And a quick PSA from me: Dagmar Herzog, a historian of sexuality based at CUNY who has done revolutionary work on post-World War II German memory and sexuality, will be speaking in conversation with Richard Goldstein, who writes on pop culture and sexuality at The Nation, at Book Culture tomorrow. Dagmar Herzog just published a new book, Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics. The book explores how the Religious Right has taken control of and subsequently manhandled the way sex is talked about in contemporary America. In three words: married, monogamous, heterosexual. This should be a great talk. I’ll be there and I hope to see some of you there too!
sexuality
Tonight is the This Is What Women Want Speak Out here in NYC. So here is what I want, what I’d like to tell the candidates, what I want them to hear. And a bigtime thanks goes to the National Council for Research on Women for their Big 5 website – a motherload of information for those of you similarly wanting to put it out there and help bring our issues to the candidates’ attention.
As a woman hoping to bring a child into this world, I have a lot of wants right about now.
As a working woman, I want guaranteed leave. Yes, it’s true, some limited unpaid leave is made mandatory under the Family Medical Leave Act. But I find it pretty disgusting that the United States is not among the 168 countries worldwide that provide paid maternity leave. And did you know, dear candidates, that mothers without paid leave in our country take fewer weeks off from work after childbirth than women with leave benefits, putting both mothers and infants at risk for health complications? And while we’re at it, nearly half (47%) of private-sector workers and 22 million women workers do not have any paid sick days. Nearly half the women who take off from work to care for a sick child give up their wages to do so. Three-quarters of women living in poverty sacrifice wages to look after sick children. If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. Fix this, puleese?
When I become a mother, I’m going to want affordable childcare. Did you know, dear candidates, that nationwide, nearly 12 million children under age 5 are in childcare each week and, in every region of the United States, childcare fees surpass the average amount families spend on food? And of course, childcare costs are particularly weighty for poor and low-income families, who pay a significantly higher share of their income for care than higher-level income groups. Providing childcare subsidies reduces work schedule-related problems for single working mothers by about 56%. So why not supply more of these?
As the future mother of a future daughter or son, I want a personal promise from you that Roe v. Wade will never be overturned. And I want you, dear candidates, to take the lead in promoting women’s reproductive rights and health, especially the preservation of reproductive rights and health for low income women and women of color. I want honest sex ed in our schools, and an end to this federally-funded abstinence-only hoohah.
That’s for starters. What do YOU want? Tell it to mic tonight at LaGuardia Community College if you happen to be in the NYC vicinity. The “This Is What Women Want Pre-Debate Speakout” is taking place tonight @ 7:00 PM and it’s free: Mainstage Theater, 31-10 Thomson Avenue, LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, Queens. More info available here.
This just in: You and your same-sex partner can get married in Connecticut as well as Massachusetts and California. I hear wedding bells from a whole state away.
(Thanks to Virginia for the heads up.)
Sex and Sensibility: Quick Takes
by Kristen Loveland
Hi to all from your Sex and Sensibility lady here. Here are a few things that caught my eye this past week:
1. The Truth About Teen Girls: Belinda Luscombe has an awesome article in Time Magazine talking about how, despite the proliferation of sexual imagery in the teenage world, maybe we shouldn’t be twisting our knickers in such a knot over their alleged sexual promiscuity. To wit:
“With the pornucopia of media at teens’ disposal in the past decade and a half, on cell phones and computers as well as TVs, early-adolescent sex should be having a growth spurt. But the figures don’t necessarily support one. Despite a minor increase in 2006, the rate of pregnancies among teen girls has been on a downward trend since 1991. Another indicator, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, is alarmingly high: nearly 1 in 4 girls ages 14 to 19 and nearly 1 in 2 African-American girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But this is the first year such a study has been completed, and the study doesn’t separate 14-to-16-year-olds from 17-to-19-year-olds, so it’s still unclear which way that trend is heading.”
Keep reading this fantastic article here and thanks to Deborah for sending this to me!
2. I Am Charlotte: The Series: While on the one hand it appears that there are finally a number of voices asking us to put on the breaks for a second and contemplate what the actual sexual experiences of teenage girls are, it looks like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons is going to be made into an HBO series. Charlotte Simmons the book has often been noted as over-stated and over-bearing in its condemnation of college sexuality. As the New York Magazine Book Review put it at the time:
“Wolfe’s vision of eroticism is ultimately too dark. When, in Charlotte Simmons, an older man has sex with a younger woman, it is, of course, cynical. But when a younger man has sex with a younger woman, it is equally cynical. Indeed, all the sex in Wolfe’s imagined university is rotten. All intimacy is rotten. At the end of the novel, Charlotte falls in with a new man. He comes from a very different walk of life than Charlotte does, and to all appearances he adores her. One might reasonably see this turn of events as a triumph—love conquering differences, love opening doors. But Wolfe intends for us to see it as a defeat: The man is not suited for his clever country heroine; she has forgotten, he suggests, that “she is Charlotte Simmonsâ€; she has lost her identity.”
To put it mildly, I’m not overly-optimistic about the way the series will portray yet another young woman who has lost her character to the hedonistic offerings of that Gomorrah now known as the American university.
3. The Old is New Again: And finally, on a slightly different note, Ann over at Feministing recently wrote about John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, who wants to pay low-income women to be sterilized. Something that is consistently overlooked in mainstream’s take on what it means to be Pro-Choice is that it is just that: the choice to have or not to have a child. As a political position, it is both concerned with those woman who, for x, y, and z reason, choose not to have a child, and with those from whom the right to have a child is coercively taken away. There have been a number of studies and histories done on sterilization abuse which, particularly in 1970s America, targeted poor and minority women, and included everything from outright nonconsensual sterilizations, to unclear statements signed on the hospital bed before an abortion, to, well, something like LaBruzzo’s brilliant idea. The government has no place in coercing a targeted group of women into permanent reproductive decisions.
Sex and Sensibility
Sex and Sensibility is a weekly column from Kristen Loveland that seeks to put the reasoned voice of a young woman in her 20’s into the “sex wars” fray. Sometime member of the “hook-up generation” and frequent skeptic of the social, cultural, and sexual messages young women receive from the religious right and national media, Kristen provides a voice for a much-discussed generation that has had little chance to speak up for itself.
Removing the Kid Gloves
by Kristen Loveland
In an article appearing in Wednesday’s New York Times titled “Girl Talk Has Its Limits,†the lives of young girls are once again put under the microscope for inspection by a pack of inquisitive adults. Not content to explore the sexual landscape of Miley Cyrus, cultural scrutiny now delves into female friendships and asks whether girls really should be talking, or “co-ruminatingâ€, with each other so much, because “[s]ome studies have found that excessive talking about problems can contribute to emotional difficulties, including anxiety and depression.â€
First of all, this is old news. My roommate’s abnormal psychology textbook from 2004 notes, “It is known that rumination is likely to maintain or exacerbate depression, in part by interfering with instrumental behavior.†Notice the terms “maintain†and “exacerbateâ€â€”the depression derives not from the rumination itself but from another source.
Unsurprisingly, one of the not-so-hidden assumptions of this article is that girls have an unhealthy obsession with boys:
“I could see it starting already,†she said, adding that she has made a concerted effort recently not to dwell on her own problems with friends and to try to stop negative thoughts. “From sixth grade, it’s boys are stupid, boys have cooties,†she said. “And then it progresses to boys have cooties but 20-year-old cooties. So you might as well change it when you can.”
Ah yes, the fragile female psyche. I might ask why the author wasted over 1,000 words devoted to a question bound to lead to a dead end. After all, will you ask your daughter to bottle up her worries instead? I might also ask why the author used fictional models from Heathers, Mean Girls, Sex and the City, and Gossip Girl for female friendship. Sure, I’ll admit that I talk to my girl friends—a lot. I get a feeling of distinct pleasure when I look at my cell’s phonebook, considering which of my good friends I should call next to ruminate about “so-and-so who failed to call†or “you’ll never guess who showed up last night†or “is it just me, or does she seem a bit self-centered lately?†But these exchanges have never quite reached the dramatics of a Lindsey Lohan-led cast, though they might be a lot more interesting if they did.
While I’d like to say that the article’s author clearly hasn’t seen enough Woody Allen movies, it’s true that females are more prone to clinical depression than males. Nonetheless, it seems rather facile to place 1,000 words of emphasis on co-rumination as explanation—even irresponsible as I watch the article trek up the New York Times “Most Emailed†list. Because in the end the article (note its placement in the Fashion & Style section) is simply another of those proprietary “What’s wrong with our young women?†pieces that will make the rounds of forwarded email and provide all too simplistic answers for questions that really deserve more complex consideration. What’s wrong with our young women? They talk to each other too much. What’s wrong with our young women? They’re too superficial. What’s wrong with our young women? They give away the milk for free.
While newspapers and magazines are understandably aching to draw readers in, we can’t ignore the implications of such incessant prying into young women’s lives. It’s noteworthy that so many articles focus, or place the blame, on the actions of young women themselves (friendships, sexual relations, drinking habits, college experiences, etc.), instead of on the society in which they are raised. But perhaps we aren’t so much interested in solving “the young women problem†as in lifting back the curtain to sneak a covert glance at that object of intense public fascination: the Miley Cyruses, the Britol Palins, and all the other bright young female things that seem so troubled. As one writer notes, “The modern American female is one of the most discussed, most written-about, sore subjects to come along in ages.â€
The funny thing is, that was actually written back in 1957, which means the new ain’t so new. A young Nora Johnson was talking about “Sex and the College Girl” in the 50s, the era of the domesticated and constrained female, who kowtowed to the reasonable, responsible expectations of society. Yet Johnson’s description of her generation struck me as so relevant to today:
We are deadly serious in our pursuits and, I am afraid, non-adventurous in our actions. We have a compulsion to plan our lives, to take into account all possible adversities and to guard against them. We prefer not to consider the fact that human destinies are subject to amazingly ephemeral influences and that often our most rewarding experiences come about by pure chance.
Those are my italics. I emphasize that last line, because I think it is something we often forget as a society, perhaps in an effort fill the news feed, perhaps in an effort to re-corset our daughters. Depression and anxiety are, of course, conditions to be treated seriously. But efforts to analyze each and every aspect of young American women’s lives, (always premised, of course, on a concern for those young American women’s well-being), is a form of the strictest regulation, and ignores the intense wonder of unknowing and chance.
Whenever I read stories implying that we should worry about such-and-such an aspect of young women’s behavior, I picture an invalid who lives to be a hundred by lying on her sofa all day. But does she live? And is she any more psychologically sound for having been removed from experience all these years—or has her mind warped in on itself, obsessively concerned with the minutiae in life because she has never known the larger things? Shouldn’t we… wait, sorry, I had to catch myself there for a second. I’m afraid I was getting rather alarmist.
Anyway people, remove the kid gloves.
Passing along info on an event in NYC this Saturday that I sadly can’t attend — but maybe you can (and can tell me about it!):
Mating in Captivity: Sexuality and Monogamy Roundtable
Participants: Michael Kimmel, Pamela Paul, Esther Perel, Owen Renik (moderator)
September 13, 2008, 2:30 PM
This roundtable will address the ways in which monogamous partnerships affect sexual desire, sexual function, and sexual need. How do secrets and risky behaviors play a role in undermining domestic stability and trust, while potentially enhancing sexual activity? Does domestic partnering imperil our inherent sexual drive? Is it more beneficial to preserve the stability of the family unit than to explore one’s sexuality to the fullest? Is it possible to do both? What are the chemical and structural influences that play a role in this dynamic? The multidisciplinary panel will examine these questions and the way that imagination can play a role in the sexual dynamic of marriages and long-term sexual partnerships.
Sponsored by THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION (how’s that for the name of an institute?!) at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
If anyone goes and wants to blog about it here, door’s WIDE open 🙂
And now for our monthly contribution from Jacqueline Hudak, who writes the Family Stories column here at GWP. Here’s Jacqueline!
Heteroflexibility
Sexual politics are in a time of huge transition – think Ellen and Portia – and still, there is simply no public cultural consciousness about the concept of “sexual fluidity.†A well-crafted recent book by Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Harvard University Press), takes another step toward putting it on the map.
While perhaps not yet a public story, the notion of women’s sexual fluidity is certainly coursing through the zeitgeist. I was in the midst of writing this post on Diamond’s book when I decided to take a break and see Woody Allen’s new film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And there it was, right there on the big screen: sexual fluidity, and all the attendant complexities.
In one scene, Scarlet Johanssen’s character Cristina, is relating the complicated story of her relationship with Maria Elena, who happens to be her lover’s ex-wife. Her friends Vicky and Doug listen intently. As Cristina pauses, Doug rushes to ask, “So, what, you mean you’re a bisexual?†To which Christina replies, with some discomfort, “Oh, I’m not really into those categories.â€
Not into those categories indeed.
Diamond, a Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, has conducted, to date, the only detailed longitudinal study of women’s same gender attractions. She interviewed nearly one hundred young women at two year intervals over a period of ten years about their relationships and desires and found that, for women, love and desire are not rigidly lesbian or heterosexual. By the 10th year of her study, two-thirds of the women had changed their identity label at least once.
The notion of “sexual fluidity” contradicts the dominant cultural story about sexuality—the idea that you are one thing or another, but rarely both. That story shapes our ideas about sexual orientation as fixed in early adulthood and remaining static throughout a lifetime. But as Diamond so eloquently points out, for women, this has not been the case.
One of the many things I loved about this book was the depth and analysis of research that Diamond amassed. Having done research on this topic myself, I was aware that there was a lot of data around that supported a more fluid conception of sexuality for women – Kinsey, Adrienne Rich, and the ‘erotic plasticity’ model in 2000, to name a few. The only problem was, it didn’t conform to the (male) sexual standard. Since genital sex is not necessarily how women construct their sexual identities, the sexual experiences of women have been invisible, or somehow deviant from the (male) norm. My friends, we have been called ‘outliers.’
My only disappointment with the book was that I wanted the conversation to continue. Just as it ended I felt like I had arrived at the good part: the implications of women’s sexual fluidity, for us as researchers and clinicians, and more importantly, as partners and mothers. As a family therapist and mom who went through such a transition, I know it was not a solitary process; it entailed numerous and ongoing conversations with my children, family and extended community. Suddenly I found myself in the midst of a story that was totally unfamiliar: Married woman with two kids falls in love with a woman. I mean, wasn’t I supposed to know which team I played for before I turned 45?
I remain curious and perplexed about our need to hold on to these rigid and discrete categories when they obviously do not fit for women. I am heartened by the youth who do not seem to have the same attachment to the labels, and instead are ‘questioning’ ‘spectrum’ and ‘heteroflexible.’ Perhaps my children’s generation will focus on the quality of a relationship rather than the sex of their partner. In the meantime, perhaps movies such as Barcelona books such as Lisa Diamond’s, and real life family stories like ours will help inch the conversation along just a little bit more.
For previous posts by Jacqueline, click here.
I’m back in action. I mean, rather, back at work.
A piece I wrote, “Sex and the Single Guys, For Real,” is up today over at the Women’s Media Center. The piece has nothing to do with Grandma of course, unless you count the fact that Marge volunteered at a center that offered counseling and contraception to teens, for which I will always remain extremely proud of her.
My WMC commentary features Michael Kimmel’s new book, which was also reviewed, btw, by Wesley Yang in yesterday’s NYTimes (see “Nasty Boys”). Here’s the teaser:
With all the excitement of the summer games, you may have missed this juicy bit of “news†from Olympic Village: as soon as their competition ended, the athletes apparently got rather busy themselves.
They had sex. Lots of it. So much that organizers in Beijing handed out free condoms, says former Olympian Matthew Syed of the UK’s Times Online. And this year, Syed tells us, the female athletes were as horny as the men.
We’ve long been inundated with images of young men with libido flowing unchecked. But with sexual insatiability now cast as an equal-opportunity calling, the guys are no longer portrayed as alone. If all the hook-up hoopla about kids on U.S. campuses is true—the girls have gone wild! the boys can’t get enough!—then the athletes in Beijing were hardly the only modern young men and women engaged in an Olympic-size orgy of never-ending desire.
But wait! New research…Read the rest.
And for those here in NYC, Kimmel will be reading from and discussing his book, Guyland, on Sept. 9 at 7pm, at Borders Columbus Circle. I may see you there….
You may have heard that the Bush administration’s latest attempt to infringe on women’s reproductive rights could give health-care workers the right to refuse contraception to their patients. Yes, it all sounds a bit pre-Griswoldian. I’d like to say I’m shocked. But I’m not. After all, we live in a world of abstinence-only sex ed and, for a time, Eric Keroack. More especially, we live in a cultural climate intent on pathologizing and condemning young people’s sexual practices, and governmental encroachment on the sexual habits of legal adults seems like the obvious next step. But let’s be honest, they’re really concerned with the sexual habits of young women, and are we surprised?
In 2007 when I first opened the Atlantic Monthly to discover Caitlin Flanagan’s take on Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked, which chronicles “the semi-anonymous ‘hooking up’ that is now the norm,” I was floored. After noting Stepp’s conclusion that the “girls” were “exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually†by the practice, Flanagan carried on her own paternalistic diatribe on “girls” who change “in some ugly ways when left on their own.” I was shocked. They were talking about me. Or, at least, they thought they were talking about me. After all, I was a 23-year-old woman who had hooked up with men I was not nearly in love with throughout college. Did this make me an “ugly-wayed” girl?
With other things on my mind (a grad school thesis, job search, friends and flings), I promptly forgot about it. However, soon I realized that this trend wasn’t going away. What has followed, from both the religious right and so-called cultural studies of my generation such as Unhooked and Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shalit, has been an attempt to convince young women that by engaging in pre-marital, or more broadly “pre-love,” sexual activity, they risk their emotional and psychological well-being. With women no longer prohibited by fear of pregnancy or STDs, purity propagators are now on a mission to tell women that, like smoking and fatty foods, sex is bad for their health.
The recent publication by the The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute of Sense and Sexuality, subtitled: “The college girl’s guide to real protection in a hooked-up world” highlights this fact.
According to Sense and Sexuality, girls should avoid hookups because oxytocin, released during sex, will cause a girl to “develop feelings for a guy whose last intention is to bond with you.” Further, it scientifically observes that “as the number of casual sex partners in the past year increased, so did signs of depression in college women.” In sum, once you have sex with a guy, you’re a goner. You fall in love, you get attached, you’re bound to become love-sick and depressed when it doesn’t work– all because you had intercourse.
Don’t you find it odd that such arbiters of high culture and higher religion center their definition of “love” on sexual intercourse? While troubadours once spun tales of romantic despair and literal illness caused by love unrequited, today’s story-tellers have pared that soulful feeling down to a simple physical act. As my generation would say, how ironic. As I would say, how wrong. In a recent Vanity Fair article, British bon vivant Nicky Haslam, now 68 and with many lovers come and gone, says, “The truth is I’m not that interested in sex… I’m about love. It’s wonderful once or something. The quickest way to fall out of love is to sleep with somebody. Don’t shatter the crystal.†Go ahead. Call me a romantic. But my greatest heartache was not caused by the guy who hopped in and out of my bed and got away, but by the guy who seemed to fulfill my ideal of what I want in a partner, and got away.
Let’s talk about agency and subjectivity, because I think it’s about time the media published more first-hand accounts from the “hookup” generation itself. Tracy Clark-Flory, my own age (24), wrote a great article at Salon about her “hookup” experience–she’s had about three times as many hookups as relationships, and concludes, “like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships.” Like many my age, who will wait to marry until they are well into their late twenties and thirties, she has found hookups to be a way to romantically vet men. I whole-heartedly agree.
And about that term “hookup”–so amorphous, so undefined. To be clear, if I tell a friend that I “hooked up” with so-and-so last night, her first reaction will be “So how far’d you go?” A “hookup” can range anywhere from making out to a full romp in bed. It might include slinking out at midnight or staying over, cuddling in the morning, going out for brunch. It is one of the most ill-defined terms of my generation, which makes it surprising that so many adults have such firm opinions on it. And while a hookup may be “semi-anonymous” as Flanagan says, it often involves a classmate or an acquaintance or friend you’ve known for years. It can last a night, a month, or three years on and off.
In college and beyond, the line between hooking up and dating has become increasingly blurred. I’ve known couples now engaged who began with an orientation-week hookup. I’ve known wine-and-dine daters who have dropped out of the picture with nary an explanation. Do I worry about girls who engage in hookups because they think the only thing they have to give are their bodies? Of course. And as Shira Tarrant recently noted in Bitch, “the modesty movement makes some good points about the effect a hypersexual culture can have on women’s well-being and sense of self.”
Yet why are our moral watchdogs so quick to condemn women’s sex-positive behavior as primary culprit? As Tarrant goes on to argue, such an analysis leaves women with only two choices: to be either virgin or whore. And personally, I’d like to think of myself as neither. Writes Tarrant, “If we refuse to acknowledge that judgments about women and modesty come from an extremely narrow-minded, controlling view that has more to do with punishing female sexual agency than with modesty itself, all we’re doing is restating that good girls don’t, bad girls do, and each gets what’s coming to her. 
” By targeting immodesty and hookups, in fact, such commentators only undermine their mission, ignoring the complex social influences that actually do lead some women to value their bodies over their selves. Self-destructive sex is a symptom of a greater social pathology–not the cause.
But haven’t I ever felt “exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually” from “hooking up”? Yes, sometimes, just as I’ve felt exhausted by tested friendships and challenged beliefs. Show me a Bildungsroman protagonist, or an average American college student, who doesn’t need to go through emotionally and physically trying times to develop a better understanding of what he or she wants in a career, a friendship, a partner, in him- or herself.
At the end of her Atlantic article, Flanagan writes: “The bitter pill for many parents sending their daughters to college is that there is no possible way to protect them from what they will encounter once they have been dropped off at the freshman dorm.” As a woman who is very different today from the tremendously introverted and scared 18-year-old her parents dropped off at her freshman dorm, all I can say is: thank goodness for that.
-Kristen Loveland
Did anyone see that article last weekend on the Olympic athletes and sex? The Times Online’s Matthew Syed reported on how the athletes were acting like bunnies once their sport was over. Of greatest interest to me, he noted that success on the field didn’t necessarily translate in gender equitable terms. While Olympic gold is a “surefire ticket to writhe†for even the geekiest of Olympian men,” says Syed, “gold-winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round.â€
Why might this be? Syed’s hypothesis:
“It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous.”
In all fairness, Syed is not condoning the phenomenon, merely noting it. Is he correct? What do you think?
Tonight is the This Is What Women Want Speak Out here in NYC. So here is what I want, what I’d like to tell the candidates, what I want them to hear. And a bigtime thanks goes to the National Council for Research on Women for their Big 5 website – a motherload of information for those of you similarly wanting to put it out there and help bring our issues to the candidates’ attention.
As a woman hoping to bring a child into this world, I have a lot of wants right about now.
As a working woman, I want guaranteed leave. Yes, it’s true, some limited unpaid leave is made mandatory under the Family Medical Leave Act. But I find it pretty disgusting that the United States is not among the 168 countries worldwide that provide paid maternity leave. And did you know, dear candidates, that mothers without paid leave in our country take fewer weeks off from work after childbirth than women with leave benefits, putting both mothers and infants at risk for health complications? And while we’re at it, nearly half (47%) of private-sector workers and 22 million women workers do not have any paid sick days. Nearly half the women who take off from work to care for a sick child give up their wages to do so. Three-quarters of women living in poverty sacrifice wages to look after sick children. If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. Fix this, puleese?
When I become a mother, I’m going to want affordable childcare. Did you know, dear candidates, that nationwide, nearly 12 million children under age 5 are in childcare each week and, in every region of the United States, childcare fees surpass the average amount families spend on food? And of course, childcare costs are particularly weighty for poor and low-income families, who pay a significantly higher share of their income for care than higher-level income groups. Providing childcare subsidies reduces work schedule-related problems for single working mothers by about 56%. So why not supply more of these?
As the future mother of a future daughter or son, I want a personal promise from you that Roe v. Wade will never be overturned. And I want you, dear candidates, to take the lead in promoting women’s reproductive rights and health, especially the preservation of reproductive rights and health for low income women and women of color. I want honest sex ed in our schools, and an end to this federally-funded abstinence-only hoohah.
That’s for starters. What do YOU want? Tell it to mic tonight at LaGuardia Community College if you happen to be in the NYC vicinity. The “This Is What Women Want Pre-Debate Speakout” is taking place tonight @ 7:00 PM and it’s free: Mainstage Theater, 31-10 Thomson Avenue, LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, Queens. More info available here.
This just in: You and your same-sex partner can get married in Connecticut as well as Massachusetts and California. I hear wedding bells from a whole state away.
(Thanks to Virginia for the heads up.)
Sex and Sensibility: Quick Takes
by Kristen Loveland
Hi to all from your Sex and Sensibility lady here. Here are a few things that caught my eye this past week:
1. The Truth About Teen Girls: Belinda Luscombe has an awesome article in Time Magazine talking about how, despite the proliferation of sexual imagery in the teenage world, maybe we shouldn’t be twisting our knickers in such a knot over their alleged sexual promiscuity. To wit:
“With the pornucopia of media at teens’ disposal in the past decade and a half, on cell phones and computers as well as TVs, early-adolescent sex should be having a growth spurt. But the figures don’t necessarily support one. Despite a minor increase in 2006, the rate of pregnancies among teen girls has been on a downward trend since 1991. Another indicator, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, is alarmingly high: nearly 1 in 4 girls ages 14 to 19 and nearly 1 in 2 African-American girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But this is the first year such a study has been completed, and the study doesn’t separate 14-to-16-year-olds from 17-to-19-year-olds, so it’s still unclear which way that trend is heading.”
Keep reading this fantastic article here and thanks to Deborah for sending this to me!
2. I Am Charlotte: The Series: While on the one hand it appears that there are finally a number of voices asking us to put on the breaks for a second and contemplate what the actual sexual experiences of teenage girls are, it looks like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons is going to be made into an HBO series. Charlotte Simmons the book has often been noted as over-stated and over-bearing in its condemnation of college sexuality. As the New York Magazine Book Review put it at the time:
“Wolfe’s vision of eroticism is ultimately too dark. When, in Charlotte Simmons, an older man has sex with a younger woman, it is, of course, cynical. But when a younger man has sex with a younger woman, it is equally cynical. Indeed, all the sex in Wolfe’s imagined university is rotten. All intimacy is rotten. At the end of the novel, Charlotte falls in with a new man. He comes from a very different walk of life than Charlotte does, and to all appearances he adores her. One might reasonably see this turn of events as a triumph—love conquering differences, love opening doors. But Wolfe intends for us to see it as a defeat: The man is not suited for his clever country heroine; she has forgotten, he suggests, that “she is Charlotte Simmonsâ€; she has lost her identity.”
To put it mildly, I’m not overly-optimistic about the way the series will portray yet another young woman who has lost her character to the hedonistic offerings of that Gomorrah now known as the American university.
3. The Old is New Again: And finally, on a slightly different note, Ann over at Feministing recently wrote about John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, who wants to pay low-income women to be sterilized. Something that is consistently overlooked in mainstream’s take on what it means to be Pro-Choice is that it is just that: the choice to have or not to have a child. As a political position, it is both concerned with those woman who, for x, y, and z reason, choose not to have a child, and with those from whom the right to have a child is coercively taken away. There have been a number of studies and histories done on sterilization abuse which, particularly in 1970s America, targeted poor and minority women, and included everything from outright nonconsensual sterilizations, to unclear statements signed on the hospital bed before an abortion, to, well, something like LaBruzzo’s brilliant idea. The government has no place in coercing a targeted group of women into permanent reproductive decisions.
Sex and Sensibility
Sex and Sensibility is a weekly column from Kristen Loveland that seeks to put the reasoned voice of a young woman in her 20’s into the “sex wars” fray. Sometime member of the “hook-up generation” and frequent skeptic of the social, cultural, and sexual messages young women receive from the religious right and national media, Kristen provides a voice for a much-discussed generation that has had little chance to speak up for itself.
Removing the Kid Gloves
by Kristen Loveland
In an article appearing in Wednesday’s New York Times titled “Girl Talk Has Its Limits,†the lives of young girls are once again put under the microscope for inspection by a pack of inquisitive adults. Not content to explore the sexual landscape of Miley Cyrus, cultural scrutiny now delves into female friendships and asks whether girls really should be talking, or “co-ruminatingâ€, with each other so much, because “[s]ome studies have found that excessive talking about problems can contribute to emotional difficulties, including anxiety and depression.â€
First of all, this is old news. My roommate’s abnormal psychology textbook from 2004 notes, “It is known that rumination is likely to maintain or exacerbate depression, in part by interfering with instrumental behavior.†Notice the terms “maintain†and “exacerbateâ€â€”the depression derives not from the rumination itself but from another source.
Unsurprisingly, one of the not-so-hidden assumptions of this article is that girls have an unhealthy obsession with boys:
“I could see it starting already,†she said, adding that she has made a concerted effort recently not to dwell on her own problems with friends and to try to stop negative thoughts. “From sixth grade, it’s boys are stupid, boys have cooties,†she said. “And then it progresses to boys have cooties but 20-year-old cooties. So you might as well change it when you can.”
Ah yes, the fragile female psyche. I might ask why the author wasted over 1,000 words devoted to a question bound to lead to a dead end. After all, will you ask your daughter to bottle up her worries instead? I might also ask why the author used fictional models from Heathers, Mean Girls, Sex and the City, and Gossip Girl for female friendship. Sure, I’ll admit that I talk to my girl friends—a lot. I get a feeling of distinct pleasure when I look at my cell’s phonebook, considering which of my good friends I should call next to ruminate about “so-and-so who failed to call†or “you’ll never guess who showed up last night†or “is it just me, or does she seem a bit self-centered lately?†But these exchanges have never quite reached the dramatics of a Lindsey Lohan-led cast, though they might be a lot more interesting if they did.
While I’d like to say that the article’s author clearly hasn’t seen enough Woody Allen movies, it’s true that females are more prone to clinical depression than males. Nonetheless, it seems rather facile to place 1,000 words of emphasis on co-rumination as explanation—even irresponsible as I watch the article trek up the New York Times “Most Emailed†list. Because in the end the article (note its placement in the Fashion & Style section) is simply another of those proprietary “What’s wrong with our young women?†pieces that will make the rounds of forwarded email and provide all too simplistic answers for questions that really deserve more complex consideration. What’s wrong with our young women? They talk to each other too much. What’s wrong with our young women? They’re too superficial. What’s wrong with our young women? They give away the milk for free.
While newspapers and magazines are understandably aching to draw readers in, we can’t ignore the implications of such incessant prying into young women’s lives. It’s noteworthy that so many articles focus, or place the blame, on the actions of young women themselves (friendships, sexual relations, drinking habits, college experiences, etc.), instead of on the society in which they are raised. But perhaps we aren’t so much interested in solving “the young women problem†as in lifting back the curtain to sneak a covert glance at that object of intense public fascination: the Miley Cyruses, the Britol Palins, and all the other bright young female things that seem so troubled. As one writer notes, “The modern American female is one of the most discussed, most written-about, sore subjects to come along in ages.â€
The funny thing is, that was actually written back in 1957, which means the new ain’t so new. A young Nora Johnson was talking about “Sex and the College Girl” in the 50s, the era of the domesticated and constrained female, who kowtowed to the reasonable, responsible expectations of society. Yet Johnson’s description of her generation struck me as so relevant to today:
We are deadly serious in our pursuits and, I am afraid, non-adventurous in our actions. We have a compulsion to plan our lives, to take into account all possible adversities and to guard against them. We prefer not to consider the fact that human destinies are subject to amazingly ephemeral influences and that often our most rewarding experiences come about by pure chance.
Those are my italics. I emphasize that last line, because I think it is something we often forget as a society, perhaps in an effort fill the news feed, perhaps in an effort to re-corset our daughters. Depression and anxiety are, of course, conditions to be treated seriously. But efforts to analyze each and every aspect of young American women’s lives, (always premised, of course, on a concern for those young American women’s well-being), is a form of the strictest regulation, and ignores the intense wonder of unknowing and chance.
Whenever I read stories implying that we should worry about such-and-such an aspect of young women’s behavior, I picture an invalid who lives to be a hundred by lying on her sofa all day. But does she live? And is she any more psychologically sound for having been removed from experience all these years—or has her mind warped in on itself, obsessively concerned with the minutiae in life because she has never known the larger things? Shouldn’t we… wait, sorry, I had to catch myself there for a second. I’m afraid I was getting rather alarmist.
Anyway people, remove the kid gloves.
Passing along info on an event in NYC this Saturday that I sadly can’t attend — but maybe you can (and can tell me about it!):
Mating in Captivity: Sexuality and Monogamy Roundtable
Participants: Michael Kimmel, Pamela Paul, Esther Perel, Owen Renik (moderator)
September 13, 2008, 2:30 PM
This roundtable will address the ways in which monogamous partnerships affect sexual desire, sexual function, and sexual need. How do secrets and risky behaviors play a role in undermining domestic stability and trust, while potentially enhancing sexual activity? Does domestic partnering imperil our inherent sexual drive? Is it more beneficial to preserve the stability of the family unit than to explore one’s sexuality to the fullest? Is it possible to do both? What are the chemical and structural influences that play a role in this dynamic? The multidisciplinary panel will examine these questions and the way that imagination can play a role in the sexual dynamic of marriages and long-term sexual partnerships.
Sponsored by THE PHILOCTETES CENTER FOR THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF IMAGINATION (how’s that for the name of an institute?!) at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
If anyone goes and wants to blog about it here, door’s WIDE open 🙂
And now for our monthly contribution from Jacqueline Hudak, who writes the Family Stories column here at GWP. Here’s Jacqueline!
Heteroflexibility
Sexual politics are in a time of huge transition – think Ellen and Portia – and still, there is simply no public cultural consciousness about the concept of “sexual fluidity.†A well-crafted recent book by Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Harvard University Press), takes another step toward putting it on the map.
While perhaps not yet a public story, the notion of women’s sexual fluidity is certainly coursing through the zeitgeist. I was in the midst of writing this post on Diamond’s book when I decided to take a break and see Woody Allen’s new film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And there it was, right there on the big screen: sexual fluidity, and all the attendant complexities.
In one scene, Scarlet Johanssen’s character Cristina, is relating the complicated story of her relationship with Maria Elena, who happens to be her lover’s ex-wife. Her friends Vicky and Doug listen intently. As Cristina pauses, Doug rushes to ask, “So, what, you mean you’re a bisexual?†To which Christina replies, with some discomfort, “Oh, I’m not really into those categories.â€
Not into those categories indeed.
Diamond, a Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, has conducted, to date, the only detailed longitudinal study of women’s same gender attractions. She interviewed nearly one hundred young women at two year intervals over a period of ten years about their relationships and desires and found that, for women, love and desire are not rigidly lesbian or heterosexual. By the 10th year of her study, two-thirds of the women had changed their identity label at least once.
The notion of “sexual fluidity” contradicts the dominant cultural story about sexuality—the idea that you are one thing or another, but rarely both. That story shapes our ideas about sexual orientation as fixed in early adulthood and remaining static throughout a lifetime. But as Diamond so eloquently points out, for women, this has not been the case.
One of the many things I loved about this book was the depth and analysis of research that Diamond amassed. Having done research on this topic myself, I was aware that there was a lot of data around that supported a more fluid conception of sexuality for women – Kinsey, Adrienne Rich, and the ‘erotic plasticity’ model in 2000, to name a few. The only problem was, it didn’t conform to the (male) sexual standard. Since genital sex is not necessarily how women construct their sexual identities, the sexual experiences of women have been invisible, or somehow deviant from the (male) norm. My friends, we have been called ‘outliers.’
My only disappointment with the book was that I wanted the conversation to continue. Just as it ended I felt like I had arrived at the good part: the implications of women’s sexual fluidity, for us as researchers and clinicians, and more importantly, as partners and mothers. As a family therapist and mom who went through such a transition, I know it was not a solitary process; it entailed numerous and ongoing conversations with my children, family and extended community. Suddenly I found myself in the midst of a story that was totally unfamiliar: Married woman with two kids falls in love with a woman. I mean, wasn’t I supposed to know which team I played for before I turned 45?
I remain curious and perplexed about our need to hold on to these rigid and discrete categories when they obviously do not fit for women. I am heartened by the youth who do not seem to have the same attachment to the labels, and instead are ‘questioning’ ‘spectrum’ and ‘heteroflexible.’ Perhaps my children’s generation will focus on the quality of a relationship rather than the sex of their partner. In the meantime, perhaps movies such as Barcelona books such as Lisa Diamond’s, and real life family stories like ours will help inch the conversation along just a little bit more.
For previous posts by Jacqueline, click here.
I’m back in action. I mean, rather, back at work.
A piece I wrote, “Sex and the Single Guys, For Real,” is up today over at the Women’s Media Center. The piece has nothing to do with Grandma of course, unless you count the fact that Marge volunteered at a center that offered counseling and contraception to teens, for which I will always remain extremely proud of her.
My WMC commentary features Michael Kimmel’s new book, which was also reviewed, btw, by Wesley Yang in yesterday’s NYTimes (see “Nasty Boys”). Here’s the teaser:
With all the excitement of the summer games, you may have missed this juicy bit of “news†from Olympic Village: as soon as their competition ended, the athletes apparently got rather busy themselves.
They had sex. Lots of it. So much that organizers in Beijing handed out free condoms, says former Olympian Matthew Syed of the UK’s Times Online. And this year, Syed tells us, the female athletes were as horny as the men.
We’ve long been inundated with images of young men with libido flowing unchecked. But with sexual insatiability now cast as an equal-opportunity calling, the guys are no longer portrayed as alone. If all the hook-up hoopla about kids on U.S. campuses is true—the girls have gone wild! the boys can’t get enough!—then the athletes in Beijing were hardly the only modern young men and women engaged in an Olympic-size orgy of never-ending desire.
But wait! New research…Read the rest.
And for those here in NYC, Kimmel will be reading from and discussing his book, Guyland, on Sept. 9 at 7pm, at Borders Columbus Circle. I may see you there….
You may have heard that the Bush administration’s latest attempt to infringe on women’s reproductive rights could give health-care workers the right to refuse contraception to their patients. Yes, it all sounds a bit pre-Griswoldian. I’d like to say I’m shocked. But I’m not. After all, we live in a world of abstinence-only sex ed and, for a time, Eric Keroack. More especially, we live in a cultural climate intent on pathologizing and condemning young people’s sexual practices, and governmental encroachment on the sexual habits of legal adults seems like the obvious next step. But let’s be honest, they’re really concerned with the sexual habits of young women, and are we surprised?
In 2007 when I first opened the Atlantic Monthly to discover Caitlin Flanagan’s take on Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked, which chronicles “the semi-anonymous ‘hooking up’ that is now the norm,” I was floored. After noting Stepp’s conclusion that the “girls” were “exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually†by the practice, Flanagan carried on her own paternalistic diatribe on “girls” who change “in some ugly ways when left on their own.” I was shocked. They were talking about me. Or, at least, they thought they were talking about me. After all, I was a 23-year-old woman who had hooked up with men I was not nearly in love with throughout college. Did this make me an “ugly-wayed” girl?
With other things on my mind (a grad school thesis, job search, friends and flings), I promptly forgot about it. However, soon I realized that this trend wasn’t going away. What has followed, from both the religious right and so-called cultural studies of my generation such as Unhooked and Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shalit, has been an attempt to convince young women that by engaging in pre-marital, or more broadly “pre-love,” sexual activity, they risk their emotional and psychological well-being. With women no longer prohibited by fear of pregnancy or STDs, purity propagators are now on a mission to tell women that, like smoking and fatty foods, sex is bad for their health.
The recent publication by the The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute of Sense and Sexuality, subtitled: “The college girl’s guide to real protection in a hooked-up world” highlights this fact.
According to Sense and Sexuality, girls should avoid hookups because oxytocin, released during sex, will cause a girl to “develop feelings for a guy whose last intention is to bond with you.” Further, it scientifically observes that “as the number of casual sex partners in the past year increased, so did signs of depression in college women.” In sum, once you have sex with a guy, you’re a goner. You fall in love, you get attached, you’re bound to become love-sick and depressed when it doesn’t work– all because you had intercourse.
Don’t you find it odd that such arbiters of high culture and higher religion center their definition of “love” on sexual intercourse? While troubadours once spun tales of romantic despair and literal illness caused by love unrequited, today’s story-tellers have pared that soulful feeling down to a simple physical act. As my generation would say, how ironic. As I would say, how wrong. In a recent Vanity Fair article, British bon vivant Nicky Haslam, now 68 and with many lovers come and gone, says, “The truth is I’m not that interested in sex… I’m about love. It’s wonderful once or something. The quickest way to fall out of love is to sleep with somebody. Don’t shatter the crystal.†Go ahead. Call me a romantic. But my greatest heartache was not caused by the guy who hopped in and out of my bed and got away, but by the guy who seemed to fulfill my ideal of what I want in a partner, and got away.
Let’s talk about agency and subjectivity, because I think it’s about time the media published more first-hand accounts from the “hookup” generation itself. Tracy Clark-Flory, my own age (24), wrote a great article at Salon about her “hookup” experience–she’s had about three times as many hookups as relationships, and concludes, “like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships.” Like many my age, who will wait to marry until they are well into their late twenties and thirties, she has found hookups to be a way to romantically vet men. I whole-heartedly agree.
And about that term “hookup”–so amorphous, so undefined. To be clear, if I tell a friend that I “hooked up” with so-and-so last night, her first reaction will be “So how far’d you go?” A “hookup” can range anywhere from making out to a full romp in bed. It might include slinking out at midnight or staying over, cuddling in the morning, going out for brunch. It is one of the most ill-defined terms of my generation, which makes it surprising that so many adults have such firm opinions on it. And while a hookup may be “semi-anonymous” as Flanagan says, it often involves a classmate or an acquaintance or friend you’ve known for years. It can last a night, a month, or three years on and off.
In college and beyond, the line between hooking up and dating has become increasingly blurred. I’ve known couples now engaged who began with an orientation-week hookup. I’ve known wine-and-dine daters who have dropped out of the picture with nary an explanation. Do I worry about girls who engage in hookups because they think the only thing they have to give are their bodies? Of course. And as Shira Tarrant recently noted in Bitch, “the modesty movement makes some good points about the effect a hypersexual culture can have on women’s well-being and sense of self.”
Yet why are our moral watchdogs so quick to condemn women’s sex-positive behavior as primary culprit? As Tarrant goes on to argue, such an analysis leaves women with only two choices: to be either virgin or whore. And personally, I’d like to think of myself as neither. Writes Tarrant, “If we refuse to acknowledge that judgments about women and modesty come from an extremely narrow-minded, controlling view that has more to do with punishing female sexual agency than with modesty itself, all we’re doing is restating that good girls don’t, bad girls do, and each gets what’s coming to her. 
” By targeting immodesty and hookups, in fact, such commentators only undermine their mission, ignoring the complex social influences that actually do lead some women to value their bodies over their selves. Self-destructive sex is a symptom of a greater social pathology–not the cause.
But haven’t I ever felt “exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually” from “hooking up”? Yes, sometimes, just as I’ve felt exhausted by tested friendships and challenged beliefs. Show me a Bildungsroman protagonist, or an average American college student, who doesn’t need to go through emotionally and physically trying times to develop a better understanding of what he or she wants in a career, a friendship, a partner, in him- or herself.
At the end of her Atlantic article, Flanagan writes: “The bitter pill for many parents sending their daughters to college is that there is no possible way to protect them from what they will encounter once they have been dropped off at the freshman dorm.” As a woman who is very different today from the tremendously introverted and scared 18-year-old her parents dropped off at her freshman dorm, all I can say is: thank goodness for that.
-Kristen Loveland
Did anyone see that article last weekend on the Olympic athletes and sex? The Times Online’s Matthew Syed reported on how the athletes were acting like bunnies once their sport was over. Of greatest interest to me, he noted that success on the field didn’t necessarily translate in gender equitable terms. While Olympic gold is a “surefire ticket to writhe†for even the geekiest of Olympian men,” says Syed, “gold-winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round.â€
Why might this be? Syed’s hypothesis:
“It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous.”
In all fairness, Syed is not condoning the phenomenon, merely noting it. Is he correct? What do you think?
