This attitude and aversion to confrontation carries over into other areas of life. Many young women still feel uncomfortable being direct and open with each other because they have had so little practice giving and taking criticism, and have a hard time not holding a grudge against the person who gave the criticism, even when the intention behind it is good. By contrast, the way men communicate with each other lends itself to building trust because they know their male friends will be upfront with them. It also orients men toward interpersonal conflict resolution and compromise, instead of trying to please everyone or “keep the peace.” This could partly explain why, in a recent Gallup poll, just a quarter of women would prefer to work for a female boss while 40 percent would prefer a male boss (a third had no preference).26
Why is it so hard for women just to say what's on their minds—even to their best friends? Because women's social lives, especially when they are growing up, depend so heavily on what other women think of them. Information about others is seen as power, and they fear losing not just one friend, but being alienated by other friends who are swayed by that one friend's approval. Most women also do not want to hurt each other's feelings, but in the process, what they are truly feeling doesn't get articulated, so whatever issue was really concerning them gets left unresolved for the sake of preserving the friendship and greater social cohesion of the group. So there is a feeling of social isolation that also exists among women.
Many modern women, like modern men, are also turning away from socializing, relationships, and intimacy with the opposite sex. In Japan 45 percent of women say they have no interest in sex and up to 90 percent of young women think that staying single is better than marriage.27 Worry over the dwindling birth rate has even prompted Japanese researchers to begin work on creating artificial wombs, in which embryos can be brought to term without a human host.28
The New York Post recently observed a trend of women in their twenties and thirties who would rather take care of a dog than get married or raise a child. Doggie-loving female readers told them that they didn't even think twice about giving up changing diapers, dealing with temper tantrums, and creating college funds for the predictable affection of their four-legged “child.” One woman said that it required less work and that she'd have more time to go out. No babysitter needed! Another said dogs were preferable to other companionship options, and that her little pup was “great, except he snores a lot. He even has his own Instagram. A dog is easier to transport than a child. It's less final than having a child.” The number of dogs under twenty-five pounds has increased in recent years.29
For the women who would rather partner with a man, many have impractical, even otherworldly, expectations of who their suitor should be. Just like how porn gives men an unrealistic impression of sex, many women's version of porn—romantic comedies and erotic novels—gives them unrealistic expectations of what men will bring to the relationship. Though most women generally desire a man who is at least as tall, or taller than themselves, many successful young women also admitted to us that their checklist of qualities a potential partner must possess only increased as they became more educated and financially independent, further narrowing the pool of men they would give the time of day to. The reasons behind this invariably revolved around wanting to maintain a similar or better quality of life and social status once children came along in their partner-marital relationship. As a consequence, “marrying up” is more important than it used to be,30 yet women are not under the same financial pressures, which leaves the women at the top and the men at the bottom less likely to find a partner.
Eighty-six percent of Americans believe a father's income is “very important” or “extremely important” while just a quarter said a mother's income was “extremely important.”31 those same lines, there are only ninety-one never-married men aged twenty-five to thirty-four with jobs for every one hundred never-married women of the same age with jobs,32 yet three out of four women would not date an unemployed man while two-thirds of men would date an unemployed woman.33
A recent survey of over 1,000 men and women found that 82 percent of men and 72 percent of women said the man should still pay the full bill on a date. Even as a relationship progresses, 36 percent of men said they pay all the bills, versus 14 percent of women.34 In other words, young women are becoming more educated and financially successful than young men but they are less willing than men to meet their partner in the middle when it comes to sharing expenses and gift-giving. A perfect example of this is the luxury jewelry company Tiffany & Co.'s “ drop a hint” option underneath “add to shopping bag.” A pop up window will appear: “Dear ____: Apparently ____ has been daydreaming about this and we thought you'd definitely want to know. A hint from your friends at Tiffany.”35 You'd never see this on a website for men's products!
Perhaps this will change as men and women both become more comfortable with women leading, or with gender equality.
Landmines and Eggshells: Sexuality and Dating
Just as most women don't want to be called sluts, most men want to avoid the label of chauvinist, particularly “chauvinist pig,” as it can be ruinous both professionally and personally. These names have been used unproductively for years; the difference now is men have a set of rules about what they're not supposed to do, but have nothing about what they should be doing, so while fewer guys are getting called chauvinists, they don't act as resolutely in the dating arena as they might have in the past.
When you talk to older couples, the man will say something like, “She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen,” and the woman will say, “I thought he was the biggest jerk when I met him . . . then he won me over.” Now when a woman says “no,” men listen and back off, not knowing how to change their approach in the future, which means everyone gets fewer dates. Or they act like a jerk or resort to pickup artist techniques because they were rejected without explanation. It is especially confusing for men when they hear women tell them they want to be with a man who is nice and respectful, yet see that the women respond more favorably to men who act more aggressively and with disregard for the woman's feelings. Some have dubbed this the “Hero-Asshole Complex,” in contrast to the Madonna-Whore Complex.
It seems that desire plays by different rules that we, as a society, do not know how to discuss yet. Indeed, the majority of women want to feel overwhelmingly desired by their love interest, not logically contemplated, but this leaves a gray area for men to proceed. In a recent article on the male experience of feeling desired versus the female experience of feeling desired, Mark D. White, chair of the philosophy department at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, discussed this perplexing situation:
If I were dating and trying to achieve the appropriate balance between thoughtful consideration and spontaneous desire, I would consider the costs of failing to show sufficient respect—specifically, the risk of offending or hurting a woman—to be much higher than the costs of showing insufficient desire and passion—mainly, risking making a woman unhappy and endangering the success of the relationship. The way I think about things, I would consider the first risk much more serious than the second, and I would err on the side of respect and consideration. This may be what's behind the man Dr. [Noam] Shpancer calls “the delicate, tentative guy who politely thinks about you and asks if this is okay or that is okay,” who “may well put you in a sexual coma—not despite these qualities, but because of them.”36
For a lot of guys, as much as women say “no means no,” in reality no often means maybe. Maybe as in prove or show—in a nonsexual way—why she should say yes. One Redditor commented on the article, saying:
I think men are kind of lost. The systems we've all been raised on had a very definite role for us to play. But we're told now it's dangerous. We are told to act differently, but often find that in one context or another, women want us to be cautious and respectful, and in other contexts, they want the abandon of desire. Get it wrong and you are either unaggressive (not forceful o
r dominant enough) and on the other end, too forceful and “rapey.” It's difficult to know what we ought to be at any given moment. You'll see men rewarded for being respectful and egalitarian one moment, but then you'll hear a woman talk about a sexual fantasy of a man taking her without asking and just dominating her. What kind of signal do I take from these conflicting messages? Can a woman want both things? And if she does, how can she expect the man to navigate what she's wanting? Or is it that they don't really want both, they truly want one or the other, and something cultural is pressuring them to say they want the other [too]?37
One young man from our survey echoed a parallel view:
In a post-feminism generation, gender roles are unclear. Men in their late 20s to early 30s today were raised to be sensitive and caring, and to hide any aggressive impulses, but find this gets them nowhere. Women in their 20s to early 30s talk about feminine empowerment but are still only sexually attracted to overt displays of strength and aggression. Sensitivity, politeness and asking what a woman wants are extreme turnoffs because they are perceived as weakness. Not only is being a new kind of man a turnoff, it also keeps me from making the first move because I learned to worry about forcing myself onto the object of my desire, to not be crass or slimy, to not use pickup lines, etc. But there are no clearly defined rules for what I should be doing, just a set of things that I shouldn't do-all the things that would elicit results . . . I'll just go play video games, thanks.
One thing that has changed is the pressure women feel to be “liberated.” No one can agree on what exactly that is though, and one of the reasons why feminism broke off into so many subgroups was because there was so much disagreement about what sexual liberation was. For example, some women, such as Candida Royalle38 and Annie Sprinkle,39 thought porn was empowering, while others, such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, and Robin Morgan,40 thought it undermined feminism's goals. Despite the efforts of religious conservatives and radical feminists to eradicate porn, societal attitudes have shifted since the 1960s from the expectation that a woman be pure and virginal until marriage to being ready, willing, and able to hook up anywhere, anytime, with no strings attached. Though the current situation has debunked certain taboos, most sexual education curriculums are still stuck in the Victorian age. “Our bodies, our choice” sounds powerful, but what good is it when nobody understands their own body or choices?
Arguably, men are confused because women are confused. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy, a staff writer at the New Yorker, discussed the impact that sexual objectification and self-objectification have on the development of sexuality and identity of young women. She investigated the rise of the raunch culture and the effects of female “empowerment” shifting from the fight for women's rights to strip dance classes. Levy writes that women of all ages are confronted with the same issues, yet:
Whereas older women were around for the women's movement itself, or at least for the period when its lessons were still alive in the country's collective memory, teenage girls have only the here and now. They have never known a time when “ho” wasn't part of the lexicon, when 16 year olds didn't get breast implants, when porn stars weren't topping the best-seller lists, when strippers weren't mainstream . . .41
These days, when someone says “you look like a porn star,” it is often taken as a compliment. We shouldn't be surprised that young women are watching more porn and acting as if hotness and lust are virtues when they are barraged with images that combine sexual exhibitionism with a glamorous lifestyle. Think of the number of women who are household names who you haven't seen in lingerie; you can probably count them on one hand.
Amid the “contradictory mishmash” of messages from parents, peers, and the media, it is unrealistic to think that teenagers will pay no mind to their hormones, disregard the porn stars on television, and not be curious about all the sites dedicated to sex on the Internet. Levy says that it should be no wonder that teens are not cooperating with the traditional plan to save oneself for “the one” or are comprehending that sex is performance given for attention, and suggests that:
Rather than only telling teens why they shouldn't have sex, perhaps we also ought to be teaching them why they should. We are doing little to help them differentiate their sexual desires from their desire for attention . . . If there's a way in which grown women are appropriating raunch as a rebellion against the constraints of feminism, we can't say the same for teens. They never had a feminism to rebel against . . . Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at free-wheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety.42
Levy references interviews with teen girls conducted by Deborah Tolman, for her book Dilemmas of Desire. Tolman found that the girls could not differentiate between the experiences of being wanted versus the experience of sex. The girls also ignored or suppressed their own arousal, in what Tolman described as “silent bodies,” because they were terrified that really feeling “embodied sexual desire” would only lead to disease and unwanted pregnancy. What the girls mostly felt was a “great deal” of confusion and anxiety.43
Things have gotten a lot worse for women in recent decades, says Australian feminist Germaine Greer: “Liberation hasn't happened, even sexual liberation didn't happen . . . What happened was that commercial pornography was liberated, fantasy was liberated, but people weren't liberated.”44
Language Does not Equal Liberation; Liberation Equals Liberation
We bring up these challenges and contradictions in the women's movement as well as the distortion of statistics about sexism by politicians because it is important for women to realize that unless the catchy slogans actually have a basis in reality, true empowerment for women will not exist. Despite the progress that has been made by the women's movement, there are many real flaws that exist in the current Western social and cultural structure for both sexes. Furthermore, feigning concern for legitimate women's issues through political correctness creates unfounded anger toward men and diverts attention and resources away from making long-lasting improvements or generating more effective cooperation between the sexes.
Nick Cohen, a journalist for the Spectator, recently discussed the detrimental effects this kind of political correctness has in a recent article:
What distinguishes our times is the fanaticism about the power language. Starting on the post-1968 left and moving rightwards ever since, is a belief that slips in language reveal your opponent's hidden meanings and unquestioned assumptions. The wised-up need only decode, and everyone will see the oppressiveness of the elite . . . Indeed, your insistence that you can change the world by changing language, and deal with racism or homophobia merely by not offending the feelings of interest groups, is likely to allow real racism and homophobia to flourish unchallenged, and the sick and disadvantaged to continue to suffer from polite neglect.45
Instead of examining the real issues honestly, we have censored them. Which is why, in 2014, we simultaneously ended up with a Mississippi sex education class comparing women who have sex to dirty pieces of chocolate46 and Beyoncé in a bikini on the cover of Time magazine's “100 Most Influential People.”47 On one level, the bikini photos pay homage to positive body image campaigns, but on another level, it says that, as a woman, no matter what you've accomplished, what matters most is how your body looks. What are young girls (and boys) who idolize celebrities supposed to think? The cover may as well have shown Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball.
In today's world, a woman who appears in the media is expected to willingly objectify herself to stay relevant. If she is not traditionally beautiful, she can either pile on the makeup or go for a dark or edgy look—but she's still expected to try to put her sexiest foot forward. Photoshop can take care of the rest.
Some actresses are speaking out against the status quo. For example, Rashida Jones, one of the stars of Parks and Recreation, wrote a piece for
Glamour about the pornification of everything, saying that women can't possibly all be into strip dancing or showing so much skin. Owning and expressing one's sexuality has been an important step for women, she said, but most of what's out there seems so staged—“. . . in my opinion, we are at a point of oversaturation.” In television, this oversaturation is known as a “tonnage issue,” which TV network censors will report when there is an overuse of a certain phrase. “When it comes to porn imagery and pop culture, we have a tonnage issue,” Jones said, but because of the ubiquity of these images and the personas that accompany them young girls who imitate celebrities may not see that personal sexual expression is related to having pride about who they are on the inside.48
If Beyoncé's cover on Time is not the tonnage tipping point, we don't know what is. Why is being a woman today so much about being one of the guys” with “really amazing hair”—as feminist Caitlin Moran puts it?49 And why is taking your clothes off the only way for a woman to publicly communicate self-acceptance? When we insist that every woman is beautiful and encourage them to show more skin as a form of empowerment, we not only place even more emphasis on physical appearance, we devalue it.
I (Nikita) have always wondered why so many women loathe feeling sexually objectified, yet, with any bit of fame or weight loss, find that objectification to be empowering. We refuse to admit that being a sexual object is a powerful position, yet we celebrate our own success by choosing to present ourselves as a collection of body parts to be ogled, thereby reducing the power that position holds by removing the mystery of it. I don't think young girls are the only ones who are confused; it's mostly women who are creating this media for other women, and it's women who are buying it! We are the ones that are reading the articles about celebrity cellulite, and our insatiable schadenfreude means such articles will continue to appear. Guys couldn't care less. Perhaps, what we really resent is that sexual power can be so fleeting and biologically determined—both things over which we have no control.
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