Posts with the tag sexuality

David Brooks Gets Judgy on Relationships, Fears Text Messaging

Kay — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:21:01 EST

Today David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, seems to have been reading a few too many New York magazine online sex diaries. Brooks seems horrified at what he reads, saying "the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner."

Brooks goes down the tired old path of decrying the "hookup culture," where people occasionally have causal sexual encounters rather than asking partners to the sock hop and grope each other in the back of a car. Brooks wistfully says:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

I get really tired of this attitude from the older generation of people looking down at young people because they have more choices with their sex lives than the previous generation. The same, tired tropes of feminism and technology are destroying the "good ol' days" era of dating is absurd and reductionist.

Let's Talk About Sex (Columns), Baby

Kay — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:03:53 EDT

The Nation reports that ever since Berkeley's "Sex on Tuesday Column" in 1996, students have been writing columns in the vein of what author Alex DiBranco calls the "student sex columnist movement."

At its core, the sex column phenomenon is a radical progressive movement in the sense of pushing against traditional silence and the status quo, which is a source of concern for many administrators, parents and even students. Challenges to the columns stem from a conservative mindset--whether that be political, religious or cultural.

The challenges, it seems, are numerous. Universities and state legislatures threaten to pull funding from campus media that publish sex columns. Ultimately, to me it seems like more expression about sexuality is a good thing. Sex columns, as trite and annoying as I often find them, sometimes do perform an important public service for people who feel alone in their sexuality. The good ones push conventional wisdom and social norms about what's "normal" when it comes to sexuality. The Nation column pointed out that Dartmouth is a school known as a conservative campus, but the Dartmouth Free Press, a Campus Progress-sponsored publication, has been publishing a sex column for years.

The sex column entered the pages of the Dartmouth Free Press in 2004, when senior Sheila Hicks, sexual leftist and host of the campus radio sex talk-show, "In Your Pants," encouraged readers to send "the questions you probably wouldn't ask your parents or your clergy members" to Dartmouth's liberal, progressive and alternative biweekly. Clint Hendler, Free Press editor in chief during the latter half of Hicks's tenure, saw the column as "a way to put a thumb in the eye of campus elements who found a ready outlet in the Dartmouth Review for rather churlish and reactionary takes on steps taken by the administration and others to support safe sex and LGBTQ culture." Unsurprisingly, given the aesthetic of the paper, sex columnists for the Free Press tend to be more clear about having explicit political and activist motivations than those on campuses in general.

Heather Strack asserts in the Free Press, "A sex column is a significant statement of female rights. Not only am I a female columnist, but I am writing about a topic considered taboo and improper for a woman." Women are the main target of abstinence/purity movements; thus, even if most columnists do not state this as unambiguously as Strack, the campus sex column is not only about students seizing control but about hearing underrepresented voices. Though men are readers in equal numbers, the sex columnist is a (straight and queer) female-dominated profession, with a small minority of queer men.

It's true that not all sex columns are the same. Just as many are inspired by Sex and the City, Cosmopolitan, and Dan Savage (although Dan Savage's column is decidedly the most progressive of the three, since he actually acknowledges that non-straight couples exist), as they are by open and honest views of sexuality. Sometime around my junior year (if I recall correctly) my alma matter's campus daily began publishing "Dr. Date," a letter response column that reads like a more inane version of Savage Love. The column, as I remember it, was awfully relationship focused and took more of an opportunity to snark than it did to educate.

Siegel reviews Girls Gone Mild

Kay Steiger — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 12:37:21 EDT

Deborah Siegel, the author of Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, has an excellent review of Wendy Shalit's new book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good up at The American Prospect today. She touches on some very good points that moralizing can be a difficult topic to broach:

To me, ethics and morality apply to the way we craft our arguments. More moral dichotomizing is hardly what women, what girls, what any of us need now.

I agree. It's hard enough to be a young woman these days, with all kinds of social pressure about what grades we're supposed to get (good ones), how many sexual partners we're supposed to have (not many), the way we're supposed to look (sexy), and how much we're supposed to weigh (the less, the better). Piled on top of that, Siegel says that Schalit adopts a lot of the language the Christian right has been using for the last 15 years to push young women to adopt the virgin model.

What women need is to realize that they can break outside of stereotypes and forge their own thoughts, styles, and moralities. Young women need a more supportive environment rather than another pile of lectures.

Multiple Sex Partners, You Do the Math

Kay Steiger — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:27:39 EDT

In this rather odd NYTimes article, it says that men have, in median numbers, more heterosexual partners than women do. Gina Kolata, upon consulting some mathematicians, says this is impossible. The economists over at Crooked Timber, think differently. Meanwhile, the larger question is, why are these numbers unequal? Regardless if the numbers are right, women either say they have fewer partners or they actually do. I would say it largely has to do with a social standard. Men are expected to have more partners. A man with a lot of sexual partners is a "player" whereas a woman with a lot of sexual partners is a "slut." Now, economists, you tell me who has more incentive to rack up the numbers.

Free (Virtual) Condoms in Second Life

Kay Steiger — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:58:22 EDT

The popular role-playing game Second Life has a new region that focuses on free sexual health education. The region was built by the British University of Plymouth and features sexual health information, rich with links to new websites, as well as one-on-one counseling space, and even a free condom-dispensing machine. At last -- virtual sex is finally safe.

It's just sex!

ODUMarc — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:29:37 EDT

Two points, really. The first is on the world’s fascination with “virginity” and America’s obsession over it. The second point is about the emphasis society tends to put on the act of sex.

Reading one of the Campus Progress web logs this morning, I ran across an interesting statistic – that just about or more than 50 percent of college students are “still virgins.” My question: why do we care? Why is it that, as a society, we treat losing one’s virginity as sort of a rite of passage in which a new person is born and the old, less mature person is gone? It’s to say, as if, a person’s accomplishment in life is based on whether or not that person has engaged in sex. With rite-of-passage teen movies like “American Pie” being a part of the popular culture, it seems the message we’re sending teens is: your worth and dignity is based on whether you’ve “done it.” Yet, they also get messages from the Christian-right about remain “pure” and “untouched” until marriage. The result is a clash of culture, in which, on one hand, the message is about the importance of having sex. On the other hand, the message is about “saving” oneself until marriage. What’s a kid to do, really, in that situation? If virginity is so special, how come the majority of us aren't even in touch with the person to whom we "lost" it? The truth is when it comes to virginity, there is nothing lost, and nothing gained.

Besides, what's the exact definition of a virgin anyhow? One who's pure in both thoughts and mind? One who's never orgasmed? One who's never had intercourse? One who's had intercourse but never orgasm? Does oral sex count? What about priest sex? It's all confusing, really -- yet we're still obsessed with the idea of virginity.

The fact of the matter is that there are more important things to worry about in one’s lifelong accomplishment than sex and “virginity.” We see movies like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” but we don’t see movies like, “The 40-Year-Old Bum Who Hasn’t Done a Damned Thing to Make the World Better.”

Sometimes, I wonder why. Why can’t we just teach kids, from both the left and the right that sex is something amazing and wonderful that should only be had with responsibility, respect and readiness? Isn’t that a much better message than: if you aren’t having sex, you’re a loser or if you’re having sex, you’re a slut?

Wouldn’t it make the whole abstinence education debate much easier to digest? Wouldn’t it make birth control much more easily gotten? Wouldn’t it strike down patriarchy and society’s ideal of a family at its root? It certainly would. Just by changing our personal outlooks on virginity and sex, we can certainly make move the world in the right political direction.

Second point: why does society put such a strong emphasis on the act of sex? It is, after all, only sex. I don’t mean to sound like a frat boy here, but sex is just an act. It’s neither holy nor God’s gift. It’s neither divine nor special. It’s purely biological, just like any other activity that we engage in as humans. Sure, sex is certainly not making love, but it’s got a quality of its own. Just like going for a walk, having dinner or spending the afternoon with someone, sex is just an act. It only becomes special when the person with whom we are sharing it is special. Other than that, sex is just – sex. Why make things any complicated than life already is? To be sure, one should always be monogamous in a relationship, but let’s not treat sex anymore special than just a kiss. A kiss, after all, without any emotions put into it, is just a kiss.

Hooking up and down

ashwini — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:26:32 EST

I remember being somewhere between amused and horrified when during my mom’s wedding (her second, which is why I was there of course), her now-husband said in his reception speech that after many months of corresponding through e-mail and phone, they finally “hooked up.”

Of course, as most folks who are 40+ mean when they use the phrase, he meant “met.” (This is particularly scandalous/hilarious when one considers the strict sexual morality of my culture that strongly, STRONGLY frowns on pre-marital sex.)

But it’s difficult as a 22-year-old recent college graduate to think of that word in any other sense than une liaison d’amour, something less innocent than making out, but just short of sex. (Is this correct? Who knows. Who cares.) And her husband’s misstep, which is sure to elicit snickers from the 18-30 crowd, is caught on video forever.

Slate’s Meghan O’Rourke recently reviewed Laura Sessions Stepp’s screed, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, which obviously denounces “the hook up.” I have not read Stepp’s book, nor do I plan to, but O’Rourke takes Stepp to task for the wild assumptions and misguided conclusions Stepp reaches in her tome. Stepp’s thesis, according to O’Rourke, is that young women (of high school and college age) who engage in recreational “hook ups” will become jaded, emotionally bankrupt, and cynical of love—all which would lead to (heavens!) a hard time finding a husband:

“Just below [Unhooked’s] surface lurk the usual naked (and prurient) fears about girls and sex: Girls who put out are going to get hurt. Instead, Stepp argues, they should admit ‘the bar scene is a guy thing’ and stay home to ‘bake cookies, brownies, muffins’—after all, guys, she confides, will do ‘anything’ for homemade treats. (Who wants chlamydia when he can have cake?)”

I’m not convinced that sexual promiscuity automatically equals liberation, for any gender—and particularly when there’s alcohol involved. But some people enjoy it, and others don’t. And neither should be judged.

But, as a public service, please tell all of your parents to refrain from using “hook up” as a substitute for “to meet." Do you really want to hear your mom say "Dad and I are hooking up at the soccer game later on in the afternoon"??? Yeah, I didn't think so.