Excellent Article

Shan posted a link to an article entitled "The Sexual Revolution 'Robbed Us of Our Fertility'."   I was very happy I took the time to read it.  The writer made points that need to be made.  If I had time for a rant, I'm sure I'd be declared an angry feminist at the end of it, so it's a good thing I don't have the time.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my daughter last week.  She was bemoaning the fact that she has been in college for a month and no one has asked her out.  Other girls had boyfriends by the first weekend.  She wanted to know, "What is wrong with me?"

I said, "There is nothing wrong with you.  But there is a problem.  The problem is that guys look at you and you look like someone who would not sleep with them on the first date.  So they by-pass you for the girls who look like they would.

Being a baby boomer, the sexual revolution was in full swing when I was in high school.  And I was "religious."  As a result, I was labeled "cold," "a prude" and, the worst label in those days, "frigid."  I don't know what words are used these days, but I'm sure my daughter will take a pounding from them, whatever they are.  It's very hard to convince an 18 year-old that this is a very good thing.

I've never before read an article that addressed the fact that society's attitude shift needs to begin with the men.  Someone, somewhere should be telling men that it is not okay to dump a woman (or refuse to go out with her) because she won't sleep with you. 

Of course, all things considered, it's hard to imagine where one might find that messenger.

Comments

[Fred]

Karen,

I was thinking fathers could carry that message especially, but mothers also. But it seems to me that the sexual dimension is but the culmination of a lifetime of picking friends according to utility.

A neighbor boy moved in down the street. He came to the door looking to make a friend. First he asked if I had kids. Then he said, do you have a trampoline?; do you have XBox?; do you have a swingset?

Fortunately, the answer to the last question was yes. It was clear to me that the main value of friends for this boy was what toys we had. So different from my own childhood when most of our time was filled with any number of adventures, schemes and games-- few if any of which required appliances...

[Mitch S.]

Of course, in the 21st century guys never,ever get dumped for not wanting to have sex.

[Lynn]

Karen, I actually know some young male college students who would love to meet a girl like your daughter, someone that they respect, who can have fun without being drawn into the wild college
partying/drinking/sex scene. She'll find them in classes, the library, the dorm/apartment, church functions, and through friends.

[Bender]

Other girls had boyfriends by the first weekend. . . . and they had ex-boyfriends by the Monday after the first weekend.

As for this idea that the "attitude shift needs to begin with the men" -- frankly, that merely perpetuates the problem. There are plenty of guys who bought into that long-past idea that girls all wanted to be ladies and only had sex because they were pressured by the guys, but when these guys tried to play the gentleman and pursue a chaste relationship with them, it was the guys who got dumped in a hurry. Women today want it as much as, if not more than, the man does.

I, myself have had too many women suddenly lose interest when it was clear after a week or two that I wasn't going to try to have sex with them. Conversely, before my full-time return to the faith, I had long-term relationships precisely because I selfishly sought sex with them.

[Amy G.]

Could also be that no one has asked her out because she's so awesome they all assume she has a boyfriend already.

[Lynn]

That might be it, Amy!

[Erich 'Science Dude' Schwarz]

"Someone, somewhere should be telling men that it is not okay to dump a woman (or refuse to go out with her) because she won't sleep with you."

Well ... there's a lot, lot more to it than that. Unless being a boyfriend is a public utility, like being drafted into the Army before 1973, I don't think there is such a thing as a moral obligation to ask somebody out! Nor is it obvious that there is a moral obligation to keep dating somebody, given that even the Catholic Church allows annullments of full-up marriages...

I have been sitting here for 30 minutes trying to get my sense of all this into words and failing. I guess if I could sum it all up, it'd be this:

Being a young adult means starting to learn that doing the right thing is not always rewarded, at least not right away and not without a Lenten period where one just does the right thing without a reward. Obviously your daughter is not happy to learn this at age 18. But she probably needs to start learning it, all the same.

In the past this got settled by people having arranged marriages, pretty much by age 18. But in a free and affluent society, nobody I know wants that; and in America, they haven't wanted it for decades and centuries, really. So young Americans have to find a potential mate who they can both be in love with and love more deeply. That's a good thing to want (I say, in the teeth of all the conservative naysayers in the world) and a very good thing to find. But it is tough. It's not something that one can just order up like a pizza.

It is no easier to be an 18-year-old young man than to be a young woman of that age. Trust me on this.

And the ones of either sex who seem to be having a easy fun time now ... well, I've seen some of these people in later life. Some really did mature and become vigorous older people. Others didn't. The ones who didn't paid a big price for having had things easy too early. The ones who did had had to go through some crucible of their own sooner rather than later. Nobody escapes life unscathed.

To be at all serious about love and sex is to be countercultural in America, I think. Not just in the sense that there are a few religious people surrounded by rutting heathen: in all probability, most of the students around your daughter are at least nominally churchgoing Christians themselves. But more in the sense that this is a society where gratification is easy (thank God -- I don't miss the impoverished Ireland my mother's family fled), but deeper things are still hard, and where there's a great temptation to just go for gratification and forget joy completely.

To remember that joy exists, to prize it, to demand that one's romantic love be imbued by it, and to accept solitude as the cost of that demand, is not something confined to believing religious young people, or to people of faith. And it's always a somewhat isolating and difficult choice. At least until Joy comes along. If and when it ever does, in the shape of a true love.

[Dan]

The boys are always going to want what they want, even if it's wrong. It's always been that way and it always will be (granted there are exceptions -- if I were dating I for example would not seek pre-marital sex). What has changed is that now there is contraception. This has set off a fierce sexual competition among women, who, to compete, are being forced, to put it in colloquial street language, "to give it away for free." As the basic laws of economics dictate, the free availability of a good drives down its price. This is the basic point of the article that Karen posted and it's true.

[Erich 'Science Dude' Schwarz]

Contraception matters, a lot. But I don't think it's the only thing going on.

Another factor -- a big one -- is that we marry for love, not because our families more or less ordered us to. That makes finding a spouse nontrivially more difficult.

Yet another factor is that, until very recently indeed in human history, something like 95% or more of us were farmers and were likely to live out our entire lives in a relatively finite geographical era. That meant we were qualified to earn a living by about age 18 and were not likely to want or need to travel a vast distance to do so. In the last two centuries, that's totally changed: we now expect young people to study and prepare to support themselves until at least age 22 and often a lot later (a lawyer isn't self-supporting until age 25 at least; an M.D., until about age 27 at least; both will have serious debts from education).

And then on top of it all, people are just not simple enough to be accurately summarized by any particular lazy cliche. Young people do want sex. They also want about a dozen other things. That makes life hard. Nor is there any simple panacea that we can just tell people to robotically follow: simply being religious may or may not be a good thing, but there is zero evidence that it makes this Luv issue any easier whatsoever for either sex.

Adult life's just hard sometimes. That's why it's called "adult" life.

[Dan]

Since I left my last comment, I reflected a bit on how I felt when, 30 years ago, I was 18 and a freshman in college. At the time I was not a practicing Catholic and had the most pagan of beliefs and practices when it came to sex. Yet nevertheless with regard to women the question of "will she go to bed with me?" was not a consideration at all really. The real questions in my mind were "is she pretty?," "does she like me?" and "would she make a nice girlfriend?" If the answer to questions 1 and 3 were yes and at least "maybe" for no. 2, I would want to ask her out. Whether she would sleep with me wasn't a factor at all. I would bet that many 18 year old males are the same way -- probably not all, but many.

[Allison]

--Someone, somewhere should be telling men that it is not okay to dump a woman (or refuse to go out with her) because she won't sleep with you.

When WOMEN tell men this, it will change. How will that happen? When women stop sleeping with men on the first N dates. When women stop acting like they agree that sex is a commodity. When women stop taking themselves so unseriously. When women stop thinking abortion will solve a "problem". And when they stop dating men who dumped other women for not sleeping with them, THEN men will change. When there are actual consequences for their actions, men will change.

Women have always been what civilized men. The problem is that women's liberation has meant women finding the lowest common denominator with bad male behavior, rather than elevating men to the level of dignified women. So now women aren't cvilizing anyone.

[Allison]

No one asks anyone out anymore in college, though. Does she understand that?

The girls who appear to have boyfriends didn't get asked out either. They hooked up.

[Maureen]

The first two weeks, everybody I knew was dating everybody else I knew. Changing partners every day or so. They also drank a lot if they could get it.

Frantic and panicky homesickness is what it was, as much or more than hormones.

Me, I went and hung out with the gamers in their vast office or the library, because I didn't need my pretend-daddy to hold my wittle hand and sweep wif me so's I wouldn't be all scaredy-waredy of the big bad college.