What do Women Want?
It seems that sex is the last thing on a calculating girl's mind in Maureen Dowd's What's a Modern Girl to Do? According to Dowd's 20 and 30 something native informants, the new protagonist of "Sex in the City" can forego sex if the guy is willing to pick up the tab.
She paints a picture of young women with calculators for hearts and icemakers on their pussies. There is absolutely no account of how the pill liberated women to act on their desires. Perhaps it's because sexual fulfillment turned out to be not so fulfilling or that feminine frigidity once again appears as the perfect solution to a sexual/financial double-standards where women who get wet and forget to feign indifference are punished for their sexual enjoyment while cool customers who can throw up a Blackberry flavored smoke screen of being overbooked and undersexed will get the guy and the guy who pays as well. This to me is the most appalling hypocrisy of the dating situation described in Dowd's article.
Cosmo has not a word about the devastating joint melting danger of falling in love over some good sex, but it does offer many tips about keeping your man sexually entranced -- my favorite was yelling out the names of your friends who find your orgasming boyfriend "hot" while he climaxes. With this much planning ahead, how is a girl to let herself go when it's her turn?
I'm not asking for better advice about falling in love, just commenting on the impoverished vision of female-male relations offered to women once again.
She paints a picture of young women with calculators for hearts and icemakers on their pussies. There is absolutely no account of how the pill liberated women to act on their desires. Perhaps it's because sexual fulfillment turned out to be not so fulfilling or that feminine frigidity once again appears as the perfect solution to a sexual/financial double-standards where women who get wet and forget to feign indifference are punished for their sexual enjoyment while cool customers who can throw up a Blackberry flavored smoke screen of being overbooked and undersexed will get the guy and the guy who pays as well. This to me is the most appalling hypocrisy of the dating situation described in Dowd's article.
Cosmo has not a word about the devastating joint melting danger of falling in love over some good sex, but it does offer many tips about keeping your man sexually entranced -- my favorite was yelling out the names of your friends who find your orgasming boyfriend "hot" while he climaxes. With this much planning ahead, how is a girl to let herself go when it's her turn?
I'm not asking for better advice about falling in love, just commenting on the impoverished vision of female-male relations offered to women once again.
4 Comments:
Are you saying you didn't like the doughnut trick?
There's one odd aspect to this article, Dowd starts off saying she didn't like the dress-down style of 60s feminism. Instead she yearned for romance, dressing up, cocktails & fine hotels. Now that is back, but not appealing. Except her portrait of all this - now & then - is one of totality conformity. I wonder about her portrait?
Sure, I take the point: men are insecure & limited & modernity has always offered an excess of tedious, mind-numbing labor. The return to men taking the check though seems to make the sexual transaction more explicit rather than rule it out.
Are you saying you didn't like the doughnut trick?
There's one odd aspect to this article, Dowd starts off saying she didn't like the dress-down style of 60s feminism. Instead she yearned for romance, dressing up, cocktails & fine hotels. Now that is back, but not appealing. Except her portrait of all this - now & then - is one of totality conformity. I wonder about her portrait?
Sure, I take the point: men are insecure & limited & modernity has always offered an excess of tedious, mind-numbing labor. The return to men taking the check though seems to make the sexual transaction more explicit rather than rule it out.
Are you saying you didn't like the doughnut trick?
There's one odd aspect to this article, Dowd starts off saying she didn't like the dress-down style of 60s feminism. Instead she yearned for romance, dressing up, cocktails & fine hotels. Now that is back, but not appealing. Except her portrait of all this - now & then - is one of totality conformity. I wonder about her portrait?
Sure, I take the point: men are insecure & limited & modernity has always offered an excess of tedious, mind-numbing labor. The return to men taking the check though seems to make the sexual transaction more explicit rather than rule it out.
"The return to men taking the check though seems to make the sexual transaction more explicit rather rule it out."
Point taken! My argument is that instead of "sexual liberation" problematic as that was, we have a repressive and conformist discourse of "sexual calcuation." Dowd poses the problem as a false choice between two presumed inadequate modes of confronting men. And if I were an orthodox Lacanian, I would say that this is once again proof of the aphorism "There is no sexual rapport (or rational proportion)." And yes, feminism believed in a purely rationalized 50/50 distribution of all forms of psychic and economic labor that seems naive to our jaded eyes.
I think Dowd's "research" focuses on the daughters'
of privilege, who have always been used to thinking in terms of the bottom line.
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