I think my colleague Ann Friedman has the last word on Laura Session Stepp's jeremiad against the hook-up.
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Unhooked Again
11 Mar 2007 08:30 pm
Comments (6)
I'm really sick of turning on NPR and listening to Stepp prattle on and on.
What Stepp is really bemoaning is a kind of "old-fashioned girl" or is at least looking for a contempo version of one. And, there's something to be said about someone who would rather read Jane Austen and not Bridgit Jones. A heartbreakingly beautiful girl in college once surprised me with a brownie she had baked for me. Now, this girl wasn't Mary Poppins by any stretch - she hooked up here and there. But, this was somethin' else. A fuckin' brownie!- nobody had ever even put a pop tart in the toaster for me before.
Whenever I see an obviously demented stern conservative moralistic screed such as the Stepp piece, my instinct is that the subtext is nothing more than "THE SLUTS! THE TOTAL SLUTS! FILTHY DESIRES AND CHEAP SEX PERVERTS! AND HOW COME NO ONE EVER WANTED TO HOOK UP WITHMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!111!1q!!!!!!!"
I think we can all agree on the baked goods.
But baked goods and a satisfying hook up -- that's a winning combination. Like chocolate and peanut butter.
Someone needs to buy Ms. Stepps a sense of humor.
I would rather give the last word to this lady from another generation:
Professor Rosenblatt said one older woman he interviewed said she had her own bedroom because, “I’ve paid my dues. I’m old enough that I don’t want to have sex at 1 a.m.”
excerpt from
"To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime"
by Tracie Rohzon, March 11 New York Times
Like most of the upper classes of old, seems like some middle class folks in the U.S. are finally figuring out that "hooking up" in their own homes is a preferable state of matrimony. Sex is better when both parties actually feel like having it, in marriage and outside of it. Marital "duty" with one party furnishing a body for other services in kind is not equivalent to pleasurable sex.
It's clear to this boomer feminist that this whole todo being pushed by Stepp types is about sublimating pleasure to keep certain kinds of societal norms in place. Personally I think that we have seen lots of evidence that this leads to unreasonable expectations from marriage, and the consequent failure of so many. It's not an old idea, it's a mid-20th-century Western one. Granted, it's one that comes out of Western notions of courtly love combined with the more worldwide longterm preference for virgins for female marriage partners. But it even goes unreasonably beyond that. If you're going to make marriage a form of prostitution, at least come out clearly and warn those entering into it that that is what they are buying into.
Comments closed March 25, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Ms. Friedman's dismissal of Ms. Stepp's case of the vapors is very well done. As I commented at on her site:
I’m just amazed at the way this sexist clap trap is treated as serious scholarship. It’s all just based on the notion that young women couldn’t possibly enjoy casual sex. I think it says a lot more about the author than her subjects.
As an old guy of the blank generation — college years 1978-82 —I can assure that people were hooking up happily in the days before the internet tubes. What do you know, we were also drinking and taking drugs and generally having a fine old time of it. Most of us had monagamous relationships that proved to be less than permanent (not a bad thing either) but between those relationships, people (even women people) had needs. This was generally considered fun, harmless amusement if you will, for all parties concerned. Maybe Ms. Sessions Stepp (isn’t that some kind of workout?) really is in her 80s.
Posted by Klein's tiny left nut | March 11, 2007 10:48 PM