We don't, however, get too many writers who quite so openly tell us that other people's frankness is screwing with their efforts at self-repression.
But that's not the most interesting article on sex I read today—Meghan O'Rourke, who writes the Highbrow column for Slate, takes on a new book that shines the old conservative chestnut that women who have sex and don't hold out for love will have bad sex and no romance:
[Using the common] metaphor of [casual sex as] practice for a grueling competition says a lot about both the phenomenon Stepp is describing and her blinkered perspective. What her own reporting suggests, but she doesn't seem to see, is that if there is a problem, it isn't that young women are separating love and sex. It's that they are blurring sex and work: The hookup culture is part of a wider ethos of status-seeking achievement. As one girl puts it: "Dating is a drain on energy and intellect, and we are overwhelmed, overprogrammed and overcommitted just trying to get into grad school." So they throw themselves into erotic liaisons with the same competitive zeal they bring to résumé-building: "If you mention you think a guy is hot, your friend may be, 'Oh, he is hot. I'm gonna go get with him,' " Anna, a high-school student, reveals. The combination of postfeminist liberation and pressure from parents to "do it all"—as one kid puts it—has led girls to confuse the need to be independent (which they associate with success) with the need to be invulnerable. Thus, they frame their seemingly explorative sex lives in rigid, instrumental terms, believing that vulnerability of any sort signals a confusing dependence. The result? Shying away from relationships that can hurt them—which includes even fleeting obsessions that can knock them off balance.Honestly, any Sex & the City episode will give you this same insight, but O'Rourke's narrative voice is a hell of a lot less annoying than Carrie's.If this is true, the last thing young women need is more assignments from those who view relationships as yet another arena in which they better "win." In that sense, Unhooked is part of the very problem it's trying to offset. While noting that a fear of "failing" makes college girls insist that they've got matters under control when they don't, Stepp offers up the same prescriptive diagnoses that get in the way of young women asking themselves what they—as individuals—might really want: "I hope to encourage girls to think hard about whether they're 'getting it right,' " Stepp says. At the same time, young men get away without such cautionary lessons: Stepp follows a long pattern of leaving them out of the picture. From at least the 1920s (when everyone thought flappers were destroying manners) on through the 1980s (when teen pregnancy rates had everyone alarmed), girls have been hearing that their sex lives are the symbol of generational decadence.
The truth is that even the sex-as-work ethic has an upside—one Stepp fails to see. For the first time in ages, young women are actually concentrating, in some fashion, more on their work and on their female friendships than on love and sex, and many do feel empowered by this. One of the studies Stepp cites found that young women feel less pressured to engage in sex than their male peers do. If some have a tough time figuring out what romantic or sexual pleasure is, they are nonetheless hardheaded about their status as pioneers in a new sexual landscape. "If there's one thing that I know about adults, it's that they pounce on adolescent sexuality with zeal," says Alicia, a student at Duke, aptly pinpointing the adult impulse to scold. Stepp couldn't resist the impulse herself. Buying into alarmism about women, Unhooked makes sex into a bigger, scarier, and more dangerous thing than it already is. The fact is, love is a messy arena, and in it most of us make both wise and foolish choices. C'est la vie, if not l'amour.
We don't, however, get too many writers who quite so openly tell us that other people's frankness is screwing with their efforts at self-repression.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the basis for this characterization?
You're being pretty hostile. The op-ed writer in The D may have different ideas about what is appropriate in a public forum and what is inappropriate, but he defends his priggishness pretty honestly. It's a fair argument he makes...he would prefer a less sexualized atmosphere on campus and he believes it damages the College's integrity. I disagree with his main viewpoint, but I never arrived at the leap that he is "self-repressed". In fact, he seems pretty honest and open about his preferences and they deserve as much respect as someone promoting more openess about sex and gender throughout the campus.
ReplyDeleteAND
if you're going to stick that much of a Slate article uninterrupted on your blog, why not just put the whole damn thing. Be a more selective copy-and-paster, it makes for more interesting reading.