That night was a Halloween when she was a college student and she dressed up as a whore. Now that she's not a college student it's time for you to stop hooking up. She did that whore-costume thing when she was younger, so it's time for you to stop. Guess why? Because of feminism! Ha ha. That was the most transparent slip I've ever seen.
And I don't mean why not wear a transparent slip next time you want to dress like a whore. I mean, she did what was fun for her when she was so young that dressing slutty easily made her look super-sexy, and now that she's older and it's others who are young and have this automatic sexiness at their command, she's suddenly staunchly feminist. Ha.
This woman, Donna Freitas, is flogging a book — "The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy" — but the sample of her writing she's sharing in WaPo is awful.
I remember that night fondly, even though my feminist sensibilities cringe a little now. Not only is "fondly" the most cliché adverb to slap onto "remember" to try to give it some oomph — "sensibilities" can't "cringe."
And does feminism cause a feminist to cringe when thinking about things like that time she dressed like a whore? To cringe means (quoting the unlinkable OED):
To contract the muscles of the body, usually involuntarily; to shrink into a bent or crooked position; to cower.Picture a position of the body. Is that a feminist position — shrinking and crooked, cowering? Figuratively, it's:
To experience an involuntary inward shiver of embarrassment, awkwardness, disgust, etc.; to wince or shrink inwardly; (hence) to feel extremely embarrassed or uncomfortable. Freq. with at.Is that feminism — shivering with embarrassment, awkwardness, disgust? Maybe Freitas is purveying the same old shame with a deceptive "feminism" label, and maybe she's just a bad writer. Either way, I wouldn't recommend this book (though with that title, it could be a great gag gift for the right person).
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39 comments:
For some reason I picture her as Clint Eastwood:
Get off my lawn. Grrrrr.
I actually had to say this to some kids the other day; I couldn't believe it myself.
@Professor, you broke the code. Not bad for a university professor from Wisconsin.
Maybe Freitas is purveying the same old shame with a deceptive "feminism" label, and maybe she's just a bad writer.
And maybe she's both.
I really don't give a fuck about the seven million of varieties of feminism.
But, the elder ladies are in for a shock in the near future.
We're headed for a restoration of faith and family. That's the inevitable cycle of American history.
The next great rebellion, all you triumphant lefties, will be against you and your values.
Her article gave the impression that many of her favorite ideas are support by polls about what other people are doing. "Those people and their lack of morals" polls used to demonstrate her point ... not persuasive for me.
There has never been a man, not one, who considered sex to be just one more item on his to do list. But, ya know, there ain't no difference between the sexes. Yeah, right, ha ha ha ha ha....
I’ve spent the past eight years investigating hookup culture
Eight years??
Bullshit!!
She needed a justification for all of her one-night-stands, and she called it a study. At least, writing the op-ed gives her a chance to get paid for all the pussy she gave away.
She should move to Wisconsin. She'd fit in with all the former bingers who want to do away with binge drinking.
The equality of women has always been a big plus. It is only the chattering classes desperate need for new material that is beginning to bore us.
We were coming home from sunrise service and breakfast filled with joy and strength...and then NPR had a silly season program of chattering creative navel gazers enamored of themselves that seemed such a waste of human time.
It was a relief to turn it off.
Why not just get religion if you're gonna get all church lady on us. They have all the stuff up and running: books, costumes, rituals, community. Why reinvent the wheel, girls?
I do appreciate this though, because it's no fun to be naughty if it's not naughty. Wag that finger at us, please. But you need a bad guy, a foil. "Satan" is ancient history', the "chauvinist pig" is passe', "homophobe" kind of misses the target, "sexist" is just worn out like "racist". This idea can't have any power without a villain. It needs a little work.
WaPO, NYT are doing a lot of disservice to many legitimate male and female social issues. I think it is their choice of articles to be printed that skews the issue. Look at the Alzheimer's article below, ridden with so many lefty gobbledygook instead of just presenting that man's experience and letting the readers do what they want with it. Same with another story in NYT, yesterday -- "breastfeeding, look at me I am such a self-less human being". They have appropriated and tainted many issues with lefty rosy/whiny/preachy/ glasses that many are no longer interested in a good faith discussion about them.
It was a bad idea in the 60s.
But only now, when there's a real crisis coming in society, do they decide it's a problem.
Her feminist sensibilities might cringe a little when she thinks of easy college sex, but she herself gets a distracted faraway look in her eyes.
The woman can't get laid by someone who might have to see her again. No wonder she's unhappy.
Advice to young women: let it grow back.
Peter
"The United States is broke—fiscally, morally, intellectually...."
Former budget chief David Stockman in today's NYT.
Last night I watched part of "No Strings Attached," the Natalie Portman movie about a med student who wants a love-free love life. The film, what I could tolerate, consisted mostly of young women making jokes about men's penises, the male lead smoking pot with his father (who has stolen his girlfriend), and a girl at a bacchanal with the word "Whore" emblazoned on her panties. Ghastly.
Some of the saddest, most pathetic publications today are those for young women like "The Frisky" "Jezebel" and "The Gloss" which celebrate celebrity fashion, kittens, abortion and promiscuity.
I think that we are finally getting to the point that more and more young adults are realizing that "can" is not the same as "should" when it comes to sexaul freedom.
One basic problem with the hookup culture is that it isn't really natural for humans. For one thing, we aren't Bonabos (pygmy chimps), our relatives who live communally and use a lot of sex as a social lubricant. We aren't, because our young are dependent much longer, and historically required two parents to survive and thrive. So, there was an evolutionary advantage to our species of chimp in monogamous pairings, where females can entice/capture males (hopefully the fathers of their children) into providing support and helping to raise their children. A surprising number of the ways that we differ from other apes seem designed to push in this direction, including hidden ovulation, female orgasm, and even the contents of our seminal fluid. So, it shouldn't be surprising that both sexes, but I think our females in particular, feel a psychological need for pair bonding.
Another part of this is that while initial value of females seems to be tied up in their sexual alure, and thus how many males desire them, in the longer run, much of their value with men revolves around their exclusivity. One of the deepest seated fears of males is that they will be tricked into spending their precious resources raising the children of other men fathered on their own mates (And, hence the source of much of what feminists consider so unfair or sexist in our society). This is again, "wet wear", and is most likely a direct result of those men not guaranteeing paternity of their children not leaving as many genetic descendants, if they leave any.
So, I always found it sad when Carrie and the other women on "Sluts in the City" would jump from bed to bed every episode trying to find "Mr. Right", because every bed they jumped into reduced their worth in the eyes of many men. Who can trust a woman who so easily has sex with so many men, when it comes to the issue of guaranteeing paternity? (And, remember, through most of our millions of years of genetic programming, we didn't have DNA testing). Even now, in our liberated times, with all things even, a female's worth seems inversely related to the number of male partners she has had. Yes, it is unfair, but it is the trade off that human women made with hidden ovulation, etc. many many millenia ago, making paternity far more difficult to determine than maternity.
There used to be a saying that women got intimate to have sex, while men had sex to get initimate. In other words, for women, the closeness came first, before the sex, while with men, they needed the sex for the bonding. But, now, a lot of the young women seem to be having the sex first, and never getting to the bonding that they craved in earlier generations.
Last night I watched part of "No Strings Attached," the Natalie Portman movie about a med student who wants a love-free love life. The film, what I could tolerate, consisted mostly of young women making jokes about men's penises, the male lead smoking pot with his father (who has stolen his girlfriend), and a girl at a bacchanal with the word "Whore" emblazoned on her panties. Ghastly.
It is, however, fictional. I rather doubt that many people live their lives in such a manner.
So, I always found it sad when Carrie and the other women on "Sluts in the City" would jump from bed to bed every episode trying to find "Mr. Right", because every bed they jumped into reduced their worth in the eyes of many men.
Once again, fictional. SATC was essentially a gay man's idea of what a straight woman's love life was like.
Peter
Youth and beauty gives women a chance to gamble and win but the window of opportunity is very brief. I think women go into denial about what they'd really like to get out of it because it's uncool and makes them look devious.
But if they can parlay that moment of *some* power into a good marriage and family then they win. Or, sleep their way to the top at least. Look at Barbara Walters et al.
Modern ideologies seem like nothing more than expensive and overly complicated methods for discovering what was known all along.
"One basic problem with the hookup culture is that it isn't really natural for humans."
I agree with you but feminist professors are writing books and articles to try to prove the opposite.
It just shows that "feminism" is really just a cover for leftist women to dominate others and have their sensibilities reign supreme.
Now, like other typical leftist movements, the older ones turn on their own.
Leftists in general, and feminists in particular, are just Church Ladies with a differnt religion.
Its the same old shaming and bullying of dissenters to enforce social conformity bullcrap that used to be done by the Christians. Now it's gays, skin color minorities and women doing it. And they are completely fine with it.
I think she suffered from an errant auto-correct - the sentence was probably intended to be:
"I remember that night fondling, even though my feminist sensibilities cringe a little now."
Leftists in general, and feminists in particular, are just Church Ladies with a different religion.
What a profound insight.
" [Sex in the City] was essentially a gay man's idea of what a straight woman's love life was like."
That's it. That's the perfect description.
Let me expand a bit on one of my sub-points above. The theory is with hidden ovulation seems to be that by hiding it, males would have to stay around constantly in order to guarantee paternity of the children that they raise. If it weren't hidden, as it is with other chimp species, then the males would only have to stick around at the time of ovulation, which, at least with common chimps, is quite obvious to all concerned.
The problem for human males though is that this is also the time when our females are the most promiscuous, desiring alpha male genes that their beta male partners cannot provide. So, countering this, may be the reason that our males evolved to include a potent combination of mood hormones and the like in their seminal fluid. I also suspect that it is part of why males seem to be wired to prize loyalty and lack of promiscuity. And, yes, maybe taught them that sensitivity to females' moods and cycles increased their ability to detect ovulation.
To make a long story shorter, females evolved to pair bond with males to have a second parent providing resources for the raising of offspring, due to the greatly lengthened time of dependency required to grow our big brains. So, they evolved ways to bond males to them. But, there was an evolutionary advantage to alpha genes, and so some females cuckolded their beta mates to get them. Males evolved some defenses, but, I think, mostly developed societal defenses to this. And, if it sounds circular, it is, with this sort of evolutionary dance or competition occurring between sexes in most species.
In The Temple Of The Seven Sisters, they can take their penance seriously.
In The Temple Of The Seven Sisters, they can police their own imperiously.
But this one came to it on her own.
Maybe she's got a future as a scribe, scribbling down the latest statistics on the pay gap, or the the mommy wars for the coming Golden Dawn Of Equality.
" [Sex in the City] was essentially a gay man's idea of what a straight woman's love life was like."
Yes, but... At a deeper level, it did something for a lot of women. Maybe it was to live out their own fantasies of a lot of promiscuous sex, fancy shoes, etc. Something at I, as a straight male, could never quite understand. Figured that if I were thrown into that situation with those women, I might have considered a night or so with one or two of them, but would have made sure that I was using a double condom if I did. But, a lot of women loved the show.
As to the point that it is fiction - yes, but fiction to be successful must reach people at some level of their being. It must resonate. And, figuring out why is the interesting part.
BTW - I drive my SO crazy with this sort of analysis. I will ask why detergent commercials are being run with action/drama shows late at night, or asking why there is so much sex on some of these shows. And, for the latter, her response is that it is fiction. Yes, but that ignores the question. There are reasons why Sluts in the City was successful for so many years, despite having apparently been a gay male view of straight women dating. A lot of straight female (and gay male) eyeballs viewed the series, and that made money. But why? And, I think the answer is that, like romance novels, the TV promiscuity ties into, and is a substitute for, the drive for those alpha genes that I mentioned earlier.
***I have been in the room of the scribes, stealing away just before I was, no doubt, to be revealed in my guise of hipster eunuch journalist.
Upon each hour, the scribes would stand, wordlessly, and gather in a circle around the bust of what appeared to be a golden, grinning man.
A ritual ensued, each woman walking slowly in a circle, eyeing the statue, tension solwly building. The pace quickened until suddenly the most foul language and invective began. Some spit upon him, hurled insults and arguments and abstruse, poorly reasoned theories. One turned and caressed his head, kissed him, and rubbed his shoulders with words of encouragement.
A few even self-flagellated.
As quickly as it began, it ended, and each scribe went back to writing pieces for the Atlantic, Slate, and The New Yorker, mixing current events, global warming, and spoke again of the coming Age Of Equality.
It was only later, after waiting for many hours, did I see the bust closely. There, in the pale light, was almost a piece of kitsch, stained, nicked, plaster underneath.
On the pedestal, I could make out the words:
"Herb Wasserman: Salesman Of The Year, 1958, Revco Industries"
The worst part isn't her writing, it's that she dared to suggest that the hook-up culture is damaging to a person's ability to form relationships.
Good thing that churches have been trying to sound a warning about sexual morality...
Oh. Wait.
Nevermind.
So a whore is sexy. Dressing like a whore is sexy. Someone is really stupid and sick. Hooking up, doing what a whore is paid to do for free, is stupid beyond words.
The author wants to stop hooking up because no one is interested in her even she will do it for free.
Pathetic.
elkh1
A whore isn't paid for the sex, she is paid to leave afterwards.
ROFL. For nearly 4 decades women have been peddled this line of crap and now it's not so good eh?
Today's "progressive" or liberal is tomorrow's conservative.
We are most likely to be "progressive" or liberal when we are young because youth engenders a certain dissociation of risk. As we grow older, most people also mature (i.e. better judgment), and come to appreciate the circumstances of reality.
There used to be a saying that women got intimate to have sex, while men had sex to get initimate. In other words, for women, the closeness came first, before the sex, while with men, they needed the sex for the bonding. But, now, a lot of the young women seem to be having the sex first, and never getting to the bonding that they craved in earlier generations.
Bruce Hayden: For several years I attended writing classes in the Bay Area and was flummoxed by the hookup context of the younger students' stories. It really came off as joyless and competitive. With the women it also included an amazing contempt for their male characters.
P.S. You're one of the commenters here I look forward to reading.
Look: http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Donna+Freitas&go=&qs=n&form=QBIR&pq=donna+freitas&sc=8-13&sp=-1&sk=
@Bruce Hayden
You need to read Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
Is that feminism — shivering with embarrassment, awkwardness, disgust?
Yes.
Next question.
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