Why does an article about the supposedly changing sexual mores of young people need to appear in the NYT every 4 months or so? And why is it always changing for the worse? The story is the same as always: a culture of casual sex is preventing young people from finding the romance they truly desire. How could such a culture develop if people were not happy with it? This article blames the “mancession” (yes, the writer seems to still believe that myth), and texting, but underneath all that is the real problem that evolving gender norms are just so confusing.
It’s hard to read a woman exactly right these days … You don’t know whether, say, choosing the wine without asking her opinion will meet her yearnings for old-fashioned romance or strike her as boorish and macho.
Ok, this might sound ridiculous, but how about asking? Simpler still: If you want to be “an old-fashioned boor” and she’d prefer to be treated as an equal, then maybe you’re just not meant to be together?
While the article imagines a better, simpler past when dating rules were clear and gender roles were rigidly defined, some of the comments tell a different story:
Good riddance to the old dating culture. How many healthy, long-term, and happy relationships have resulted from it? This article talks with nostalgia about “the rules” to dating but those “rules” exemplify everything that’s wrong about the concept of dating.
Whatever the reports say about hookup culture, people are notoriously bad at accurately reporting on their own sexual behaviors. Change over time is hard to pin down as well–when we ask people to self-report, are we measuring actual behaviors or are we measuring how willing people are to talk about them?
If things are indeed changing I really wish the next NYT article about the mating habits of the American young person could consider, even for one paragraph, how some of these changes could be good.
Amy A. Hasinoff 