Yep, nailed it! Liberal prudish concern about age differences (as long as both are above the age of majority) is 99.5% concern about expressed female agency and 0.5% about harm protection. Also, most liberals, especially American ones, are very, very prudish indeed.
I have no idea about anything that happens on that show, but there’s also an element — mostly from women, I might add — of competition protection.
Strangely, it’s not just worry about younger women, though that is certainly a lot of it. When I was dating a woman considerably older than me in the 1990s, I got a whole ration of shit from women about how terrible that was. So did a friend of mine was who was doing the same thing.
There’s a seven year difference between me and my partner, but I look much younger than I am, so most people don’t notice. But even that I suspect would be out of bounds if most people were able to detect it without examining our driver’s licenses.
America is the most prudish of the Western countries, by a country mile.