I think it does - not because the act itself matters one way or the other, but because, as I mentioned, I’ve expressly heard misogynists use “hookup culture” (and the suppose eventual end of the family unit as a result in their minds) as a reason women should not be equal.
It’s an important discussion, IMHO, because when you hear the White Male Establishment™ pushing back against this culture, it may not be obvious to everyone that they are also very likely pushing back against female equality as well.
I did listen to the podcast, and I for the most part agree with the author. The book isn’t at all asking the question that the post is titled with, but instead examines sexual politics as they play out on college campus post sexual revolution, but pre-true egalitarianism.
I think that scrutinizing and trying to police young women’s behaviour is certainly not, so this pile of gatekeeping dressed up as an article should probably put a sock in it.
Gender and sex are not the same thing. Also, we absolutely need to work for a society where men are free to be feminine, but men being feminine will not solve sexism.
Maybe the mods should institute a six-hour rule for feminism-geared topics, six hours when only those who identify as female may comment. Just in case it’s unclear, I’m quite serious. I think it would be a good idea. You’re not the only one who’s frustrated by the underrepresentation of women early in threads. It’s no one’s fault per se, and I believe @orenwolf that’s it’s mainly a consequence of the stats of membership (which is a related problem), but it’s still a problem that’s most apparent in threads like this one. [Captain Obvious moment, and comment springs from yours, but is not intended to be directed at you, but at the mods.]
Christ, it takes a special kind of messed-up species to make sex joyless. You had one job, humanity!
It’s a podcast, not an article. And it’s not gatekeeping. I’m not saying I totally agree with everything they say, but IMHO it’s worth listening to and it’s a mistake to dismiss it out of hand because of the pithy click-baity title.
I feel like that’s one of the only things I can comment on. I’m a white man, I’m from the Midwest, and depending on how poor our towns are, we can take advantage of that progressive ranking that both the left and the right sneer at.
Well, that, and of course we need to make sure black men, Hispanic men, etc., aren’t unwelcome because they’re men. This is one of the areas where I totally agree with intersectional feminism: it’d be really shitty for white women to look to black men and say, “Sorry, men, you had your chance, now it’s our turn.”
If I could ban one thing, it’d be all those videos where Mike Rowe acts smug about college education and why it’s unnecessary. Bitch, you have a BA and you get paid to shill for trade schools, of course you’re pushing trade school.
Anyway, I don’t mean to threadjack, you just hit on a subject I care about. It bothers me to see the Midwest get poorer and less populated, and the kids that are here getting their heads full of, “Don’t go to college, take some welding classes, and that’s all you need.”
This sums up my own feelings and is generally in line with the meat of the podcast:
"When I was in college, I held a belief I’m a little ashamed of now: that casual hookups are intrinsically disempowering and demeaning for women.
It was a sentiment echoed by many conservative commentators whose books and articles I eagerly read, feeling that they affirmed my own feelings and experiences.
Looking back on it, though, I can understand why I believed that: I thought that casual sex was degrading because I had felt degraded every time I had it.
But as I later realized, the reason I felt degraded wasn’t because casual sex is inherently degrading. It was because my hookup partners had treated me like an object, like a means to an end. They didn’t care about my pleasure, they disrespected and ignored me afterwards, and they were often pushy and coercive.
The more I learned about feminism, the more I realized that my experiences with casual sex with men fit into a much broader pattern of structural sexism. They treated me that way because that’s how they’d learned to treat women (often not just in hookup situations, either), and the reason they’d learned to treat women that way was because they, like all of us, were raised in a sexist society.
In order to completely remove sexism from hookup culture, we’d have to completely remove it from society, and that’s a tall order – for now. There are still things we can do to make our hookups less sexist and more empowering."
I think it’s a question of how to separate femininity from historical power-based stereotypes. Cheerleading in its origin was fundamentally a second class activity, people don’t go to see the cheerleaders, they go to see what the cheerleaders are cheering.
Take away stereotypes and I think a lot of guys still do sports in high school. Without expectations what would those high school girls do instead? Theatre? Dance? Something that looks a lot like cheerleading except where the cheerleaders are the main attraction?
I don’t see anything wrong with women who want sex going out and getting the sex they want.
I also see a lot of previous feminism, with good intentions, often demonizing sex as being “what men want” and for that reason bad. I think it was a bit easy to fall into the same Victorian demonizing of sex as dirty. And of course to be fair, it was still a bit of a mess too. I expect that sexualization vs. empowerment will remain often tricky to distinguish, forever.
But if women don’t want sex, or want it, or want it but differently, or anything else they want, that’s all each individual woman’s business. If a woman wants to get sex and gets it with full consent all around, there should be no barriers to her feeling just great about it.
There should be no “walk of shame” with women. It should be the same as I think it should be with men, or any gender. It should be the walk home of “Fuck yeah, I got a piece and it was good.”
I think the title is misleading—like, it’s not necessarily about whether an individual’s lifestyle is “feminist” (no more than can buying Starbucks coffee “capitalist” (aka the microscopic view)… but it seems like the actual content is more nuanced… to do with the macroscopic, where “feminine-coded” traits that are absolutely useful for society like nurture-ship, emotional labors, and teamwork area not coded desirable in society.
i like to separate these two scales because if your political worldview is dominated by the question in the thread of whether buying a cup of fair-trade coffee makes you less complicit in capitalist imperialism, you’ve lost the story.
[also, despite my user name i am not a mister.]
[also, sorry to @popobawa4u i didn’t mean to reply to your comment specifically.]
As a man I’m not sure I fully grasp your rational here. Why would they (he) treat you special? If you are hooking up the end goal, the release, is the objective. The podcast pretty much lays it out there as being a mechanical, emotionless act done for the sake of pleasure. To expect him to care about your satisfaction implies he cares about you - that pretty much voids the emotionless aspect of the hookup. In general you are both treating each other as an object, perhaps there is sexual chemistry, perhaps not. Implying that you are treating each other as more than a way of gaining physical contact and sexual gratification implies there could be more, which again moves from hookup to potentially something much more emotionally complicated.
As basic non-human analogy - renting vs. buying. Typically people take care of what they buy much more so than renting simply because they are investing into the longevity of their purchase. If the ownership time limit is fixed why invest more energy than is needed into the most basic care possible?
It does not mean that at all. Being a good lover for any period of time (long or short) means being considerate. Just because you’re hooking up doesn’t mean it needs to be all about you. Also as a man, I don’t have any trouble grasping the rationale.
It doesn’t imply that.
And here we go. I think I see the source of your confusion. Why buy the cow, right?
That is one possible implication. But in addition to only duty to self or other, there is also the matter of duty to the group - be it village, subculture, or other community structure. Assuming either unilateral or mutual self-interest is very limiting, but sadly not uncommon.
4Chan’s /pol/ and /r9k/ have a general idea they use to describe this, the 20/80 rule. The idea is roughly the top 20% of men will hookup with 80% of women. And then insert a bunch of infographics about marriage stability vs. sexual partners, STD rates, ect. ect… ending with no woman can be truly alone since some man will always want her, while a man can be completely undesirable to all and foreveralone.png
In reality I think the podcast does a good job laying out that statistics that 20% of men and women enjoy the hookup culture and at the other end 30% don’t engage in it at all. Nothing wrong in either aspect. I wouldn’t be a part of the hookup scene, meaningless sex wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable as caring relationship sex. I can take care of my physical urges myself.
