◼ The hookup culture that has largely replaced dating on college campuses has been viewed, in many quarters, as socially corrosive and ultimately toxic to women, who seemingly have little choice but to participate. Actually, it is an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves. - Hanna Rosin/The Atlantic
But this analysis downplays the unbelievable gains women have lately made, and, more important, it forgets how much those gains depend on sexual liberation. Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-school party—are for the first time in history more successful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.
◼ So, women have finally succeeded in becoming all they hate? - Elizabeth Scalia/The Anchoress
How utterly depressing. The sexual revolution and its illusory notion of “having it all” has folded in upon itself to forge a chain-link of perfect irony: 21st Century women have become precisely the shallow, insincere, career-fixated, corporate people-users that early feminists decried.
Women were going to teach men how to be human, remember? Instead, they’ve become everything they claimed to hate.
◼ Aaaahhh! Aaaaahhhhh! AAAAAaaaaahhhhhhHHHH! - leahlibresco/Unequally Yoked
That’s my knee jerk reaction to Hanna Rosin’s new piece for the Atlantic on whether women are well served by hookup culture.
