Rachel Simmons wrote yet another piece expressing concern that “hook-up culture” is damaging to girls, and this time, it’s actually getting taken seriously by feminist bloggers. The reason is that, unlike someone like Laura Sessions Stepp who is clearly acting out of prudery and a general disdain for the intelligence of young women, Simmons is responding to the pain she sees in the letters she gets from college aged women as an advice columnist for Teen Vogue. Simmons also has feminist values, and struggles with what she perceives as a genuine gap between her feminist ideal that states that men and women are both sexual and emotional creatures, and a torrent of mail from young women who are having sex with guys in an attempt to win them over, only to find themselves kept on a string. And more in sorrow than in anger, she concludes that commitment does happen for young women because they withhold sexual favors and only dole them out in exchange for this commitment, and that “old ways”—-while completely sexist, because they purported that men want sex and women want commitment, and there’s a tense exchange between the two, and that love is functionally transactional—-at least gave girls a card to play.
I enjoyed Kate Harding’s impassioned response, but I’m going to attack the power struggle issue that Simmons identifies with a different tactic, by talking about power itself and what creates it. I fully accept that Simmons might be perceiving a real struggle on college campuses, where many young women want boyfriends, but most young men want to keep their options open while still getting laid, and this is causing a lot of pain for young women, because they don’t get what they want, but guys get what they want. But I reject the sex-obsessed interpretation of how this struggle came to be. (Which is that young women are not sexually motivated, so they can use sex as a weapon to force commitment.) When I see such a large scale power struggle between men and women, I tend to think the reason is rarely biology, and usually socially constructed sexism. Experimenting with this starting point, I think I have a much better explanation for what’s going on: Boys have power over girls in the “hook-up culture” because boys have power over girls in a male-dominated society. And that this is true in any sexual milieu, and that Simmons commits the error of nostalgia, even when she’s trying not to, when she thinks women had more power over men in the past because they withheld sex (under duress).
Let’s start with the past and work up to the present. She leans on Kathleen Bogle, who wrote a book that is more scientific than other hook-up panic books, and much more calm, and so has been given a pass by feminists. She quotes Bogle:
Bogle opens with some downright cool history: In the first decade of the twentieth century, a young man could only see a woman of interest if she and her mother permitted him to “call” on them together. In other words, the women controlled the event.
Cut to a hundred years later: in today’s hook up culture, physical appearance, status and gender conformity determine who gets called on, and Jack, a sophomore, tells Bogle about party life at school: “Well, talking amongst my friends, we decided that girls travel in threes: there’s the hot one, there’s the fat one, and there’s the one that’s just there.” Er, we’ve come a long way, baby.
Actually, women did not control the event, as anyone who has read even a single piece of literature from the actual era of calling could tell you. The woman still had the symbolic power women have always had, which is the technical right to say no, but they had no initiation power. And men didn’t spread around courting in some socialist fashion. Just as now, back then men had the sole power to determine how much social status a single woman had by choosing whether or not to court her. Not every woman was Scarlett O’Hara, with a dozen suitors hanging off the front porch. Even then, there were “fat” ones, “hot” ones, and ones that are “just there”, and the hot ones got all the social status and all the suitors. Men controlled the social validation of women then, in a way that’s far more complete than now, because back then, being unchosen long enough meant you were left a spinster, which was even more toxic than it is now. So really, the only women with the full right to say no where the ones pre-chosen by men to have lots of options. Nowadays, women at least have the right to turn their nose up to men who have no charms, because we’re not forced to marry men we don’t like to avoid spinsterhood.
But courtship then faded into dating.
According to Bogle, in the “dating era” (just the use of the word “era” tells you where college dating has gone), men asked women on dates with the hope that something sexual might happen at the end.