Old Enough to Vote, Old Enough to Choose: Age Gaps, Billy Corgan and the Adulthood We Keep Taking Back

By Ryan Thompson | 2026-10-28

Punk wheatpaste poster of a brass balance scale holding a large dark hourglass and a small golden hourglass in perfect balance, surrounded by torn posters of a ballot box, car key, dog tag and wedding rings

Primary source: https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/lifestyle/billy-corgan-wife-age-gap-b3074896.html

Categories: Commentary

Tags: Age Gap, Relationships, Personal Responsibility, Billy Corgan, Lindsay Clancy, Cornell Seven, Philippines, Marriage, Culture

Billy Corgan just set the internet on fire again, and this time it had nothing to do with music.

On the October 22 episode of The New York Times' Popcast, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman was asked about the age gap with his wife, Chloé Mendel. He met her in 2012, when she was 19 and he was 44. Today he is 59, she is in her early thirties, and the gap runs about 25 and a half years. They married in September 2023, and they have three children: Augustus, born in 2015, Philomena, born in 2018, and Juno, born in March 2025.

Corgan said the gap was an "advantage." In his words, his wife "hadn't been wounded like so many people are," and she was "really open to love." He was careful to say there was "nothing wrong" with the women of his own generation. His point was that two hurt people struggle to build something whole. The Independent reported the backlash within days: sexist, patronising, infantilising, out of touch. You can watch the clip from Popcast yourself and decide.

I am not here to defend every word Billy Corgan says. I am here to ask the question nobody in that pile-on wants to answer. If a 19-year-old woman is an adult, why do we keep talking about her like a child?

The Adulthood We Hand Out, Then Take Back

Look at what the United States already trusts an 18-year-old to do.

She can vote. The 26th Amendment settled that in 1971, on the argument that anyone old enough to be sent to war was old enough to choose the government that sends them. She can sign contracts and take on debt. She can enlist in the armed forces, carry a rifle, and come home in a flag-draped box. She has been driving since she was 16. She can be tried and imprisoned as an adult.

But when one of them chooses a husband who is twenty years older, a large part of our culture suddenly discovers that the frontal lobe isn't finished until 25, and that she couldn't possibly have known what she was doing.

You can't have it both ways. Either an adult is an adult, or the age of majority is a lie. If 19 is too young to choose a partner, then it is too young to vote and too young to die in a uniform. If it is old enough for those things, then it is old enough to say "I do," to whoever she wants, at any age he happens to be.

Notice which choices get reopened. Nobody voids a 19-year-old's vote or her enlistment contract because she was "so young." The adult choices that get revoked after the fact are the personal ones, and almost always in one direction.

Maturity Is Not a Number

I am not pretending there is no such thing as predation. A 44-year-old pursuing a 15-year-old is a crime, and it should be. Coercion, fraud and abuse are wrong at any age.

But "he was older" is not an accusation. It is a fact about two birth certificates. Maturity is measured by what a person does: whether she supports herself, makes plans, keeps her word and owns the results of her choices. I have met 19-year-olds running households and 40-year-olds who could not keep a job.

The age-gap panic depends on treating young women as permanently impressionable. That is not feminism. It is a polite way of saying women cannot be trusted with their own decisions, and that the people around them, especially later, get to decide what those decisions "really" meant.

Punk poster illustration of a golden key rising on a balance beam while a heavy iron weight breaks loose from its chain — Rights without responsibilities is not equality. It is a one-way deal.

The Responsibility Gap

Here is the pattern I keep seeing. Western culture tells women they are fully equal: equally capable, equally rational, equally entitled to every door men walk through. But when an adult woman's choices go wrong, a different script often comes out. Suddenly it is youth. It is hormones. It is pressure. It is a decision that, years later, has to be reinterpreted.

Take the case of Lindsay Clancy in Duxbury, Massachusetts. In January 2023 she strangled her three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan, then tried to take her own life. She has admitted to the killings. Her defense argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and could not be held criminally responsible. Prosecutors argued she knew what she was doing was wrong. In September 2026 her murder trial ended in a mistrial, with the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of acquittal by reason of insanity. On October 1 the judge denied her request for a not-guilty finding, ruling that the evidence was enough for a jury to find her criminally responsible. As I write this, prosecutors have not said whether they will retry her.

Postpartum psychosis is real. What struck me was the public conversation around the case, which often boiled down to this: her hormones made her do it, she could not control her hormones, so she is not responsible. Think about what that argument means if you take it seriously. If biology can erase a woman's responsibility for the worst act a human being can commit, then on what basis do we say she is fully responsible for anything? You cannot argue that women are the equals of men in judgment and then argue that their judgment evaporates when the consequences arrive.

Then there is the Cornell case. A former student says she was sexually assaulted in October 2024 by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, now dubbed the "Cornell Seven." In a public statement on September 28, 2026, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said her sworn six-page statement to police in November 2024 "did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped," and described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as "voluntary, conscious, and consensual." His office declined charges on that basis. Nearly two years later she filed a civil lawsuit alleging something very different. Her lawyers say the police summary left out key parts of what she told investigators. Cornell's own Title IX panel sanctioned several of the men, two of them with expulsion. Under public pressure, the DA has now reopened the case for a grand jury. No one has been charged, and none of it has been proven in a court.

I don't know what happened in that room, and neither do you. The question is not whether this particular woman is telling the truth. The question is what a sworn statement from an adult is worth. If an adult's account of her own consent can be revised two years later, and seven young men's lives hang on the revision, then consent stops being something an adult gives. It becomes something that can be reassigned after the fact.

I'll say plainly what I see. Many western women today want the privileges that men have always had, the freedom, the authority and the final say over their own lives, without always accepting the responsibility that came attached to them. Men have never been allowed to say, "I was young, my hormones were raging, and I've since decided I didn't really mean it." Equality that only runs one way is not equality. It is a ratchet.

This is not a claim that women are weaker or less intelligent. It is the opposite: women are fully capable adults, which is exactly why they should be held to the same standard as everyone else.

My Own "Age Gap"

I don't write about this from a distance.

I married my ex-wife when she was 19 and I was 25. Six years. Today she tells people I took advantage of her youth, that I was "much older" than she was.

Here is who she was when we married. She had already moved out of her parents' house. She was attending a top university on an academic scholarship. She was not naive and she was not dumb. She made her own decisions, including the decision to marry me.

Six years. If a six-year gap between a university scholar and a 25-year-old man is predatory, then the word has no meaning left. The story changed because the marriage ended, not because the facts did. When the outcome went bad, the choice was rewritten into something that happened to her rather than something she did.

What hurts most is that my children now repeat the same thing: that the age gap was "unfair." They didn't reach that conclusion by examining a marriage that began before they were born. They absorbed it. I love my kids, and I don't blame them for echoing the parent they heard it from. But I want them to know the truth. Their mother was an intelligent adult who chose her life, and her choices were real. Taking that away from her, even in hindsight, does her no honor.

Punk poster illustration of a Philippine street at golden hour with palm trees, a jeepney and two empty plastic chairs at a small store table — Different culture, different assumptions about who gets to choose.

What I See in Southeast Asia

I now live in the Philippines, and the contrast is impossible to miss.

Here, a woman of 18 or in her early twenties partnering with a man in his sixties or even seventies is not a scandal. I see these couples all around me: at the market, at church, at the mall, at the next table over at dinner. Some are happy and some aren't, like relationships everywhere. Plenty of these matches are as practical as they are romantic, which was the norm for most of human history.

The difference is that the culture treats her as an adult who made a choice. She is expected to live with that choice, good or bad, and so is he. Nobody waits ten years to announce that she was a victim of the calendar.

I am not saying every age-gap match here is wise. I am saying it exposes how odd the western position has become. The West preaches female empowerment louder than anywhere on earth, yet it is often the place most eager to declare young women incapable of choosing a husband.

Adulthood Is a Package Deal

So back to Billy Corgan. His comments were clumsy, and I understand why "wounded" landed badly with women his own age. But Chloé Mendel was 19 when she met him, came from a family running an international fashion house, and has spent the 14 years since building a life, a family and businesses alongside him. She has defended the marriage herself as a partnership of equals. The people insisting she was too young to choose are not protecting her. They are overruling her.

Here is where I land. Adulthood is a package deal. It comes with agency, the right to choose your partner, your faith, your work and your life, and it comes with accountability, which means owning those choices when they go wrong. You don't get one without the other. Not men, not women, not at 19 and not at 59.

If we want young women treated as equals, and I do, then we have to stop rewriting their decisions the moment those decisions become inconvenient. That is what we expect of every adult man, and it is the only standard that treats women as full human beings.

Anything less isn't protection. It's a permanent childhood, handed out selectively, and it's dressed up as progress.