Politics & Current Events
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
s/o from 10 things to tell teenage girls
The Bleaker Sex
By FRANK BRUNIPublished: March 31, 2012
See the whole article here:
Excerpt:
It comes along at a moment of fresh examination of women?s progress. A just-published book, ?The Richer Sex,? by Liza Mundy, asserts that women are well on their way to becoming the primary breadwinners in a majority of American families; it rated the cover of Time magazine two weeks ago. It will be joined later this year by ?The End of Men,? by Hanna Rosin, which answers the question posed by the title of Maureen Dowd?s prescient 2005 best seller, ?Are Men Necessary?? As Rosin sees it, not so much, because women have achieved unprecedented autonomy.
But ?Girls? also amplifies a growing chorus of laments over what?s happening on the sexual frontier, a state of befuddlement reflective in part of post-feminist power dynamics and in part of our digital culture and virtual fixations.
Are young women who think that they should be more like men willing themselves into a casual attitude toward sex that?s an awkward emotional fit? Two movies released last year, ?No Strings Attached? and ?Friends With Benefits,? held that position, and Dunham subscribes to it as well.
In a recent interview, presented in more detail on my Times blog, she told me that various cultural cues exhort her and her female peers to approach sex in an ostensibly ?empowered? way that she couldn?t quite manage. ?I heard so many of my friends saying, ?Why can?t I have sex and feel nothing?? It was amazing: that this was the new goal.?
She added: ?There?s a biological reason why women feel about sex the way they do and men feel about sex the way they do. It?s not as simple as divesting yourself of your gender roles.?
THE Web confuses things further, unfurling a seemingly infinite cosmos of ready possibility and abetting lightning-fast connections. Several popular cellphone apps give someone with a sudden whim for a date the pictures and physical proximities of similarly inclined prospects. An assignation may be no more than 10 minutes and 20 blocks away.
Dunham noted that the Web also fosters a misleading sense of familiarity between people who have shared nothing more than keystrokes. ?All sorts of promiscuity don?t feel like promiscuity,? she said. ?But a month of text messages does not a personal connection make. I?ve fallen victim to the sensation that I understand some guy?s essence when I?ve really just read 15 of his tweets.?
And there?s an emerging literature of complaint from young men and women alike about the impact of free or cheap online pornography. Early last year, New York magazine ran an article by Davy Rothbart, 36, who admitted faking an orgasm with a real live woman, learned that other men had done so as well and wondered if a ?tsunami of porn? was to blame. It was titled ?He?s Just Not That Into Anyone.?
Last February GQ pondered the problem from a feminine perspective. A young woman writing under a pseudonym cited her and her friends? experiences to assert that for more and more men, ?the buffet of fetishistic porn available 24/7? had created very particular and sometimes very peculiar, ratcheted-up desires.
?To compare it to another genre of online video,? she wrote, ?why watch a clip of one puppy frolicking in a field when you can watch eight different puppies cuddling with a sweet-faced baby armadillo tickling a panda bear? And after seeing that, why ever settle for a boring ol? puppy frolicking in a field again??
?Guys my age watch so much pornography,? Dunham told me, adding that she has been subjected to aggressive positioning and ?a lot of errant hair pulling? and has thought: ?There?s no way that you, young Jewish man from Chappaqua, taught this to yourself.?
These experiences inform her ?Girls? sex scenes, which have a depersonalized aspect. So does the sadomasochistic relationship in the best-selling erotic novel ?Fifty Shades of Grey,? a publishing-industry phenomenon about a virginal college student presented with a contract to become the ?Submissive? to a dashing older man?s ?Dominant.? The contract covers waxing, hygiene and the frequency with which she must work out. She haggles him down from four times a week to three.
Credibly or not, the college student seems exhilarated at the start. Dunham?s more convincingly rendered characters seem perplexed, and their frustration with men raises questions about whether less privacy means more intimacy and whether sexual candor is any guarantor of sexual satisfaction.
People can be so available in a superficial sense that they?re inaccessible in a deeper one. Or, as Dunham put it, ?People underestimate the importance of making solid connections.?
Re: s/o from 10 things to tell teenage girls
I guess I'm the odd one out because I have never equated sex with some sort of emotional investment. However, this:
I've definitely experienced this. You get with a guy and he expects some freaky porn shizz in bed without actually running it by you to make sure you are on the same page. I have never minded consensual freak, but I actually broke up with a boyfriend after the first time we slept together because he was downright aggressive and didn't seem to grasp that I wasn't into being treated like that.
I go back and forth as to how I feel about porn in general, but I have long wondered how many men have warped expectations as a result of viewing it on the regular.
Possibly, although I think an argument could be made that the fallout from porn-based warped expectations may be a bit more serious than the fallout from rom-com-based warped expectations. I'm not sure that a woman's skewed perspective is likely to put a man in a place of serious discomfort and physical disadvantage, and possibly fear.
Because the man's perspective and expectation is always the baseline for normal. Always.
I have a friend who reads romance novels like it's her job. She has since she was in HS. I'm not dissing the books, because I read my share of them, too. But my girl, she absolutely 100% thinks a guy she's dating should act like a character from those books. It's set her up for disappointment again and again and it's hard to watch. She's a smart girl, but she can't seem to get past this unrealistic expectation.
Though I do agree with IIOY, that it's not as damaging to the other person in the realtionship.