OGP: An Analyzation

There's a common fear for most 14 and 15 year old boys who are about to enter their freshman year in college. It's something that many of us had tried to deny, despite the horror stories we had heard from our brothers and other older boys. Call it going into denial of what was undoubtedly going to happen before it happened. Deep down, we all knew that it would eventually force us into a world of suffering and degredation, where we were not cool enough or good enough, and I'm sure some of us have never fully recovered.

What were we scared of? There are many things that kids are scared of going into their first year of high school. The freshman year, when you were at the absolute bottom shelf of the pecking order. You were going to be the plastic bottle of Vladimir Vodka in F. Scott Fitzgerald's liquor cabinet. Was our deepest fear that we would be shoved into a locker by a senior? That we would be tea-bagged in the football locker room after practice? That we would feel small an inadequate?

We were scared of all of these things, but our deepest fear was not any of the previously stated travesties.

Our deepest social fear was an acronym: OGP.

When I first entered high school, we didn't have a name for what would later become OGP. It was just something that happened, like a Bar Mitzvah or death. It was a passage of life. Something that you had to go through in order to enjoy the fruits later on in life. It wasn't until a few years later when I was having a conversation with one of my good friends from another school about the dating of girls in a lower grade than our own.

"You've gotta love that OGP," he'd said.

"What the fuck is OGP?" I'd asked, having really no clue at all.

"Oh, Old Guy Power."

The menace now had a name.

Allow me to explain exactly what "Old Guy Power" is. I'm sure all men that have gone through high school and/or college know exactly what I'm talking about, and I have no doubt that most girls understand it too, though very few of them will admit to such knowledge. Old Guy Power is, essentially, the natural appeal of older men to younger women.

Why exactly this is has never been scientifically proven, though there has been more than a fair share of conjecture on the matter. Some feel that the girls are attracted because with age--usually--comes maturity, in both a physical and mental tense--consider this, ladies: Would you rather date a macho man or a 5'2" kid with the anatomical mass of a paperclip that still pube squeaks? Others believe that the girls are simply tired of the boys that they spent their long and dramatic junior high years with and are looking for fresh faces to alleviate the pains sustained from adolescent love gone wrong. This can also go the other way, as the older guys may have grown tired of the girls that they have previously shared a high school with. Still others believe that OGP only exists because of the social ladder. These theorists would imply that it is simply "cooler" in the eyes of their peers for one in the 9th grade to date a senior, thus elevating this person's stance on the social ladder and, in most cases, their own self esteem (personally, I cannot say that I believe this. That is some pretty shallow shit to ever think about someone, though some have been more substantially effected by the OGP plague than I).

OGP is usually first brought into a boy's life during his freshman year of high school, as I have previously stated. These adolescents almost immediately lose the apple of their respective eyes to older, usually popular, guys. Said boys walk around in a stupor of impenetrable existential angst for the next year or two, or even three, before the circle of secondary education completes itself. It is at this point that these once unhappy fellows are able to take advantage of...no, that is the wrong phrase. They are able to utilize the fruits of OGP and court younger women.

This same cycle again repeats itself in college. The incoming freshmen sometimes cannot even get a word in with their new classmates of the opposite sex before they are snatched up by upperclassmen. They endure the same pains that they had become all-too-familiar with in high school all over again, and then they bide their time until the next year when a new freshman class of girls comes in. Many of my friends and acquaintances are already salivating over the opportunities that they may come across this school year.

Then, after college, when students are released into the "real world," all bets are off. Age is no longer of any consequence, unless the boys are going "cougar hunting" (which would be scouting for older women, more often than not divorced middle-aged women), or the girls are "gold digging." Both are pretty shallow.

Why and when OGP happens is not extremely important. The fact that it does happen is. Old Guy Power has shaped the destiny of countless mortals for as long back as history can document. Joseph was older than Mary, Ben Franklin married a woman much younger than himself, Sid was older than Nancy, and many others (I really don't feel like doing the research right now). Oh, and Jerry Lee Lewis married his 14 year old cousin.

I can't find any legitimate gripe within myself against OGP for one simple and almost terrifying reason: If it were not for Old Guy Power, I very well may not be here. My own father was three grades above my mother, and is two years older chronologically. How can I complain about a force that was strong enough to aid in putting me onto this earth? I wouldn't even know what OGP was if not for my parents, because I would be nothing. I wouldn't have been born.

So, I guess you can say that OGP is sort of a necessity. This is putting it in a comforting way, to be sure. Whether it is necessary or not, it is here, and it is never going anywhere. Even legal age laws couldn't put a dent in the side of the massive ship that is the SS OGP. It's like the Titanic, except it is truly unsinkable.

The only thing that one can do is bear the stress and sadness that OGP sometimes offers, and then lurk in the bushes, waiting for the day that the power truly belongs to them, the day that they become an "Old Guy."

The circle, my friends, it will never end.