just because you’re 13 doesn’t mean you’re not a dirty, dirty whore who shouldn’t be criminalized for being female and lacking morally-sanctioned options

New York magazine (yes, the same magazine Raee was complaining about last week; I read it in her kitchen yesterday while we were making hummus) has an article about a 13-year old prostitute, Lucilia, and the strange logic behind sex worker criminalization.

If Lucilia were a 13-year-old Chinese girl smuggled to New York and made to work in a Queens brothel, she would not be seen, in the eyes of the authorities, as a prostitute at all. She would be a sex slave, a victim of human trafficking, and if she had the good fortune to be discovered by the police, she would be given federal protection and shielded by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. But she’s not.

In this city, a U.S. citizen like Lucilia is seen by the law as a prostitute. The federal law technically applies, but local law- enforcement follows state law. And according to state law, she is a victim, yes—of statutory rape, since the legal age of consent in New York is 17. But since the rapist paid money for the privilege, she’s also a criminal, subject to arrest, prosecution, and incarceration, no matter how young she is.

I think it’s a really good article. It’s absolutely ridiculous that a girl barely out of junior high can be prosecuted for prostitution, as if this was just some choice she made on her own — oh, you know, instead of going to math class today, I think I’m going to go sell my body on the street. That’ll be fun..

But the article doesn’t go far enough, because what it fails to point out is that most prostitutes — 13, 18, 43 — aren’t really in the business just because they love having sex with strangers so much, and, really, they were tired of the 9-to-5 grind anyway. People don’t become prostitutes — especially the kind that are out hooking on the corners and not in some high-price escort service, which I imagine account for most prostitution arrests (easier to find, etc.) — because they have a shit-ton of options. And criminalizing people for making the best choices that they can under their circumstances in order to support themselves is just wrong. Sadly, it seems our government is not even at the point where it can contemplate the decriminalization of 13-year-old prostitutes, let alone prostitutes as a whole:

Robert J. Flores is the head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Department of Justice. He is a former Manhattan A.D.A. who now administers the federal funds that fight the sex trafficking of minors in New York. “There’s a suggestion that this is a type of prostitution,” he says. “It’s not. It’s really the commercialized rape of our children.” Yet even he backs off from anything that looks like decriminalization. “We don’t want to see child prostitution legalized,” Flores continues. “The fact that this conduct remains illegal serves as a warning for everybody, including the teenagers, that they are doing something that’s wrong.

And we wouldn’t ever want to give up a chance at moralizing for policies that actually make sense….

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Don’t worry, baby — you can’t get an STD from me; I have a popped collar.

Sometimes I feel like the powers that be delight in making younger generations seem ridiculous.

A professor of mine, Lenny Steinhorn, who wrote The Greatest Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy, complains that much of the criticism leveled at young boomers once upon a time was that “these were not serious people.” I recently saw a clip about a TV special on the lives of 25-year-old women, and Barbara Walters, interviewing the interviewer from the special, asked “Are they a serious group? Do they read newspapers? Do they care about the war in Iraq? Are they more concerned with having careers, or raising families?”

Putting aside the fact that it seems sort of silly to assume the only way to be a “serious person” is to read newspapers and follow the Iraq war, it seems by and large much sillier to think you can characterize an entire age cohort as careerist or family-oriented, serious or not serious, etc. Nonetheless, of course, the media often seem hell-bent on trying. Examples: two recent Washington Post stories dealing with issues surrounding DC-area college kids.

Now I’m a bit above this age cohort, but I find it hard to believe people have gotten drastically more ridiculous and frivolous in the past three years since I’ve been out of undergrad. This is, however, the only conclusion one could draw from these two stories.

The first is on college students and debt. Although the article points out that “the median education loan debt is nearly $20,000 for full-time students at four-year colleges,” and that tuition at Georgetown is $33,000 this year before fees and housing, it goes on to suggest that perhaps too many Georgetown students are really in debt because they are busy spending at “shops selling $200 jeans and bars mixing $15 cocktails.”

The second article is on the HPV vaccine, and why some college women are choosing not to get it. The article pretty much glosses over the fact that the shots are really expensive — $150 per shot for a 3-shot series — and that a lot of university health insurance plans don’t cover it yet. There are probably not many students who can afford the shot on their own, or without their student health insurance, and many more who may be under their parent’s insurance plans but are afraid to get the shot for fear their parents would then think they were having sex.

But reasons given in the article?

“There will always be something else out there, some other disease discovered, or a drug that doesn’t work anymore,” Kirsh says. “We’re always hearing about STDs becoming more prevalent. This is the time of our lives when we’re supposed to be carefree. Now there’s always some danger hovering above.”

Yeah, man, it’s amazing how health issues don’t really care if you’re in the blossom of youth, isn’t it? God, stop making me pay attention to things, I’m in my early 20s! I’m carefree, dammit. But it gets even better:

Some students prefer to focus on the dangers right in front of them, like the friend passed out after a party. Says Levey: “You see someone who’s wasted on alcohol or stoned on your couch. Viruses like HPV can seem minor by comparison.”

This seems like a ridculous, non-sequitar kind of comparison. How many people are ever going to find themselves in a situation where they only have once chance to get the HPV vaccine, and at the same time they have a drunk friend puking on their couch, and they have to decide, right then, which thing to pay attention to? I was going to get this vaccine, but then this guy on my couch was smoking a hookah, and I completely forgot about sexual health for the rest of my life?

Notable, of course, that the student who made the above statement was a male, who can’t get the vaccine, can’t even be tested for HPV, and is not gonna be at risk for cervical cancer if he gets it. Makes more sense why the stoned guys on his couch are gonna be much more pressing. But why is this even quoted in the article as a reason why women aren’t getting the shots?

What is interesting is some of the general sexual-politics sort of issues that a few of the college women bring up.

Some assume that hookup partners who can afford popped-collar shirts and expensive jeans are not the kind of guys who would be infected.

Really? I though everyone kind of assumed the popped-collar type of guys are gonna be the biggest STD-carriers? If only I’d know I could just stop using condoms if I start sleeping with men with more expensive pants!

Male partners are one reason protection is not more common, says GWU senior Adrian Tworecke from her perch in a wing chair at the Sigma Kappa sorority. “They’ll ask if you’re on birth control, and if you are, they’ll say they’re not going to use a condom.”

And if a woman brings up the fact that a man can be infected with HPV and pass the virus to her?

“You’re going to offend him,” Strattner says. Or, senior Mallory Kirsh says, “He’ll say, ‘Do I look like someone who would have an STI?’ It’s so hard. It makes it look like you don’t trust him.”

And obviously, trusting and pleasing your male partners is more important than worrying about your own health. I mean, they wear expensive jeans! What’s a little thing like speaking up for yourself when compared to that?

Edit: oh, goodness, I just noticed that the HPV article was written by miss Laura Sessions Stepp. It all makes so much more sense now….

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well, pulling out is still free

Check out this article about a huge hike in the cost of birth control at colleges. I direct you to it as I almost missed it entirely. It’s in the ‘Student News’ section of the Education section of today’s CNN website. Even though, per the article, 39% of undergraduate women are on oral contraception, so this affects several million people about as directly as something can affect a person. I think it’s news, but maybe that’s because it affects women of a similar age and sensibility to me. Whatever the reason, if I can muster a fair degree of outrage on topics that I’ll likely never have first-hand experience with, this is worth discussing. If you read the article, the price increase is attributed to a change in Medicaid policies, causing big drug companies to abandon the deals they used to give colleges. Since the universities themselves aren’t going to be helping out, it’s going to cost undergraduate women at least double what it used to cost to get the same prescriptions.
Which leads me to… when I was your age. Honestly, when I was an undergraduate on the pill, I didn’t know where the price break was coming from. I just knew that it didn’t cost much to maintain my lifestyle. It was a noticeable dent in one week’s drinking money and that was about it for the quarter. Money worries were confined to tuition, rent, food, books, incidentals…maybe confined isn’t the right word. But no one was panicking over the cost of the pill.
Of course, when I graduated, I bounced around to no less than 6 jobs (it’s been not quite 3 years since I was in college), and at various times I had lousy insurance, no insurance, or was just plain unemployed. I ended up paying a lot for birth control. Probably five times what I was paying on campus. But here’s the one constant, and why I’m not worried about today’s college-bound or college-enrolled women: it still beats the alternative. No one who’s committed to being childless (for however long) is going to let prescriptions lapse because it costs a little more.

A personal tip from me: where I went to school anyway, if you let a balance from the clinic (or their pharmacy) remain unpaid, they would tack it on to your tuition bill as a benign ‘medical center expense’. Maybe your parents pay that bill, or maybe you have loans. Either way, doing this about one quarter a year will ease your current out-of-pocket costs.

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68 cents for a pet penis and Drew’s still not happy with Second Life

Drew from Toothpaste for Dinner explores Second Life and is not amused:

I thought I’d poke around a little more, to see what was available. There was a place called Freebie Warehouse that I teleported to, which was full of…. cubes… with bad JPEGs on the side. You can click on the cubes and download scripts, which make you do something, or make your guy move around, or wear something. It was retarded. Imagine that every time you bought a shirt from a store, you had to install Windows on your torso. Pretty fun.

And for all the university classes offered in Second Life and entrepreneurial opportunities and girls nights out and book signings and Nancy Pelosi and Ben Folds avatars walking around, Drew finds that people really just wanna use Second Life like for what they’ve always wanted to use the Internet for: synthetic sex.

Everything in Second Life seems to be coated in a preteen’s understanding of sex. It was very titty-booby pee-pee doo-doo. From the fantasy asses to the cyber-ruins surrounding Freebie Warehouse, there really was nothing but clumsy cybersex. I wandered through this wasteland for a while, until I finally came to a normal-looking store, with windows, and people inside, so I went in.

The store sold penises, and penis avatars. I didn’t actually get to see what they looked like, because I didn’t have any fake money to spend (and I wasn’t really interested in chipping in twenty bucks to these cats’ weird sex trip.) A pet penis, which would follow you around and “come on command” (I’m guessing you have to right-click and load a script and wait thirty seconds is what they mean by “command”) was 100 fakebucks, which converted to US$0.68. Okay, that’s not bad.

If you think putting on a condom takes you out of the moment, imagine having to install a script every time …

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a chocolate heart? pshh! I wanted a virgin!

Patrick Fagan at the National Review had a piece up yesterday on why “virgins make the best valentines.” If it sounds the least bit tinged with misogynistic raciness, take out the racy part and you’ve got it right; it’s all about a good old-fashioned misogynistic-sort-of monogamy of the use-your-vagina like a venus marriage trap variety. But remember, don’t use it too much, or you will die old and alone (thankfully, he doesn’t mention cats). Lest you think this is just this dude’s opinion, he’s got Scientific Facts® to back him up, from a real live Scientific Survey. Fagan’s extra-special Science Brand Misogyny® tells us that:

A few years ago Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson of the Heritage Foundation did an analysis of the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth and found that for women 30 or older those who were monogamous (only one sexual partner in a lifetime) were by far most likely to be still in a stable relationship (80 percent). Sleeping with just one extra partner dropped that probability to 54 percent. Two extra partners brought it down to 44 percent. Who would have thought that the price of sleeping with even one partner would lead to divorce for almost half of those who had only one extra tryst?

Julian’s response made me laugh out loud:

I guess it’s possible that unmarried penis acts like some sort of malevolent magic wand, cursing those it touches to failed relationships. But the most plausible answer to Fagan’s closing rhetorical question is: “Nobody, because that’s fucking moronic.”

He goes on to offer all sorts of plausible explanations for the (dubious at best) findings, things that apparently Science Brand Misogyny® cannot take into account:

What is eminently believable is that people who have only ever had sex with their spouse display that pattern of sexual behavior as a function of a highly conservative value set that privileges the stability of a single monogamous relationship over all sorts of competing goods, and that set of values also produces a tendency to pick a partner and lock in early. (Another possibility, of course, is that both the sexual behavior and the stability reflect limited option sets: If your prospects for attracting high quality sex partners are poor, as might be reflected by limited sexual experience, then the incentive to hang on to whoever will sleep with you is higher.) But to suppose that abstinence somehow causes stability independently is just bizarre.

Radley Balko would just like to point out that the virginity study was done by Rector-Johnson.

I would just like to point out that Fagan makes being born seem like some sort-of perilous adventure (emphasis mine):

Almost a quarter of our children are aborted today, 80 percent outside of marriage, while 60 percent of those who do manage to make it alive through the birth canal eventually end up with their parents rejecting each other.

And that when Fagan’s Science Brand Misogyny® does not give him the results he wants, he just makes things up:

While 80 percent of the virgins in the Rector-Johnson study above maintained a stable relationship, 20 percent failed. That data set cannot tell us but I suspect that many of these latter virgins were foolish enough to trust themselves to a “predator”-scripted male.

Hmmmm, 20 percent of the time my results find that intact hymens are not magical yellow-brick-roads to happily-ever-after-forever-and-ever …. could that mean that, oh, my study is completely fucking bogus? Or maybe even a little bit bogus? Or maybe these results aren’t as causal as I suggest? …… Nah! It just means that 20 percent of foolish virgins picked the wrong guy, a guy whose predator-script was so ingrained that even their magical virginity powers couldn’t work against it (this is all beginning to sound vaguely harry-potter-esque to me. Harry Potter and the Magical Intact Hymen!). Now “the data set” contains no evidence about this what so ever, but that doesn’t matter …. that’s the beauty of Science Brand Misogyny®! It comes with a special kind of research tool and empirical data testing called Just Make Stuff Up. Like here, for instance:

From Steve Nock’s research on Virginia divorces, we know that roughly two thirds were initiated by the wives. Extrapolating from Rector-Johnson’s research I bet most of the wives in Nock’s sample did not come to their husbands as virgins, but before marriage were already used to rejection and rejecting and to moving on to another man.

I don’t really have any data to back up that most of the divorced Virginia wives didn’t “come to their husbands as virgins” (But mommy! I wanted the dolly without the used hymen!), but it doesn’t matter, because I’m using my special scientifically proven Just Making Stuff Up tool, Science-Brand Misogyny approved.

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links for 2007-02-01

• Dead Barbaro speaks…
  “Well, I’m dead. You happy now, motherfucker? I’m sure you thought I went somewhere else, but I hate to break it to you, chappy: I’m in horse heaven. I’m eating oats soaked in Cristal and getting my giant horse balls licked by a 20-year-old Anne B
• iPod vibrator attachment
  Ladies, I would buy this for you. I’m that kind of guy.

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collective moratorium on sex-and-the-city references, anybody?

Why does it seem that Dawn Eden is everywhere lately?

In America’s Future Foundation’s latest issue of Doublethink, Cheryl Miller interviews Eden, along with two other virginity cheerleaders I haven’t heard of before but who apparently also have wrangled book deals by spewing oh-what-have-the-radical-feminists-done-to-us rhetoric about how some combination of the “sexual revolution,” Seventeen magazine and, of course, Sex and the City, has conspired to deprive women of their natural inclinations to be housewives and endless baby incubators.

The article is called, of course, “Sexless in the City,” and opens with a nod to Carrie Bradshaw. I don’t understand why the show is still being trotted out as the be-all-end-all of deprivation and evil feminist ploys, especially since the handful of episodes I ever saw made me want to puke with their horrible stereotypical portrayals of what women must really talk and think like. But, like I said, I’m no Sex and the City expert, so I can’t really say too much about it, except how long has this fucking show been off the air? You’d think the anti-sex-brigade could at least find a timelier scapegoat. Grey’s Anatomy, for instance, has plenty of pre-marital, extra-marital, casual sex; Meredith Grey is always involved in multiple sexual relationships at once! Or what about Desperate Housewives? Boston Legal? Perhaps, as a commenter at Feministe recently said, all the conservative ire really does stem from the fact that the show has the word “sex” in the title.

The whole AFF interview with Eden is just … bizarre. It begins with a rolling stone style first-person interview account of Dawn’s attire and love of tape recorders:

I’m running late for my interview with New York Daily News editor and blogger Dawn Eden at Japonica, a hip sushi bar in Greenwich Village. I finally make it to the door and take a quick look around. I spot her immediately. She’s wearing a feather boa, a black leather cap and some sparkly silver jewelry — a get-up I recognize from pictures on her blog, The Dawn Patrol. When I sit down and take out my ancient Sony tape recorder, she coos over it: “I just love seeing an old-fashioned cassette recorder.” She is not at all what you would expect a Christian author who has just finished a book about the virtues of chastity to be like.

… then delves into the requisite Dawn-used-to-sleep-with-rock-musicians and-loves-60s-music background, as Dawn complains about being pigeon-holed as being “too-far-right,” while she compares Planned Parenthood to Nazi eugenicists and gay marriage proponents to Mussolini.

The other two women interviewed in the article, Carol Liebau and Jennifer Marshall, actually seem a bit more level-headed, and Sex and the City is hardly discussed at all throughout the piece, so, again, why the need to bring it up in the title/lead paragraph, I don’t know. It’s almost like the requisite I-don’t-want-to-think-of-a-hook-to-write-about-anything-having-to-do-with-women-sex-feminists-christians-etc-so-I’ll-just-insert-a-line-about-carrie-bradshaw thing to do, I suppose.

Anyway, I’ve discovered Dawn Eden’s latest protégé, who touts herself as The Unlikely Feminist, “a conservative-bleeding-heart-pro-life-feminist-catholic-emo-loving-cynical-hopeless-romantic-vegetarian,” who is “defining the next wave with compassion … because contrary to popular opinion, we don’t all come from the same mold.”

In her latest post, “unlikely feminist” writes:

… my roommate and I were watching Sliding Doors the other night and I found this quote particularly amusing:Gerry, I’m a woman! We don’t say what we WANT! But we reserve the right to get pissed off if we don’t get it. That’s what makes us so fascinating! And not a little bit scary. (Lydia)

Sigh. I know I’m sounding kind of feminism-police-y here, but, geez … using one of your first blog posts to quote a horribly stereotypical movie line about how women are mysterious flighty creatures who don’t say what they want but expect men to know and that’s the glory of womanhood does not exactly scream breaking the mold, or whatever it is she’s going for.

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porn is going to bring Blu-ray to its knees

Ever since Blu-ray discs came out, I’ve been wondering when Blu-ray discs were going to go away. It looks like the porn industry is going to handle that for us, and all we’ll have to do is purchase and watch porn as per usual.
A time is coming, if it hasn’t already for you, when DVDs will be phased out by one of two technologies: HD DVD or Blu-ray. There’s not really a choice in the matter. The next time you buy a player, it will likely be one of these with backward compatibility for all of your DVDs (the PS3 has this). The difference between the two is negligible in a lot of people’s minds; they’re also both the same size as a CD or DVD, so the visual appeal shouldn’t play any part. Blu-ray is the more impressive of the two based on storage and performance. There are specs on the Wiki sites that I don’t entirely understand but Blu-ray is the clear winner in technological terms. It would still be up in the air if not for the worst thing about Blu-ray: it was developed and is being marketed by Sony.
Sony does not want any part of the billion dollar porn industry. Digital Playground, for example was ready to make the switch to Blu-ray last year, but apparently Sony does not want its technology used in what it sees as a seedy, undesirable market. HD DVD doesn’t care who you are as long as you have money. Digital Playground is now producing titles in HD DVD. Soon enough so will all of the other largest porn distributors, and within a couple of years you’ll be hearing ‘Blu-ray’ only as a punchline on late night TV.
If you think that’s an overreaction, I will call your attention to the late 1970s into the 80s when Sony drove Betamax into the ground in under 10 years. Just as with Blu-ray, they had proprietary ownership of the technology. Betamax lost against a lesser opponent, VHS, simply because JVC (who developed the VHS technology) allowed other manufacturers to make players and didn’t try to limit what would be available for viewing. We’ve often heard about home players ushering out the age of the X-rated theater, but it is not often noted that none of those VCRs were Betamax. Had I known that my whole life, I would have understood long ago the VHS or Beta conundrum.
On a side note, I think the name Blu-ray is detrimental too. The disc is named after the light wave that reads it? It’s a little too ‘sharks with laser beams on their heads’ to sound like anything but a weapon. I can see a villian menacingly saying, “Get me the Blu-ray.” Companies should learn, the public at large loves abbreviation. In the future, I am putting all of my money behind whichever technology uses initials.

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… although i do remember being disturbed by the jiggling blue rubber dildo this woman placed next to me at the student health center

From Mona Charen’s book review of a new book on “campus hook-up culture:”

American campuses are, for the most part, laboratories of liberalism. You want an abortion. No problem.

That’s funny — I’ve been to two colleges myself, and visited my friends on countless other college campuses, and I seem to have missed the free-for-all abortion laboratories. Maybe it’s because I’ve always opted out on the campus tours, but you’d think they’d at least put it on the campus map somewhere?

The whole thing is frustratingly ludicrous.

Unprotected

is a hard slap at the sexual free-for-all that prevails on American campuses and throughout American life. The author, revealed since publication as Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist at the student health service at UCLA, was hesitant to put her name on this book. The orthodoxy within the academic world is a strict one and those who transgress often pay with their jobs.

What does Dr. Grossman believe that is so dangerous to admit? Well, start with ordinary sex. She believes that casual, promiscuous sex is tough on many women. They are hard-wired to bond with those they have sex with (the hormone oxytocin is implicated) and she sees countless female students reporting stress, eating disorders, even depression for reasons they cannot understand.

In related what-will-those-crazy-liberal-college-campuses-come-up-with-these-days news, oh my god! people teach classes about blacks and queers and commies!

At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn’t include “race, class and gender” among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on “cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion” during the age of the Bard.

Now let’s just get back to classes that only focus on white men, like it should be. While we’re at it — why are we even sending women to college in the first place? As Mona from above points out, on college campuses, “No effort is spared to teach young people about the dangers of smoking, saturated fat, “unsafe sex,” and even osteoporosis. But no one tells young women that if they want to be mothers they would do well to plan their careers around the unavoidable biological fact of declining fertility after age 35.”

I would say more, but anything I’ve got would pale in comparison to this and this.

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links for 2007-01-04

• Flirting | Don’t misunderestimate yourself | Economist.com
  Women, apparently you won’t talk to me because you’re put off by my god-like sex appeal. It’s okay. I get that a lot. But if you won’t talk to me I’ll never get to leave you.
  (tags: psychology science relationships dating sex evolution)

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Your grandma in the backseat of a 57 Chevy

A study released yesterday by the Guttmacher Institute finds that premarital sex is “nearly universal” among Americans, and has been since the 1950s.

The vast majority of Americans have sex before marriage, including those who abstained from sex during their teenage years, according to “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003,” by Lawrence B. … Further, contrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, the study shows that even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage.

The new study uses data from several rounds of the federal National Survey of Family Growth to examine sexual behavior before marriage, and how it has changed over time. According to the analysis, by age 44, 99% of respondents had had sex, and 95% had done so before marriage. Even among those who abstained from sex until age 20 or older, 81% had had premarital sex by age 44.

I think the above paragraph makes it a little unclear … 95 percent of 44-year-olds had pre-marital sex? What about, say, 18-year-olds? If they haven’t had sex yet, would they be counted as not having pre-marital sex, although they could very well have sex between now and the time they get married? Or did the study only measure those over a certain age? I suppose I could find all this out, but I’m not going to.** Suffice to say, a whole hell of a lot of people are fucking before marriage, and they have been for a while, despite conservative nostalgia fantasies about the 1950s.

The whole thing got me thinking, however, about premarital sex in general, I suppose. And here’s a question I’d love to hear more people’s thoughts on: does having sex early on in a relationship lead to a more egalitarian arrangement?

Almost all of my long-term relationships pretty much started out with sex. I didn’t word that right, exactly – what I mean to say is not that we were having sex and then started dating because of it, but that once we liked each other, the whole sex thing shortly followed. And I think this stems from my intense dislike for the intricacies of the whole will-we-or-won’t-we process in the early dating stages. I have no patience for it.

Now I’m not saying that it’s good for ALL dating couples to shack up right away. There are a lot of good reasons why either party might not be ready to get sexual until a certain point in the relationship (health issues, safety issues, trust issues, a sort of mutually-agreed-upon prolonging-the-anticipation, perhaps). But I think all too often, girls/women say no out of some sense that its the proper thing to do until a certain threshold of time has been passed (or money has been spent), even if they would, otherwise, be down with having sex. This leads to what Amanda at pandagon so brilliantly refers to “hide the bunny.” Women withold, guys woo, back and forth until the female feels that a suffiicient amount of time/money/effort has been spent that can justify her “giving it up,” so to speak (a term which is in itself commodifying).

The problem is that this sets up, from the very beginning, an unequal situation. From the onset, its a woman as commodity, male as purchaser situation. And once a relationship has been set up as such, I think it’d be hard to overcome, even with all other things being equal. The relationship has been founded on terms that are inherently un-egalitarian. It also plants the idea that sex isn’t something that should be mutually enjoyed by both members of a couple, but rather some sort of weird tool used to obtain power, etc.

On the other hand, if people just have sex when they want to have sex and don’t worry about whether its the proper time or not, then it sort of sets up sex as a mutually gratifying thing, and avoid that whole messy buying/selling scenario. If either party isn’t ready to have sex, fine. But if you’ve got a situation where someone wants to but is holding out in order to see how high the offer will go, then … well, I just don’t understand.

(and please don’t tell me it’s because of evolutionary psychology)

** Okay, Washington Post clarifies: By age 20, only 12 percent of people interviewed had married, but 77 percent had sex, and 75 percent had sex before marriage. By age 44, 99 percent of people were no longer virgins, 95 percent reported having had premarital intercourse, and 85 percent had married at some point.

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