men quickly give way to a kind of concern-trolling that further reduces these celebrities to something less than human. There is something about a prominent couple with an age gap that inspires some of the more questionable opinions in online fandom. Evans, who has never been married before, is 42.

It was also sadly unsurprising that the reports elicited a startling level of misogyny towards Baptista and a renewed cycle of discourse over their age gap.

So, the news that Chris Evans, America’s ass, had married Warrior Nun star Alba Baptista was always going to make some of his more ardent fans a little frenetic.

It’s a cycle as old as celebrity itself, whether it’s Elvis marrying Priscilla, the Beatles' various couplings, or the One Direction guys sowing their wild oats. It’s inevitable that, when one of the internet's boyfriends settles down, his fans will freak out over the news.

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