the feminist librarian reads

FAIL: "Deferred gratification makes sexual politics sense | Maura Kelly"

I know I shouldn’t let it get to me, but articles like this just make me SO STABBY FEELING! because they perpetuate ideas about women and men and sex and feminism and humanity that I find extremely harmful to the well-being of people. For example:

1) The idea, based on personal anecdotes about the author’s friends, that all women regret casual sex.

2) The idea that casual sex and long-term relationships are mutually exclusive categories.

3) The idea that casual sex = women “acting like men” (because apparently all men are into casual sex).

4) The idea that “casual” sex (which she doesn’t define) is by definition unfulfilling, loveless sex,

5) Which (have we mentioned?) makes women unhappy and regretful.

6) The idea that FEMINISM is responsible for leading women to believe they should “act like men” and have all this unfulfilling sex in the name of liberation.

7) The (shite, baseless, discredited-by-the-research) idea that women and men are innately different in what they desire in relationships and what they desire sexually, when in fact most research points toward men and women having more intra-group diversity than inter-group diversity (that is women as a group vary widely from one another, and men do as well … far more so than the two groups differ from one another as groups).

8) Stemming from #7 the idea that “women” and “men” constitute binary, oppositional sex and gender categories, erasing queer and trans* spectrum folks entirely from this narrative of female and male sexuality.

9) The idea that FEMINISM is responsible for the unhappiness of “women these days” who apparently answered the clarion call of the zipless fuck and are now regretting the loss of their market value (because all women have to offer men to catch and keep them is TEH SEX and the withholding of TEH SEX).

10) And finally — because in the end, this is really what grinds my gears — underlying all of this is a truly cynical, neoconservative, free-market libertarianism view of human relationships in which women’s value is reduced to their bodies and men are reduced to their libidos, and men are the market and women are the product. Which is just a fucking impoverished way to approach this thing we call love.

Like, man. If that’s all you want from your relationships? Some sort of exchange of goods and services rather than some sort of actual caring and friendship, sexual pleasure and reciprocity? Empathy and learning and … I don’t know, joy? Then … I guess? Go to it?

But … really? THAT is what you want to pressure your peers into seeking? THAT is how you want to encourage them to understand the world?

(thanks to jedicrow for the link; she knew it would piss me off and that I’d find some words to explain why)

Notes