Hooking up and the Alleged Decline of Society

Okay, so last week in The New York Times, there was a lovely little op-ed column entitled The Demise of Dating, about those crazy kids and their penchant for "hooking up." The gist is that teenagers these days start with sex, which then perhaps evolves to dating, rather than following in the footsteps of their wise elders and going on a couple dates before they even think about having sex. Oddly enough, this is not the first article on the subject of teen sex practices that I've read recently in a major news source. Legitimate journalists just seem to be fascinated by the wacky mating behaviors of The Youth of Today.

However, this article, by Charles M. Blow, while it cites some interesting studies, includes several claims that I found both offensive and just plain weird. (As a sidenote, is it immature of me to be amused by the fact that this guy's last name is "Blow"?)

First of all, Mr. Blow (heh) asserts that, "When I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm." Seriously? Are you trying to tell me that earlier generations didn't have meaningless sex? Granted, I haven't done extensive historical reasearch on the subject, but I somehow doubt my generation invented this concept. Alcohol existed in the past. College existed in the past. Hormones existed in the past. Logically, this seems like a recipe for sex, no? Am I just incapable of looking outside of my particular historical perspective, or is Mr. Blow being a little naive?

But then it gets worse. Listing the cons of this "strange culture" (Mr. Blow's words, here), he states, "Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse." Did you hear that, boys? All girls just want to get married! It's all they think about! Women only have sex to get that ring on their finger! ...Are you kidding me with this bullshit?

And just to wrap it up, the article concludes with a little dash of shaming and moralizing:

That’s not good. So why is there an increase in hooking up? According to Professor Bogle, it’s: the collapse of advanced planning, lopsided gender ratios on campus, delaying marriage, relaxing values and sheer momentum.

It used to be that “you were trained your whole life to date,” said Ms. Bogle. “Now we’ve lost that ability — the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them.”

Now that’s sad.

...Wow. Damn that collapse of advanced planning. If I had been planning better, I might be hitched already! But I just spent all my college years gaining an education--and I let all those available mens slip right through my fingers! Oh wait, no. I'm pretty sure I was planning for a career... guess that doesn't count.

In addition, why exactly is it a positive thing for people to be trained their whole lives to date? You know what that training consists of? Reinscribing gender roles. Teaching women that "he won't buy the cow if he can get the milk for free," so it's their responsibility to make sure they "get" commitment before they "give up" their virginity. Teaching men that they need to buy women's attention by paying for dinner or getting them gifts. And a whole lot of other outdated baggage that I, for one, am not too sad about jettisoning.

Finally, I'm gonna need to take issue with the entire premise of dating as Professor Bogle describes it. Does anybody else think that the notion of "just ask someone out and get to know them"... but with the long term plan of having sex with them, maybe, after an appropriate number of dates, and hopefully we can get married someday, if all goes as planned!... is rather odd? Why should we feel the need to obsessively define romantic relationships in a way that we're hardly ever required to define friendships? This article points out that most hooking up occurs between friends. While Blow & Bogle seem to believe that this is a sign of deteriorating social skills and "relaxing values," maybe our generation is just rebelling against the prescribed progression of relationships. Maybe friendship first, then sex, then possibly romance (rather than romance, then sex, then hopefully friendship) isn't the worst way to go.

The article does point out one major downside to hook-up culture that I agree with: increased risk of sexual assault "because hooking up is often fueled by alcohol." True, and sad. However, what about hooking up that does not take place in a tequila-soaked haze? Perhaps we can read this as not just "sheer momentum," but a deliberate refusal of the romantic fantasy that popular culture forcefeeds us.

Or do you think that everybody is actually just drunk and horny?

On my conspicuous absence

I know, I know... I've completely disappeared in the last couple weeks. Again. In my defense, it's the time of year for final papers, obsessively listening to "Winter Song" by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson instead of writing said papers, and basking in Christmas cheer. These things are time consuming. On the plus side, I'm now officially done with my first semester of grad school, and appear to have survived. My brain's still checked out, however, so it'll be a couple days before I get around to posting all the extended rants that I've been pondering lately.

Instead, in honor of finals, I leave you with this delightful video that I recently discovered. I recommend watching it before every daunting task (such as, say, being in the same house with your family for more than 3 days this holiday season).

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes

Prop 8: The Musical

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Love this.

Salon's Rebecca Traister on Michelle Obama

There's a great piece up on Salon by Rebecca Traister entitled "The Momification of Michelle Obama," in which she criticizes the fact that all the publicity surrounding the new first lady focuses on her clothes, what schools she's going to send her daughters to and how she plans to stay out of politics (i.e. "Look, she's black, but she's not scary, because she's definitely not a Hilary Clinton-type first lady!"). Now, I love reading about the Obama family as much as the next person--They're getting a new dog! They're BFFs with the Bidens!--but something about the coverage of Michelle had definitely been irking me, and Traister does a great job of illuminating why.

If only she had refrained from stating that the media coverage of Michelle Obama reveals "the shortcomings of feminism." Way to generalize, Traister. Whose feminism? Which feminism? Ugh.

An excerpt, for those of you too busy to read the (rather long) article:

All of these imaginatively ghoulish impressions of Michelle were made possible by her real-life achievements: She had a career that made the equal division of labor in her home a necessity; she had an education and pedigree that meant neocon critics could pick apart her honors thesis; anxieties about her imagined conference remarks had heft only because it was plausible that this accomplished woman would be at a conference with Bill Clinton to begin with. What was even scarier was that Michelle was widely understood to be her husband's closest advisor and consigliere. The threat of Michelle Obama was built around her intellectual and professional competence, her personal power and insistence in the home and in the world that she have the same opportunities for success as a man.

But the day that Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race, the bar for conversation about Michelle dropped precipitously. Suddenly Fox News was calling her "Obama's baby mama," and Michelle was on "The View," jawing about her bargain dress and pantyhose, breakfast foods and childcare. It was back to cookie-recipe land, the antiquated universe from which she has not since escaped. And we understand why. The exoticism and difference of Obama's race was all the progress the American people could take in one election, conventional wisdom went. A threateningly competent woman might put them over the edge.

Your Daily Dose of Evangelical Crazyfaces

The American Family Association has thoughtfully released a video entitled, "They're Coming to Your Town," in which they detail the eeeevvvvvil strategies of gay activists who INTEND TO TAKEOVER THE WORLD OMG DOOM IS UPON US!

Some gems from the production description:

Residents of the small Arkansas town of Eureka Springs noticed the homosexual community was growing. But they felt no threat. They went about their business as usual. Then, one day, they woke up to discover that their beloved Eureka Springs, a community which was known far and wide as a center for Christian entertainment--had changed. The City Council had been taken over by a small group of homosexual activists.

The Eureka Springs they knew is gone. It is now a national hub for homosexuals. Eureka Springs is becoming the San Francisco of Arkansas. The story of how this happened is told in the new AFA DVD “They’re Coming To Your Town.”

Also available in a convenient five-pack, in case you want to give a little paranoid hatred to all your favorite people for Christmas this year!

I promise, I am not kidding you with this. You will watch the trailer, and you will think it is parody, and you will be wrong.

The Bechdel Rule

In one 1985 strip of her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," Alison Bechdel made a joke about representations of women in films. One of her characters claims that she doesn't go see movies unless they meet three criteria: 1) It has to have at least two women, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something besides a man. The punch line? "The last movie I was able to see was Alien... The two women in it talk to each other about the monster."

Since NPR dredged this strip up in "All Things Considered" in September, people have been talking about whether it's still so difficult to find movies/TV shows that fulfill the Bechdel Rule. I'd say that most TV shows meet the qualifications, mostly because they just have a lot more screen time in which to do so (although Sex and the City is, surprisingly, borderline). But movies--that's a little more difficult. For the sake of curiousity, my roommate Danielle and I went through our DVD collections (somewhere in the range of 150 movies combined).

1) Fried Green Tomatoes
2) Steel Magnolias
3) Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
4) Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood
5) Now and Then
6) Girl Interrupted
7) Chicago
8) Mean Girls
9) Iron-Jawed Angels

So, that's a grand total of 9 that meet fulfill "The Rule." (Plus two that were debatable--9 to 5 and The Matrix--because women talk to each other about men, but not in romantic ways.) And this is from the movie collections of two feminists! Of those 9, we've got 5 stereotypical chick flicks, 2 movies about women who are criminal/crazy, 1 about girls being mean to each other, and... okay, 1 about the suffrage movement. Conspicuously missing (and yes, I do own a fair amount of films in these genres): action films, sci fi/fantasy, indie movies, Disney...

Of course, this isn't the only thing to think about when looking at movies--there are a lot of other films that I like, and some on that short list that I'm not too fond of. And certainly, the pool of acceptable movies would get considerably smaller if, for example, we limited it to two women of color talking to each other about something besides a man. But it's definitely something to think about in terms of media representation of women.

Not to mention that all this seems a whole lot more like a conscious choice to marginalize women in movies in light of incidents like the president of Warner Bros. declaring last year that he wouldn't even look at scripts with women in the lead role. Seriously?

Good Reads: Joan Didion

How have I never read anything by Joan Didion until now? Actually, I can tell you exactly how. I remember reading rave reviews when her book The Year of Magical Thinking came out in 2005, and promptly deciding not to read it because it had a stupid title that sounded a whole lot like a self help book. Ditto on my choice to ignore someone recommending her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem--possibly because I have a tendency to avoid anything with religious allusions in the title.

However, I am an idiot. Despite her penchant for lame titles, Didion is exactly my kind of author. Thoughtful, nostalgic, a gift for beautifully detailed sentences that perfectly describe a moment or a feeling... I read her most famous essay, "Goodbye to All That," yesterday, and I think I'm in love.

Fortunately, some good (typo-prone) samaritan has transcribed the essay online--read it, please. I need other people to gush about how gorgeous it is with me. And if you have already read it, recommend which of her books I should read next! I need more.

The beginning of "Goodbye to All That," to tempt you:

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty

Apparently large research universities are a foreign planet on the academic honesty front. At my undergraduate institution, a tiny liberal arts school that's basically engaged in a love affair with its honor code, the process was fairly simple when someone got caught cheating: hearing in front of the Honor Council, typically guilty verdict, leading to a likely semester-long suspension, at least. It seems that schools like UT just don't have the time or patience to deal with all the instances of lying, cheating undergraduates that crop up when you have 50,000 students. The stories I've heard from my TA friends of students caught in the process of blatant, shameless cheating on tests getting passes from professors and administration are astonishing. Frequently, the punishment seems to be a meeting with the Dean, where if you apologize, you're let off the hook. Really? What is this teaching students? Pull a couple fake tears out of your ass and everything's okay? (Academic) honesty doesn't matter in the first place?

Lately, there's been a lot of coverage in the local news about an adjunct professor who was recently fired at Texas A&M for publishing in his blog the names of six students who plagerized an assignment for his class. His syllabus provided a warning that this result was possible, stating, ""No form of dishonesty is acceptable. I will promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other form of dishonesty." Upon the publication of the names, one student went to the administration, and the professor was fired for a breach of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Now, this professor's method probably wasn't the best or most mature way of dealing with cheaters. But what do you do with students who seem to have no respect for the system? I can imagine that as a professor, watching students unapologetically cheat and get away with it one semester after another, you might reach a level of frustration that would cause you to seek any new solutions you could think of. Thoughts, dear readers?

Sex for Voting?

In honor of election day tomorrow, I thought I'd open up a little friendly debate on when it's appropriate to incorporate women's sexuality into advertising campaigns. The above poster, made and distributed by a group of women in Brooklyn, is a takeoff on a 1968 anti-war poster that read "Girls say yes to boys who say no."

Now, there's a variety of opinions floating around the online feminist community about this poster. According to the feminist magazine Bust, the poster proves that "politics can still be fun." But several Salon writers criticize the ad for its "boring, overdone sexual politics and its hipster aesthetics," with one going so far as to claim that it makes her "want to put a fist through the wall." And taking something of a middle ground, feminist blog Jezebel weighs in on the poster as "a little self-consciously cutesy, certainly derivative and ironically playing into outdated sexual mores, but ultimately harmless."

Most importantly, my roommate Danielle pointed out that the only place she'd even seen this poster was on feminist blogs, so why the hell did anyone even care?

Frankly, I'm more inclined to fall on the anti-poster side here, but not necessarily because I'm intensely offended at the poster's invocation of women's sexuality. The use of sexuality in advertisements is nothing new, and it seems clear to me that this poster is not intended to be taken literally in any way. With its retro black and white design, and the fact that it was created by a group of obviously historically aware women, I find it incredibly implausible that anyone involved with its making really intended to convey the message that all women would have sex with any man who voted for Obama. Especially since the text at the bottom of the poster reads, "Sarah Palin is not a woman's choice," it seems difficult to argue that the purpose here is to speak to men who want to get laid. And honestly, I don't think contemporary men are so dumb that that's the message they're going to get out of this. Instead, the poster seems intended humorously and aimed at a female audience.

On the other hand, the nostalgic nod to the New Left that lies at the core of this poster kind of irritates me. Considering how sexist the progressive movements of the 1960s were--need I evoke the famous quote that "the position of women in SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] is prone"?--I am fairly certain that the original poster was not intended in a tongue-in-cheek manner, nor was it directed at women. I'm consistently frusterated by the way that many contemporary youth progressive movements (particularly on college campuses) evoke the 1960s as some sort of perfect, idealized moment of activism. In saying, "Girls say yes to boys who say no," anti-Vietnam war activists intended to establish sex with liberal girls as some sort of prize for good protest behavior. So my question when I look at this Obama poster becomes: why even go there?

Obamalove '08

Sorry I've failed at posting for the last week and a half, folks. Things have been busy, life happens, you know how it goes. And you can't say I didn't warn you - I am famously bad at updating blogs. But - aha! - I'm back, so let's not dwell on the past.

Instead, can we think about the fact that in two days, Barack Obama (according to all polls in sight) will be elected President of the United States? You know, I sometimes worry about the amount of hope that so many people have invested in this man, and whether all this change that we want to believe in can really possibly happen. But then I watch things like his thirty-minute Infomercial of Hope, Joy, and Love, and let me tell you, I've totally bought in to the message. I really believe that an Obama presidency will shift the direction of this country.

Maybe we won't even be the object of the entire world's distaste anymore! (Really... I know it sounds excessively optimistic, but The Economist's Global Electoral College poll suggests that every country except Iraq, Algeria, and the DRC pretty much stands in Obama's corner.)


Besides, how can you look at a picture like this one and not see epic leadership? The man gave an inspirational speech in the rain! If that's not presidential, I don't know what is.

Google Saves Us From Our Drunken Selves

You know, everybody does things that they regret when they're drunk. Some people make out with strangers. Some people projectile vomit into other people's shoes. Some people pass out in the grass outside their apartments. Others drunk email their former significant others?

That's why Google is going to save you from yourself. In their process of taking over the world, Google has just released their lastest innovation--Mail Goggles. This new optional feature of Gmail requires users to answer five simple math problems before sending emails between 10pm and 4am on weekends. Theoretically, if you can't figure out the answer to 35 divided by 7, you probably shouldn't be sending that declaration of undying love to the dude who broke up with you for some chick that you hate.

First of all, this is totally more necessary for text messaging. Who sends drunken emails anymore anyway--way too much effort. Secondly... could we maybe take a little responsibility for our drunken actions? Half the fun of doing stupid drunken shit is telling stories the next day. And maybe your ex ought to know that you're still in love with them. Didn't anybody ever think of that?

Democrats Know How to Party!

Best animation ever. Via Shakesville, although it's floating around all over.

EDIT: Fun trick: "One Week" by Barenaked Ladies belongs with this animation. I'm not kidding. Try it.

The Obligatory Thoughts on Sarah Palin

You know, Sarah Palin stories never fail to inspire a sense of righteous anger in me. It seems like every day there's a new article in the media about either her or her supporters saying or doing something that is fundamentally offensive to me. Not being able to name a single newspaper she reads? Check. Co-opting feminism to support a radically anti-feminist agenda? Check. Basing her entire campaign on a blatant anti-intellectualism? Check. As for the supporters... well, I'll get to that, but for the moment I'll just remind you of that dude who yelled "Kill him" in reference to Obama at one of Palin's rallies.

And if it's not the McCain/Palin campaign pissing me off, some sexist idiot is marketing a Sarah Palin action figure or blow-up doll or porno (no, I'm not linking that one), and then I have to get all worked up about that. Or some second wave feminist is attempting to convince me that Palin's candidacy should be celebrated for advancing the cause of women's rights when the woman tried to make rape victims pay for their own rape kits. (Honestly. I thought those Palin-lovin' feminists were just a myth, then I listened to two of them speak last week.) In the words of Amy Poehler on SNL's Weekend Update: Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!?!

And that's not even going into the subject of my very real fear that McCain is either going senile or has been replaced by a robot controlled by the religious right.

Frankly, having to be this angry all the time is tiring.

I'm sure that you, my dear readers, are aware of all or most of the things I just mentioned, but sometimes I get started ranting about the Palinator and I just can't stop. All this rage was heading towards a point, however, and that was to direct your attention to an article by Mark Leibovich in today's New York Times entitled, "Among Rock-Ribbed Fans of Sarah Palin, Dudes Rule." The gist of this article is that, despite the apparent attempts of the McCain campaign to snag disaffected Hilary Clinton supporters with the Palin pick, she's actually much more popular among men. In fact, one woman interviewed estimates that Palin's rallies are populated by as high as 70% men. Now, of course there's the typical exasperating nonsense about guys screaming "Marry me, Sarah!," claiming that they come to Palin's rallies "just to look at her," and wearing buttons reading "Proud to be voting for a hot chick." But that's expected. What really got me were the following comments:

“They bear us children, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it’s time we let a woman lead us,” said Larry Hawkins, a former truck driver attending a rally late Thursday at Elon University in North Carolina. Mr. Hawkins said he would rather vote for Ms. Palin than for “McCain and Obama combined.”

Men have done plenty to mess up the country, he said. “The sexual drives and big egos of male leaders have gotten in the way of politics in this country.” Mr. Hawkins said he talked to fellow truckers, and a lot of them feel the same way. “They think it’s time for a woman, too,” he said. “This one. Palin is our kind of woman.”

What do we make of this? Can we read this as progress, as a type of "conservative feminism" (as Leibovich calls it)? I would argue no, and here's why. These men aren't saying that it's time for a woman in the White House because this specific woman is more qualified than any of the men running in terms of policy or political experience. What they're saying is that she's more qualified because of an assumption of innate female characterics--passively sexual and willing to take a backseat to others. In addition, there seems to be some sort of implication that women are owed a little slice of the political pie... because they give birth. Honestly, has that sort of thinking ever helped women?

These Palin supporters aren't ready to acknowledge women's equality--rather, they're willing to make an exception for this one woman, who offers a campaign based on a myth that they can understand without having to shift their paradigms: that of the supermom who can do it all and still be "all woman." Palin isn't making progress for all women who follow her; she's just found a way to work the system without challenging at all the sexist assumptions on which it rests. Can we really say that this is what we want feminism to look like?

Sarah Haskins

The first post is of the funny links variety. If you read any of the major feminist blogs out there (Feministing, Jezebel, etc), you've probably heard of comedian Sarah Haskins. But honestly, I'm basically obsessed with her, so I really don't believe enough can be said about her amazingness.

With some of the funniest explicitly feminist comedy out there, Haskins' "Target: Women" segments, for the web TV show "infoMania," take the media to task for the constant messages with which they bombard women consumers. The subjects of her sarcastic humor range from sexualized commercials for cleaning products, to the discomfort with women pooping, to the latest, on Disney princesses.

My all time favorite Sarah Haskins clip, however, has to do with - you guessed it - weddings. And if you hate clinking on links, I've taking the liberty of embedding it right here for you! So watch it. Now. I'm serious.

For the Purposes of Introduction

I've never been good at updating blogs. I'm too busy, I'm too lazy, I'm preoccupied with watching Veronica Mars on DVD for the 40th time... you know, things come up. However, I've recently realized that, quite frankly, I have a lot opinions about things. In fact, "a lot" may be an understatement. And so, with the intention of rescuing my friends and family from my constant rants on topics ranging from Sarah Palin to the state of academia to television/the media to feminism in all its forms, I've decided to give this blogging thing another try. We'll see how it goes.

So, to employ the absolutely most cliche way possible to start a blog, let's have a little visit from dictionary.com, shall we?

dis·rupt
–verb (used with object)

1.	to cause disorder or turmoil in: The news disrupted their conference.

2.	to destroy, usually temporarily, the normal continuance or unity of; interrupt: Telephone service was disrupted for hours.

3.	to break apart: to disrupt a connection.

–adjective

4.	broken apart; disrupted.

There's a reason I chose to call this little project "Disruptive Feminist." As a first year master's student in Women's and Gender Studies, I'm realizing more than ever that the more I learn, and the more I read, the less able I am to look at the world the same way. Shit's complicated, you know? Pretty much everything in our society is a lot less self-evident than we're taught to see it. So maybe this blog can disrupt some of the daily assumptions about things we take as normal or obvious. That's a lofty goal. Maybe it will just help me work out the constant rethinking and unknowing going on in my own brain.

Or maybe I'll just use it to post some funny links. Guess we'll find out.