"Why I’m Happier in a Sexless Marriage."

A headline at Redbook. Excerpt.

I appreciate the idea of sex, but I feel about it like I feel about working out...

My husband’s the same way.... Not having sex be a regular part of our routine means we’ve had to work harder to fulfill each other’s emotional needs.

What would I do if my husband wanted more sex? Well, then, he wouldn’t be my husband...

"Lazy Men Are Responsible for the Great Orgasm Deficit."

A headline at Cosmopolitan. Excerpt:

These days, it feels like men are letting themselves off the hook for one-sided orgasms a little too easily.... "I know some women don't have orgasms every time. Don't worry about it." Now that he's framed it like you're the one who's being forgiven for your tricky, finicky genitals...

Framing. It's not just for politics.

And since the new study on the low rate of female orgasm has emerged, so have myriad response pieces (by women) about how sex feels good even without an orgasm, and how orgasms are almost besides the point.

Are they? Sure, it's true, to a point. But is this just a rationalization to continue letting men off the hook and Criss Angel Mindfreak women into thinking that their own orgasms aren't as important as the man's?

I had to look up Criss Angel Mindfreak. I thought it referred to some character who puts her all into pleasing men, but apparently it's the name of a reality TV show about a magician named Criss Angel. Mindfreak isn't part of the performer's name I was disappointed to learn.

That short Cosmo article used the phrase "off the hook" twice, and the about the new study — which went to another Cosmo article — is about the orgasm deficit in during "hookup" sex. Too many hooks!

And Cosmo math is terrible. The headline at that linked article says "Only Half of All Women Orgasm During Casual Sex," and the text says:

Today in ~*~*Duh, Science~*~*, research presented at the International Academy of Sex Research’s annual meeting reflects that women are half as likely to orgasm during oral or penetrative sex as a casual hookup versus either of those sex acts in a relationship.

~*~*Duh, Math~*~*

Trashing contempt for women with contempt for men.

I tried to read this WaPo column by Alexandria Petri called "Why Bustle.com doesn’t work for women." It's about how the male founder of a website for women has "ample contempt for the very market he was aiming at." I think Petri, aiming for the market he has contempt for, aims contempt at him. But she quickly dives into generic contempt for men, on the theory that men don't read "books," and by "books," Petri means novels, and somehow the general failure of men generally to read novels feeds back into the topic of why Bryan Goldberg's Bustle sucks.

Excerpt:

Reading is one of the few sure-fire ways to become better at being human. So it’s a problem when anyone doesn’t do it — and an especial problem recently, when boys are increasingly slipping behind, at least compared to their female counterparts.

As of 2009, boys lagged 39 points behind girls, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment. One of the suggested reasons that boys aren’t reading is that unlike girls, who are somehow fonts of empathy capable of leaping from one perspective to another at a single bound, reading books from male or female perspectives with equal vigor and ease, boys can only be summoned to respond to the stories of other boys.

Who suggested this reason? No one's name is stuck to that stereotype, it's just a "suggested reason." Boys can't read because "books" are those fictional stories told from a perspective that can only be understood if one possesses empathy and that's something boys lack or Goldberg lacks or who the hell knows? It's just a theory out there, not a theory Petri herself admits to embracing as she wanders about trying to aim at that man who takes aim at women.

"It’s hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be."

"Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique,' eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home."

All this seemed possible because the pill had just become widely available, and for the first time women had control over whether and when they had a child. (I will never forget finding that oddly shaped, Pez-like dispenser in my mother’s bedroom right after the birth of my youngest sister; my mother called her “That’s It” for weeks before giving her a name.)

From a long WaPo article by Elsa Walsh titled "Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life." The quoted part describes the author's mindset, which later changed. I chose to quote that because: 1. Her mother sounds so cold, calling an infant "That's It." (A child called "It"!) and 2. The author makes her college age self sound like a nitwit. She says she was 15 when Roe v. Wade came out, so I figure she was born in 1958. I was born in 1951, and I always thought the Gloria Steinem presentation of women's liberation was a women's magazine pep talk. Friedan's book begins as a rant about the bullshit in women's magazines. If you had a brain at the time, you didn't take this stuff at face value. I don't accept Walsh's assertion that oh, if you were only there back then in the 1970s, you'd have been thoroughly intoxicated.

There were other feminist writers back then, and there were plenty of readers interested in feminism who didn't like Steinem and who didn't bother going all the way back to Freidan. When I went to college (circa 1970), the new books young women get excited about where "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch," and the older book we went back to was "The Second Sex." These books had some critical edge and were not simply cheerleading women about having a conventional middle-class life modernized with the addition of a great career and planned, delayed reproduction.

Walsh is working off a false premise about what life was like back then. She has a book to promote, and I can understand the urge to write a book that acts like it's discovered something new. But, really, the problem with the idea that you can't really "have it all" has been well-known all along.

"If you are 17 or under, a federal prosecutor could have charged you with computer hacking just for reading Seventeen magazine online..."

"... until today."

It’s not because the law got any better...

Seventeen highlights the absurdity of giving terms of service the force of law under the CFAA. It boasts a readership of almost 4.5 million teen readers with an average age of 16 and a half, and yet, until today, the average reader was legally banned from visiting Seventeen.com. That’s right, for a magazine dedicated to teen fashion, the publisher’s terms explicitly restricted online access to readers 18 and older.

"In Love With a Sex Addict" — oh, really?

I hadn't given much thought to the much-bruited Tiger Woods/Lindsey Vonn romance, but something about that magazine cover set off my bullshit detector. I think his PR people contacted her PR people and this couple was concocted for our consumption. I love the way they are in love... with the camera. Smiley eyes!

Here's the underlying story.

"They're a really happy couple -- not living together yet," a source explains to Us Weekly... "He confessed everything in his past to her and stuff - they're really into each other," the source tells Us.

Confessed? How do you confess — and stuff! — when everything was all already in the newspapers? And speaking of everything... did you see this new Nike ad that's been "criticized by some"?

The Ladies' Home Journal in 1963.

 

Encountered searching for something else just now. I'm putting this up because I like how it looks simultaneously so old and...



.... so current. 

"My name is Emily Bazelon. I’m a feminist. I’ve never read Betty Friedan’s book—until now."

Says Emily Bazelon (on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of "The Feminine Mystique").

I'd never read the book myself until recently. My reason for not reading it was that I'd regarded it as something that addressed the troubles of my parents' generation. I went to college in 1969, when everyone was reading "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch." "The Feminine Mystique" seemed really old fashioned — about June Cleaver and her cohort.

Here's Bazelon:

[W]hat hit me was Betty’s howl of frustration. It’s primal, and you feel its desperate force on almost every page. God, did she feel trapped among the slipcovers of the suburbs and in the pages of the women’s magazines she wrote for, where big ideas and questions were entirely unwelcome. The only way to escape was to pulverize the image of the Happy Housewife Heroine who is the title of Chapter 2. Betty’s fiercest critique in this book is of the “mistaken choice” she thinks traditional gender roles forced middle-class women and their husbands to make....

What made me dislike the book — when I finally read it — was that Freidan was not in the role of the housewives she purported to understand so well. She was in the role of writing for women's magazines. She didn't like the limited topics that were the stuff of that kind of magazine. She makes an assumption that women who buy a magazine are only interested in the topics covered by that magazine. But that's absurd! If you bought a magazine about cooking/childcare/fashion, that wouldn't mean you aren't interested in politics or science or whatever else is supposed to be more important. You might have other magazines — or books — for that.

Why the assumption? It might be frustrating for a journalist who's interested in politics to crank out material about topics she doesn't care about, but it was wrong to project those frustrations onto the unknown women who bought the magazines for their own purposes and used the information in those magazines in their individual private lives — perhaps to make a nice dinner efficiently so there would be time to read a good book in the extra time one can make in a day when you don't have a job. The notion that A Job belongs at the center of everyone's life is a huge scam, and the blithe rejection of the 1-earner marriage was an amazing, tragic shift in American culture. The equality of women — the ambition and the fulfilment of women — did not demand that we all get a job.

Lower left-hand corner of a magazine is a monument to things not being anywhere nearly as good as they are said to be.

AND: This seems to be the post where I should remind you to use my Amazon portal, and let me just recommend: "Betsey Johnson Women's Flirty Faux Fur Slipper Boot." What's up with calling everything "flirty"? This is a strange fashion-writing tic. There's no way that slipper boot is flirting with anyone. It's quite the opposite. I mean, it's like those "In the mood/Not in the mood" pillows, with those slippers being the "not in the mood." [These can be your "in the mood" slippers.]

But... I know... the craze for "flirty" started with skirts, because of the rhyme "flirty skirts." And "flirty" is an alternative to "sexy," when you've already written "sexy" somewhere else on the page and "slutty," "sultry," "seductive," etc. etc. — all those other words on your women's magazine editor list — are not quite right.