‘Gender-neutral housing’ may sound like a good, politically correct-sounding idea, but a majority of American adults aren’t buying it.
A survey released by Rasmussen Reports finds that 71% of American adults oppose Rutgers University’s announcement to designate dormitories in which “male and female students can choose to live together as roommates on floors with co-ed rooms and bathrooms.”
Only 45% of adults under 30 oppose the plan. The other 55% probably haven’t seen what a male can do to a bathroom!
With the traditionally romantic Valentine’s Day comes one of Radical Feminism’s worst, annual assaults on women: the Vagina Monologues.
Marketed to college students primarily as a way of ‘ending violence against women’, Eve Ensler’s dehumanizing, male-bashing porn play does violence TO the majority of American women who don’t care to define themselves as mere sexual organs and playthings.
Radical feminists, Women’s Studies faculty, and the Jane Fonda Hollywood crowd love the play for its shock value. Laughably, these useful idiots are the first to make a scene if a man even suggests that women are sex objects, yet the last to recognize that every scene in the play projects — in overtly vulgar and degrading terms — that exact Neanderthal image of women.
You don’t have to see the play to form an opinion. Take a quick look at the 10 “Facts vs. Fallacies” compiled by the Luce Institute to see if you can spot any redeeming features in the play.
Ensler tried to move the play into the mainstream of local community theaters with very little success – wiser women don’t buy what she’s selling. So she relies on the college campus to keep her distorted sexual and political dreams alive.
Valentine’s Day is a month away, so if you’re a student disgusted by this play’s concept, have a little fun this year. Plan a couple of counteractive Valentine Day projects, or nail up a few posters, of your own on campus, and have a happy, real woman-empowering Valentine’s Day.
Virginia Ironside was a 17-year-old in 1961 when the birth control pill was first licensed in Britain. She chronicles the ugly side of the swinging 60s sexual revolution for women in a UK Daily Mail article.
Virginia Ironside at age 20
The culture shock:
In the 50s, sex was completely taboo. At Woman magazine, where I worked a decade later, the journalists weren’t ever allowed to use the word ‘bottom’ – not even in ‘bottom of the garden’ or ‘bottom of the saucepan’. They couldn’t print the word ‘menstruation’…
…we’d been brought up to say ‘no to sex, but the only reason for that was because we might get pregnant. And if we’d got pregnant then of course we might have been thrown out of our parents’ home, or forced to give the baby up for adoption. Before the law changed in 1967 there were abortionists around, but they were illegal, and you couldn’t go to one without paying a lot of money in used notes to a dodgy doctor off Harley Street.
It was a ‘man’s world’:
If you can imagine emerging from this repressed background into the swinging 60s, equipped with a contraceptive pill that had only recently become the hugely popular and completely reliable form of birth control, you can also imagine how ill-prepared we all were for what was to follow.
Register before Nov. 1 for this annual conference at Princeton University on November 12 & 13.
It begins Friday (8 pm) with “Friends with Benefits or the Benefits of Friends? The fall of friendship in the hookup culture and the need for its restoration to relationships.”
Saturday’s fare includes “Masculinity and the Real Man” and “Feminism and Femininity,” breakout sessions for students and faculty, and an expert Q&A panel.
Love & Fidelity Network’s third annual conferencelooks to be a good one.
This is an interesting question worth exploring. A paperback novel I’m reading contained this line by the male protagonist (paraphrased):
Why is it that some women can look sexy whether they are wearing a bikini or a raincoat down to their ankles?
Is it attitude? Carriage? Confidence? Or that and more?
artschoolnerd had this comment in an earlier post:
Sexy is how you carry yourself. It’s confidence. The skimpiest halter top in the world won’t turn any heads if the girl wearing it cowers or is apprehensive. When you remember someone sexy, it’s usually not what they wear or look like, it’s what they did and how they did it.
What they did and how they did it. That’s an interesting observation. Examples, anyone?
Is mystery a part of the sexy equation? Projecting a message that translates I have worth … I know who I am … and you can only guess ALL that I am and have to offer?
If so, does sexy become slutty when the mystery is removed from the equation? You, too, can know all that I am … and judge for yourself the worth of who I am and what I have to offer?
Jessica Grose at Slate.com pens an interesting piece on the shame cycle women feel after pursuing a life of casual sex. Feminist authors Julie Klausner and Hephzibah Anderson are among her several examples.
“When you cry about things not working out,” Grose quotes Klausner in a new collection of essays, “you’re crying not only because a guy you slept with now doesn’t seem to care you’re alive, but also because you’re ashamed of yourself for crying.”
Grose also quotes Anderson’s confession (in a book to be released this summer) at having such deep regrets about casual sex that she gave up “penetrative sex” for a year:
ABC News previewed a short clip of Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss a while back. The documentary captures pre-teen and teen-age girls discussing oral sex – and prostitution – as casually as the weather. Ordinary girls from middle- and upper-middle class families who see no harm in offering their bodies for money, homework, or a new handbag.
“Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”
“This is the bitter fruit of forty years of feminist domination in the United States,” writes Pamela Geller, who argues that the public schools, the culture, and the children in them have been poisoned by the left’s attitude toward sex.
The Week had a thoughtful article recently on love in the time of hooking up (full article posted here and here).
“In the dating era, students would go on a date, which might lead to something sexual,” says Kathleen Bogle, a sociologist at Philadephia’s La Salle University. “In the hookup era, students hook up, which might lead to dating.”
Is hooking up harmful? Depends on whether you ask peers or professionals.
Many college kids scoff at that very question. They say they’re just having fun, and that as long as both people understand the terms, it’s win-win. But some health professionals have raised alarms about the spread of sexually transmitted disease, and warn that many young adults are paying a price for learning to divorce sex from feelings and attachments.
“They don’t learn to build that emotional intimacy before they get physically intimate,” says adolescent gynecologist Melissa Holmes. “They may grow up not knowing how to connect with a partner on an intimate level.”
James Cox, director of the counseling center at the University of Pittsburg, says more than a quarter of his clients come in with anxiety, depression, and other emotional problems because their relationships feel superficial and confusing.
“Hooking up is like any other kind of peer pressure,” he says. “We need to encourage students to make independent, healthy choices.” That may be especially true for women.
Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut, author of Notes from the Cracked Ceiling, moderated a panel discussion recently on the evolving nature of feminism. Kornblut opened the discussion with How often have we heard that feminism is dead? Is it?
Syndicated newspaper columnist Kathleen Parker suggested the movement that demanded a certain way of thinking — one requiring every woman to sign on to a specific platform — is dead. Once there was no longer any space for women who disagreed with that platform, the old feminism had run its course. But feminism is far from dead; it’s reincarnating in a different way.
Former McCain-Palin advisor Nicolle Wallace said there is no shared form of reference for what feminism means anymore. Wallace discussed Sarah Palin’s responses to different questions that drew distinctions between ‘equality’ feminism and ‘reproductive rights/abortion’ feminism.
Those distinctions are important. Equality unites women. Abortion divides them, and it does so in extreme and unexpected ways.
Although much has been said already about Edward Cullen and his gentility, I wanted to post my own thoughts:
From young girls to middle-aged mothers, women across the country line up hours beforehand on opening night to watch a movie sequel about vampires and true love. Why? Because interwoven into this highly fantasized tale fraught with teen angst and dialogue that occasionally sounds wooden, lies a message of sacrifice and self-control for the sake of something greater. Edward becomes every woman’s hero, not only because of his dashing good looks and strange intriguing powers, but because he can say no to his inclinations in order to protect and preserve his beloved.
Elizabeth Morowitz, author of “Bitten by Twilight,” muses that the popularity of the movies hinges on its message of love and relationships:
