If you haven’t heard the above term “mesophilia” before, that’s because Seto created it to to refer to people who are attracted to middle-aged individuals. “I think nobody has studied mesophilia yet because it’s not seen as a pressing need clinically,” Seto explained. In other words — and this is a point he makes in his paper as well — if a mesophile goes about searching for sexual gratification by casing the local Target for dads who are down, it doesn’t put anyone at risk of harm (homewrecking aside) or lead to lawbreaking in the way a pedophile searching for victims does. So because of the lack of research interest in mesophilia, Seto is inferring the existence of this orientation rather than pointing to an established literature on it.