The same old song

Sucker for advice columns that I am, I've had to branch out from Prudie and Dan, because sometimes weekend NJ Transit trains take that long. Which brought me to this Mariella Frostrup letter, from a man who sure sounds like a winner:

I have a female colleague who has, over the past three years, told me she loves me and would like to marry me. The problem is that I do not love her and I have told her that. I used to be in a relationship with another girl, but we recently broke up. In April I was at a low point and my colleague visited me and we had sex, and now she is pregnant. The dilemma I have now is that she insists that I marry her because the child will need a father and a mother.

It goes on, but doesn't become much more sympathetic or, for that matter, straightforward. Was this woman confessing her love and proposing marriage before the two had any kind of sexual entanglement? Or were they seeing each other, and he considered things more casual than she did? Was this April visit significant because that's the hookup when Female Colleague became pregnant, or was it the one and only hookup between the two parties? All of this matters, because we're looking either at a massively unhinged woman who's asking an acquaintance who could very well not be the father to marry her, or at a woman whose what-in-quainter-times-would-have-been-called-boyfriend refuses to commit.

Frostrup (whose advice is pretty sound, I suppose, either way) seems to assume the former. I read the letter... as close as I could read anything on my phone on a Sunday night train, and I'd say it's 50-50. It's obviously in the man's interest to downplay the extent to which he may have led her on by, say, having had some sort of ongoing thing with her. I mean, in most ordinary life situations, when one party's in love and the other is not, the two are at the very least involved.

Anyway. The bigger takeaway here, for me, was that letters like this - stories like this, and it's one of so many - illustrate the problem with the so-very-now gender-neutral approach to understanding and giving advice on relationships. Precisely everything that's playing out in this letter is deeply wrapped up in both the sex and the gender of the participants. Their sex, because of the pregnancy that's resulted (something I don't think Savage's "monogamish" ever successfully addresses - birth control can fail, people who support abortion in principle don't always want to get one, etc. - not issues in same-sex relationships), and their gender, because of the same-old-song way this is playing out. She wants marriage and kids; he wants consequence-free intimacy with a woman who's either very bad news (but hot/available enough to be interesting for sex) or just far, far more into him than vice versa. We might speak of them as "partners," but to do so ignores both biology and deeply-ingrained social roles.

"The Beauty Myth," Part II

And done.

-The sexual-desire part of the book may be more interesting than the cosmetics/cosmetic surgery one. Wolf writes about how a woman, under the beauty-myth regime, can't be both "serious" and "sexual," whereas men are able to be both of those things at once. Not fair! I agree.

And this - digression alert! - points to the challenge of writing on more general topics. I can be reasonably confident that no one has said exactly what I have about 19th century French-Jewish intermarriage, because I can just keep up with the finite set of books and articles on tangentially-related topics. Whereas the topic of female heterosexual desire...

-Wolf on the definition of the ordinary female body being defined as ill: yup, spot-on. I was so happy when she got to the bit about the invention (in 1973 in this country, apparently, although Wikipedia says 1968) of cellulite. What virtually all women look like from at least certain angles (and if you think you don't, consider the possibility that your mirror-area is not as well-lit as you thought, or that your glasses prescription not as up-to-date) is not a 'condition.' While I can understand that there are women who have particularly a lot of this skin texture, who may be particularly bothered by it, the idea that the normal state - or an achievable state - might be to have none at all starts to seem awfully silly when one notices what even slim female athletes look like - not airbrushed - from behind.

-But... what about hair? Presumably body hair wasn't a thing in 1991 as it apparently is in 2013. But I'm referring to the hair on women's heads. To the amount of maintenance it seems to require. To the racial disparities (was intersectionality invented yet in 1991?) in what it takes to look conventional. Wolf barely mentions the existence of hair-primping, devoting endless ink instead to the question of skin creams. I find this surprising, especially given that, from photos, it appears that Wolf and I have the same hair texture (and more importantly, volume), so I would somehow imagine she would know the drill with hair-taming. But then again, in 1991, big hair was in.

-As for her conclusion, yes, a turn to more subjective beauty would be welcome. The problem is, it's not entirely the fault of corporate interests that we now have this idea of a universal Beauty. It's also that  we simply have more images of what other people look like than ever before, not all of which come from advertising. Where there was once the prettiest girl in the village, it now begins to seem plausible that there could be a prettiest girl in the world.

And I suppose I'm also skeptical about how one draws a line between good, fun self-adornment and self-hatred. In theory, such a line might be drawn (surgery bad, neon nail polish good), but in practice it always seems to be that whatever a particular woman does, she may define as reasonable, whereas it's whatever women do above-and-beyond what she does that counts as excessive. And as much as beauty 'obligations' fall on all women, no matter their natural looks, it's clearly going to be much easier to stop caring so much for women who can do so and still be conventionally attractive in whichever area.

Tights for boys

-Inspired by the recent tragedy in Bangladesh, the Guardian has provided a list of places to find "ethically, locally, lovingly made clothes for babies and children," because what is a factory collapse if not an excuse to luxury-shop, and why wouldn't we assume ethical (or greenwashed) clothing producers genuinely love your child. It's an amalgam of causes - anti-materialism (one also learns, in a disclaimer, that it's also OK to buy less), gender-progressivism (one must now dress one's children in gender-neutral clothing? what happened to the good old days, when one could simply love and accept children who wish to crossdress?), and heaps upon heaps of old-fashioned (but thinly-disguised) let's-go-buy-expensive-stuff-and-distinguish-ourselves-from-the-commoners.

Pardon the cynicism, but for whatever reason, this gets to me. The factory collapse story just keeps getting worse, but shopping for organic cotton "tights for boys," while probably not contributing to the problem, most likely isn't fixing it either. What probably needs to happen - and I believe commenter Britta and I have both already addressed this - is, things need to change in how clothing is produced-relatively-cheaply abroad, things that will somewhat-but-not-drastically increase the price of that clothing.

-On the topic of kids these days and materialism, another Guardian piece takes on the new phenomenon of fancy-schmancy children's parties. "As a child, when I used to go to birthday parties – which wasn't often – I might take a card. I would then get sandwiches, crisps and lemonade and play a few party games." Times have changed. Or... have they? This topic was deemed timely for a 1964 U.S. television audience. How I know this...

From the dept. of plus ça change

A "Dick Van Dyke Show" episode from 1962 revolves around the recent publication, in a highbrow general-interest mag, of an article called "The Decline of the American Male." Well how about that?

Breeders!

This post is in honor of the fact that several classic Straight People Problems have been submitted to professional advice-givers. These are really the fundamentals, Straight People 101, the dilemmas that, if we answered once and for all, we'd eliminate the need for 90% of questions submitted to advice columnists.

1) From the latest Savage Love podcast: A man calls in, 26, in a one or two year relationship with a woman, 27. She has 'asked him to propose' by a certain date. He, meanwhile, has all this stuff to figure out before that time, even though he sees himself marrying her. He also mentions, in the call, that he has dumped other women due to his own ambivalence, leading to a don't-know-what-you-got-till-it's-gone situation. He loves his girlfriend, but...

2) Then we have this letter to Prudence:

Seven years into my marriage with my ex-wife, I still wasn't sure if I wanted kids. Eventually she stopped having sex with me—citing my indecision as her reason—and our marriage broke up two years ago. Eight months ago, I met my now-fiancee and fell in love very quickly. She's much more sexually adventurous than my ex-wife, our moral and political beliefs are more in sync, and we're a better fit for one another. I proposed to her on Thanksgiving shortly after learning she was pregnant. Here's the weird thing—I'm overjoyed about her pregnancy. I can't even explain it. Because I have many friends in common with my ex-wife, who's still single, news reached her quickly. She immediately called me, furious and in tears. [And so on.]

It is the same man.

3) Next up, another letter to Prudence, same link:

I am a college junior majoring in political science, and I want to study abroad and travel the world. My biggest hurdle is my boyfriend. We have been together for five years and have a loving and mature relationship. We plan to spend the rest of our lives together. But he is against me studying abroad. [And so on.]

If you've had the misfortune to sit through "Undeclared," you are now picturing Jason Segel's character, whose perfect embodiment of the clingy-bordering-on-creepy high school sweetheart of a college freshman made the show bearable.

4) Finally, we have this woman introducing herself in a text-only-but-NSFW letter to Savage: "I am a queer, cis-gendered woman in my 20s who prefers male partners (sexually and romantically)."

Wrap your head around that one.