The EXPENDABLES
I am surprised Cosmopolitan has not gone out of business, yet. I used to read it in my early 20s, now I step back and realize what an insult it was to my intelligence. When did you last see the cover title "Dating to marry" or "Sex is better in marriage"? Instead all I see are self-absorbed articles on how women can maintain this no-strings attached attitude on their sex lives. That is massive denial right there. I wonder how society would change if that happened--probably for the better, don't you think? I was talking with my friend one day and she was telling me about her 2yr live-in relationship with her ex.
me: "You want to get married some day, right?"
her: Well, of course
me: So, would you still move in with the next guy if you are not married to him, yet?
her: Well, yeah why not?
This short and depressing dialogue with my friend is just one example of the vicious cycle we perpetuate on men not growing up. People are that blind to the fact that it is actually women who set the precedent for how men treat us in society. Let's talk about virtue instead of equality for once. Who cares what the men do--we, ladies are the neck of the woods: change how we respect ourselves and we inadvertently teach them how to treat us. Just take a cue from syndicated radio talkshow host Dr Laura Schelesinger who has dealt with thousands of people over the years:
"Women are no longer bound by social rules that say, "Nice girls don't." Women, according to the new mantra, are entitled to their own sexual experience and pleasure. Throw the birth-control pill into that mix, and hallelujah, women can enjoy the full range of real and perceived male promiscuity. How wonderful. Now women can have multiple sexual experiences without pretense or hope of caring and intimacy. Does this increase feminine self-esteem? I think not.(3)
Therin lies the issue with how the word "empowerment" is defined these days: able to sleep with who you please (because you two are in love, based on that feeling at that time, right?), when you please (because marriage is obsolete and it’s the third date already so what are we waiting for?) and not thinking about the ramifications of that (I don’t know, STDs, pregnancy, resentment, you name it). I don't think that is the definition of empowerment--I think society has gotten it mixed up with selfishness. I use you, you use me, we walk away--hey, what's the damage done? The damage done is a loss of respect for the soul of the other person.
The cold truth about feminism is that over the past 50 years of being implemented it echoes irony all around it. In the words of author and radio host Dennis Prager:
"Feminism has created what is undoubtedly the weakest generation of women in American history. My grandmother, who never heard the word “feminist” and who never graduated from high school, was incomparably stronger than almost any college-educated feminist I have ever personally encountered, or the many I have read and listened to."(22)
SEX IN THE CITY
"Chivalry is dead and women killed it"
- Dave Chappelle
Throughout my 20's my girlfriends would often quip "oh, you can sleep with him if you don't care about him but if it serious, hold off on sleeping with a guy" Basically the worst and most illogical advice in the world. So disrespect your values, your body and the man you could care less about unless its for your own selfish desires and then turn the tables when you eventually do find someone worth respect and show him you respect yourself by holding off? Integrity has left the building.
As with concepts like the “teenager” and “middle-class,” dating is a historically recent invention, spurred by an influx of women into the big cities looking for work around the turn of the 20th Century. The word “date” was not even coined until 1896!
By the mid-1910s, women on dates came to be known as “Charity Girls” since they took no money for their “favors,” and thus were perceived to be giving it away as charity. This did not fly with a particular group and according to reports in the 1920s “the prostitutes at New York’s Strand Hotel complained that Charity Girls were putting them out of business.” (17) Over the many decades men out there have taken this as a cue of putting off marriage, leading to a residual effect of holding onto their adolescence until they are about 40. Not surprisingly the word "adolescence" is a recent vocab word, too, new in the mid 20th century to justify and perpetuate the man-boy behavior we ladies see all around us.
Fast forward 100yrs and we see tv shows that are a tribute to charity women back then. WhereSex In the City(1998-2004) left off, The Bad Girl's Club(2006-) and Girls(2012-) picks up. These shows have been a pillar to teens and young adults who are just beginning to form their outlook on sex. The never-ending shameless tale of women trying to play like men instead of challenging men through our virtue needs to be introduced back into society. People like to talk about the feminist forerunners who were women but they often don't take in to account the willing accomplices--yes, men. Hate to break it to all of the Samantha Jones of the world, but, in the words of Gavin Mcginnes "Men invented feminism to get more blowjobs and women fell for it.
The rise of career women today does not help women's odds of settling down as our society has shaped girls’ mindsets from early on that we need more material stuff than ever before. It's no wonder women want to have their own careers these days--out of necessity or act of the will. There are many women that would like to get married younger than they let on. The average woman who claims she wants to get settled into her career before marriage and family is a subconscious byproduct of feminist future celebrating the independent emancipated women. We see this in movies, tv shows, magazines, pretty much everywhere these days. However, our biological clock unfortunately does not have a Daylight Savings on it: we want to "sleep in" on our reproductive years as we focus more on our productive years in the workforce. And you wonder why there are a significant number of American men importing their brides from the Eastern Block countries--it is because they are finding less and less the traditional housewife role here in America.
REPERCUSSIONS
I should have lived back in the 1950s when there there was more stigma for being loose before marriage and less stigma for wanting to wait. Today, things are flipflopped in an effort to become more "equal" with the guys in terms of their own sexual freedom. Premarital sex is no longer a novel exciting experience they portray in media. It just reflects what we have become as a society: dull, in denial, and depraved of real committed love.
We all happen to know that one couple that cohabitated for years, got married and had children--and we think if they can do it so can we! The issue is exceptions like that (and horrible examples might I add) are like the sheep in wolf's clothing analogy. The act of giving yourself up to another man longterm without any commitment in marriage might seem innocent and harmless but a dark cloud looms over all of us. The truth is we humans were not made for shallow intimate relationships with the opposite sex. The mainstream media has fabricated perpetual dating as a lifestyle--when it should be more of a qualifying process for marriage. That sounded kind of glum and unromantic but we seriously all need a head check if we want to change things around here.
The feminist movement has produced an idiocrasy the world has never seen before: too emotionally constipated to hold people liable anymore for personal responsibility and too gluttonous in the fact that nothing can satiate the character complex it has grown into over the years. The degradation and dismissal of the core nuclear family unit is its main target and it will never veer from that. Even if you don't call yourself a feminist there is no way you have not fallen in its traps.
I was recently conversing with a young single mother who had her child in high school several years ago and was now in the midst of cohabitating with a man. I did not know a whole lot about her situation but I will never forget what she said point blank, holding back tears: "Sex should be illegal. It causes so much confusion when you are not married." I think a lot of the girls out there including myself can resonate with that fact. I was a late bloomer but I thought by that time the guys around me would have been more serious about marriage--wrong. I didn't start dating until after college and, boy, was I in for a rude awakening: sex is commonplace and to let on that I have any respect for myself and simultaneously for the man I am with (who could end up being another woman's husband down the road) was foreign to many of the men I dated.
We've made it a necessity because it is constantly pushed in our faces to awaken those desires before we are ready for a life-long commitment. Just like the new technological advancements we treat sex outside marriage the same way--"It's common place, get with the times!". People are not fessing up enough to realize this normalization of behavior is impacting our moral foundation.
Men and women need to start thinking of themselves as two big units like in the army. If one man messes up (i.e. scorns a woman) in the dating realm the rest of the male unit suffers down the line--they all reap the repercussions by inadvertanly taking the blame for that one bad guy in their unit who showed up in the woman's ' life before they did and they are punished by her preconceived notions. One could flip this coin around to show the same thing can happen to a woman when she disrespects a guy in a relationship and causes irreparable damage to his psyche. For a long time that may hinder his dating life and have a negative effect on an otherwise wonderful new woman in his life—now shesuffers the repercussions. Whatever case you are in, we must think more responsibly about where each one is coming from and not make ourselves too vulnerable from the beginning--or, that's right, we'll be on the ground doing those push-ups .
I joke with my friends now that I either want to be best friends with a guy or be married to him--I don't want to go through this intermediate stage of BS we call dating. Obviously that is not true because that part is so much fun--yet, what a crisis at the same time!lol We think we have all of the technology in the world to process the future but we can not process what real love looks like without commitment in marriage.
Dating in the 21st Century is a [insert french adjective] crapshoot. Its like going on a road trip taking all of the unpaved detours with no Google Map (yep, time to brush off those Rand Mcnallys). This is why I always encourage my married friends to stay married and remind them they are not missing out on anything.