Sex, Sociology and the Single Girl - NYTimes.com - 0 views
douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...-sociology-and-the-single-girl
sociology couples conservatism sexual norms cultural morality
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In the aggregate (note that word again!), the current conventions surrounding premarital sex seem to push women to conform to male desires rather than to their own stated preferences
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in our sexual culture, the male preference gets treated as normative even by women who don’t share it, and whose own comfort level with sex outside a committed relationship is actually substantially lower.
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there are three ways you can look at this kind of data, three attitudes you can take. One possibility, which I take to be view of a number of the feminist writers who criticized my column, is that the division in stated preferences is itself a social convention — one of the legacies of patriarchy and male privilege, an entirely socially-constructed divergence that reflects the historical shaming of promiscuous women and the devaluing of female sexual pleasure.
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it still feels like a very strange sort of feminism that looks at the literature on sexual and romantic preferences and makes what men want the measure of empowerment, happiness and health.
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The second possible attitude, which I think is actually more commonplace (though often unstated) than the strict feminist take, doesn’t dismiss these patterns but basically denies that they have any clear relevance to individual lives and relationships — because every sexual situation is so different, every romantic encounter so distinctive, that trying to draw any kind of specific life lessons from what a bunch of men and women tell a sociologist is a fool’s errand.
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the “rigid social conventions” of the past were so self-evidently anti-sex and awful that it’s better not to question whatever conventions we’ve replaced them with.
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ignore the sociology, to insist that the patterns and preferences have no relevance to people’s happiness, or to try to paper them over out of an implausible fear that merely acknowledging them will send us hurtling back into the world of “Mad Men,” the Victorians, or worse.
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Which brings us to the third possible response to the sociological findings and patterns mentioned above. If there’s evidence that 1) women’s stated sexual preferences are somewhat more conservative than what men say they want and what our cultural norms encourage, that 2) women’s happiness increases when their sex lives conform to their own preferences rather than to the culture’s more libertine script, and that (at least anecdotally) 3) men tend toward a kind of indecisive, listless, semi-exploitative relationship style when their preferences are too easily fulfilled, then perhaps — just perhaps — what we have here is a case for a somewhat more conservative sexual culture.
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Just a culture where it’s a little easier for women (and men) to act on attitudes and preferences that, in the aggregate (!!!!), seem to correlate more with happiness and flourishing than many social liberals are willing to acknowledge or admit.