The Loveline Conservative
 “What does talking have to do with sex?!” Dr. Drew Pinsky’s mockery of a stereotypical male response to the female predilection for intimate conversation was met by a swell of blithe laughter from the audience at the Independent Women’s Forum’s (IWF) Annual Campus Sex and Dating Conference on Capitol Hill on July 16.
Pinsky’s popular philosophy holds that talking actually has a lot to do with sex. Dr. Drew was on hand to speak to a co-ed group of more than 50 interns about college and a healthy sex life. Pinsky, who has partly made his professional career by answering young people’s questions about the finer points of romance on the hit radio show Loveline, which was also an MTV show for a few years, was in familiar territory engaging this summer’s beltway collegiate cohort in a discussion about their own views and issues concerning love, sex, and everything in between.
Pinsky, who has more than 20 years of experience observing the college dating scene, discussed his observations. College romance these days, Pinsky maintains, seems to offer a meager three options: the overly hasty “joined-at-the-hip” scenario, “friends with benefits”—an arrangement that he says “like communism looks good on paper but usually doesn’t pan out when enacted in real human terms,” and the ambiguous “hook up.”
Mention of this last term provoked an anonymous audience member to shout: “Define that!” Pinsky responded that it doesn’t have a definition. “The only common factor in the hook-up seems to be that there’s no relationship involved, and it always occurs while intoxicated,” Pinsky offered. He noted that the ambiguity of the term is one of its assets—many young people use it to refer to anything from kissing to sexual intercourse. This observation led into an analysis of the varying reasons that both guys and girls find it necessary to consume consciousness-altering substances to engage in this behavior.
“If hooking up is so great, why do you have to get loaded to do it?” Pinsky asked. The consensus at the IWF lunch was that for a guy, getting drunk is a way of bolstering confidence so he can go after what he really wants (sex), and not feel responsible the next morning. For a woman, getting drunk is a means to “numb” her instincts, to “medicate” herself so that she can do what her emotions are telling her not to.
Amidst the general portrayal of men as sex-craving, intimacy-incapable heathens, and women as self-unaware, emotion-laden pushovers, Pinsky didn’t mention that many men look to marriage as an important foreseeable life goal as well, or that men can experience the same “hurt” and “confusion” which stereotypically personifies the female response to hooking up. Nor was there a nuanced approach to female sexuality. The idea that some women might actually know themselves well enough to be able to judge what’s good for them and act accordingly—even the ability to enjoy casual sex—received little discussion.
Pinsky’s forthrightness is admirable. He said he believes simply that “people need to talk, to get this stuff out in the open” and proclaims that “everything I’m saying is not opinion per se, it’s observation. I have no agenda.”
The same could hardly be said for the IWF. The fact that the IWF promotes traditional values and gender roles that are restrictive to women, under the guise of being “a strategic tool to defeat the hegemony of the left on so-called ‘women’s issues’ and…to develop a new vision, based on truth and common sense, for women and families in American life,” is a poorly kept secret. (Hint: Anytime “so-called” appears before “women’s issues” it’s a tip-off for right-wing propaganda.)
As IWF director of campus programs, Allison Kasic mentioned in her opening remarks on Monday, the IWF has been holding this annual forum since the publication of its 2001 study, “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right – College Women on Dating and Mating Today.” The study finds that for the majority of girls and women, marriage “is still a major life goal,” and that “most women hope to meet their future husband at college.” The report deems phrases such as “booty call” scientific jargon, and the introduction guarantees “the autonomy of the scholarly process, the IWF did not involve itself in researching and writing this report.” But the report also offers judgments such as this one:
College women say they want to be married someday, and many would like to meet a future husband at college. Yet it seems virtually no one even attempts to help them consider how their present social experience might or might not lead to a successful marriage, or how marriage might fit with other life goals. … The absence of appropriately updated social norms … leaves many young women confused, and often disempowered, in their relationships with men. Socially defined courtship is an important pathway to more successful marriages.
In short, the report smacks of a biased agenda that supposedly comes from a women’s advocacy group.
So, when Pinsky was invited by the IWF to provide insight into “who’s getting the short end of the stick in the college dating scene—guys or girls,” it came as no surprise that the answer turned out to be women. “The IWF study found that women are unhappy, so that’s what we’re trying to deal with,” Pinsky said, “ and it’s very clear to me that what IWF was seeing was accurate.”
There was no shortage of scientific explanations: Men are wired to salivate at any image of a woman, and the testosterone racing through their veins suppresses chemicals like oxytocin that build attachment in the emotional center of the brain. Women, meanwhile, are “victims” of chemical attachment-builders and are wired to find sexual appeal in intimacy.
The first lesson in any gender studies discipline, however, is the awkwardness of biological rationalizing in the social environment. Perhaps several thousand years ago men and women developed different instincts in the name of survival, but—–newsflash— we no longer live in caves. Using science, either for justifying behavior or for confining men and women to narrowly defined gender roles based on “what’s natural” isn’t accomplishing much.
Pinsky did, however, offer a more hopeful vision of the future of college romance, suggesting that, “conversation and interaction are probably what’s best.” Pinsky ended by lauding the novel notion of communication. At least that is a solution most of us can agree upon.
Elisabeth Zerofsky is a summer 2007 intern at The American Prospect.
Illustration: August J. Pollak
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//Amidst the general portrayal of men as sex-craving, intimacy-incapable heathens, and women as self-unaware, emotion-laden pushovers//
See, I find Campus Progress informative, but it’s hard to take seriously writers who make these kinds of partisan leaps in logic. I fail to see anything in this story which characterizes Pinsky as conservative OR liberal.
Take the above quote, for instance: is it controversial to suggest that college students are immature sexually (and in most every other way, too)? I know it probably makes YOU feel better, as a college student, to decry that characterization as unfair. But I went to college, too. And nobody knows exactly who they are between the ages of 18-22.
Plus, as you admit, Pinsky’s whole message to people of all ages (and I’ve been listening to his show since I was 13) is a very healthy one: COMMUNICATE. In this age of lie-based sex education, in what way does that make Pinsky “conservative”?
Do the editors of this force you to make broad partisan jabs in these stories, even if the subject doesn’t warrant it?
— Chris - Jul 26, 01:26 PM - #Chris, you’re right about one thing. This article doesn’t explicitly pursue a claim that Dr. Drew is conservative. I think you missed the point of that quote. The author is demonstrating how Dr. Drew used a widely held stereotype about gender behavior in order to generalize about sexual interaction. The author, obviously writing from a background in gender studies or feminism, meant to say that Dr. Drew’s simplistic view of men and women does a disservice to us all, by excluding men and women who don’t fit into this rigid binary, such as men who look forward to a fulfilling marriage or women who aren’t troubled by casual sex. Furthermore, and this is the elevating factor, this rigid, stereotype-driven approach has been used to interpret and explain a study by a conservative group attempting to reestablish reactionary gender roles. This smacks of poor methodology, confirmation bias, and the very common problem of assuming social effects as biologically determined.
— Andy - Jul 26, 02:39 PM - #I don’t see how any of this is partisan. This is very much gender studies territory, and I thought it was interesting in demonstrating how pop sociology can have harmful effects on those with untraditional genders.
Partisan jabs? Hardly. Pinksy is a conservative to the extent that he relies on received stereotype and rigid gender/sex formulae. And in this article, it is demonstrated that he does indeed have such a reliance.
Why do conservatives think and behave as they do? We must keep in mind that fundamentalisms, of which so many otherwise good-hearted Christians (as well as some Muslims, Jews, Hindus and others) have fallen prey, are a reaction to modernity. This is expressed in the anxiety-laden and often militant (hence, “culture wars”) compulsions to intrude into everyone’s private lives quite like the early Puritans of New England did and even went so far as to invade Maryland to conquer the Catholics. A peculiar thing about fundamentalists is that they “serve the Lord” under the order of their theological authorities and are to keep each other (in their circle) in check, because anyone in the group may be “one of them” or become “tempted by the devil” into doing something wrong. Anyone who fails to toe the line is subject to being ostracized for the slightest infraction, and it is common to find the people in the pews on the other side of the church are suspects. Science, being involved in human progress, is quite often “the work of the devil,” hence many areas of the hard and social sciences (i.e., evolution, stem cell research, psychotherapy, sociology) are targets of their “culture wars.”
The authorities command a peculiar over-concern with the sexual goings-on of other people, and the followers seem quite eager to carry on the compulsion, kinda like the wangers in the bushes at a nude recreation site. The Puritans tried to police sexual goings-on, too, but most people still were sexual beings. Go figure!
As a man, with children, I can testify that men have – and were born with – feelings, too. Sadly, boys are conditioned in too many of American society’s domains to this day to be tougher than is necessary. I believe this manifests into a tendency among many men to feel a need to control everything and everyone in their lives, including women, quite like organized religion teaches that we are to think in hierarchical terms: God, downward to male humans, female humans, children, and animals, each expected to obey the ones a notch up. It may be true that women prefer strong men, but that should never connote the faulty notion “women are weak and emotionally fragile.” Women are extraordinarily strong and have the ability to experience a more comprehensive range of emotions (the latter being most likely a matter of social conditioning).
I don’t know exactly when it started (a couple of decades or so?), but a lot more men are learning how to communicate – how to listen empathically to women as well as to other people; how to be more considerate of what it takes to make things optimally harmonious. Thanks to rampant egocentricity, there is still a long ways to go in this society. We are finding many answers in the social sciences, but we are also finding that a lot has to do with common sense – treat others with respect and the rewards will follow.
— Bob - Jul 26, 07:27 PM - #Regardless of how Dr. Drew relates male and female stereotypes, what truly disturbs me is that IWF would tout that women are nothing but mate searching, M.R.S. degree wanting, self medicating, chemically wired, boundary desiring dolts. I can not possibly relay the frustration and sheer listlessness with which I read this article due to the fact that men and women and the relationships they have are painted in broad generalization brush strokes. Biological, social or otherwise, each individual and their relationships exist within their own set of constraints and possibilities. It is my wish that young women don’t feel that without a set of specific social norms, they can’t be happy. Evidently, some where along the line, they’ve missed the memo.
— Erika - Jul 27, 01:09 AM - #Elisabeth, thanks for a smart article that does Brown proud!
— Brown alum - Jul 27, 03:08 PM - #//Partisan jabs? Hardly. Pinksy is a conservative to the extent that he relies on received stereotype and rigid gender/sex formulae. And in this article, it is demonstrated that he does indeed have such a reliance.//
He’s also been dealing with young people and their sexual problems for a long time. Is it possible that he said what he said because that’s what he’s observed? I agree with her characterization of the IWF, but I think it’s a leap in logic to suggest that Pinsky is some tool of that organization simply because he spoke at their function.
And, again, he’s referring specifically to college-aged kids. He wasn’t saying that ALL women and men fit these cliched gender roles, just that young people tend to be immature sexually as they figure out who they are as people. Have you ever been to a keg party? He’s not inventing this out of whole cloth. Fortunately, as people mature, they can be more liberated sexually and become who they really are. But lots of people struggle with identity in college, and that’s what I think he was referring to.
— Chris - Aug 2, 11:14 AM - #I still will never show contempt to women and girls who voice confusion over coercion. Seems more of a republican thing to do anyway.
— Ifeoma - Aug 6, 09:55 PM - #