by Hanna Rosin
Individual women tend to become more sexually adventurous as they date more. They adapt their behavior quickly to match the expectations of family, peers, church groups, a move to a new country where sexual mores are different. Studies of older women show small cohorts that masturbate much more with age, whereas men’s masturbation rates almost always stay constant over a lifetime. Women can go cold after a breakup and then become passionate when they meet someone new. Men’s sexual desire is defined by what Alfred Kinsey called “no discontinuity in total outlet.” Their appetite stays constant. If they do not have a girlfriend, they masturbate to make up the difference. Women fall in love with women, and then with men again. Studies of swinger culture in the 1970s, for example, showed that women entered the subculture with gusto, and were much more experimental in it than men.
The modern-day index to women’s sexual plasticity is anal sex. More women have tried it, and tried it repeatedly, than ever before. In 1992, 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried it, and now, at the upper end of that bracket, the number is 40 percent. Many people would assume that this increase reflects new lows in the chivalrous standards as men force their porn fantasies on real live mates. But as Slate writer William Saletan points out, the data doesn’t support that view. Women who had anal sex were far more likely to report having had an orgasm during their sexual encounter—more even than those who received oral sex. There are lots of possible explanations—women who are willing to try anal sex trust their partners more; orgasms relax women, so they are willing to try anal sex; sexually adventurous women are willing to try anything. But whatever the explanation, the general conclusion is that advances in sexual openness are, in fact, advances.
Baumeister, who teaches at Florida State University, is prone to brilliant, sweeping theories on an unusually wide range of subjects. In this case he traces the implications of his findings across global cultures and back in time. In years past, and in many cultures still, women’s sexual malleability has made them vulnerable to coercion and control, either by an individual man or a patriarchal culture; say, mullahs in Afghanistan. But it also makes women adaptable to changing circumstances, and able to take advantage when sexual mores change. When a space opens up for them to do something new—like a fifteen-year space when they are no longer required to get married or have children or otherwise live at the mercy of men but can live as they please—they will move into it.
Thus we have landed in an era that’s produced a new breed of female sexual creature the world has never witnessed before, one who acknowledges the eternal vulnerability of women but, rather than cave in or trap herself in the bell jar, instead looks that vulnerability square in the face and then manipulates it in unexpected, creative, or crazy ways. It’s no accident that the most popular fictional heroine of the last decade is Lisbeth Salander—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—a pale waif who was sexually abused as a child but, instead of cowering or attending support groups, spends her adulthood beating up scary men.
Sometimes the new kind of woman takes her revenge not with a knife but with excellent comic timing. In the fall of 2010, Duke senior Karen Owen became momentarily famous when her friends leaked her pornographic PowerPoint presentation, which described her sexual exploits with thirteen Duke athletes, whom she identified by name, skill, and penis size. (“While he had girth on his side, the subject was severely lacking in length.”) In Owen’s hands, scenes of potential humiliation got transformed into punch lines. (“Mmm tell me about how much you like big, black cocks,” number six, a baseball player told her. “But, I’ve never even hooked up with a black man!” she told him. “Oh . . . well, just pretend like you have,” he responded. “Umm ok . . . I like big, black . . . cocks?”)
The 2012 successor to Sex and the City is Girls, a new HBO show created by indie actress/filmmaker Lena Dunham, who plays the main character, Hannah. When Hannah has sex, she is not wearing a Carrie Bradshaw–style $200 couture bra and rolling in silk sheets, but hiking her shirt up over belly flesh loose enough that her boyfriend, Adam, can grab it by fistfuls. In one scene they have failed anal sex. “That feels awful.” In another, Adam spins a ridiculously degrading fantasy about Hannah being an eleven-year-old hooker with a “fucking Cabbage Patch lunchbox.” Hannah plays along, reluctantly. But when she’s done she doesn’t feel deep remorse or have to detox with her girlfriends or call the police. She makes a joke about the eleven-year-old, which he doesn’t get. Our enduring image of Hannah is of her rocking out with her roommate to Swedish pop star Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.”
In Hannah’s charmed but falling-apart life, her encounters with Adam count as “experience,” fodder for the memoir she half-jokingly tells her parents will make her the “voice of this generation.” She is our era’s Portnoy, entitled and narcissistic enough to obsess about precisely how she gets off and how she will later write about it. (Adam plays the role of the Pumpkin or the Monkey from Portnoy’s Complaint, so many props in Portnoy’s long and comical sexual journey.)
The suspense in Girls is not driven by the usual rom-com mystery—Will Hannah get her man? She snags him pretty early on. Instead it’s driven by the uncertain outcome of her career—Will she fulfill her potential and become a great writer? When in the season finale Adam asks to move in, she rejects him because she’s afraid he might hinder her bigger plans.
There is no retreating from the hook-up culture to a more innocent age where young men showed up at your father’s door with a box of chocolates. This is why the “war on women” that popped up in the 2012 primary season and centered on contraception played as absurd. The most appropriate responses to the bombast were those that asked some version of, “Are you serious?” A society that has become utterly dependent on the unfettered ambition of women cannot possibly, with a straight face, reopen the debate about contraception.
Even the women most frustrated by the hook-up culture don’t really want that. The hook-up culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the independence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself. The only option is to do what Hannah’s friends always tell her—stop doing what feels awful, and figure out what doesn’t. And take some comfort in the notion that for most people who make it through the rocky years, it ends well. Young women may be less vulnerable than ever but that does not mean they experience that as empowerment. As the young woman from Yale told me, it will take time for them to figure out what they want and how to ask for it. A gay friend of mine once made this astute observation: The college hook-up culture right now is at the same phase as gay sex was in the 1970s. Young men and women have discovered a sexual freedom unbridled by the conventions of marriage, or any conventions. But that’s not how the story ends. Ultimately the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women.
THE LAST TIME I saw Sabrina, she was just back from a Buddhist retreat in Vermont and still had a bit of what she called the “luminous glow.” From this vantage point, she found it hard to relate to her old stressed-out trading floor self, “nasty and short and only wanting everyone around me to talk in bullet points.” She was softer and more contemplative about love, too. “I don’t need a man to survive and I don’t need him to pay the bills, but people still need each other. That’s just how we’re built.” She was starting to face up to what she calls her addiction—the particular disease that afflicts women in an era when love and sex are sped up and confusingly mixed together: “I guess what I want is the candy. I need the love to feel the passion, and I need the passion to feel sexually into it. My last boyfriend told me I’m the kind of person who creates the weather. I bring on the sun, and then one day, I let the rain clouds in. Fuck. I just get bored. I want the candy—the first few months of the relationship, the passion, the puppy love, getting to know someone. That’s what makes the sex good! I know that’s a game, that’s not a real relationship. I don’t even know the person! But fuck. I d
on’t want to eat my veggies.”
Sabrina had a few new boyfriends during the time I knew her, and always she was half in love. The last I heard, she was planning to move with one of them to California. “He’s really amazing! Glad I held out for the right one,” she wrote me. “So many people settle.” A good friend of hers had recently gotten married, to Sabrina’s surprise. She thought her friend had always been keeping the guy at a distance, never really letting him in. After the wedding, Sabrina asked her friend about that. “You get married,” her friend told her, “and you stop keeping the guy at bay.” For the moment this seemed like a reasonable goal to aim for.
A few months later she wrote me that she was “very well and happy—planning a wedding actually :) and the best part, it’s mine!” Sabrina had met a guy from the Midwest who’d come to New York and been shocked that “smart, educated people were hooking up left and right with people they wouldn’t share a cereal bowl with.” In dating him she had realized that men and women want largely the same things, but men are afraid to admit it for fear of losing their “man-cred.” “I think NYC is full of people who want sublime connection but can’t find it so rationalize useless hookups to bide the time . . . I think the solution is really knowing oneself and being honest/genuine in one’s value.”
THE SEESAW MARRIAGE
TRUE LOVE (JUST FOR ELITES)
Perhaps the most famous TV sitcom scene ever comes from a 1952 episode of I Love Lucy called “Job Switching.” The antics are set in motion by a tiff over money. “Do you realize how tough it is for a guy to make a buck these days?” asks Ricky. “Do you think that the money grows on trees?” And thus the game is on. Ricky and Fred will play the housewives for the day while Lucy and Ethel go out and look for a job. The resulting pandemonium illustrates the absurdity of such a reversal of roles. Ricky and Fred dress essentially in drag, with flowered aprons and do-rags on their heads. For dinner they produce two exploding chickens, a volcanic eruption of rice, and a seven-layer cake as flat as a pancake, leaving the kitchen a disaster. The ladies fare no better. They get jobs at a chocolate factory, which produces the famous scene: the chocolate bonbons racing down the conveyor belt as Lucy and Ethel, overwhelmed by the pace and terrified of the boss, stuff them in their mouths, chef hats, and shirts. The girls return home hoarse and exhausted and eager to restore the natural order of things. “We’re not so good at bringing home the bacon,” Lucy confesses, and Ricky suggests, “Let’s go back to the way we were.”
Barely two generations later, the housewife is a rare breed on American television, unless you count the Real Housewives of anywhere, who would not be caught dead in a flowered apron that wasn’t part of a kinky maid’s costume. During the intervening years, the real-life Lucys and Rickys sat down at the American kitchen table and Lucy laid down the new rules. At this point Lucy was working, perhaps as a headhunter or a publicist or a Hollywood agent. Ricky meanwhile was still nurturing his “creative pursuits.” Lucy was bringing home at least as much money as Ricky, and some years more. Lucy was a woman reborn, hiring and firing, getting promotions, then coming home to put little Ricky to bed. Big Ricky was helping out, too, picking up from day care every once in a while or making a playground run on a Saturday morning so Lucy could go to a spin class. And by now he’d learned to roast a chicken. Wasn’t that something? But Lucy, newly attuned to the cadences of her own satisfaction, wanted still more.
By now, going “back to the way we were” was no longer an option. In 1970 women in the United States contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the average American wife contributes 42.2 percent. More than a third of mothers, in the United States and the UK, are the family’s main breadwinner, either because they are single or because they make more money than their husbands. This latter category of breadwinner wives, also known as “alpha wives,” are a particular shock to the usual marriage regime, given that they were once considered as bizarre and exotic as a portly man in a frilly apron. Within one generation, demographers expect them to be the majority of American families, with families in Europe and some Latin American and Asian countries not far behind. In fact, argues Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, the whole question raised in the I Love Lucy episode and rehashed in some form today, about whether mothers should work, is moot, “because they just do. This idealized family—he works, she stays home—hardly exists anymore.”
In the confines of intimate relationships, women’s growing economic power has done extraordinary things. For the 70 percent of Americans without a college degree, the rise of the breadwinner wife is associated with the destruction of marriage. Women are choosing to stay single rather than marry men who can’t step up and provide. The divorce rate has stayed as high as it was in the seventies, and every year fewer people get married before having children. In Washington, DC, for example, an astonishing 63.8 percent of mothers act as their family’s main breadwinner, largely because the city has so many poor single mothers.
But for the elites, the result is exactly the opposite. Since the seventies, the college educated have become far more likely than anyone else to rate their marriages “happy” or “very happy” and less than half as likely to get divorced; out of wedlock births are virtually unheard of among them. Marriage has become yet another class privilege in America, the gated community of human relationships, the “private playground of those already blessed with abundance,” in the words of sociologist Brad Wilcox, the head of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project.
What was the trick? Smashing the old model, which was largely built on the assumption of male economic dominance. In Lucy’s time, a woman had no choice but to marry up; how else could she get ahead? Sylvia Plath described these privileged husband-hunters memorably in The Bell Jar as “hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or another” and looking “awfully bored.” In fact, she writes, “girls like that make me sick.” Now that women can have their own careers, they can banish the waiting and boredom and that air of dependence that makes a freethinking woman sick. They don’t need a man to get ahead, so they can find one they really want to be with instead. And isn’t that a purer form of love, anyway?
When I got engaged in the late 1990s, I had a vague concept in mind of an egalitarian marriage. I’d seen my husband work out some family finances for his parents one afternoon in a highly competent way, and remember feeling relieved that I’d be able to offload that particular task. I’d seen him playing with friends’ kids; he seemed to enjoy it. We were both journalists with about equally successful careers, and I assumed it would stay that way.
This in itself was a radical enough vision. My mother had worked sporadically when I was a kid and started her career only after I had left for college. My father, like most fathers I knew, worked steadily every day. But I assumed my husband and I would both work, both raise children, and on into a happy retirement. I am not an especially precise planner, but if you’d have pressed me for an exact ratio, I would have given the same one most women of my generation had in mind: fifty-fifty, with its soothing intimations of yin-yang harmony and feminist equity.
The new model of elite marriage renders even that simple equation obsolete. The prevailing arrangement now is a constantly shifting equation—sixty-forty or eighty-twenty or ninety-ten. I call it the seesaw marriage, where any side of that ratio can be filled by either partner at any given time. A husband can work to support his wife through school and then she can take over and be the hotshot lawyer. A wife can start out ahead and then decide to cut back and take care of the children. These new bourgeois marriages work, argues marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, because they have “much less rigid gender roles.” Anyone can play the role of breadwinner for any period.
In the fifteen years I’ve been married, I’ve started to encounter more families where the wife is at least for some period the main breadwinner. Some couples seem to ease into it naturally—the wife is a born workaholic and the hu
sband delights in, say, coaching the sports teams or picking the kids up after school. One woman at our preschool can’t stop bragging about her stay-at-home husband—although, I can’t help it, I am still startled by the sight of him hanging around the school making handprint T-shirts for the teachers. Some dynamics are not so pleasant—one woman I know, whose husband works part-time as an airline mechanic, never seems to run out of ways to call him a loser. Another, with an out-of-work lawyer husband, complains about petty things—why does he spend all her money on dress socks if he hasn’t had a job interview in over a year, and why does he have to subscribe to every damned sports channel? In a couple of cases I know, the disparity never felt natural, and the couple got divorced.
The emotional landscapes of such families were a mystery to me, which is why last year I conducted an extensive survey of seventy-five hundred people in female-breadwinner couples in the online magazine Slate, and followed up with interviews. Slate readers are much more educated than the general population, and the majority of people who answered the survey were women. Still, the responses start to get to the bottom of some of the more sensitive questions: Does more money mean more power in the relationship? Do more hours worked mean fewer hours taking care of the children? Do the men feel liberated? Humiliated? Do the women feel proud? Taken advantage of? Does a husband ever separate darks from whites?