"My older sister once told me about 'Finals Friends With Benefits,' people you had sex with only during finals week to deal with the stress of exams."

"I never thought I would be the type until I asked Kam over on the last day of winter classes, and soon 'Want to take a study break?' became the sexiest of booty calls. Kam asked me if I wanted to watch a TED talk he had been assigned as homework...."

The ellipsis marks the place in a NYT "Modern Love" column where I had to stop and laugh. Something about the combination of "sexiest" and watching a TED talk. And it gets even unsexier. The TED talk is Malcolm Gladwell on the topic of marketing. If you do continue reading, you'll find that the author Sophie Dillon — "a junior at Yale" — uses Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on marketing to explain different labels for sexual relationships. There's a "wide spectrum" that goes from "single, talking, friends with benefits, hookup buddies (all physical, no friendship), cuff (a temporary, reliable cuddle buddy for wintertime, when it’s too cold to go out and meet people, a special favorite of Northeasterners), exclusively hooking up (all physical with the same partner), dating, and then the finish line: 'in a relationship.'"

In the end, the young woman wants "a relationship" with Kam (a male), and after a drunk friend calls Kam "a coward" for not being willing to call what they have "a relationship" and she realizes she's "scared" to confront him about it, she finally confronts him with "Are we going to do this thing? Or does he want to chicken out?" Notice all the fear words.

Anyway, they end up at the so-called "finish line," "in a relationship."

Now, why doesn't this NYT column have a comments section? Young Sophie must be protected from the mean things people might say. Speaking of fear. But what is there to say about this? I have 6 things:
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"But more and more research reveals that though the thought of a smart woman is appealing to men..."

"... a real, live smart woman standing in front of them is actually a turnoff."

Abstractions are more appealing than particularities. It's easy to think of "smart" as a positive characteristic, but any given smart person is likely to have used that smartness to arrive at other characteristics that are going to complicate the good. But the study in question never confronts the men with women who actually are smart, so my theory wasn't tested. The men were just told that the women had done better on a test, so the study only looked at the abstraction and what effect it had on the minds of men when they were not confronted with meeting a woman and when they were. In real life, you meet people and you don't know how smart they are. You become aware as you get to know the person as an individual, with all their characteristics, and if they are smart, you only figure that out as you're also seeing what they do with their intelligence, whether they show off, condescend, and seek advantage or whether they're modest, ethical, and interested in other people.

"Like any self-respecting individual would, I found this to be a massive, painful, bitchy slap in the face."

"To be invited to such a waste of time was the biggest insult I’ve received in a good few years. It implies I have an insufficient understanding of what does and does not constitute consent and that’s incredibly hurtful. I can’t stress that enough."

Said the U.K. college student, who posed for a picture holding a "This is not what a rapist looks like sign."



I don't find the sign very convincing. Why would a rapist look a particular way? Rapists smile for photographs. Rapists wear shirts and sweaters. Rapists can be young white men. Rapists deny that they are rapists. Anyway, I'm willing to assume the anti-rape training session was long, tedious, and pitched at a low intellectual level. But "massive, painful, bitchy slap in the face"? The "biggest insult ... in a good few years"? "Incredibly hurtful"? To be fair, perhaps the training session was too successful in teaching him how to be super-sensitive. I hear the old REM track playing, everybody hurts.

I'm reading this over at Think Progress, where the headline is "Male Student Says He Doesn’t Need To Be Taught Not To Rape. Here’s Why He’s Wrong." First, I'd like to say that I find there to be something microaggressive about headlines like "Here’s Why He’s Wrong." So controlling. I feel stifled. Why not "Here's why I believe he's mistaken"? Acknowledge the existence of other people and their perspectives. It's taking me a while to settle down and read this column, which was written by a woman named Casey Quinlan.

[George] Lawlor asserts that he doesn’t “look like a rapist.” But what, exactly, does that mean? Lawlor never describes what a rapist should look like. 

That was my reaction too.

And, unlike the stereotype that sexual predators are strangers who jump out of the bushes, most rapists are actually people who the survivor trusted or at least knew....

Good point. 

Plus, despite the fact that Lawlor assumes most students know what consent is — even in what he calls “nuanced situations where consent isn’t immediately obvious” — the evidence suggests that college students aren’t entirely aware.

True.  But Quinlan doesn't take account of how long the training session was or how patronizing. I don't know either, but Lawlor's original blog post is available. It's called "Why I don’t need consent lessons," which suggests that he'd object even to a short presentation on a sophisticated intellectual level. Lawlor, "summoned to this year’s 'I Heart Consent Training Sessions,'" was "overcome by anger." The idea of any training at all — not just tedious, patronizing training — made him so mad he was overcome. To be overcome is to be defeated, as if by an enemy in battle. That's the nature of his anger. That's a mental state at odds with the simpering image in the photograph.

Let me explain, I love consent. Of course people should only interact with mutual agreement, but I still found this invitation loathsome. Like any self-respecting individual would, I found this to be a massive, painful, bitchy slap in the face. To be invited to such a waste of time was the biggest insult I’ve received in a good few years. It implies I have an insufficient understanding of what does and does not constitute consent and that’s incredibly hurtful. I can’t stress that enough.

Oh! For the first time, I realize that his intense reaction was to not to a long, patronizing training session, but to the invitation. He objects, strongly, to any training at all, including anything about the subtleties of consent:

I also know about those more nuanced situations where consent isn’t immediately obvious as any decent, empathetic human being does. Yes means yes, no means no. It’s really that simple. 

So it's nuanced... and yet it's really simple? Isn't it possible that the training session would open up some complexities that you hadn't thought about? Do you really know how drunk or nearly drunk your partner is allowed to be before you're doing something wrong?

... The only people who’ll turn up will be people who (surprise, surprise) already know when it’s okay to shag someone. No new information will be taught or learned....

Self-appointed teachers of consent: get off your fucking high horse. I don’t need your help to understand basic human interaction. 

If you don't go to the session, you don't know that you won't learn something and you don't know how "basic" the information will be. And why so angry? Why use the word "shag" and "fucking" in this context?

Next time you consider inviting me or anyone else to another bullshit event like this, have a little respect for the intelligence and decency of your peers. You might find that’s a more effective solution than accusing them of being vile rapists-in-waiting who can only be taught otherwise by a smug, righteous, self-congratulatory intervention.

Again, why is this man so angry? The invitation was to the "I Heart Consent Training Sessions." Where is the accusation that he's a "vile rapists-in-waiting" or that those leading the sessions are "smug, righteous, [and] self-congratulatory"? How does he know the event is "bullshit"?

Now, maybe this exaggerated language is his idea of satire. And maybe he's trying to give back the kind of rhetoric he feels he's heard from the anti-rape activists and the point is to crank up other students and get them into the mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore mode.

I'm done reacting to this character. What do you think?

"Or maybe your soul is telling you that sex is supposed to mean something, that, in fact, sex is supposed to be the accompaniment of love — the type of love that commits for a lifetime."

"Could be that your soul is sane in a culture that is not."

That's the top-rated comment at a NYT "Modern Love" column by a young woman named Ali Rachel Pearl who's trying to understand why she hasn't had sex in 2 years:

Maybe my secondary abstinence...

Secondary abstinence is abstinence by someone who has been sexually active in the past.

...  isn’t in allegiance to God but to my own broken heart and the fear that seems to produce a kind of magnetic repellant [sic] whenever I come close to someone I desire.

My friends don’t seem to understand my secondary abstinence. They ask if I’ve had sex yet. “How can you go so long?” they ask. “I can’t imagine.” They say: “You have to lower your standards.” “Go to the bar more.” “Join a dating website.” “Make really good eye contact.” “Get rid of your hang-ups.” “Be more open.” “Stop being afraid.” “It’s just sex,” they say. “You have to stop refusing to sleep with people just because you don’t immediately want to marry them.”...

Every night that I go to a concert or a party, every day that I walk around the neighborhood, I find my secondary abstinence trailing me like a sad ghost or an unwanted dog.

"If I read it right, you start out scared to talk to women, you learn all these techniques and score a lot..."

"... and then... you meet this woman for whom none of it works and you fall in love and swear off your player ways."/"Yes that’s exactly it, " says Neil Strauss. "Obviously I was a journalist, this community [of pickup artists] already existed, and I went in to describe my experience of it. But because no one had even heard of this world, and the techniques, let’s face it, are so objectifying and horrifying, that the book became the bible of what it was trying to chronicle in a more neutral way. So I think all of a sudden there were these horrid ideas that people read about in The Game and ... The Game became the origin of those ideas...."

The supposedly reformed Mr. Strauss proceeds to blame mothers, saying that what he and Robert Greene ("The Art of Seduction") and Tucker Max all have in common is:

We all have narcissistic mothers. So what happened? What happens when you grow up with your identity being squashed by this mother who never sees you but only sees herself, is you grow up with a fear of being overpowered by the feminine again....

He's still overpowered, in his mind, if he needs to say that. Picture it. His mother exists, and he's telling the world she "squashed" him and only saw herself. Who's squashing here and who's only seeing himself?

"Does this article say anything I couldn't just easily guess?"

I ask Meade after he sends me a link to a MarketWatch article titled "Why men are threatened by smart women/A new study suggests men might not want to date women who are smarter than them."

He says "no," but then explains that it connects to the themes that have been raised on the blog recently. He perceives the article as advice aimed at men, advice that resembles the kind of advice that's been aimed at women over the years. He's read the article. I haven't. So I was skeptical: "Is this really aimed at men?" At the headline level, it looks like more massage for the female mind, and I'm tempted to translate the title uncharitably to: Why men avoid you: You're smart! A new study suggests that the men who don't want you are not good enough for you.

Okay, now I've read the article. In the study, men were prepped for an encounter with a woman by being told that the woman scored higher than he did on an intelligence test. The men then met the woman and judged her to be relatively unattractive.

MarketWatch asked psychologists about how men can overcome bias (if they have it) against smart women.

This supports Meade's perception that it's advice for men. (It is, at least, if you get all the way to the last 3 paragraphs of a 13 paragraph article.) One psychologist tells men to focus on "appreciating" the woman and to "realize that this is an issue with your own self-esteem." Another psychologist says men could try to become more intelligent and to concentrate on other "areas of your self-concept."

This article was really aimed at...

Men, and it worked rather well.

Men, but men aren't going to listen to this.

Women, of course. Seeming to talk to men is an effective angle in talking to women.

Women, but it may lose them by failing to be all about them.

Both! Men who want to work on their flaws and women who want to help them.

 

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"And then I saw you. You'd taken shelter under the balcony of the Old State House. You were wearing a teal ball gown..."

"... which appeared to me both regal and ridiculous. Your brown hair was matted to the right side of your face, and a galaxy of freckles dusted your shoulders. I'd never seen anything so beautiful.... We sat at the counter of that five and dime and talked like old friends.... After an hour or so, I excused myself to use the restroom. I remember consulting my reflection in the mirror. Wondering if I should kiss you, if I should tell you what I'd done from the cockpit of that bomber a week before, if I should return to the Smith & Wesson that waited for me. I decided, ultimately, that I was unworthy of the resuscitation this stranger in the teal ball gown had given me, and to turn my back on such sweet serendipity would be the real disgrace. On the way back to the counter, my heart thumped in my chest like an angry judge's gavel, and a future -- our future -- flickered in my mind. But when I reached the stools, you were gone. No phone number. No note. Nothing.... I'm an old man now, and only recently did I recount this story to someone for the first time, a friend from the VFW. He suggested I look for you on Facebook. I told him I didn't know anything about Facebook, and all I knew about you was your first name and that you had lived in Boston once...."

From a lovely piece in Craigslist's "Missed Connections," about a missed connection that happened way back in 1972 (via Jaltcoh).

It called to mind the little speech by an old man in "Citizen Kane," explaining what old men remember:

One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in... and on it, there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on - and she was carrying a white parasol - and I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all - but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.

I think a lot of old men read my blog. Sometimes I blog about what women are wearing and they crowd into the comments to say that it would never occur to them to think about what dress a woman had on....