I’ve never understood this insistence that women are somehow not interested in sex or find sex icky. I wonder if it is a fantasy that misogynists have to have in order to get themselves aroused.  I just have never understood those men who just want get themselves off but not their partner off.  Part of what gets me off is seeing my partner get off as well.  If they’re not having a good time, then I’m not having a good time.

I liked the look of the book reviewed here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/childism-confronting-prejudice-against-children-by-elisabeth-young-bruehl/2011/12/14/gIQAihSywP_story.html

as an antidote to this kind of attitude.  The kind of control she’s trying to exercise can be pretty damaging to kids.

In my experience of parenting so far, little kids care A LOT about the difference between boys and girls, and want to understand as much as they can about it.  It’s important to my daughter’s identity that girls are like this, and boys are like that, and she’s a total sponge for what it all means.  She’s forming a whole identity around it.  So what’s it going to mean when puberty hits, and she has to completely rearrange what she thinks she knows?  Somehow I don’t think holding onto “girlhood” is going to cut it.

Caitlin Flanagan exposes herself on the radio

Heh heh… </beavis>

i just remember seeing flanagan on the colbert report several year back promoting her other book where she wildly sung the praise of stay at home motherhood/house wifery but then admitted she had a nanny to take care of her kids so she could write the book and cook her husband a nice meal.

Admitting that she really was a working mother was out of the question, though.

@Comment #2: dopus dei on 01/19 at 10:52 AM

The kind of control she’s trying to exercise can be pretty damaging to kids.

Part of the reason I have good relationships with both my parents is that they never tried to micromanage my life. Other people my age, whose parents were more controlling, don’t have very good relationships. I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but still.

Does Flanagan actually believe girls should go to college? Abstinence obsession, in my experience, tends to correlate strongly with the belief that women should go straight from their parents’ house to their husbands’ house. Indeed, the general trend towards marrying later is viewed as a tragedy by the abstinence obsessive. Of course, they like to frame it as feminism making those girls slutty and unwilling to settle down with Mr. Good Enough, thus encouraging the Mr. Good Enoughs of the world to remain in a state of prolonged adolescence.

Ugh, barf.  Not just the specifics but the underlying essentialism, too, is so grody I want to go take a shower.

The belief that women don’t like sex lets the guys who don’t want to put forth the effort to be attractive and good lovers off the hook.  Why bother with all that when you can trick or bribe women into fucking you?  (That’s what they think anyway)

“I mean, how would you prefer a girl to first see porn: in her bedroom by herself, or because a boyfriend in college shows it to her?”

This is a very incisive and interesting point.  I had never thought about the way that “porn is for boys” disadvangtages a girl by putting her in situations where her partner has done a lot of “research” about what gets him off, but she doesn’t have the same background about herself.  I would hope my daughter would have at least enough experience with porn to be able to say to the aforementioned boyfriend “I’m not interested in that…  but what about this?”

My favorite part of the interview which slipped by unnoticed is where she says “kids don’t even date anymore, therefore date rape doesn’t exist”.

My parents tried to raise me essentially this way. I do think I had a pretty messed up view of sex and sexuality thanks to this idea that boys were only interested in sex, while I shouldn’t be interested at all. It took four years of college and a couple years living on my own to break those mental patterns. Also, even though the computer was in the family room, pretty much every member of my family was caught looking at porn or erotica at some point, which honestly was more awkward than just letting us browse in solitude.

Thankfully my best friend in high school was gay so my parent’s attempts to steer me towards date-like interactions with boys were a hilarious failure. I had the only bedroom in our converted walk-up basement so after a certain point my friends, male and female, would just come over at all hours.

Flanagan’s fixation with childhood and infantilizing adolesence as childhood is weird, to me. Even her idea that high school should be this treasured paradise of girlhood/boyhood is something I just don’t relate to—I liked high school and everything, but I don’t put that time in my life up on any sort of pedestal: I simply don’t think about it too much. It was a stepping stone to college.

What innocence? I became a big fan of masturbation and dirty books* back when I still had not just a collection of stuffed duckies, but also a complete set of braces on my teeth. Do young women need to be kept out of libraries too? Hah, trick question, of course the answer is yes.

*When I was your age there was no Internet porno and we had to read our smut

@dopus dei HOW did I not know that book existed?! I’ll be ordering it from my local library immediately after I’m done enjoying this deconstruction of Flanagan’s myopic worldview

All parents want to produce copies of themselves, either how they are or what they could not be be but think others should be.  Which tack is Flanagan: “never had fun, so no one should” or “had fun and regretted it, so no one should”?

Comment #13: Yawgmoth on 01/19 at 12:51 PM: “When I was your age there was no Internet porno and we had to read our smut”

Or write it. I mean, I was figuring out what sort of kinky shit I wanted to do in my own girlhood bedroom without the internets starting when I was about twelve? And yeah, I still have a shelf full of stuffed animals, and watch “Shaun the Sheep” to relax. And I’m in my thirties. I really feel like this distinction between adults who still enjoy their childhood pursuits and adults who have sex is really, really false. Regardless of gender identity.

Semi-off topic, I know, but as I was reading this post I was struck by a funny thought.  It came to me right about at bullet point 3 near the top.  I find it interesting, if not ironic, that Amanda was relieved of her duties in the erstwhile John Edwards presidential campaign due to her, shall we say, salty language and provocative views, at the same time the candidate himself was making a moral train wreck of his own and so many other lives.  Weird.

From the annals of Pandagon: One of the more interesting things to me about Flanagan is her Mattel exec husband, whom she won’t discuss in interviews. He’s not just religious, he has a particular vehicle for his faith… Barbie.

I don’t see why she won’t discuss him. It makes for resonant copy.

“She’s just a reactionary, and one with a particular obsession with young women.”

...which pretty much means she’s an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, “conservative”.  Ho hum.

Flanagan has a Reactionary Mind?  Of course she does.  It’s a very old tradition among “conservatives”...

***

I wonder if having only boys has caused her to overcompensate on embracing and idealizing stereotypical Patriarchy-sourced “girl” behavior.  And what’s with restricting internet access for girls and not boys?  Or are boys already deemed to be impure simply because they’re boys (so no point in restricting internet access), where girls are deemed to be pure as long as they are unsullied by boys (and have only restricted access to the internet)?

So when is she going to start telling everyone that masturbation is the root cause behind all of the world’s ills — physical, mental, and spiritual (those that are not the result of contraception use, as testified to by “Man-on-dog” Santorum) — and must be stopped by any means necessary?...

jeev, she claims she does. I mean, according the Wikipedia, she has both a BA and MA from UVA. Though she wrote a book scolding women for having jobs, now to sell this book, she’s singing the praises of women’s economic equality. She knows better than to buck the trend towards empowering girls; even conservatives who want women to get back into the kitchen often make an exception for their own daughters. Her whole schtick is to present as a reasonable, realistic conservative. (She’s pro-choice, for instance, in no small part because the horrors of illegal abortion are not something you can blithely deny without coming across as delusional.) So she says girls should get an education and get into sports and all that, but she’s just drawing the line at sexual curiosity. That’s for boys only.

Kate Beaton recently turned me on to the BBC show Terry Jones’* Medieval Lives. I watched the episode on “The Damsel” yesterday and it was really impressive, not just from a historical viewpoint but from a feminist one. This “idealized version of womanhood” is entirely fabricated, not historically accurate, and pretty uninteresting, frankly.

*Yes, Terry Jones of Monty Python.
Also, It really bothers me that the possessive of people whose last name ends with an S is the same possessive for a plural of people. Shouldn’t it be Jones’s, as we’re just referencing Terry, and not Jones’, which would indicate the entire Jones clan?

I’ve never understood this insistence that women are somehow not interested in sex or find sex icky.

I assume it’s a holdover from 19th century medical theory, which tended to minimize women’s sex drives, sometimes to the point of denying the existence of the female orgasm.  (Just “hysterical paroxysm,” don’t you know.)  There’s probably a good deal of overlap with the ideal of “True Womanhood” from the same period, which saw women as a “civilizing” influence on beastly, lustful men.

@ Mighty Ponygirl - in college, I took an upper-division course on Reformation-age European history. One of the original source materials we had to read were Scottish ecclesiastical court documents from that period. I’d say about 75-80% of them minimum involved women in court because of sex. (Amuse yourself by saying “bore a bairn in fornication” in a thick Scottish accent.)

Amanda - thanks. Reading Flanagan’s shorter pieces leaves me no desire to actually suffer through anything longer.

Fixating on the need to control girls and hold them back is the patriarchy’s way of replicating itself, a la the old Joe Camel character that pitched Marlboro cigarettes to kids.  You don’t survive unless you can travel into the next generation.  Patriarchy gets buy-in among the older set by exploiting normal parental anxiety and worry, and pitting parents against kids: You don’t really want your daughters to have an emotionally easier life than you had, did you?

That’s why writers like Caitlin Flanagan will always have a gig, silly and unoriginal though they are.

Wasn’t the original “true womanhood” back in the classical and dark ages one where women were uncontrollable jezebels who were destroying the purity of men with their insatiable lust? Or something like that?

Also, It really bothers me that the possessive of people whose last name ends with an S is the same possessive for a plural of people. Shouldn’t it be Jones’s, as we’re just referencing Terry, and not Jones’, which would indicate the entire Jones clan?

For what it’s worth, Strunk and White agree with you. “The Elements of Style” actually prescribes a final s for all possessive nouns, no matter what letter they end in. So according to them, “Jones’s” is actually correct.

That’s pretty off-topic. I have feelings about the blog post but they’ve all been expressed by people smarter than me already.

imagining the typical teenage girl as horrified at her burgeoning sexuality and desperate to return to the comfortable world of childhood

I always thought this was more true of boys than of girls, actually.  Both my wife and my mom, for example, use literally flowery language to describe their experiences with puberty—they “blossomed” into womanhood, and talk about it as an exciting time in their lives.  My wife will refer to the almost-teen girls wearing particularly inappropriate (for a religious sanctuary) clothing while attending their friends’ bar/bat mitzvas at shul as “trying out their new bodies”.  On the other hand, my and my male friends experience with puberty was when our bodies became awkward (no “new body” that we wanted to display to anyone), our voices cracked, we suddenly were faced with urges we could barely handle, etc.

In short, my own experience and the experiences of the boys I knew best with puberty was one of some degree of horror at our burgeoning sexuality while, from what I gather talking to the women in my life, their experience was most definitely one not of horror but of excitement.

if anything, it’s men who are more likely to keep their childhood toys. How many guys not only have a collection of action figures and comic books from their youth, but continue to buy new things that have a connection to childhood playthings?

I do. I’m 40. My place is filled to overflowing with graphic novels and comics. And when I’m in a comic shop looking around, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever actually seen kids in one (mind you, I tend to go when the kids would be in school, and I don’t get to them that often). Youngest I’ve seen is college age.

My latest addiction is those remote controlled indoor helicopters. We have a few in the office now, and sometimes someone will blast Wagner as a flight of toys goes flying down the hall.

our voices cracked, we suddenly were faced with urges we could barely handle, etc.

Ah yes, the raging stiffie stage of growing up. Which would happen all of a sudden in the middle of class for no particular reason, and it’s not like algebra was that stimulating…

I’ve done my best to raise defiantly elitist children, which necessarily required a lot of frank age-appropriate discussion of friendship, romantic love, sexual development, sexual behavior, and dating. And politics.

In my experience, kids are relieved to be able to say that Facebook is vulgar and shallow, and to be able to regard high-school dating as something engaged in by people who aren’t clever because they don’t have strong interests in things outside themselves.

Kids aren’t much improved by the predations of commercialism, materialism, or precocious sexualization, and if they’re raised to be self-confident in their own value, and to respect their talents, not mention boundaries, they’ve an excellent sense of what’s legitimately worth their while.

Also, as far as raising girls is concerned, there’s no stronger form of pro-active feminism than to make sure that, from a very early age, they’ve as much access as possible to all forms of science and math.

I continue to be baffled by men who think they’re stunningly original by virute of their dudeliness.

Seems odd Hugo. High school dating can actually be quite fantastic. As can college partying/ hook-ups. It seems the internet gen is increasingly forgetting the extreme importance of social aptitude.

And this idea that women hold on to their toys and men dont is the most wtf thing I have read today.

Ok, I’m gonna go off on a rant for a bit here, because this one is close to my heart.

Pretty much everything truly awful in my life has come from this attitude.  I spent about a decade loathing myself for wanting to be sexual, and spent that entire period completely incapable of understanding what it meant when a woman was interested in me.  I treated the women in my life awfully, and went back and forth between binging and purging on sexual activity.  I couldn’t create any kind of robust ethics surrounding sexuality, because this poisonous attitude infected all of my attempts to implement it.  When you think every makeout is secretly rape, you poison your soul.

I hate that Caitlin Flanagan is trying to hurt so many other people by transmitting these attitudes to another generation.  I hope she is suddenly stricken by a disease that withers her vocal cords and protects us from her.

For proper effect, you need to spell it, “Twue Womanhood.”

And yeah, I still have a shelf full of stuffed animals, and watch “Shaun the Sheep” to relax. And I’m in my thirties. I really feel like this distinction between adults who still enjoy their childhood pursuits and adults who have sex is really, really false.

I never really thought about it before, but most of my leisure time is divided between sex-related stuff (if not directly, then to do with activism/theory of sexuality, or art) and kid-oriented stuff (watching kid’s tv/animation for all ages). Programs for children are not only nostalgic, they also contain a lot less irritating crap and are very relaxing if you don’t want to bother deconstructing every sexist plotline or speech by an obnoxious talking head. Plus, there’s a lot more creativity there than in a lot of adult-oriented dramas.

DAS, I think you’re suffering from Grass Is Greener syndrome.

Puberty is wretched for everyone. Girls who “developed first” experienced a special hell of ridicule and bra-snapping. Even if girls decide they want to “try out” their new bodies, that doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from incredible anxiety about their weight, their boobs, and whether or not they’ve shaved the right places and how often that needs to happen.

Amanda, you make a great point about how the transition from childhood to adulthood is rarely addressed, especially by conservatives.  It’s all about when it should take place, and for conservatives, the later the better.  It’s a process, and I don’t think enough people really think about it like that.  It happens anyway, of course, but too much time is spent fretting about whether it’s happening too early and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

I will say that I’m in favor of having young kids’ (I have only boys) Internet access monitored, including by having the computer in a public space.  They’ll still make mistakes (and have), but I feel like I’ve got a better chance of having a discussion about it (and they might make fewer of them) if it’s more out in the open.

jeev, she claims she does. I mean, according the Wikipedia, she has both a BA and MA from UVA. Though she wrote a book scolding women for having jobs, now to sell this book, she’s singing the praises of women’s economic equality. She knows better than to buck the trend towards empowering girls; even conservatives who want women to get back into the kitchen often make an exception for their own daughters. Her whole schtick is to present as a reasonable, realistic conservative. (She’s pro-choice, for instance, in no small part because the horrors of illegal abortion are not something you can blithely deny without coming across as delusional.) So she says girls should get an education and get into sports and all that, but she’s just drawing the line at sexual curiosity. That’s for boys only.

This gets her position exactly.

I think that Flanagan is just a pure expression of all the fear, shame, and guilt that is still attached to female sexuality even now, more 40 years after both the sexual revolution and second wave feminism. And for some reason, that fear, shame, and guilt is more difficult to overcome than all the other barriers that were broken. People who can totally accept the idea of working women, for instance, or equal pay, or coed colleges, just get all fouled up when it comes to girls having Teh Sex. Honestly, I think even Obama suffers from this in his horrendous Plan B decision, in which he talked about having the position that he had because he was the father of two daughters.

For whatever reason, this is THE toughest nut for feminism to crack. Much tougher than convincing Americans about other aspects of gender equality.

For what it’s worth, Strunk and White agree with you. “The Elements of Style” actually prescribes a final s for all possessive nouns, no matter what letter they end in. So according to them, “Jones’s” is actually correct.

However, Strunk and White were never put in charge of the English language. If enough people use “Jones’”, that makes it correct, no matter what a some stuffed shirts who edit a style book think. Language is the ultimate democracy.

And of course, the double standard where boys are permitted freedom and experience while girls are sheltered doesn’t function without an underclass of girls - “sluts” - who exist to provide the boys with sexual experience and release before they are ready to settle down with the good sheltered girls. 

Yeah, conservatism really is a nasty and hateful worldview.

If enough people use “Jones’”, that makes it correct, no matter what a some stuffed shirts who edit a style book think. Language is the ultimate democracy.

However, I’ll bet quite a few people who’d use just the apostrophe will, when they’re speaking, say something like “That’s Tess’s house” (pronounced tesses), because otherwise they’d sound like a three year old (“That’s Tess’ house”).

John Joel Glanton says,

“Seems odd Hugo. High school dating can actually be quite fantastic. As can college partying/ hook-ups. It seems the internet gen is increasingly forgetting the extreme importance of social aptitude.”

It depends on the kid, I suppose. And on the cultural, and economic, milieu in which they find themselves.

But in my experience, high-school age boys and girls often feel significant pressure to enter the sexual marketplace when they don’t feel ready to do so.

Which is one of the reasons why I learned that it’s very useful to give kids enough self-confidence in their talents and intelligence that they’re able to opt-out of “popular” activities and not feel bad about themselves.

College “partying/hook-ups” are an entirely other matter, and not one that I, as a parent, can much influence. But I do think it’s wise for kids to postpone serious dating until they reach college, if for no other reason than that, in college, they’ll be far more likely to meet someone who seriously shares their interests.

(And this can be particularly important for young women passionate about science and/or math. I’ve a good friend who had a miserable time in high school because she was a “geeky science girl” whom no one wanted to date. But she worked her ass off and got into MIT where she immediately became the belle of the ball.)

@Comment #36: Mighty Ponygirl on 01/19 at 02:46 PM

Puberty is wretched for everyone.

I remember this one girl in high school that I liked, and talked to. We were in the same gym class. I remember that I found it difficult not to stare at this girl when we were in the co-ed pool together because she had big breasts. I felt awkward with this desire but found it hard to stop. Years later, I met her at a high school reunion and she had had breast reduction surgery. Men should remember, it certainly can be hard for us to deal with lust and with our changing bodies at adolescence, but we don’t generally feel the need to get surgery over it.

we had to read our smut

And walk in the snow uphill both ways to do so.

Okay, I just cannot let it stand. Dilan, I make fun of Strunk & White, too, but goddammit, E.B. White was no “stuffed shirt”. TAKE IT BACK. HE WROTE CHARLOTTE’S WEB. Also, this:

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Necessary-Why-You-Feel/dp/0060733144

*weeps softly for the youth of today*

I write fan-fiction, and the readers who are most likely to request that I write smuttier, kinkier stories are girls between the ages of 13 and 16. I appropriately age-filter my fics on the sites I put them on, but the girls figure out how to get past the filters. Oh, nooooooooooo, they’re not interested in sex at alllllllllllllll.

And walk in the snow uphill both ways to do so.

No, we had to steal it, or find that unexplained stash of slightly old porn in the woods.  We were learning theft and/or woodscraft, not like the lazy kids these days and their Googles.

However, Strunk and White were never put in charge of the English language. If enough people use “Jones’”, that makes it correct, no matter what a some stuffed shirts who edit a style book think. Language is the ultimate democracy.

I agree with the first sentence. I’m not actually an advocate of prescriptivist grammar. But your “democracy” notion of language misses the point because it assumes there has to be one “correct” form. The point of language is to communicate and make yourself understood. So if Jones’ and Jones’s are both equally understandable in a given context, they’re both equally “correct.” As long as the person you’re talking to understands your meaning, why nitpick? So Jones’s isn’t “wrong” just because it’s uncommon. It would be wrong if it made a sentence less clear, but that’s hardly likely.

No, we had to steal it, or find that unexplained stash of slightly old porn in the woods.  We were learning theft and/or woodscraft, not like the lazy kids these days and their Googles.

Yeah, what was with the old porn in the woods?  We came across it all the time when I was a kid.

I really couldn’t tell you.  Maybe some old pagan god found a new lease on life as the Porn Fairy, distributing weathered copies of Oui and Penthouse to the needy suburban adolescents?

So I’ve been wasting time reading through the old links about Flanagan and in a 2006 Feministe post commenter zuzu said she realized that Caitlin was Sue Ann Nivens.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_Ann_Nivens

Spot.  Fucking.  On.

@Comment #49: DonnaDiva on 01/19 at 03:54 PM

Yeah, what was with the old porn in the woods?  We came across it all the time when I was a kid.

Discards from older kids, maybe?

Yeah, what was with the old porn in the woods?  We came across it all the time when I was a kid.

It’s part of the National Forest Service’s new initiative to get young people interested in the outdoors.

She proposes sheltering girls (and only girls, apparently) ...by insisting that cross-gender socializing only occur in traditional date-like situations, probably involving the boy picking the girl up (which conveniently shuts off any dating before 16, soon 18 in places with graduated driving licenses).

There are so many things to dissect about Flanagan, it’s understandable this hasn’t come up yet, but…are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?  The best way to shelter girls is to make sure they’re alone with boys in a vehicle they don’t control?  Yeah, that has always worked out just awesome for the girls involved.

@ Hugo de Toronja #30:

high-school dating as something engaged in by people who aren’t clever because they don’t have strong interests in things outside themselves

I’m sorry, but that is ridiculous. All kinds of people engage(d) in dating in high school. In my experience, there were as many kinds of relationships as there were kids. Of course some weren’t “clever” and lacked “strong interests in things outside themselves.” That’s true of adult dating, too. But it can also be two smart kids finding each other, or a band geek falling passionately in love with a budding artist, or what have you.  I’m 32 and a historian, and couldn’t wait to escape high school. But I was lucky enough to have a long-term high school relationship with a sweet, smart boy from when I was 15 to 20. While also participating heavily in an extracurricular (that he didn’t share) and getting good grades. That relationship helped balance the other parts of my high school life, and sheltered me from a lot of the social pressures I would have otherwise felt.

We’re both happily married to other people now, but I would venture that we both benefited from being in a respectful, sexually active, monogamous relationship in our teens. It gave me a high bar against which to measure other men - if they didn’t treat me with respect and trust, I knew I could do better.  That relationship helped me be a stronger woman and feminist.  Of course no one should get involved sexually before they’re ready - but it’s not always a bad thing, EVEN if they’re only teens.

I’m frightened for (or maybe of) her boys. What happens when they discover “girls” actually do enjoy sex? What happens when they get dumped by a girl despite being all romantic-and-shit?

Froggae—I don’t know about you, but when I was dating in high school, it was the “romantic” guys that freaked me out. They wanted a level of emotional intimacy and intensity right off the bat, and were more likely to be controlling, jealous, and borderline abusive. The guys that just wanted to have a friend they could fool around with? Much more fun to deal with.

Okay, I just cannot let it stand. Dilan, I make fun of Strunk & White, too, but goddammit, E.B. White was no “stuffed shirt”. TAKE IT BACK. HE WROTE CHARLOTTE’S WEB. Also, this:

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Necessary-Why-You-Feel/dp/0060733144

*weeps softly for the youth of today*

How much of a modern edition of Strunk and White was written by E.B. White, Amanda?

The modern editors of that publication (and most other English style books) are very much stuffed shirts, or at the very least, are adopting the pose of stuffed shirts for specialized audiences who want a prescriptive norm.

I agree with the first sentence. I’m not actually an advocate of prescriptivist grammar. But your “democracy” notion of language misses the point because it assumes there has to be one “correct” form. The point of language is to communicate and make yourself understood. So if Jones’ and Jones’s are both equally understandable in a given context, they’re both equally “correct.” As long as the person you’re talking to understands your meaning, why nitpick? So Jones’s isn’t “wrong” just because it’s uncommon. It would be wrong if it made a sentence less clear, but that’s hardly likely.

I never said “Jones’s” is wrong. Indeed, if you are Jonesing for Jones’s, go right ahead.

Both forms are “correct”.

Flanagan’s fixation with childhood and infantilizing adolesence as childhood is weird, to me. Even her idea that high school should be this treasured paradise of girlhood/boyhood is something I just don’t relate to—I liked high school and everything, but I don’t put that time in my life up on any sort of pedestal: I simply don’t think about it too much. It was a stepping stone to college.
Comment #12: Tyro

You seem to be hinting at it, but I’m surprised that no one has pointed out the obvious in this thread:

This woman is simply projecting her experience of adolescence onto everyone else.

She was likely a late bloomer, she probably felt threatened by adolescence. I actually empathize with this. I dreaded puberty’s onset too and wanted to hang onto the GI Joes. I remember distinctly wishing that I could stay in grammar school and not go on to middle school. I had a really great childhood, loved camping with my Dad and so forth.

I was also the youngest, and watched as my older brothers rebelled against my parents after puberty and I always saw the issues from the parental point of view. 

I feel for this woman - and I think it’s pretty much been proven that the longer you keep kids away from adult vices like promiscuity, drugs and alcohol, then they are far less likely to become sex addicts or alcoholics as adults.

She sort of reminds me of Heidegger - She’s based a ‘philosophy’ basically around her own subjective experience of adolescence and sex.

The best way to shelter girls is to make sure they’re alone with boys in a vehicle they don’t control?  Yeah, that has always worked out just awesome for the girls involved.

The danger of rape is part of the point. I mean, I certainly don’t think Flanagan consciously wants teenage girls to be raped. But that potential is very much a deliberate part of the design of patriarchal social norms such as this kind of dating.

@Comment #59: KingElvis on 01/19 at 03:55 PM

She’s based a ‘philosophy’ basically around her own subjective experience of adolescence and sex.

Don’t we all?

#56 Mighty Ponygirl: Agreed 100% (and it’s true in my adult life as well)! I’m just thinking about the repercussions of those boys discovering girls don’t fit neatly into the mold presented to them.

No doubt mom has suggested or said outright that girls who don’t fit her description are unnatural or unworthy or duped by feminism or some such shit. But at least one of her sons has to reach a point where there are just too many of those girls around for mom’s description to be the natural or essential one, no?

Don’t we all?

Well, the problem is when people turn their personal anxieties or icky feelings about sex into moral laws.

But at least one of her sons has to reach a point where there are just too many of those girls around for mom’s description to be the natural or essential one, no?

Some guys have this revelation, but others are perfectly comfortable viewing many/most women as an unwashed horde of sluts.

ATHEIST:

I’m referring to the growing consensus about Heidegger that most of his concepts around “authentic being” or ‘dasein’ were mostly him just projecting his own quasi-spiritual journey.

and I think it’s pretty much been proven that the longer you keep kids away from adult vices like promiscuity, drugs and alcohol, then they are far less likely to become sex addicts or alcoholics as adults.

Um, no, just no.  Seeing people with healthy attitudes all along helps to keep people from adult vices.  What the hell makes “promiscuity” a vice?  Unsafe sex, yes; lots of it with different people, not if that is what someone wants for themselves.  I don’t believe in “sex adiction”, as portrayed in popular MSM.  Those who claim to suffer from it are usually just trying to cover their asses.  If exposure to alcohol caused alcoholism there would be more of them in Europe and fewer in the US.

@Comment #64: KingElvis on 01/19 at 04:17 PM

I’m referring to the growing consensus about Heidegger that most of his concepts around “authentic being” or ‘dasein’ were mostly him just projecting his own quasi-spiritual journey.

OK, that makes sense. Maybe Heidegger should have married Caitlin Flanagan. That could have been a romance for the ages…

Are you taking a course on Heidegger, or something like that, may I ask?

Hugo, it’s all well and good to encourage your children to do well in school and concentrate on academics so that they go to a good college (people I know whose narrative of high school revolved around some big relationship they were in tended to develop less interesting personalities, IMHO), but that’s not an option for most people. There can only be so many academically focused people in a given high school. Most people’s experiences in adolescence are going to revolve around their social and romantic experiences, so it’s a good question about how to manage them. What is insulting about Flanagan’s POV is that she is saying that the best way for girls to manage their social experiences in adolescence is to have them defined by boys. Boys thus have their adolescent experiences defined by being a boy, and girls have their experiences defined by boys and their experiences with boys. It’s making girls people defined only in their relation to boys.

@Froggae: based on my personal experience, a profound freakout, years of therapy, and a nice batch of total cruelty toward people you profess to care for.

The hell with Caitlin Flanagan.  The hell with her right in her evil, lying, manipulative cruel, lonely, awful, hateful face.

A good commentary on Strunk and White:

http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/ETfinalProof.pdf

But I do think it’s wise for kids to postpone serious dating until they reach college, if for no other reason than that, in college, they’ll be far more likely to meet someone who seriously shares their interests.

Given that high school is the time that kids are generally figuring themselves out as people, dating strikes me as a good way to sidetrack that process.  I suspect that part of the reason my SIL is still hung up on her ex-husband is because they’ve been more or less together since her senior year in high school. Basically, she’s never been a single adult. Throw in a large serving of evangelical ‘family values’ (and two kids) and she seems pretty much blinded to the possibility that she shouldn’t be with this guy.

Mightywombat says:

I was lucky enough to have a long-term high school relationship with a sweet, smart boy from when I was 15 to 20. ...That relationship helped me be a stronger woman and feminist. 

Our viewpoints differ.

For a great many reasons, I’d counsel against any 15-year old child of mine, especially a daughter, from persisting in a 5-year relationship, no matter how sweet or smart the boyfriend or girlfriend.

Given social norms, now often reinforced by ambient political discourse, it’s difficult enough to raise a daughter sufficiently confident in her own resourcefulness and capacities for self-reliance that she’s comfortable with herself whether or not she has a romantic partner.

Sex and romance are fine and healthy, but not when they compromise, or forestall, autonomy.

And I think too many kids are pressured into exploring sex and romance before they’ve a reasonable sense of who they are and what they want. (“Teen romance” sells a lot of clothing, cosmetics, acne medication, cosmetic dentistry, and plastic surgery.)

At any rate, I’ve never noticed a great deal of societal pressure encouraging kids to be intellectual or studious or particularly committed in a rigorous way to any of the arts.

I have, however, witnessed significant coercive force, from many fronts, brought to bear on kids to make them want to be “cool” and “hot” and enter the sexual marketplace as soon as possible.

(And successful entrance into the sexual marketplace necessarily requires possession of the right cell phones, computers, social network accounts, facial features, hair styles, clothes, shoes, make-up, etc., etc.)

Also, screw these descriptivist natterings. Hate for Strunk and White looks like a lot of people trying to work out your hostility to your high school English teacher who failed to recognize your supposed genius when giving you a C on your essays. The Internet has a lot of crappy writers out there who could have used the guidance of S&W.

Don’t we all?

As a starting point?  Sure.  But these beautiful brains we’ve inherited can be put to the task of enlightened self-interest as well as naked self interest.

MP @53, HAHAHAHA!  Thank you, I needed that.

Comment #59—KingElvis: She’s based a ‘philosophy’ basically around her own subjective experience of adolescence and sex.
Comment #61—atheist: Don’t we all?

I’ve not.  If I based my philosophy on my own (non-existent save for rosy palm ... I was a real Nice Guy(TM) for quite some time) experience as an adolescent with sex, I’d be a nihilist or a solipsist.

Well you have to admit that is a creative spam bot

Comment #21: Mighty Ponygirl on 01/19 at 01:32 PM

Also, It really bothers me that the possessive of people whose last name ends with an S is the same possessive for a plural of people. Shouldn’t it be Jones’s, as we’re just referencing Terry, and not Jones’, which would indicate the entire Jones clan?

Comment #26: Triplanetary on 01/19 at 02:10 PM

For what it’s worth, Strunk and White agree with you. “The Elements of Style” actually prescribes a final s for all possessive nouns, no matter what letter they end in. So according to them, “Jones’s” is actually correct.

Comment #39: Dilan Esper on 01/19 at 02:55 PM

However, Strunk and White were never put in charge of the English language. If enough people use “Jones’”, that makes it correct, no matter what a some stuffed shirts who edit a style book think. Language is the ultimate democracy.

Well, the funny thing here is that Strunk and White’s recommendation, in this case, does happen to coincide more closely with the actual grammar of English (as understood by linguists).  The plural and possessive suffix have the same allomorphs, conditioned by the same morphophonological contexts:

(1) [-əz] after a stem that ends in [s] or [z]: the gas’s smell
(2) [-s] after a stem that ends in a voiceless consonant: the cat’s meow
(3) [-z] elsewhere: Mary’s husband, the dog’s bark

Jones falls under case (1).  So if you want to rationalize the orthography of English to match a descriptive account of its grammar, you would prescribe Jones’s and not Jones’.

I’ll just toss this parenthetically into the threadjack pile: MP, re your first comment about this - it actually wouldn’t be the same.  One would write Joneses’ to refer to the “entire Jones clan,” no?

What’s the background on this SS Panzer Division dude? I guess I missed whatever pissed him off, but I’m curious now.

Because punishing people for not engaging you how you wish always makes people want to engage with you more and better. Something seems faulty with this logic.

On the Flanagan front, keeping girls naive just makes them extremely easy to exploit. It’s appealing to parents for that reason (parents who want to keep control), because it never seems to occur to them that other people can exploit that naivitee just as easily.

Needless to say, posting people’s personal information in a comment is no more reasonable here than it is on any upstanding blog. 

Amanda, or whoever, can we get “Comment #76: 2. SS-Panzer-Division „Das Reich”  on 01/19 at 06:38 PM” deleted, please?

Thank you…

Whoa, internet detective up in this thread.

Anyway, Flannagan is one of the best examples of right-wing welfare: she just invents whatever, puts it in a book, and because it’s totally retrograde it’ll get picked up and carried around. Good work if you can get it.

Special lulz: “there’s no more dating.” I guess, if you live on the moon. Down here on earth, there’s plenty of dating going on.

Hate for Strunk and White looks like a lot of people trying to work out your hostility to your high school English teacher who failed to recognize your supposed genius when giving you a C on your essays.

I write for a living. I don’t feel the way I do about style manuals because of anything my English teachers (some of whom were good and some of whom weren’t) did or didn’t do.

And I don’t even really dislike style manuals. I just reject them as a source of “correct” English. Their purpose, rather, is to give you useful suggestions as to how to speak and write within particular registers or for particular outlets.

The reason I reject style manuals as a source of “correct” English is because this thwarts one of the most beautiful things about language, which is how populist, democratic, and anti-elitist an institution it is. No matter how much some “authority” may dislike a particular locution, if enough people use it, the authorities have no power to stop it from becoming part of the language. It’s one of the few actual instances of truly democratic governance.

Well, the funny thing here is that Strunk and White’s recommendation, in this case, does happen to coincide more closely with the actual grammar of English (as understood by linguists).

This is quite false. There is no “actual grammar of English” outside of whatever is used. This is why, for instance, we don’t use the word “thee” anymore, even though it makes formal grammatical sense to use it.

And linguists, by the way, tend not to believe otherwise. You’d have to search far and wide to find a linguist who thinks that the grammar of a particular language (other than perhaps an invented one) exists independent of usage. Which linguists did you have in mind when you said “as understood by linguists”?

My favorite part of the Flanagan radio opus was the super condescending, “Irin, what could we do to have made your high school experience better?  You gave us a moment of honesty, and it’s clear your life was worthless because you didn’t have a boyfriend…”

I also like the idea that the best way to keep girls away from “guys that are bad for them,” is to lock them in their room with unicorns and pink-bound diaries.  I would think the BEST way to ensure that girls (and boys, obviously) will consort the “wrong types” is for their parents to jump in and try to dominate their lives.

Shit, I even got an MC Hammer cd in 6th grade because I though the hippity-hoppity rap music would would piss off my parents.  It was sort of impressive how little they cared, even when I escalated to NWA.  To my credit, I quickly gave up the notion that I would be swarming punk motherfuckers in blue uniforms, but that sort of rebellious instinct is pretty universal (sure there are exceptions).  The idea that Flanagan can change that with some alone time is bizarre, to say the least.

GSDavis—I was referring to a plural possessive (“The Jones’s estate”), not a simple plural (“I’m having dinner with the Joneses”).

I don’t think this was a complete derail, but it’s been damn entertaining.

My favorite part of the Flanagan radio opus was the super condescending, “Irin, what could we do to have made your high school experience better?  You gave us a moment of honesty, and it’s clear your life was worthless because you didn’t have a boyfriend…”

This was so fucking condescending I could hardly believe she said it on air. Irin is a much better person than I am, because I would have said “fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” instead of deftly deflecting the bullshit.

So, while my parents were not quite how Flanagan would want them to be, (my mother once said she never worried about anything I read or watched), I hardly dated at all in high school, didn’t have sex till I was 20, or an orgasm till I was 22. I was the smart girl and therefore commonly regarded as asexual, despite the C cup breasts, round hips and an ass that sticks out like an air conditioner. Despite my relatively chaste “girlhood”, I’m writing this comment from a dungeon in NYC, because I make my living as a dominatrix. Nothing that I do is technically sex, but it’s all sexual, at least to the clients. It’s not that I can’t do anything else; I’ve had a number of “real jobs” and I have a BA. It’s that I like this job and the freedom that it provides, in all kinds of ways. I’m still relatively chaste- I just turned 31 and I can count all my sexual partners on one hand- but my life is largely about sex.

She’s right about the nostalgia though. I want to start a collection of those My Little Pony “art ponies” you can get online.

Real Name: Frank Cuffman
Location: apparently somewhere on S Crestview St, Porterville, CA 93257 (across from the cemetery)

Sorry, dummy I’ve not lived there in 18 years, and there is no cemetery near S Crestview St if you use your google, dummy.

I looked into the name “mordiggian42”, I found it to be linked to an account on a French gaming site, Gamopat, whose owner claims to be 18 years old and has over 3,000 messages there.

Except I’ve only used that email rarely, and that’s not my account.

Find my landline, it’s listed but not under Frank Cuffman.

Also, this is my wife.

You can see me as the narrator of the Rocky Horror Picture show here.

B-by, troll.

Hate for Strunk and White looks like a lot of people trying to work out your hostility to your high school English teacher who failed to recognize your supposed genius when giving you a C on your essays.

or, you know, it could be frustration by people who’ve actually learned English grammar properly and know how much S&W suck:  http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497

@Hugo #72

Sex and romance are fine and healthy, but not when they compromise, or forestall, autonomy.

But they didn’t forestall my autonomy. That’s kinda my point. If they had, I would have stayed in-state to go to a college near his - but instead I 2000 miles away to the college that was right for me. And even before that, I continued to pursue my own independent intellectual and artistic interests, which were quite distinct from his.  I ended the relationship when it was clear to me it was time for us to go our separate ways.

My whole purpose in detailing my youthful foray into sex-and-relationship-land is to illustrate that your dour vision of young romance is hardly universal. I understand that as a father, you might feel more comfortable if your children (girls particularly?) avoided sex and dating until they were safely ensconced in college, but you’re fooling yourself if you think that that’s the only safe course for their intellectual and emotional development. What you ellipsesed-out of my quote was the part where I explained how my early experience reinforced whatever native confidence I had in choosing my own partners well.

I certainly acknowledge that most high school dating relationships are not as idyllic as mine was. But protecting or discouraging your teens from social interactions like dating, even if it means they are sheltered from the pain of breakups or betryals, is not necessarily the healthiest course of action.  I can’t imagine how conflicted I would have felt if my parents had communicated to me that high school dating was for the dull uninteresting kids. What message does that send them if they *did* have someone they wanted to date? “Romance is for the little people” is hardly a way to go through such a hormonally-charged period of life.

I understand that as a father, you might feel more comfortable if your children (girls particularly?) avoided sex and dating until they were safely ensconced in college,

that’s a pretty shitty strawman of what was actually said. being skeptical of whether being in one long relationship throughout your teen years is not even close to the same as being against romance and sex.

but then, I find “dating” in general pretty horrendous, regardless of whether it’s as teens or as adults. Relationships, hookups, friends with benefits, just hanging out with friends… there’s so many ways to interact with other people that are less fraught and less stupid than “dating” [/grumpy european]

Triplanetary @ 60:

The danger of rape is part of the point. I mean, I certainly don’t think Flanagan consciously wants teenage girls to be raped. But that potential is very much a deliberate part of the design of patriarchal social norms such as this kind of dating.

I only recently realized that implicit threat of rape was part of the Catholic abstinence education I got (Mary Beth Bonacci’s books, if anyone knows what those are). I don’t think it was intentional, either, but it was there. There was much discussion about how you shouldn’t even start making out with a guy, because by the time you get to French kissing, he’s “committed to go all the way.” (By which I think they meant “he has an erection.”)

The result was an implicit threat: If you make out with a guy, then he’s going to rape you and you’ll deserve it. The only way to stay safe is not to touch a guy ever at all.

This was combined with endless “examples” of couples who had “started having sex” (scare quotes because they really described date rape)—the girl crying all the time, the guy always pressing for more. The message was that sex is always a tool of dysfunction and abuse in a relationship. It’s always something that will hurt you as a woman. Unless of course you get the magical wedding ring first, and then it’s great!

It took me a while to deprogram myself from all that.

I’m frightened for (or maybe of) her boys. What happens when they discover “girls” actually do enjoy sex?

He becomes baffled and surprised and flabbergasted, or possibly grossed out.

What happens when they get dumped by a girl despite being all romantic-and-shit?

In the “best” case, he becomes a Nice Guy.  In the worst, be becomes a date rapist because he feels sex is owed to him after holding up his end of the bargain.

What really bothers me is the fact that she wants to deny girls access to the Internet. I was one of those “sheltered” kids who didn’t do drugs or drink or have sex AT ALL in high school - in fact, due to my social awkwardness, I didn’t even date. A large part of what allowed me to adjust to college life was the fact that my parents gave me pretty much unrestricted access to any kind of media I wanted - including the Internet - when I was a teenager, figuring that knowledge was power. It made me a lot better at understanding experiences that were different from my own, and made both less judgmental and more careful than some of my friends, who had a similar lack of excitement in their adolescence but ALSO had parents who wanted to keep them from knowing anything about how the other half lived. As a result, they either were so dismissive of the “party scene” or “hook-up cultures” that they gained a reputation as obnoxious prudes which made it impossible to find friends, OR they did want to try new things, but often ended up with drug or alcohol problems and/or on academic probation because no one had told them how to experiment responsibly.

Oy, I’m sorry I brought up Strunk and White. My intent wasn’t to propagate grammatical prescriptions, just to show Mighty Ponygirl that if she wants to use “Jones’s” she’s free to do so. I have an English degree, and unlike some people with an English degree, I was blessed with two particular professors who entirely disabused me of the notion that prescriptive grammar is useful or appropriate.

I’ve largely mastered English grammar, and as such I have my own idiosyncrasies and preferences with regard to my own grammar. (For example, I actually do prefer to use “none” as a singular, but not because I think I have to.) I was simply trying to encourage Mighty Ponygirl to do the same. If you prefer Jones’s, say Jones’s! Say it however you like as long as you’re not obfuscating the meaning!

I write fan-fiction, and the readers who are most likely to request that I write smuttier, kinkier stories are girls between the ages of 13 and 16. I appropriately age-filter my fics on the sites I put them on, but the girls figure out how to get past the filters. Oh, nooooooooooo, they’re not interested in sex at alllllllllllllll.

I’m glad someone finally mentioned fanfic. I wonder is Flanagan is even aware of the stuff because it really hammers in how much “journal-writing in you room” is just a cypher for social isolation. It’s easy to slag off on Facebook as just one more way to talk to your friends but LJ, Deviant art, and similar places can offer valuable criticism and support to budding writers/artists. Denying that just seems like a way to discourage girls from putting themselves out there.

And maybe this is just me but does anyone else get a strange “no privacy allowed” subtext from the “no internet in the room” thing? Growing up where one shared family computer for the household was a standard, most of them were placed in a spare room of niche away from prying eyes because it was understood a person might want a certain degree of privacy even if they weren’t guaranteed it. The idea that your daughter wont have internet access in her room as a way to retain some girlhood spacial purity implies she wont be spending much time on the internet in whatever other room it is in either. What you want to bet that Flanagan is the type of mom who wont let her kids out of her site in a library or bookstore for fear of what they might be tempted to pickup and skim a few paragraphs of without her around.

Comment #90: Liz212

She’s right about the nostalgia though. I want to start a collection of those My Little Pony “art ponies” you can get online.

I bought a transformer from E-Bay the first time I started getting a paycheck.

This is actually revelatory, as I assumed it was only dudes that had that nostalgic impulse.  I think it was because 1) I’m a dude (Flanagan had the exact opposite premonition because of her lady-ness) and 2) dude nostalgia was mainstreamed by my generation.  At this point, the interests of boys have become mainstays of popular culture: superhero movies, transformer movies, Lord of the Rings, video games, comics…etc (by the way, great, I’m happy when everyone is allowed to enjoy what they enjoy).

I don’t see “girl” stuff being mainstreamed in the same way.  In fact, I don’t know any women that are passionate about “girl stuff” (not saying they aren’t out there, I just don’t know any—or they’re closeted), but I do have a lot of female friends that are into “boy stuff,” meaning the designation of those things as “boy stuff” is probably stupid, in itself.

Comment #86: Dilan Esper on 01/19 at 07:56 PM

There is no “actual grammar of English” outside of whatever is used.

But the actual usage of English is a rule-governed activity, those rules are the grammar of English, and claims about what those rules are can be supported or rejected on the basis of evidence by examining native English speakers’ usage of their language.  You can find linguists debating the fine points of what I just said, but all linguists agree that it’s ballpark-true.

And linguists, by the way, tend not to believe otherwise. You’d have to search far and wide to find a linguist who thinks that the grammar of a particular language (other than perhaps an invented one) exists independent of usage.

I did not claim that there is something from high that dictates what the grammar of English must be.  I claimed two different things.

First, that there is a fact of the matter as to how English possessives are formed, and stated the rules.  This isn’t dictating the grammar of English from high; it’s a claim that can be supported or attacked on the basis of evidence.  (It’s also an uncontroversial one, BTW; you’ll find this description of English plurals in most Linguistics 101 textbooks!)

Second, that if we want to “rationalize” the orthography (not the grammar!) of English, we’d write the possessive of Jones as Jones’s rather than Jones’, because it more accurately reflects the grammar of the language.  This is a prescriptive statement, but it’s the style of prescription that linguists generally favor: the recommendation doesn’t come from “on high,” but rather it is subject to evidence and argument.  One can challenge the recommendation either by challenging the claim about the grammar of English possessives, or challenging the reasoning that leads from the claim to the recommendation.

Which linguists did you have in mind when you said “as understood by linguists”?

All of them.  I studied linguistics for some 7 years.  I’ve talked to hundreds of them, read their papers, technical books, etc.  Some would nitpick some of what I said, but there would be no major disagreements.

I think the success of the Twilight movies proves that teen girls are interested in sex, and it also proves that they are aware that some people around them will disapprove so they have to hide it behind some flimsy excuse.

Comment #99: Triplanetary on 01/19 at 09:51 PM

I have an English degree, and unlike some people with an English degree, I was blessed with two particular professors who entirely disabused me of the notion that prescriptive grammar is useful or appropriate.

That’s really too strong of a conclusion.  Most linguists who care about the topic would say that prescription is useful and appropriate as long as it’s done rationally and on the basis of evidence.

The problem, of course, is that too much of it is neither.  There’s a small genre of reasonable usage advice (see, e.g., Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage , or the Nueva gramática de la lengua española).  But of course, then there’s the huge literature of crazy irrational antievidential screeds that the genre is famous for.

And sadly the latter often invades our high school English textbooks.

Hugo, I can tell you from experience right now that the more you try to control your kids’ dating lives, the more you tell them they aren’t “really” in love? The more they will rebel and cling to their beloved. After all, he/she understands and you clearly don’t.

The actual research—-studies comparing Dutch and American families—-shows the more parents accept and embrace young love, the better kids do.

But yeah,

That’s really too strong of a conclusion.

In that you are correct. Grammatical prescription is appropriate to a limited extent in any context, and to a greater extent in more formal contexts. I’ll go to town on a school essay’s grammar, but there’s no need whatsoever to correct a person’s colloquial grammar, as long as they’re expressing themselves clearly.

Prescriptive grammar and style has its place. A publication or event may demand a certain register of speech, and that’s when prescriptivism is appropriate. The rest of the time, the primary point of language is communication, not rules, so as long as the message gets across, there’s no problem there. People who get hung up on prescriptivism are, as a general rule, missing that point, or deliberately avoiding it so they can have some measure of superiority. Hell, there’s still people who absolutely insist that to avoid splitting infinitives in English is mandatory.

I saw an article a while back on mispronunciations that supposedly make you sound stupid. The funny thing was that most of them were various examples of metathesis and language change; the usual suspects (ask/aks, nucular, etc) showed up, but one particular one was a complaint about people pronouncing prescription and prerogative with an initial per-. Especially in the latter case… go ahead, try slamming two Rs together around a schwa and see how easy that is to pronounce clearly. Make sure you have a napkin to clean up the drool.

In fact, I don’t know any women that are passionate about “girl stuff” (not saying they aren’t out there, I just don’t know any—or they’re closeted)

You should check out disneybridal.com. There was also a care bear thing awhile ago and a recent my little pony revival, although the latter is apparently led by “bros”. I agree, though, that nostalgic toy culture is mainly a boy thing and wonder what rock flannagan lives under where she hasn’t seen video game t-shirts or the transformers movies or robot chicken.

“In my experience, kids are relieved to be able to say that Facebook is vulgar and shallow, and to be able to regard high-school dating as something engaged in by people who aren’t clever because they don’t have strong interests in things outside themselves.”

No shit, feeling superior is a lot more fun than wallowing in self-pity. But every kid I knew who thought s/he was so much better than the kids in relationships turned into a mushy mess the second they got into one. Including myself. Your kids are just really good at playing you, as seems to be the case with a lot of excessively prudish parents like yourself.

And why would kids who date lack “strong interests in things outside themselves”? In my experience, a lot of the way people found boyfriends and girlfriends in high school was through common interests, like being in art or sports or band or whatever. Most of my high school crushes were a result of them being talented at an instrument, and I was a musician, too, so I saw it as us having a lot we would be able to discuss.

Also, what the hell is your big beef with Facebook?

But I do think it’s wise for kids to postpone serious dating until they reach college, if for no other reason than that, in college, they’ll be far more likely to meet someone who seriously shares their interests.

Part of the reason this happens, though, is because of the “practice” kids get from the dating they do in high school. If anything, I think a lot of times people tend to fixate TOO much on “shared interests” in high school, clinging to the one other kid who shares their talent at whatever subject (in my case, music) and ignoring other things that are important in a relationship, like say, kindness, or their outlook on the world, or whether they support your goals or just their own.

Back in about 1984, my super creepy uncle found out that my 16F cousin had stayed out past curfew and snuck in the window. His response was to remain perfectly calm, walk to the garage to get tools, then come up and take her bedroom door off its hinges. He used the door for a worktable and she never had a bedroom door until she left for college.

On the Flanagan front, keeping girls naive just makes them extremely easy to exploit. It’s appealing to parents for that reason (parents who want to keep control), because it never seems to occur to them that other people can exploit that naivitee just as easily.

Yeah, this bit my folks in the ass when my younger sister was easy prey for a predator on campus who beat and raped her.  My sister believed him when he said she couldn’t go for help, because she was raised to uncritically accept any statement from any authority figure, no matter how harmful it was to herself.

Neither of them have seriously taken on this idea or really recovered emotionally.

Man, this whole thread just activates the fuck out of me.  All of the very worst things in my life come from this attitude.

Amanda says,

Hugo, I can tell you from experience right now that the more you try to control your kids’ dating lives, the more you tell them they aren’t ‘really; in love? The more they will rebel and cling to their beloved. After all, he/she understands and you clearly don’t.
The actual research—-studies comparing Dutch and American families—-shows the more parents accept and embrace young love, the better kids do.

The mistake is assuming that the all children I’ve had the privilege to parent have been biologically related to me.

There are many reasons why a young man or young woman in high school might not feel ready to enter the sexual marketplace. And there are many reasons why a young man or young woman might need to feel appreciated and understood and accepted for not wanting to enter the sexual marketplace.

What’s disheartening is to see how self-identified liberals and progressives have, through some bizarre alchemical reworking of the very fundamentals of radical thought, embraced a sexual ethos that is entirely, from root to stem, market-driven.

It remains a matter of public fact that it is social conservatives who are unwilling to acknowledge that such a thing as “childhood” exists because they believe that there’s nothing wrong with child labor.

It remains a matter of public fact that is social conservatives who advocate on behalf of early marriage because they believe women should remain barefoot and pregnant, or, barring that, at least shackled as young as possible to a “husband” in one guise or another.

It has been my empirical experience, which is to say what I’ve observed directly of the world with my own senses, as admittedly imperfect as they are, that there are many young people, male and female, gay and straight, who are profoundly relieved to learn that it’s completely acceptable for them to pursue their intellectual and artistic interests while other kids their age are caught up in “dating.”

I will never be OK with the baldly, and unashamedly, market-driven precocious sexualization of boys and girls. Never.

It used to be that liberals and progressives and radicals were well-enough grounded in the basics of Rosseau, Fichte, Marx, Engels, and later thinkers that they’d reflexively understand why the sexualization of adolescents ran entirely contrary to the very fundamentals of liberal, progressive, and radical thought.

And I can tell you that I’ve personally parented boys and girls who were not only happy to be relived of the burden of entering the sexual marketplace, but who’ve also go on, in adulthood, to thrive as intellectually and professionally successful men and women who’ve an astute social consciousness, and who are wonderful wives and husbands and romantic partners, and who are deeply committed to seeking and promoting justice in the world.

Sorry, but innocence is a horror, as the entirety of my memoir makes apparent.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/p/memoir.html

Sorry for the self advertising, but all of my life’s experiences debunk that ideal of childhood innocence for the setbacks it creates when one is an adult.

there are many young people, male and female, gay and straight, who are profoundly relieved to learn that it’s completely acceptable for them to pursue their intellectual and artistic interests while other kids their age are caught up in “dating.”

Many, yes, but not “most”. You’re taking the perspective of a middle class/upper middle class parent with college-bound children who are going to have academic and career interests. The vast majority of teens don’t have significant intellectual and artistic interests, and the question is how they are going to manage their social development. (and, for that matter, learn to write properly so they are taken seriously) Flanagan offers are very infantilizing model that forces female identity to revolve entirely around boys and what boys think of them.

Tyro says,

“Many, yes, but not ‘most.’ You’re taking the perspective of a middle class/upper middle class parent with college-bound children who are going to have academic and career interests. The vast majority of teens don’t have significant intellectual and artistic interests, and the question is how they are going to manage their social development.

Really? Is this empirically true? The “vast majority” of teens don’t have significant intellectual and artistic and career interests?

Is this supposed to be a “progressive,” or at least “liberal” blog?

If this is what passes nowadays for a cogent critique of the status quo, then the world is far worse-off than I’d ever imagined.

You might be surprised to learn, Tyro, that “academic and career” interests are not exclusively reserved for “upper/middle class” parents with “college bound” children.

For however unambitious or unworldly or unsophisticated you would presume people who are not “middle clasee/upper middle class” to be, they’re nonetheless worlds apart from what your preening self-regard and condescension should imagine.

Good Lord. This blog is like an unselfconscious re-enactment of an episode of Uptown Abbey.

Yes. Of course. You’re entirely right, Tyro. Why bother with “literacy” and “public education” when the “lesser orders” have no interest whatsoever in those things? They’re much better off with practical training for a life “in service.”

Hugo, as someone who didn’t really have it (for a variety of reasons), let me tell you that in my opinion, emotional and social education are much much much more important than most “intellectual” pursuits during those years.

Not everyone has a strong passion for art, sport, or scholarship = why would a pleb ever need to be able to read?

This guy has been pushing his own anecdotal experience with kids as the one true gospel for parenting. Why so you keep indulging him?

There is a huge difference between “you don’t have to date/have sex if you don’t want to” and “I will actively discourage you from dating/having sex if you do want to.”  Any decent approach to sex ed will include a normalization of a wide range of both sexual desire and sexual behavior - so teens can accept where they are in their personal development at any given time, and be empowered to make safe decisions that reflect their situation.  It does not involve shaming or ultimatums (and implying that it’s an either/or between dating and intellectual pursuits, thus implying that kids who date are shallow, is shaming.)

Is some of the sexualization of adolescents market-driven?  Well sure; there really isn’t anything in our society that isn’t market driven.  But much of the sexualization comes from adolescents being, you know, sexual.  Show me a time and a culture in which teens weren’t getting it on, and I will point and laugh at you for your poor understanding of history.

Seriously, few things are more grim than conservatives’ view of heterosexuality.

Well, there’s the conservative view of homosexuality. We don’t feel love, our “relationships” are just arrangements to keep a convenient sex partner around and we only pretend to be families so that we can destroy the social order.

Language is the ultimate democracy.

I agree with the sentiment but I dread the day the dictionary writers give in and add “figuratively” to the definition of “literally”.

Your responses, Karmakin, Scrumby, and Burgundy, are instructive, even if in ways beyond which you’ve intended.

I daresay they diagnose the refractory anemia of progressives and liberals nowadays—the vague, nihilistic appeals to received bourgeois “wisdom,” the prickly resistance to any dialectical apprehension of human will and behaviour, and the denial of any conception of human potential other than what can be imagined by the “intuitive,” which is to say the retrograde middle-brow.

Don’t you think it at least somewhat odd that you’ve come to embrace the very attitudes of people who you should otherwise dismiss out of hand?

Hugo, I’m just going to mentally append [citation needed] at the end of all your posts.  Do you have anything like evidence to offer, or are you good with just condescension?  Seriously, “the denial of any conception of human potential other than what can be imagined by the “intuitive,” which is to say the retrograde middle-brow”?  What is there in saying “you’re creating a false dichotomy between social experimentation and intellectual achievement” that implies a limited conception of human potential?  No one is saying, “you should totally encourage your daughters to be in Girls Gone Wild videos, that’ll be the highlight of their lives anyway.”

This whole conversation started when a woman posted about her own experiences, and you essentially said that her lived experience was false, because apparently you as a man have a better sense of what benefits women than the women themselves do.  Speaking of attitudes of people that I dismiss out of hand.

Hugo,

You must be literally the single most condescending and pretentious bore to ever post in the comment section of this blog. I’m actually in awe right now.

Incidentally, as someone at least as familiar with radical thinkers as you are, I would only make two points:

1) Your conflating the market driven sexualization of adolescents with their developing sexualities. Just because our current social form attempts the former is no reason to condemn the latter. (Or to get all pretentious myself, it is an expression of the alienation of capitalism that this social form in sexuality, as in most areas of life, essentially creates a dialectical inversion of sexuality as a means of human connection and bonding into a market mediated act pursued for market ends).

2) The comparative studies Amanda was referring to, of Dutch adolescents vs American adolescents fairly clearly show empirically that a more open and accepting approach to adolescent relationships and sexuality results in dramatically better health and psychological outcomes for the adolescents involved, while doing nothing to hamper intellectual development. Unless you have some empirical evidence of some kind to support your assertions, which so far have been supported by nothing other than condescension and vacuous ideological mud-slinging, maybe you would be so kind as to shut the fuck up?

Burgundy says:

“This whole conversation started when a woman posted about her own experiences, and you essentially said that her lived experience was false, because apparently you as a man have a better sense of what benefits women than the women themselves do.  Speaking of attitudes of people that I dismiss out of hand.”

Your misreading, deliberate or unconscious, of what I wrote, functions nonetheless as a useful kind of Rorschach response, or free association.

You don’t bother to offer a cogent counter-explanation of why arch-capitalists, repeatedly and openly, deny the existence of childhood, or why self-proclaimed reactionaries advocate that females, as soon as possible, “pair bond” with fertile males.

You don’t bother to acknowledge why young women, few or many, might not wish to offer themselves up to the sexual marketplace.

Please allow me to guess that you would quickly agree that the feminist project, writ large, is not yet fully realized, and that extant power-dynamics, on all levels, between male and female, fall rather short of the egalitarian ideal.

To the extent you’re willing to acknowledge that you agree with those things, please tell me, then, how a parent, father or mother, gay or straight or transgender or otherwise self-identified, ought successfully counter concerted efforts fueled by many tens of millions of dollars aimed at convincing young women to offer up themselves, as soon as physically possible, as commodities in the sexual marketplace?

Also, while you’re at it, please tell me why so disproportionately few young women go to college to study science or maths when it’s been empirically demonstrated that young women who don’t study science or maths are better at those things than the young males who ultimately pursue degrees in those fields.

Praxis says:

” Maybe you would be so kind as to shut the fuck up?”

As with Burgundy’s, your comments are more useful when taken in a Rorschach, or free association, sense, rather than at face value.

Your knee-jerk access of sexual expletive suggests that, despite your liberal, so to speak, use of the words “empirical” and “empirically,” you would tend to negotiate confrontation of your ideas via a visceral, or purely emotional, response. (Which is demonstrable—or should I say empirically demonstrable?—in the case that anyone cared to read what I actually wrote.)

But to note or highlight that you find such confrontation difficult, or most comfortably mediated by a visceral, or purely emotional, response, would be merely tendentious.

In other words. Should you choose to address directly what I wrote, and should your address of same transcend your subjective, if compulsive, need to answer questions unasked, and counter arguments never stated anywhere but in your imagination, we might get somewhere.

Telling someone to “shut the fuck up” is rather lacking in persuasive force.

Unless, of course, the only reason you chose to address me in that way was because it, to you, felt “good.”

To each his or her own poison.

precocious sexualization of boys and girls

Hahahahahahahaaaaa. You think high school is an age at which sexual activity is precocious? Uh, okay.

Hugo, the complete lack of any cites for your assertions makes entirely laughable your claim that your opponents are “visceral,” “emotional,” or “intuitive” in the face of your supposed rationality. It is you who have failed to develop any kind of rational argument for your hypotheses. The repetitious nature of your self-important pseudo-intellectual blather over several hours of postings suggest that you are the one who bears the irrational emotional attachment to a set of ideas.

I saw an article a while back on mispronunciations that supposedly make you sound stupid. The funny thing was that most of them were various examples of metathesis and language change; the usual suspects (ask/aks, nucular, etc) showed up, but one particular one was a complaint about people pronouncing prescription and prerogative with an initial per-. Especially in the latter case… go ahead, try slamming two Rs together around a schwa and see how easy that is to pronounce clearly. Make sure you have a napkin to clean up the drool.

Haha, yep. I saw a similar article, and a lot of the pronunciations that were “wrong” were actually just regional and dialect variations. And if there’s one thing that pisses me off it’s the notion that your accent or dialect is any indication of your intelligence.

You must be literally the single most condescending and pretentious bore to ever post in the comment section of this blog.

Well, yes, true. But if enough people decide to write like he does, that makes it correct, no matter what a some stuffed shirts who edit a style book think.

Is there anything funnier than a pedantic conservative? They’re saying the same thing as the wingnut yelling catchphrases, but they’ve convinced themselves they’re not because they memorized a few big words (that they rarely use correctly). Too bad Hugo is imposing this on his kids. I hope, for their sake, their rebellion is thorough and gets them far the fuck away.

You think high school is an age at which sexual activity is precocious? Uh, okay.

It’s surprising to me how much wingnuttery is due to men who are still bitter that girls didn’t like them in high school, and often in college. Puffed up on male privilege, they assume the problem was everyone else, instead of them.

It’s surprising to me how much wingnuttery is due to men who are still bitter that girls didn’t like them in high school, and often in college.

I suppose one key difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals want their children and grandchildren to live in a better world than we presently do. Conservatives get angry at the notion that those freeloading descendents should have it any easier. “My life was hard, so why shouldn’t theirs be?!”

Or in this particular case, “My first sexual experience was my incredibly awkward and unsatisfying wedding night, so why should other people get to have enjoyable sex?! It’s not fair!”

My high school experience was defined by my own, personal, utterly original sexuality.  It wasn’t an adult sexuality, and I didn’t want adult things.  But I wanted to explore, understand, and appreciate sex and relationships as an emerging adult, very badly.

This had nothing to do with anyone selling me anything.  I was profoundly uninterested in anything related to sexuality, and then I was not.  It was as organic as anything gets.

Anyways.

The funny thing is that it’s Hugo himself that’s the best example of what I’m talking about. I know, I can write, from time to time in a similar fashion, when it strikes me as useful or important. (although I like to think that I’m not nearly as much of a troglodyte. Big words. I can use ‘em too.) Quite frankly, I don’t think people talking and thinking regularly like this is a very healthy thing. I do think we can over-intellectualize all sorts of things (something I work very hard to push down in myself…often with not as much success as I would like) and that’s generally what is going on here.

So yes. I stand by what I said. Actually, to be blunt, the only goal I have for youth in terms of the education that they receive, is to develop a love for learning and information. Everything else is gravy. And the thing is, forcing it into their heads, to take away pretty much everything else and focus on ONLY intellectual pursuits is the fastest way to kill this.

This is why you get so many “booksmart” stupid people.

Comment #130: Amanda Marcotte

It’s surprising to me how much wingnuttery is due to men who are still bitter that girls didn’t like them in high school, and often in college. Puffed up on male privilege, they assume the problem was everyone else, instead of them.

Certainly that’s a major dynamic, I’m not trying to undercut your point, just add color, but in my experience, I have far more liberal friends, colleagues, acquaintances fitting that description: guys who never got laid in high school and every interaction with women is slightly poisoned as a result.  Unlike conservatives, they don’t apply that insecurity to their more global political positions—they’re pro choice, will support broad feminist goals like equal pay—but the latent misogyny will bubble up at the oddest times, and usually on a personal level.  The regular explosions in the skeptical community over this issue would be good public examples.

The guys at my high school that got laid all the time were almost all conservatives, of course, it was a really conservative area.  Their attitudes toward women are defined by the classical power dynamic: we’re in charge, you do what we say, how dare you think you’re equal.  I can see them trying to dominate their daughters’ social lives from that same power control perspective—women in their lives are property.

Man, you guys got trolled.  Hugo is clearly a random argument generator.  No actual human uses that much meaningless jargon unless they’re trying for tenure and need to bulk up an otherwise contentless journal article. 

This:

I daresay they diagnose the refractory anemia of progressives and liberals nowadays—the vague, nihilistic appeals to received bourgeois “wisdom,” the prickly resistance to any dialectical apprehension of human will and behaviour, and the denial of any conception of human potential other than what can be imagined by the “intuitive,” which is to say the retrograde middle-brow.

Belongs here:

http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought.

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobed

Hmm, to which category should our resident post-modern gibberish generator be assigned?

Hugo,

Your choice to focus exclusively on joking use of such language as a counter-point to the ridiculously over the top pretentiousness of your tone and to ignore the substance of my post entirely says everything that needs to be said.

Also, for someone claiming to be critical of capitalism you are incredibly classist. I know this is a difficult concept for one with such delicate sensibilities as yourself, but you might try engaging in the substance of the points raised rather than the form.

Oh and while you are right that the capitalist class once denied the existence of childhood entirely in their desire to exploit the wage-labour of children as soon as possible, if you might notice that era has passed (as a result of class struggle) and today capitalism’s take on childhood is to train children in consumerism, the eternal nature of current social relations, and whatever limited schooling is necessary for their usefulness as wage-labour.

My point in this case is that the capitalist class denial of childhood you’re referring to has much less to do with this issue than the dialectical inversion of sexuality into a market mediated sphere of life.

When using language in inter-entity dialog, one should mindful of, and put appropriate effort into, proper word choice so as to eschew obfuscation, otherwise the resulting communication might not have as much impact as would otherwise be desirable…or so I’ve heard…

And whereof we cannot speak, thereof we should shut the fuck up.

Certainly that’s a major dynamic, I’m not trying to undercut your point, just add color, but in my experience, I have far more liberal friends, colleagues, acquaintances fitting that description: guys who never got laid in high school and every interaction with women is slightly poisoned as a result.  - doubtthat

Speaking as someone to whom that at least partially applies (although I think and hope I have gotten over it and hence my interactions with women are not poisoned as a result), sometimes not getting laid in high school can lead one to a certain liberal point of view: instead of being “[p]uffed up on male privilege [and assuming] the problem was everyone else”, one starts to blame social mores that privilege, for example, jocks over nerds and aggressive assholes (certainly you don’t have to be a Nice Guy(TM) to notice that our hyper-free-market culture rewards a certain kind of assholishness of personality) over people who are a little less aggressive by disposition.

By the way, back on topic, I realize what bothers me about this book.  I actually saw the cover and somehow the cover copy and hoped (although I shouldn’t have been so hopefully knowing who the author is) that this book would address the very real issues which girls face as they are growing up: cultural forces which continue, even in this day and age, to cast women as sexual objects and that deny agency of any kind of women.  I was hoping that this book would address very real concerns about “princess culture” and the challenges facing girls as they mature to women (about body image, etc.).

Instead this book—not surprisingly but disappointingly—seems to (full disclosure—I haven’t actually read the book) promote rather than critique those elements of culture that seek to deny agency to women.  It’s like the book took everything one would hope such a book would critique and instead celebrates it.  Of course, what else could we expect from Caitlin Flanagan?

I was one of those girls that, in retrospect, I do wish that I hadn’t gotten mired in a less than rewarding long-term (14-19 years old) relationship so young, I ended up moving out of state to be with him, stopped college for a year to get residency in that new state, based my entire major around what was offered at the college he chose to go to, moved again after my initial apartment because he didn’t like taking the two buses over to see me. I remember about 6 months after moving being miserable because his behavior was at best indifferent but I had so much invested I didn’t want to break up. In honest retrospect I think everyone would have been happier with a convenient “I guess we can’t carry on this relationship because of going to different colleges! Dee de doo!” end point. However, that would have had to come from us. As it was, with one set of parents kind of encouraging (hoping for a young marriage) and us being so “No no we’re in totally twue love forever and ever!!” Even if someone had said “it isn’t healthy for you, you need to develop yourself more rather than focusing on this relationship” I would have blown them off. Didn’t they know I was in love? Didn’t they know some people find their soul mates at 14 years old? Why not me!? And while sexuality was a part of the relationship, I would say that was actually the least damaging part of the whole thing - was actually pretty mutually pleasurable and respectful. My parents reluctantly supported me through all of this, if they’d given me a hard time it would have just pushed me all the more to his guy in rebellion and that would have been an additional reason to stick with him, if I was going to abandon my family for this guy shouldn’t I try really hard to make it “work?” Although when I did finally leave him they were pretty thrilled. And surprisingly to some, I suppose, some bad choices in high school didn’t doom me to an unsuccessful adulthood - still got through college, in a good relationship now, good family relationships.. can’t say I did too shabby! Having a non-ideal young adulthood isn’t the same as a ruinous one.

As to Flanagan’s bizarro world, I would have to say I’m yet another person who doesn’t fit her mold - while I had a few dolls I kept from childhood, it certainly didn’t keep me from wanting to be sexually active before 18 or whatever designation of adulthood she has picked. While I fully support the idea that there is a whole culture around pressuring girls to be sexually active (or as I perceive it, pretending to be sexually aware while remaining virginal) I’d caution that we step into some really weird “well you’re just being MADE to think that! That isn’t what you REALLY think!” territory when attempting to explain teenagers making sexual choices as only due to cultural conditioning rather than authentic desire.

Also, while you’re at it, please tell me why so disproportionately few young women go to college to study science or maths when it’s been empirically demonstrated that young women who don’t study science or maths are better at those things than the young males who ultimately pursue degrees in those fields.

Hugo, in all likelihood, this is because only those girls who are the very best think they are good enough to pursue a study they really enjoy while most boys who enjoy a study will at least attempt to be accepted to pursue it.  It is highly likely self-selection out of the girls who are “good” or “very good”, while the boys cover a wider range from good to best. 
This would be much intertwinned with women and girls being treated as unequal, but as the sexualizing supposedly doesn’t impact boys, I doubt that can be the cause.  Unless you have some data, I’d suggest not going there on this blog.

No actual human uses that much meaningless jargon unless they’re trying for tenure and need to bulk up an otherwise contentless journal article.

Hey!  I resemble that remark!

Re: Comment #140: A Tale of Two Cities on 01/20 at 01:19 PM

Admitting to being a banned troll?  And using slurs?

The asshole who insults people via making fun of their looks and that of their families because he appears to have nothing useful or interesting to say is back.  I really wish he’d not insult Charles Dickins that way though.

while I had a few dolls I kept from childhood, it certainly didn’t keep me from wanting to be sexually active before 18 - Tenya

Which point (about Caitlin Flanagan drawing such a dichotomy between girlhood activities like playing with dolls and sexuality) makes me wonder if Caitlin Flanagan has any actual experience with girls playing with dolls.  I’m guessing that she’s never encountered a naked Ken doll in her house?

What we call nerd are, in fact, very popular in most Asia cities I’ve visited.  Less so in Europe, IME, though there is a niche popularity for specific intellectual types. I have a feeling you don’t get out much, ToTC; or if so, only to US-like destinations.

Comment #139: A Tale of Two Cities

You know, it’s almost like academic feminism is like every other academic field on the planet: some really good stuff, some not so great, and some bizarre nonsense.

Post-modernism has generally had a negative effect on every discipline it’s come in contact with.

The true stupidity is thinking that an obviously ridiculous claim made by a feminist philosopher in an obscure academic journal says something relevant about anything published on this blog.  Arguments succeed or fail on their own merits, not based upon some tenuous connection to a broad academic field.

Please, we already have enough people trying to use words they don’t understand.  Ad hominems are often highly relevant, given a particular situation.  A type of ad hominem is fallacious:

A: Smoking is bad for your health.
B: You smoke, therefore you’re wrong.

Pointing out that someone’s life experience can cloud their judgment is not a fallacious ad hominem argument, it’s a simple factual claim that has been established so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine it would be a subject of dispute.

That same life experience is highly relevant in an epistemic sense.  My understand of and attitude towards law enforcement personnel, for example, are very different from, say, the clients I represented when I worked in a legal clinic in Chicago.  They know things about law enforcement in Chicago that I simply don’t.  Their personal characteristics—being poor and black or Hispanic—are EXACTLY the reason they know these things and my white ass doesn’t.

If you don’t call the total lack of fear of assault from law enforcement a privilege, then what do you call it?  Luck?  Good fortune?  I was blissfully ignorant of that world because my genetic lineage and the geographical area I was raised (two things I had exactly zero control over) spared me.

I would like to hear the argument that someone’s personal characteristics have no effect on epistemology.

I should conclude by pointing out the obvious: just because you can find an example of someone making a bizarre application of a concept (applying “privilege” to E=MC2), doesn’t mean the concept itself is faulty.  That’s a childishly silly argument, which again was the point of my prior post.  Amanda is not responsible for the fact that someone described as a feminist said something weird somewhere.

Comment #153: dasich

Ah, now I think I see your argument more clearly.  Yes, the application of standpoint epistemology to a range of subjects, largely math, logic, and the hard sciences, is fairly ridiculous.  That’s not to say that all examples of such are faulty, but it’s definitely a tiny minority of instances that will be useful.

But that’s not even remotely what Amanda or anyone on this blog has done.  You’re seem to be arguing that because the concept of privilege is not applicable to a certain category of subjects, it’s not applicable to any subjects.  That’s obviously a deeply flawed argument.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the 2nd Law.  Anyone of any characteristic can test the claim and verify it.  You cannot conclude from that point, however, that there is no such thing as privilege and that it has no epistemic worth.  It’s very easy to offer endless contradictory examples.

How about this (if anyone else is reading, feel free to jump in):

Relative advantage over others based on characteristics beyond your control.

Bill Gates children have a MASSIVE advantage over all other children in the world as a result of being spat from Mrs. Gates’ womb.  They had no control over that, yet their lives will be immeasurably better in a material sense than a child born to impoverished parents in Somalia.

You must be literally the single most condescending and pretentious bore to ever post in the comment section of this blog.

*sniff* I cut back on posting to cope with a real life, and suddenly everyone forgets me…

=> An odd question, at this juncture, I know, but…

Is there a reason why this site doesn’t fully cache?

Switching back and forth between pages, it seems to reload entirely each time. And it’s slow.

This isn’t happening on other sites I visit.

I’m using Google Chrome, by the way. (And don’t know much about computers, or how webpages and browsers are coded, obviously.)

I don’t think they’re ‘really, really talented’, but then I don’t believe that I live in a meritocracy.

Vague?  It’s pretty clear.  Maybe general, but certainly not vague.  What isn’t clear?  A person gains an advantage over another due to coincidental factors.

But the actual usage of English is a rule-governed activity

This is actually quite false. The actual usage of English sometimes conforms to the “rules” and sometimes does not. It is not, in fact, governed by such rules. (There are, of course, particular registers and particular publications which impose “rules” of various levels of formality on speakers and writers, but this, I am sure, is not what you mean when you say English is rule-governed. If I go out and start speaking or writing English that does not conform to what you believe the “rules” are, I will suffer no penalty or sanction whatsoever. Because the actual usage of English is not a rule-governed activity.)

I claimed two different things.

First, that there is a fact of the matter as to how English possessives are formed, and stated the rules.  This isn’t dictating the grammar of English from high; it’s a claim that can be supported or attacked on the basis of evidence.  (It’s also an uncontroversial one, BTW; you’ll find this description of English plurals in most Linguistics 101 textbooks!)

Second, that if we want to “rationalize” the orthography (not the grammar!) of English, we’d write the possessive of Jones as Jones’s rather than Jones’, because it more accurately reflects the grammar of the language.

And both of those claims are completely false.

First, there are no rules. English possessives are formed however a significant number of speakers wish to form them. Just as you will know that I am referring to the second person plural if I say “y’all” or “you all”, whether or not any textbook or any set of rules or any dictionary recognizes a second person plural personal pronoun or not.

As of right now, significant numbers of English writers use both “Jones’” and “Jones’s”. Thus, those both constitute ways that English possessives are formed. And that’s the end of the discussion with respect to what is “correct” or what the “rules” are. It is true that particular publications or particular registers might require one or the other, but both are correct and neither violates any general “rule” about English usage. Such rules do not exist outside of whatever people choose to use.

Second, we do not want to rationalize the orthography of English, is it not possible to do so, and there is no “grammar of the language” for any particular form to “accurately reflect” outside of whatever people choose to use.

This is, again, what is beautiful about language. It’s a democracy. The unwashed masses who offend certain types with their “improper English” get just as much a say, and eventually their usages become “proper” and the unpopular usages promoted by the language snobs get written out of the language. It’s a wonderful process. A lot more egalitarian than some stupid, formalistic desire to “rationalize the orthography of English”. Who gives a shit if you can do that or not?

All of them.  I studied linguistics for some 7 years.

That’s a Sarah Palin non-answer. (“What newspapers do you read? All of them.”)

Why don’t you tell us specifically which linguists believe that English grammar exists independent of usage, with citations?

Top scientists aren’t really, really talented?

I’ve known some that were more talented at politics than science, and I’ve known of plenty of cases of talented people who weren’t assholes.

Thanks for sharing.

@dasich:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen

Two Nobels, and a more non-deranged non-asshole you are unlikely to meet.

There are ways to be talented and creative which involve assholery.  There are ways that don’t.  There are ways to be ordinary and uninteresting that involve assholery, and there are ways to be ordinary and uninteresting that don’t.  There are a lot of people, and there are a lot of ways to live.

The next time someone orders a shipment of trolls, would you please let the rest of us know?  I’d be willing to pitch in some money toward more quality and more entertaining trolls.  It’d be nice not to have the bargain basement kind.  Unfortunately, this is one of those things that you get what you pay for, and rock bottom prices will only get you a troll as dumb as one.  Thanks!

“Do you actually know what “operationalization” means?”

Yes, but that’s just a more douchey reiteration of your claim that it was vague.  Operationalization=make something unclear, clear.  I contend that my definition was clear.  Any factual instantiation will prove that.  Argument by repetition + synonym is just a recipe for time wasting.

SporkeyO:

Inorite? It’s, like Whack-a-troll weekend on Pandagon.

This level of lunacy reminds me of BeanSlap’s meltdown. Someone needs to be banned for his own good. Watching this meltdown unfold isn’t pretty, especially with the posting of personal information and the self-justification of how this was normal behavior.

Comment #176: dasich

Look, this is obviously just a waste of time.  Notice what I said about instantiation.

Here’s an instantiation of the general definition of privilege I offered:

People in America born to wealthy parents (a factor beyond their control) will have an advantage over those born into poorer homes in so far as future earnings are concerned.

Once the point is instantiated, it’s very, very easy to test empirically.  We can even determine the, gasp, quantity of the effect: are wealthy children 10, 20, 80% more likely to earn larger salaries than children of poorer parents?  You may be shocked to learn that there are studies that deal with exactly this point.

“Privilege” is a broad concept.  If you want to test it, observe an example.  Not very complicated, very clear.

Having some psychotic traits makes one a “deranged asshole” now? Being “instrospective, solemn of manner” and the like are deranged asshole traits? Well shit, most of my friends and I are “deranged assholes”. Nice to know that my friend on anti-psychotics who works with children and grows vegetables for the local senior citizen’s home (and did so before she started taking any medication) is a lunatic who lacks even a shred empathy for others. Your use of “us” implies you’re diagnosed psychotic/schizotypical or something, and because you’re an asshole, you’ve surmised that everyone else with your personality disorder is the same. Doesn’t work that way. Context partially shapes the mind, regardless of its inherent traits. Since you can’t go two seconds without using chan jargon, it’s pretty obvious to me that your own behaviour was influenced by a certain conservative social environment on the web.

Also, fuck off. Why should we “engage” with you? This is a blog, not a country. You aren’t being censored when you keep getting banned for being a collossal bore.

Please don’t feed trolls. Email me and I will ban and delete them.

Anyone remember another Pandagon thread going quite this far afield of the original post?  I can’t ...

And maybe this is just me but does anyone else get a strange “no privacy allowed” subtext from the “no internet in the room” thing? Growing up where one shared family computer for the household was a standard, most of them were placed in a spare room of niche away from prying eyes because it was understood a person might want a certain degree of privacy even if they weren’t guaranteed it.

I’m not sure it is always “no privacy allowed” though a lot of parents do subscribe to that unfortunately. 

In the case of several HS classmates’ parents who were otherwise quite progressive in all other respects, not allowing computers/internet in the room is the same reason why they won’t allow their children/adolescents to have TVs in their room. 

It’s to encourage their children to spent more time interacting with other members of the family, to not encourage social withdrawal behavior through TV/computers/electronics, ensure they completed all their homework assignments before engaging in leisure activities via TV/internet/electronics, and to reduce sleeping deprivation issues from excess late-night/all-nighter usage of TV/electronics. 

Wasn’t an issue in my household as I grew up before internet was mainstream….though I did stick out as a freak for not being allowed to have a TV in my own room. 

Judging by how most kids with TVs in their rooms had serious sleep deprivation issues from watching TV all night and watching one set of young parent having much more serious issues with putting their young toddlers asleep because they have TVs in their rooms which they use at will…...not sure having TVs/electronics in a child’s/young adolescent’s room is a good idea unless they’ve shown they can self-regulate themselves to avoid sleep-deprivation/poor academic performance issues arising from excess late-night/all-nighter use. 

Exholt did you not read the rest of what I wrote? I’m not arguing for internet in rooms. It’s not something I had and considering the expense of even a smart phone, not something I see as a vital right. I was just adding to Amanda’s point about social isolation with my own feeling that it speaks also to a lack of “I see nothing” privacy in a kid’s life. When it comes to occasionally checking out what your kids are into, keeping the computer in a public room is kind of an arbitrary barrier. There is no reason a parent (especially a stay-at-home-with-a-nanny-mom like Flanagan) can’t just walk into their kid’s room and check out what they’re doing or what they’ve been looking at with the added knowledge that this is exactly what this kid has been up to instead of just someone in the family or staff. Flanagan doesn’t want girl’s to have a internet access in their rooms because either a. she actually respects a individual’s room as a private space that should not be broached without permission or damn good reason (fat chance that,) or she isn’t even willing to let a girl web-surf in a separate room while her parents poke their head in occasionally. If it was about sleep deprivation, or expense, or responsibility then she would have said that. But no, it’s about keeping girls away from porn, and considering how many of us managed to access that even on a public terminal, you can imagine how invasive and nosy a parent has to be to completely cut off access.

I don’t think it’s wise at all to encourage teenagers to wait until college to start dating.  It’s better for things to move slowly.  I wish I could have tried “dating” in sixth grade like everyone else.  It basically meant sitting together at lunch and sometimes talking on the phone after school.  Not a single couple ever kissed each other, that I know of.  But it was basically practicing in a safe way.  I had extreme social anxiety so I couldn’t approach boys, but I wish I hadn’t missed out on that.

In 8th grade I finally had my first “boyfriend”.  We didn’t have lunch period together, but we talked on the phone ever night and we went on a “date” once per weekend.  It was extremely awkward at first because I had missed out on that small-talk practice in 6th grade.  We eventually kissed, but it was a sort of public thing at my front door and I could just dart inside after to think about how it felt and what it meant for me.

I started having sex (not with this boyfriend) when I was 15.  I think 2 years is a good amount of time between first kiss and first sex, although it would have been nice to have a boyfriend at 14 to go in between with, just so I wouldn’t have been quite so nervous when I first had sex.

I think it’s great to have a long progression from the innocent sitting together at lunch but more than friends to full-on sex.  This won’t happen if people just wait until college to have any kind of dating.  People would have sex later, but the time between things would be much shorter.  And at the ultimate end of that, “courting” as practiced by fundies, has couples go from no kissing and sometimes no touching and only supervised visits, to full-on intercourse the night of the wedding, often after the kids have known each other for only a few months.  That is way too fast, IMO.  It’s good to have practice when things are less likely to progress.  Relationships, dating, and sex are just like anything else.  They take practice.  And the teenage years are when people are learning how to be adults in every other way.  Sex should be a part of that learning. 

It’s unrealistic to think that if they just don’t ever practice, they will suddenly have good relationships as soon as they turn 18.

Bananacat—
Leslee Unruh, who is the leader of the fanatical anti-choice movement in SD, always brags up how her daughter waited until she was married to even kiss her husband. It must have been so weird for her to go from having never been kissed to having sex all in one night. That would have been way too much for me.

bananacat, I’ve known of cases where people got married after dating in college without having dated in high school, and I’ve known of cases where people got married after knowing their future spouse for a matter of weeks or in one case, two weeks.

Everybody develops differently, so I’m wary of a one-size-fits-all approach to relationships except that people shouldn’t feel pressured to date in high school if that’s not what they’re ready for yet, but by then they should be instructed in interacting with and dating people so that when they’re emotionally ready they don’t have to figure things out for themselves because of their lack of high school experiences.

My own development in high school wasn’t as smooth as yours, but somehow I survived and lived to date women when I went to college.

Different strokes for different folks.

bananacat, I’ve known of cases where people got married after dating in college without having dated in high school

Agree with the above as that’s how the majority of my high school classmates did it. 

Some high school cultures didn’t have cultures/environments conducive to dating.  Some of the issues faced by most kids at mine included working/lower-middle class immigrant parents who feared “distractions” will derail their hopes of the next generation going off to an elite/respectable college and gaining a more secure foothold as a more assimilated member in the middle/upper-middle classes, logistical difficulties due to commute times being up to 2+ hours each way, overwhelming rigor and quantity of academic work which caused almost a third of my entering first-year class to transfer back to their local high schools, prevailing notions among peers that people who dated weren’t very serious about academics/priorities, etc. 

For crying out loud, our junior semi-formal ended up being canceled due to strong lack of student interest. 

In contrast, most of those factors were moot and there’s actually much more free time once one headed off to college.

Nearly no one in my High School dated - there was only a few dozen of us anyhow - and I think nearly all of us are married now.  I’ve been a domestic partner with the same spouse for, umm, over thirteen years.

...I also don’t know anyone from my High School who is married to someone from our school.  Even the ones who married early married someone from a different school!

I’m another person who didn’t date in high school, because I saw it as too much work. I believed I was never going to get married, and I saw no point in “practicing romance” whenI had better things to do. I knew about sex enough, but I really did not wake up to the concept of dating just for dating’s sake actually being fun until, really, my later years of college.

Nowadays, of course, I am in a long-term relationship, though I still don’t know jack about flirting. I attracted my SO through plain and simple intelligent conversation. Which IS flirting to some people, very likely to him.

The only thing that worries me about this is, I have ambitions for political office someday, and I do worry about my prospective voters seeing my lack of early romantic experience (and continued lack of skill at flirting) as a barometer of my ability to relate to people. Hell, they tried to do that to Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. I just fear it’s going to be even worse once my generation grows up, because they might just have even more of an expectation that normal people dated in high school.
Too many of us still have this idea that relating to someone as a public figure means being like them and actually sharing lifestyles. Which makes me wonder how many kids were born and, deep down, unwanted except for their role as “relatability markers”.

#116 Karmakin and #136 Praxis:

I guess that’s one reason why I thought dating was too much bother. So much of social and emotional education seems to be about limiting the intellectual. I know the idea is balance, but for someone like me who starts out being best in the intellectual, it feels like you hear “tone your brain down” ALL the time. It feels, over time, like in order to be socially and romantically acceptable you have to live in a continual damper stage, lest you spook your friend/partner.

If your focus is on correcting the “heart” deficiency, you hear a disproportionate elevation of the heart, and a diminishment of the mind. And yes; I do blame this “heart over mind” ideology Oprah and others brought us, for our society’s diminishment of thinking. We’ve been conditioned for years to think intellectualism doesn’t matter or, at the very least, isn’t very helpful at enabling you to succeed in life. And so we elect a president based on whether we’d like to have a beer with them…

just to be super-annoying, I’m going to take up the middle-ground between Hugo and everyone else, with a sprinkling of European snootiness :-p

as I said, I find “dating” horrible; it’s a ridiculously time and energy consuming, ritualized form of interaction, and at least in some parts of the (North American) mainstream, it seems to be the form of interaction around which social spaces and all other forms of interaction seem to have been built. I can totally see that such a overbearing focus on a single form of social interaction can lead to shorting kids out of developing interests that have nothing to do with romance/sex, as well as making it really difficult for them to learn social skills that have nothing to do with romance/sex.

The alternative to that isn’t denying teen sexuality like conservatives (and radical marxists, apparently?) would like to. Certainly, my youth wasn’t short on sex (though i suppose it was a bit short on romance, in hindsight). But because sex/romance was not the center of social interaction and not the main “hobby” of anyone; it was the other way ‘round, where romance and sex generally materialized by themselves out of social interactions based around hanging out with people or collaborating on shared interests/hobbies/goals, whatnot.

A social space centered around dating stifles any and everything else, and I fully blame it for the intellectual late-blooming of too many North American teens (and a few European ones; one of my classmates nearly backed out of a chance to study abroad because she was worried her bf would break up with her while she was gone), and for the inability of too many NA college-aged men to have conversations with women that they don’t perceive as flirting; also, for the overabundance of Nice Guys who see friendship with women as a means to an end.

OTOH, a social space centered around friendships and/or shared interests isn’t going to lack in fucking and flings, but is going to be a lot more varied and allow for better intellectual/athletic/artistic self-finding. And teach a lot more people how to treat other people as, well, people, not sex/romance delivery systems.

it is an expression of the alienation of capitalism that this social form in sexuality, as in most areas of life, essentially creates a dialectical inversion of sexuality as a means of human connection and bonding into a market mediated act pursued for market ends.

most awesome description of “dating” EVAR

:-p

You don’t bother to acknowledge why young women, few or many, might not wish to offer themselves up to the sexual marketplace.

tens of millions of dollars aimed at convincing young women to offer up themselves, as soon as physically possible, as commodities in the sexual marketplace

my, my, aren’t we being a little bit sexist. wherever are the complaints about young men “offering themselves up to the sexual marketplace”, especially in light of studies that show that high-school boys are often feeling pressured into relationships/sex just as much if not more than girls?

Also, while you’re at it, please tell me why so disproportionately few young women go to college to study science or maths when it’s been empirically demonstrated that young women who don’t study science or maths are better at those things than the young males who ultimately pursue degrees in those fields.

considering that this is more the case in sexually repressed USA than in sexually liberated Sweden or even Germany, your hypothesis falls flat. Fucking, in and of itself, doesn’t seem to make girls less able to enter STEM fields.

and at least in some parts of the (North American) mainstream, it seems to be the form of interaction around which social spaces and all other forms of interaction seem to have been built. I can totally see that such a overbearing focus on a single form of social interaction can lead to shorting kids out of developing interests that have nothing to do with romance/sex, as well as making it really difficult for them to learn social skills that have nothing to do with romance/sex.

Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody
I’ve got some money cause I just got paid
How I wish I had someone to talk to
I’m in an awful way

I got in town a month ago
I’ve seen a lot of girls since then
If I could meet ‘em I could get ‘em
But as yet I haven’t met ‘em
That’s why I’m in the shape I’m in

I dunno, my mother was growing up in the early 50s in San Jose, CA, she went to a Catholic High School but seemed to have a good social life from her accounts, and if you live in a little town in America, there really isn’t that much to do on the weekend anyway.

But because sex/romance was not the center of social interaction and not the main “hobby” of anyone; it was the other way ‘round, where romance and sex generally materialized by themselves out of social interactions based around hanging out with people or collaborating on shared interests/hobbies/goals, whatnot.

That last part is dating advice given to singles in America, only that’s what they tell adults:

“Take a class in something you’re interested in or like, and you’ll run into a man/woman with similar tastes.”

You don’t tell teens in America to pursue their interests because high school and higher education has become more about grabbing the brass ring.  exholt has been eloquent on the cost of this pursuit, so I have nothing to add to her accounts on various threads on this site.

I’m in favor developing and strengthening ones’ intellectual and emotional growth and becoming part of an educated middle-class, as when I was a youth going to college. 

I think the dating scene isn’t as black as you paint it here in American, here’s a prime example of how it can work when you add American ingenuity.

I think the dating scene isn’t as black as you paint it here in America

and how much comparative socializing have you done outside of America? I don’t want to sound like a complete ass, but that’s a silly statement, if only because it assumes that other places even have things like “dating scenes”, when my complaint is specifically that the USA sees human interactions as one ginormous “dating scene” while in Europe (and from what I hear Australia, as well; no data on other parts of the world, sorry), the only things that can be described as “dating scenes” are the clubs in touristy spots which exists specifically for the purpose of finding yourself a holiday fuck/fling*.

To add some anecdotes to this discussion: I have one British friend who has described dating as “interviewing for a relationship”. And one Australian acquaintance who has lived in BC for a few months and had decided to try this “dating” thing as a form of social experiment, which she was then relating to us with the same horrified fascination you use when talking about eating fried tarantulas on your vacation :-p
oh, and then there was the German acquaintance who, after moving to the US, for a while continued to interpret all instances of being asked on a date as invitations to go hang out and do something fun, and thus was bemused at the fact that the guys who invited her showed up at her door all gussied up,  insisted on paying for things, and felt entitled to various degrees of romantic and/or sexy intimacy afterwards.

Aah, cultural miscommunications. Fun stuff :-p

- - - - - -
*actually, this has to come with a caveat. Such was the situation in the 90’s. I left Europe in 2002, and I hear that Eagleland Osmosis is causing people to “date” in Europe now, too. I can at least confirm the emergence of singles bars in non-touristy places, at least.

oh, and one more thing:

That last part is dating advice given to singles in America, only that’s what they tell adults:
“Take a class in something you’re interested in or like, and you’ll run into a man/woman with similar tastes.”

this is what I mean by centering social interactions around “dating”. Hobbies aren’t means to finding someone to date, they’re ends in-and-of themselves, and telling someone that they should develop hobbies for the purpose of finding someone to date is making having a personality and a life subservient to the “finding someone to date” part. Why not just tell people to find something they enjoy doing, so that their life becomes fulfilling to them regardless of whether they’re single or coupled up? (granted, that only works if you start early, because once you embed the idea that being single is a flaw, that’s an idea that’s very difficult to dislodge again. but we were talking about teens originally, and for teens, teaching them to enjoy themselves first and not bother worrying about whether/when they’ll get a chance to couple up could probably work just fine)

I don’t want to sound like a complete ass, but that’s a silly statement, if only because it assumes that other places even have things like “dating scenes”, when my complaint is specifically that the USA sees human interactions as one ginormous “dating scene” while in Europe (and from what I hear Australia, as well; no data on other parts of the world, sorry), the only things that can be described as “dating scenes” are the clubs in touristy spots which exists specifically for the purpose of finding yourself a holiday fuck/fling*.

Those are more pick-up places than ‘dating scenes’ in American terms, and dating scenes can even extend down to church youth groups, as a friend who used to be a Pentecostal Christian put it:

“There’s only one reason kids hang out in church youth groups, and believe me, it ain’t for the theology.”

and then there was the German acquaintance who, after moving to the US, for a while continued to interpret all instances of being asked on a date as invitations to go hang out and do something fun, and thus was bemused at the fact that the guys who invited her showed up at her door all gussied up,  insisted on paying for things, and felt entitled to various degrees of romantic and/or sexy intimacy afterwards.

Aah, cultural miscommunications. Fun stuff :-p

If she watched some American TV, she might’ve picked up some clues on how social dynamics work in this country and she was probably unaware of the effect her German-tinged English can have on some American men in the way they view her as well.

I was well-aware of how European teens and young adults socialize differently than Americans because a family friend had an Italian exchange student who explained how in her country young people don’t pair up like Americans, etc.

Now, my question for you is how much socializing have you done in America?

And one Australian acquaintance who has lived in BC for a few months and had decided to try this “dating” thing as a form of social experiment, which she was then relating to us with the same horrified fascination you use when talking about eating fried tarantulas on your vacation :-p

With all due respect, Canadian culture and American culture aren’t alike, they are similar, and the Canadian politeness might be wearying on a more straight-forward Australian, IMHO.

telling someone that they should develop hobbies

Why not just tell people to find something they enjoy doing, so that their life becomes fulfilling to them regardless of whether they’re single or coupled up?

Take a class in something you’re interested in or like

which I should’ve expanded it to activities in general, not just classes.

we were talking about teens originally, and for teens, teaching them to enjoy themselves first and not bother worrying about whether/when they’ll get a chance to couple up could probably work just fine)

I had a friend who didn’t have a girlfriend for a long time, and his mother used to assure him, “There’s a Jill for every Jack”.

I agree that teens would be better off just doing stuff they like and pursuing their interests and less worrying about people like St. Caitlin who say “You should/must have a boyfriend in High School”.

I think that our American car culture has developed to favor the pairing off and not the hanging around mode of socialization as well, it’s something to think about.

Whether someone encouraged/discouraged high school dating/romantic relationships above may also be a function of geographic and cultural expectations of some families….even otherwise progressive liberal ones. 

One other reason why high school dating was discouraged was that it was associated by some in my area(NYC area) with early marriage.  Something they strongly wanted to discourage not only for the “distractions from college achievement” reasons….but also because early marriage(marrying a few years after college or earlier) had some associations with being religiously conservative and/or being from the most backward rural parts of the south/midwest.  Yes, there’s some regionalistic/classist prejudices here. 

However, judging by what I’ve heard from several southerners/midwesterners from those areas, they have the same disdain for NE/NYC folks for waiting until college to date and for marrying much later than they do on average.

Jadehawk:

I suspect that the American understanding of the “dating scene” has a great deal to do with pressure to get married, sort of the same way that Calvinism still informs American religious and political thinking even among people of no particular faith. It is pretty brutal—the whole “dating scene” as Americans understand it is very hostile to introverts (especially the type like me that can’t take yes for an answer because I can never figure out if it’s actually a yes).

That said, there’s got to be some equivalent in European countries, even if it’s different from the US. I can’t believe that people in societies less uptight than the US that there’s no random hookup culture; it probably just exists in a rather different form.

“...but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

Cleanup on aisle 190…

Now, my question for you is how much socializing have you done in America?

10 years worth of it.

also, I ended up with one American husband (now ex-) and one American boyfriend. I “dated” neither of them though.

also, I ended up with one American husband (now ex-) and one American boyfriend. I “dated” neither of them though.

Never had a cup of coffee, a meal out alone or at home with nor a movie, a play, a concert, etc, with either of them?

Anyway, you’re just playing into the American stereotype that a successful marriage is based on the foundation of the dating experience, so please don’t feel so smug about us and our Yankee social customs that as you admit are moving across the globe.

Those are more pick-up places than ‘dating scenes’ in American terms, and dating scenes can even extend down to church youth groups, as a friend who used to be a Pentecostal Christian put it:

“There’s only one reason kids hang out in church youth groups, and believe me, it ain’t for the theology.”

way to fucking miss my point. I was saying that “pick-up places” were the only forms of dating scenes in Europe, not that they were the only dating scenes. That everything is a dating scene in NA was precisely my point. Church in Europe is of course primarily a place to socialize, too, but not to form relationships; to form friendships and to figure out what to do, as a group, for the rest of the week, since as someone noted, rural areas don’t offer much in the way of entertainment and you have to create entertainment yourself.

With all due respect, Canadian culture and American culture aren’t alike, they are similar, and the Canadian politeness might be wearying on a more straight-forward Australian, IMHO.

politeness had fuck-all to do with it; and in the sense that both Canadians and USAmericans date, they’re very comparable. And I’m sorry, but the difference between Vancouverites and Seattleites is almost negiligible in most aspects, not just dating.

I think that our American car culture has developed to favor the pairing off and not the hanging around mode of socialization as well, it’s something to think about.

of course. knowing its origin doesn’t refute anything I said about its effects.

I can’t believe that people in societies less uptight than the US that there’s no random hookup culture

of course there is. but you don’t have to sit (or dance, or eat, or whatever you’ve planned for your date) through an interview first. Most hookups start at social gatherings, and then you take off to some more secluded space for the actual hooking up part. Which can be harder or easier on an introvert, depending on what kind of “social gathering” it is.

Never had a cup of coffee, a meal out alone or at home with nor a movie, a play, a concert, etc, with either of them?

not before we were already an exclusive couple, at which point I believe it’s not called “dating” anymore. Before that, most of the socializing was in groups; it’s only when we decided to have relationships that we started peeling off from the groups and spending extended periods of time one-on-one.

Anyway, you’re just playing into the American stereotype that a successful marriage is based on the foundation of the dating experience

I’ve absolutely no clue what the fuck that means. Are seriously claiming that my marriage failed because i didn’t “date”? lol

and incidentally, I don’t feel “smug” about this any more than I feel smug about the McDonaldization of the globe. Some parts of American culture simply are more fraught than in other places (and some others are more fraught elsewhere), no reason to get pissy about it. Ther eis no american exceptionalism, you really don’t need to be best at everything.

and in any case: going out to a movie or for coffee with only one person isn’t always a “date” either, or else I’ve been on a lot of “dates” with my mom. “dating” it’s a bit more than just two people socializing alone.

not before we were already an exclusive couple, at which point I believe it’s not called “dating” anymore

Nope, it’s not called dating if you’re engaged or you’ve moved in together.  You’re still dating, even if you’re only seeing each other.

That everything is a dating scene in NA was precisely my point.

Yes, that’s what you would expect where the dating culture started.  Why does that seem so horrendous to you.

politeness had fuck-all to do with it; and in the sense that both Canadians and USAmericans date, they’re very comparable. And I’m sorry, but the difference between Vancouverites and Seattleites is almost negiligible in most aspects, not just dating.

Well, Seattle and Northwest people tend to be laid-back, so I can’t see why dating in such an environment was so hellish for your Aussie friend.

knowing its origin doesn’t refute anything I said about its effects.

Duh!

Are seriously claiming that my marriage failed because i didn’t “date”?

No, I was being sarcastic.

Ther eis no american exceptionalism, you really don’t need to be best at everything.

I wish we were the best at medical care for our citizens.

Nope, it’s not called dating if you’re engaged or you’ve moved in together.  You’re still dating, even if you’re only seeing each other.

well then I guess even Americans can’t properly define what “dating” even means to them, since when I first moved here and said I’m “going on a date” while coupled up, people pointed out that you only “go on a date” when you’re single, and that I making it sound as if I’m going out with someone other than the boyfriend.

Why does that seem so horrendous to you.

I already explained that in my first post on this topic: it eats up a lot of time and energy that could be used in more entertaining and more intellectually/artistically/athletically stimulating ways, and it seems to produce a lot more (young) people who aren’t able to interact with the opposite sex on any other level, seeing everything as a means to the end of hooking/coupling up.

Well, Seattle and Northwest people tend to be laid-back, so I can’t see why dating in such an environment was so hellish for your Aussie friend.

where did you get “hellish” from? that’s not what “horrified fascination” generally means.

and incidentally, now that I think about it, I’ve not actually ever heard phrases like “I have a date”, I’m going on a date” etc. from people in relationships. They only seem to ever be uttered by singles and people in the.. uh.. trial period before deciding whether to properly couple up.  The only exception to that seems to be “date night”, which is generally used by married couples.

So I’m skeptical about your claim that “dating someone” and “being in a relationship with someone” can be used interchangeably.

English is funny like that, I guess. I mean, this is the same language where “guy” refers to a male person only but “guys” is frequently gender-neutral.

I’m “going on a date” while coupled up, people pointed out that you only “go on a date” when you’re single, and that I making it sound as if I’m going out with someone other than the boyfriend.

That’s a bit weird, this is an ordinary American using the term dating in the usual way:

I’ve Been Dating My Boyfriend for 8 Months, And He Still Won’t Tell His Family About Me

BTW, Google yields 11 million hits for the exact phrase, “Dating my boyfriend”.

I already explained that in my first post on this topic: it eats up a lot of time and energy that could be used in more entertaining and more intellectually/artistically/athletically stimulating ways, and it seems to produce a lot more (young) people who aren’t able to interact with the opposite sex on any other level, seeing everything as a means to the end of hooking/coupling up.

I’ve been in a community theater production with some young people, and they were able to interact with the opposite sex without it having to be about romance.  I think you are unduly pessimistic about dating as a whole.

You’ve never explained what was so horrifying but fascinating about her observations, so I just filled in the blanks.

Googling “dating my girlfriend” yields 12 million results.

I think you are unduly pessimistic about dating as a whole.

*shrug*
you can complain about my sample selection or my sample sizes, but the comparisons I drew unmistakably show me that Americans think of mixed-gender social interaction primarily in terms of potential to hook or couple up. This was brought to mind most recently when I went on a Paleontology dig in Poland with a bunch of college students. The lot of them were mature enough to not get weird about the fact that we were sleeping in mixed-sex “rooms” (they seemed to have been shipping crates with windows and doors, but that’s beside the point) and that the bathroom door didn’t lock. And casual conversations, even the ones which were temporarily one-on-one weren’t interpreted instantly as a come-on or flirting so that I didn’t have to work a mention of my boyfriend into every one of them as I tend to have to in the USA (a few times of a guy getting pissed at me for “wasting his time” with conversation despite the fact that I was already “taken” taught me that precaution), which is a world apart from the college students I have to deal with on a daily basis here, and was a world apart from the college students I had to deal with back in California, and the high-school students I had to deal with in Canada.

The only spaces where I’ve seen such casual mixed-gender interaction was in very marginal and “alternative” social spaces in North America.

And if I could stop being asked for private information by complete strangers, that would be nice, too. Seeing me order a coffee, or return my books to the library, is just not a good enough reason to want my phonenumber. it’s in fact fucking creepy.

you can complain about my sample selection or my sample sizes, but the comparisons I drew unmistakably show me that Americans think of mixed-gender social interaction primarily in terms of potential to hook or couple up.

It’s known as anecdata, and it’s not reliable no matter how you dress it up.

And casual conversations, even the ones which were temporarily one-on-one weren’t interpreted instantly as a come-on or flirting so that I didn’t have to work a mention of my boyfriend into every one of them as I tend to have to in the USA

Funny, I’ve never heard of an archeological dig as being considered a dating hunting ground by any American standards that I’m familiar with, so that doesn’t hold water, anecdata again.

a few times of a guy getting pissed at me for “wasting his time” with conversation despite the fact that I was already “taken” taught me that precaution

There are assholes in every culture.

which is a world apart from the college students I have to deal with on a daily basis here, and was a world apart from the college students I had to deal with back in California, and the high-school students I had to deal with in Canada.

Yes, because we all know how representative Californians are of America in general.

The only spaces where I’ve seen such casual mixed-gender interaction was in very marginal and “alternative” social spaces in North America.

I’ve seen it whilst doing 2 community theater productions with young people 1/3rd of my age or less or a little more, neither production or the theaters involved could be termed marginal or alternative social spaces.

Seeing me order a coffee, or return my books to the library, is just not a good enough reason to want my phonenumber. it’s in fact fucking creepy.

You remind me of the story of the scientists who decided to take two Englishmen and one Englishwoman, isolate them on a desert island for a year and come back to see what would happen.

They found all three living by themselves on different parts of the island.

When they asked the woman why she didn’t have activity with either of the men, she told them,

“Well, we weren’t ever properly introducted, now, were we?”

jesus, I never claimed it wasn’t anecdotes. I even stated several times that it WAS

Funny, I’ve never heard of an archeological dig as being considered a dating hunting ground by any American standards that I’m familiar with, so that doesn’t hold water, anecdata again.

and yet, all the field-trips for North American college students I’ve either been on or had classmates go on that lasted more than a day were always meticulously separating students by gender, while the students were meticulously planning to circumvent those to get some “action”.

Yes, because we all know how representative Californians are of America in general.

because California was of course the only place mentioned in that sentence, as well as the only place I’ve ever been in North America.

You remind me of the story of the scientists who decided to take two Englishmen and one Englishwoman, isolate them on a desert island for a year and come back to see what would happen.

They found all three living by themselves on different parts of the island.

When they asked the woman why she didn’t have activity with either of the men, she told them,

oh yeah; because the only two alternatives are harassing strangers for private information and Victorian-style formal introductions *rolleyes*

and yet, all the field-trips for North American college students I’ve either been on or had classmates go on that lasted more than a day were always meticulously separating students by gender, while the students were meticulously planning to circumvent those to get some “action”.

And that period of time makes it true today and forever more.

Okay.

California was of course the only place mentioned in that sentence, as well as the only place I’ve ever been in North America.

I don’t know about Canada, like I said.

because the only two alternatives are harassing strangers for private information and Victorian-style formal introductions *rolleyes*

Nope, it’s a joke not meant to be taken seriously, and you’re the first person I’ve heard who calls the American custom of asking for a phone number as ‘harassing strangers for private information’.

BTW, you still going to tell me that people don’t date boyfriends or girlfriends in America, or is that something that only happens in Canada?

She really is a powerful writer. It’s rare to find people with such banal minds who can write well. I used to enjoy her writing when I was in high school, before I started to use my head a little.

Americans think of mixed-gender social interaction primarily in terms of potential to hook or couple up.

I can’t argue with that. In dating as in everything else, we are distressingly goal-oriented.

Dark Avenger, I’d highly suggest you stop making so many assumptions and actually just read what I write. Among those assumptions: that the “period of time” is not “now”; that I was talking about Canadians when I referred to the apparently idiosyncratic meaning of “dating” that people around me use; that I claimed something that’s true today and has been so for the last 10 years in various US locations will be true forever.

And I’m sorry if you don’t think asking someone you don’t know, and have never spoken to before, for their contact information isn’t a form of harassment. Maybe you are part of the problem I’ve described then, where everyone everywhere is a potential target for one’s sexual/romantic attentions.

and in any case: surprisingly few of my acquaintances have a hard time understanding the concept of “dating” I’ve complained around here. Idiosyncratic use of the word notwithstanding, it’s rather difficult to deny the existence of this… trial period in which two people already take the step of agreeing to spend a more-or-less predetermined length of time interacting only with each other, before they ever know whether there’s any sexual or romantic interest (or sometimes even whether there’s any interest beyond the visual aesthetics of the other person), but before they can be officially considered an actual couple. It’s this constant meeting for what my friend called interviewing of potential interests, regardless of what you wish to call it, that I’ve complained about here.

Dark Avenger, I’d highly suggest you stop making so many assumptions and actually just read what I write. Among those assumptions: that the “period of time” is not “now”; that I was talking about Canadians when I referred to the apparently idiosyncratic meaning of “dating” that people around me use; that I claimed something that’s true today and has been so for the last 10 years in various US locations will be true forever.

Except that a Google search demonstrates that the usages of the last 10 years isn’t the same as your ‘idiosyncratic’ definition, the data doesn’t support your assertion.

And I’m sorry if you don’t think asking someone you don’t know, and have never spoken to before, for their contact information isn’t a form of harassment.

It’s an American custom, and I’m sorry if you think that American men and women who practice it are harrassers when they do so.

surprisingly few of my acquaintances have a hard time understanding the concept of “dating” I’ve complained around here.

I could take a poll amongst my friends and acquaintances and get the opposite result.

Your point is?

trial period in which two people already take the step of agreeing to spend a more-or-less predetermined length of time interacting only with each other, before they ever know whether there’s any sexual or romantic interest

There must be some sort of initial attraction or interest before someone asks someone out on a date, unless it’s a blind date, IMHO.

It’s this constant meeting for what my friend called interviewing of potential interests, regardless of what you wish to call it, that I’ve complained about here.

A date is suppose to be where you get to know the person better, find out what they like and dislike, see if you get along, and see if the two in question can have some fun together.

After a few dates, although I don’t subscribe to the ‘kiss by the third date or no more dates’, it should be clear whether or not there is a mutual attraction or not, if there is, then the dating wasn’t in vain.

Of course, I can see how an academician from another country would like to think that dating is just another barbaric, soulless institution, like Wal-Mart, NASCAR racing, the NFL or Mitt Romney, but it isn’t, I’m not saying it’s great for everyone around the world, but we seem to do fine by it.

For what it’s worth, jadehawk, as an American young adult who’s lived in the U.S. her entire life, I recognize exactly what you’re complaining about and I don’t get it either.

And going up to random strangers and asking for their personal information with no impetus other than “Hey look, a person of my preferred gender” is definitely creepy.

I’ve had very few male customers who could make a decision without a woman’s input. 

This is a pretty common relationship dynamic: the man acts apathetic about fashion, while the woman has stronger opinions, so both partners shop together, with the woman providing the fashion input.

Having an eye for what clothes look good on you is a skill, like anything else. And some men prefer to outsource the development and use of those skills to their girlfriend/wife.

Ah, wrong thread. I wondered where that comment went. Sorry!

Except that a Google search demonstrates that the usages of the last 10 years isn’t the same as your ‘idiosyncratic’ definition, the data doesn’t support your assertion.

you’re seriously confused. what you quoted wasn’t about the meaning of the word “dating”, it was about behavior.

It’s an American custom, and I’m sorry if you think that American men and women who practice it are harrassers when they do so.

it’s an American custom even American women often complain about. It’s a common topic in feminist conversations, this idea that all women out in public are fair targets and that a woman often won’t be left alone to go about her business without some guy butting in unasked. The worst version of that was a woman who said guys tend to actually take the book she’s reading out of her hand to call attention to themselves; a photographer I know complains that when she does outdoor shots, often guys feel they can just start talking at her and interrupt her work. So don’t make it sound as if I’m making it up that this is a problematic issue.

I could take a poll amongst my friends and acquaintances and get the opposite result.
Your point is?

the point is that the phenomenon I describe exists (hell, thecynicalromantic right there understands what I’m talking about), regardless of whether you’ve noticed; other people have noticed.

There must be some sort of initial attraction or interest before someone asks someone out on a date, unless it’s a blind date, IMHO.

pay attention. I said that, but often that “initial attraction” is simply optical aesthetics, AKA “she/he’s hot!” That’s not much.

A date is suppose to be where you get to know the person better, find out what they like and dislike, see if you get along, and see if the two in question can have some fun together.
After a few dates, although I don’t subscribe to the ‘kiss by the third date or no more dates’, it should be clear whether or not there is a mutual attraction or not, if there is, then the dating wasn’t in vain.

No fucking shit. Except where arranged marriages happen, everywhere in the world people tend to need to get to know each other better before coupling up. But only in North America do people do so by ritualistic pairing up and spending long stretches of time alone with a near-stranger (or, as noted above, a complete stranger one simply found physically attractive enough), a method far more time and energy consuming (and emotionally fraught, but I blame that more on commercializing romance a-la valentine’s day) than the alternative methods used in other parts of the Western world, and one that seems to produce too many people incapable of dealing with the sex/gender they’re attracted to in ways not related to sex/dating. That was my point. But congratulations on arguing so much about it without ever getting it.

For what it’s worth, jadehawk, as an American young adult who’s lived in the U.S. her entire life, I recognize exactly what you’re complaining about and I don’t get it either.

And going up to random strangers and asking for their personal information with no impetus other than “Hey look, a person of my preferred gender” is definitely creepy.

thanks, thecynicalromantic.

what you quoted wasn’t about the meaning of the word “dating”, it was about behavior.

I demonstrated that there was plenty of usage of ‘dating’ in talking about what people do even after someone they’ve dated became their boyfriend/girlfriend.

But only in North America do people do so by ritualistic pairing up and spending long stretches of time alone with a near-stranger (or, as noted above, a complete stranger one simply found physically attractive enough), a method far more time and energy consuming (and emotionally fraught, but I blame that more on commercializing romance a-la valentine’s day) than the alternative methods used in other parts of the Western world, and one that seems to produce too many people incapable of dealing with the sex/gender they’re attracted to in ways not related to sex/dating.

Um, dates usually take place over the course of one evening per date, and of course, that doesn’t count talking on the phone between dates, it’s only a few hours, not a long stretch of time like 12 hours or so with a ‘complete stranger’.  Also, is it too much to note that this system produced your ex-hubby and your current boyfriend, (unless they were products of arranged marriages, or both sets of parents came from other parts of the civilized Western world and didn’t date), so how did they escape the horrors you describe as the result of dating?

BTW, I like your ‘seems’, since you have no hard data aside from your experience, like social studies about the subject, confirmation from one person is just another form of anecdata.

Look, we’re not going to settle what method is the best one on this website, and I don’t know if you think that putting it down North American dating is going to make any converts here to your POV.

You seem to regard dating the way Agent Smith regarded Neo in the Matrix. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

BRITANNUS (shocked). Caesar: this is not proper.

THEODOTUS (outraged). How!

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

Caesar and Cleopatra, </i>George Bernard Shaw</i>

Interesting. 
“I’m dating X” meant that the person speaking and X were a couple when my mother was in HS in the 50-60s in SE coastal TX.  “I’m going on a date with X” only meant that the person speaking and X were going some place as a couple, whether or not that was a permenant arrangement. 
That was still pretty much the meaning when I was in HS in the 80s in WA and ID as well.  My daughter uses something similar even now as a late 20s single in MA.

Thank you for backing up my own research and experience on the subject, helen.

“Writers are always coming to dinner. I have no interest in them.
Before the dinner party, I swan around the kitchen while my mother cooks.” 

Caitlin Flanagan is still “swanning” around -  but she’s nowhere near the sharp, cool waters of Didion.  She’s mucking about in the Dale Peck pond -  brandishing a bloody scalp she probably knows she has not really taken. One gets the feeling Flanagan has been writing versions of this essay since she was fourteen - settling on this ‘take-down’ version as a wonderful publicity tool for the new book. Embarrassing that the Atlantic is a co-conspirator.