“A good life is a life with a man who is unabashedly a man”, according to this group of feminists born around 1945.
December 9, 2005 at 1:04 pm | In sexe et confidences, social theory | Leave a CommentI have run into this phenomena – what a woman quoted below calls the “feminization of men” – everywhere I have been. Most recently in LA, SF, Las Vegas and NY. And I have been told it by many woman I have talked to for the last 10 years, some as young as 20, although they call it “metro-sexuality” and “general ball-less-ness”. One speculated that it was a direct result of the “end of child-rearing” that accompanied the sexual and gender revolutions that grew out of the 1960’s. That strikes me as less than a complete answer but one that is a factor no doubt.
We live a life ungrounded and atomized and more and more virtual. When I meet someone these days, they are often astonished that a man of the old-school still exists and I feel sometimes like a unicorn. I do find men – in the old-school sense of men – but not often in “global” cities. I find them in the country and off the main stream of high culture and high technology. They are often 1st or 2nd generation immigrants and bear the more traditional cultural values.
For me, this is a shared dilemma. I want women to have the freedoms that they have won in the last 40 years, and I want a society that coheres. And one that can raise children who are clear as to what it is to be of one gender or the other, and what it is to a human, and how to be in an ongoing intimate relationship, and what it is to be a loving parent. And we need to find a way to raise children in 2 career families without them getting the short end of the stick in terms of the triage of their parent’s time and attention so as to allow them to have a childhood in which they are loved and cared for.
And somehow to do this so that the challenge of parenting AND having a career and a life is a collaboration. Easy to describe, hard to accomplish, worth the attempt I think.
In Scandinavia’s equality central, an antifeminist backlash? |
By Louise S. Nissen International Herald Tribune TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2005 |
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COPENHAGEN On the surface, women have never been stronger and more powerful. In the United States, the idea of a female commander in chief no longer seems so far-fetched. In some Nordic countries, almost half the members of Parliament are female. And shows like “Sex and the City” have conquered viewers worldwide with their take on equality and sex. And yet the legacy of the feminist revolution, which enabled the rise of strong women and sensitive men, is under scrutiny these days.Studies from the United States and Scandinavia, where gender equality has progressed the furthest, show that many women find it hard to fuse their high-flying careers with raising a family, and, consequently, they back down from having a professional life – some even before they’ve started one. In Sweden, for years the poster country for equality between the sexes, a new feminist party gained enormous momentum last year by objecting to the increase in violence against women and the gap between women’s and men’s salaries. This autumn, however, the feminist initiative fell into disarray after the movement embarked on a radical direction, rendering negative feelings that some have dubbed an antifeminist backlash.A similar backlash has now hit neighboring Denmark, too. Denmark is one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, where paternal leave is becoming increasingly popular and 75 percent of women have jobs. Yet in a new book, 12 prominent and influential women – artists, intellectuals and politicians – from the golden age of feminism in the ’60s and ’70s wonder whether gender-equality has gone too far. The women interviewed in “What Life Has Taught Me,” by Ninka-Bernadette Mauritson warn against “totalitarian feminism,” which they think might wreck harmony between the sexes: Men need to be men and women, women, they now say. Some of the women regret their earlier militant insistence that men should be soft and sensitive and want back the prefeminist “real man.”A good life is a life with a man who is unabashedly a man, according to this group of feminists born around 1945.Their generation spent their 20s burning bras, dumping high heels and crashing buses while paying only 80 percent of the fare – since women were paid less then. Now they say they want men with broad-shouldered attitudes, men who can admire them and whom they can look up to – even from the high heels that are back in vogue. Take the singer Trille Nielsen, for example. She achieved superstar status in the ’70s by singing “Hey Sister” with a hoarse voice. Today she says: “I’ve reached the point where I’m no longer afraid of or irritated with men who are proud of their masculinity.”
A Danish former first lady and member of Parliament, Lone Dybkjaer, dispatches her husband, the former socialist Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, to their empty, chilly summer cottage with a toolbox. There he can be a handy he-man with only birds and rustic floors to distract him. “He has a whole world of construction projects and tools,” the former first lady says with an amused smile. Earlier feminists defined freedom as dividing up all housework, which served to engage men in child care and housework and pushed women toward becoming tough professionals. But Dybkjaer concludes that “there is a freedom in having these spaces on our own. I have read men saying that they feel driven into a corner; they feel they don’t have any room at home. It’s not like that at our house. Poul takes up quite some space.” She thinks the wise woman lets her man play macho – and that only then can she be a real woman. Anne Braad, a well-known cleric in Copenhagen, thinks that she feminized her husband into obscurity and may have made him a caricature of himself. “He was womanly, approaching the motherly. There he was, shaking up the pillows in the living room, looking after the children and calling me when he wasn’t at home to make sure I had put Band-Aids on the kids.” Roles were completely switched in Braad’s marriage. “And that was a huge mistake,” she says today. Braad blames her divorce on this exchange of roles. She now suspects that she threw her husband right into the arms of a much younger woman, where his battered manhood could be restored. Other earlier feminists interviewed in the book also assert that gender equality can be stifling. “It is good to have a man you can look up too,” the actress and writer Anne Marie Helger says. And Etta Cameron, a singer, claims: “All men that we meet teach us something. If you’re wise, you accept that knowledge.” A famous feminist slogan from the ’70s said, “The private is political.” It still is, some of the feminists declare. Braad sees the equality debate today as about women wanting even more power: “Men are hardly allowed to present their points of view or raise their voices without feminists crying out.” Having listened to one woman after the other deplore differences lost in the name of freedom – it’s freeing to reach Lillian Knudsen, former head of the women’s union in Denmark. She has herself greatly improved women’s working conditions and pays more attention to what is gained than what is lost. Equal pay and equal power in public and private spheres are still distant dreams, even up here in the north. Yet in the World Economic Forum’s new gender gap index launched in May, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland ranked one through five among several nations in female economic participation and opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment and access to health care. Knudsen says she adopted “manly behavior” to reach the top and suspects that she had no choice. Her generation of women had to establish networks from those old schools, like men – to lobby, push and conduct cloakroom politics over drinks late at night – like the opposite sex, Knudsen says. And Maria Marcus, a writer and television-journalist notorious in the ’70s for a tell-all book about her masochism, says that the not-yet-subtle notions of the equality movement ravaged old ways while it infused women with new life chances: “We started raising question marks because the starting point was discontent with the roles and structure.” Another strong voice that epitomizes the feminist movement here is the writer Suzanne Brogger. In 1974 the feminist madonna, famous for her huge hats, untamability and candid statements, published the book “Free Us from Love,” which bulldozed the notions of marriage and family and was translated into 20 languages. And then she ended up in – marriage. Does Brogger want to declare the death of the soft man these days? Nope. “The thrill is gone when it comes to mating, that’s true; the electricity level is on low. But the dream of the ’strong man’s’ comeback is mere fantasy,” she asserts. Feminists knew from the start that the women’s revolt would threaten male supremacy and upset the erotic scene, even ruin it, Brogger says. “That was the price. You don’t change 2,500 years of female oppression in a summer holiday or a generation or two. We are still longing for the fully developed human potential in both men and women in all spheres of life, private and public.” And in the meantime? “Women might want – not a sentimental macho,” Brogger says, “but a bright man with a sense of humor who can make us laugh.” Louise S. Nissen is a Danish journalist and former U.S. correspondent. |
Question asked on a dating site: “What super power would make my life complete? Best answer: “The ability to understand women. :-)”
December 7, 2005 at 11:34 pm | In quotes, sexe et confidences | Leave a Commentfound this on a new and very bright geek dating site Consumation, posted by “Schubert”. It is a power that if i get it ever, i will use only for good.
one in two sexually active youths will contract an STD by age 25, with half of all new HIV-AIDS infections occurring among adolescents.
November 30, 2005 at 8:45 pm | In health, medicine, sexe et confidences | Leave a CommentThe nonprofit American Social Health Association (www.ashastd.org), in its 2005 report on challenges facing STD prevention in youth, says that one in two sexually active youths will contract an STD by age 25, with half of all new HIV-AIDS infections occurring among adolescents. While one response has been to fund more abstinence-only sex education, ASHA notes, research shows that teens who have made virginity pledges ultimately have rates of STDs similar to young adults who didn’t make such promises.
Semen makes you happy. That’s the remarkable conclusion of a study, which is bound to provoke controversy, which showed that the women who were directly exposed to semen were less depressed. The researchers think this is because mood-altering hormones in semen are absorbed through the vagina. They say they have ruled out other explanations.
November 24, 2005 at 4:00 am | In medicine, sexe et confidences | 1 CommentSemen acts as an anti-depressant
- 19:00 26 June 2002
- Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
- Raj Persaud
The study, which is bound to provoke controversy, showed that the women who were directly exposed to semen were less depressed. The researchers think this is because mood-altering hormones in semen are absorbed through the vagina. They say they have ruled out other explanations.
“I want to make it clear that we are not advocating that people abstain from using condoms,” says Gordon Gallup, the psychologist at the State University of New York who led the team. “Clearly an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease would more than offset any advantageous psychological effects of semen.”
Suicide attempts
His team divided 293 female students into groups depending on how often their partners wore condoms, and assessed their happiness using the Beck Depression Inventory, a standard questionnaire for assessing mood. People who score over 17 are considered moderately depressed.
The team found that women whose partners never used condoms scored 8 on average, those who sometimes used them scored 10.5, those who usually used them scored 15 and those who always used them scored 11.3. Women who weren’t having sex at all scored 13.5.
What’s more, the longer the interval since they last had sex, the more depressed the women who never or sometimes used condoms got. But the time since the last sexual encounter made no difference to the mood of women who usually or always used condoms.
The team also found that depressive symptoms and suicide attempts were more common among women who used condoms regularly compared with those who didn’t. The results will appear in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
And Gallup told New Scientist that his team already has unpublished data from a larger group of 700 women confirming these findings. In this study, the always-use-condoms group were more depressed than the usually-use-condoms group, suggesting the discrepancy in the smaller study was a sampling error, he says.
Alternative explanations
But is it really the semen that affects women’s mood? The researchers say they looked at alternative explanations such as whether women who seldom use condoms took oral contraceptives, how often they had sex, the strength of relationships, and the possibility that having a certain type of personality influenced the decision to use condoms. But none of these factors can explain their findings, they say.
In fact, the results aren’t a complete surprise because semen does contain several mood-altering hormones, including testosterone, oestrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinising hormone, prolactin and several different prostaglandins. Some of these have been detected in a women’s blood within hours of exposure to semen.
The question many people will ask is whether oral sex could have the same mood-enhancing effects. “Since the steroids in birth control pills survive the digestion process, I would assume that the same holds true for at least some of the chemicals in semen,” Gallup says.
“I understand that among some gay males who have anal intercourse, it is not uncommon to attempt to retain the semen for extended periods of time,” he adds. “Suggesting, of course, that there may be psychological effects.” But further research will be needed to confirm whether exposure to semen through oral or anal sex really does affect mood in heterosexual or homosexual partners.
But why should semen have such an effect? “It makes no sense to me for this phenomenon to have evolved,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. But Gallup counters that men whose semen promotes long-term mood enhancement might have more chances to indulge in sexual activity.
from UC Berkeley’s daily paper which did a survey on the best pick up lines…
November 23, 2005 at 4:40 pm | In sexe et confidences | Leave a CommentThe finalists for best pick-up line are below, by category.
Most direct:
1. “I think you should finish that beer and come home with me.”
2. “Nice shoes. Wanna Fuck?”
3. “I want to eat your pussy ’till you come all over my face and then I’ll fuck you ’till you forget your name.”
4. “I want to wrap your legs around my neck and wear you like a feeding bag.”
Best incorporation of a pun:
1. “That shirt is very becoming on you. If I were on you I’d be coming too.”
2. “Did you grow up on a chicken farm? ‘Cause you sure know how to raise cock.”
3. “Do you wash your clothes in Windex? ‘Cause I can see myself in your pants.”
Hardest not to smile at:
1. Said while eating ice cream: “Know what goes good with ice cream? Sex.”
2. “Hi, I’m Australian.”
3. “I lost my teddy bear. Can I sleep with you?”
4. “The body is 90 percent water and I’m awful thirsty.”
“And yet we love it. We love receiving it; we love giving it. Or maybe we love receiving it and we hate giving it. I’m an anomaly. I hate receiving it and I love giving it. I have never, ever gotten off from oral sex. I pride myself on giving good—no, amazing—head. But last night a guy started going down on me and I told him to stop. It just doesn’t work like that for me.” Miriam Datskovsky
November 23, 2005 at 8:13 am | In sexe et confidences | Leave a CommentSpitting, Swallowing, and Some Other Secrets
Sexplorations
This is a column I’ve been avoiding writing. It’s the column that landed the former Yale sex columnist—I refuse to say her name, I dislike her so much—on the Today show. It’s the column her parents naively discovered before they knew college sex columnists even existed. Now, my parents both know that I write a sex column—after some painful exchanges, my mother no longer reads it, and my father thankfully never bothered—but that doesn’t change anything. Let’s face it. There is nothing not dirty about oral sex. It’s someone’s penis in your mouth; it’s your tongue inside someone’s pussy. Blow jobs. Eating out. Giving head. Gross.
And yet we love it. We love receiving it; we love giving it. Or maybe we love receiving it and we hate giving it. I’m an anomaly. I hate receiving it and I love giving it. I have never, ever gotten off from oral sex. I pride myself on giving good—no, amazing—head. But last night a guy started going down on me and I told him to stop. It just doesn’t work like that for me.
Older generations are astounded at our fascination with oral sex. Newspaper, magazine, and journal articles reveal astonishment at the ease with which we give head. Writers and psychologists alike are obsessed by the way we differentiate between oral sex and sexual intercourse. A recent Columbus Alive (yes, as in Ohio) news article on the definition of oral sex put it most bluntly: “Who said Bill Clinton didn’t have a legacy?�
Here’s what these older journalists and psychologists don’t get: it doesn’t really matter whether you classify oral sex as sex or not. We still take it more lightly than sexual intercourse. For one thing (and I am by no means promoting unprotected sex), it’s safer. For another thing, it’s a stepping-stone. You can have oral sex and thereby postpone actual sex. Or you can have oral sex and get all the juices revved and oh-my-god have actual sex. Just don’t think you’re not a slut because you only give guys head and don’t fuck them.
I have to confess, part of what makes writing this column so difficult is that I haven’t ever gotten off from oral sex. And it’s not as though I haven’t had multiple people—including two long-term boyfriends—try. The gay friend I just had dinner with says that girls would kill to orgasm from actual sex, to be in my shoes. I’m not so sure. I’m at a bit of a disadvantage writing this column. Gay friend lays down the five rules of oral: 1) vampire (no teeth, although those of us more advanced may want to employ a little at times), 2) toothpaste (it’s not a tube of toothpaste, nothing’s going to come out if you squeeze it), 3) desert (you need saliva. Drink some water or chew some gum first), 4) fruit-basket (don’t avoid the boys), and 5) instrument (it takes practice—not necessarily on multiple people, though).
Then we get to the age-old dilemma: to spit or to swallow? I will never forget the moment my freshman year when I discovered that my roommate, along with a number of our other friends, always spit. I’ve never dreamed of doing anything but swallowing. If you think about it, the longer it’s in your mouth—i.e., if you spit—the more you’re going to taste it. But then again, if you’re as bad at swallowing things as I am at getting shots down without gagging, maybe you ought to spit after all. A little clean-up might be awkward enough, but a little too much gag reflex is plain too awkward.
Women are much more complicated than men. Oral sex for men—gay and straight—holds the same value. Oral sex for gay and straight women is entirely different. A friend of mine who’s been with several guys and girls confesses that you almost need a different language for discussing girl-on-girl action. It’s as intimate and requires just as much foreplay and time as it does for a straight girl, but it isn’t a stepping-stone. Straight girls are often uncomfortable with a guy going down on them; gay girls never have that concern. They understand each other, so they give each other better head. Gay guys, lesbians, and bisexuals have a serious advantage: they know what they like and can give the same to their lovers. They don’t have any of the inhibitions straight girls have. They don’t brag, as so many of my guy friends do, about their amazing oral sex skills; they know better than to be cocky. If I didn’t think pussy was so gross, I might actually be jealous.
I can’t believe I’m writing this. I don’t want you to know these things. This is my space. To be totally honest (hell, we’re already sharing secrets), I’m not sure why I’m writing this column in the first place. I’m dreading seeing my byline tomorrow morning. Maybe “dreadingâ€? is an exaggeration. More like nervous. I only know that oral sex and all its gore and glory, my frustration with my inability to get off from it and the multiple awkward moments that it has generated for me, and whatever else you might be thinking of, have to be faced. So do my secrets.
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