Letters to the Editor
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Not Your Generation, Tracy...
No matter what the original article says, look to younger people, e.g. my nieces and nephews and their pals. (They are younger than you; I am older.)
Nothing in their world seems romantic, except their parents' and uncles' ideas and ideals. It's a whole new ballgame, even since your day. Life goes on; society changes fast.
"Feminine" and "Masculine" are both more intense and less clear now. In ten years, unless you and I take some sort of rehab classes, we will not even be able to dicuss these concepts.
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ohboyohboyohboy
This post is like an all you can eat buffet for the Broadsheet Angry Troll division. Brightstar! Quick! Fire something off before your computer screen is completely obscured by foam.
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Speaking as a dude
I do think dating is difficult now, in ways that it was not difficult for men of previous generations.
But I don't think it is any direct result of women working. I do think, and it's been my experience, that people of both sexes don't know so clearly what they want. Being a straight man, this surfaces for me as women not knowing what they want; but I can see male friends of mine being unsure on their own side of the fence.
We're at a new point in our development as a species; near freedom from starvation and from biological necessity. And just like all other points in time in our history as a species, it's unprecedented. So, as always, we're making it up as we go along.
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yeah right
Men are allowed to express their femininity? Try being a guy and going to work in a skirt -- I doubt you'll get much support. Or even spending as much time and energy on clothes/makeup/jewelry that many women do, and you will be ridiculed as a dandy or girly-man. Women have much more societal support for expression of both masculinity and femininity(terms which ideally would not even be used when describing a person's behavior).
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Yes, but...
.. the number of young women who are taking over corporations is so small that you cannot be sure that you have the right comparison group when you compare them to young men playing with Nintendos.
I have just finished reading First In His Class, a biography of the young Bill Clinton, and found myself quite awed at the way in which high-powered young persons like Bill and Hillary Clinton went about life from a very early age. It doesn't seem like they ever had time to watch TV, because they were always busy making friends and influencing people. However, you can hardly extrapolate from the behavior of Rhodes scholars and their circle to ordinary working people.
The United States comprises people of a great variety of ethicities and cultures, and the kind of generalizations you find in this type of article are very questionable.
I think it probably IS true that upper-middle class women can now earn enough to live independently, so issues like two being able to live as cheaply as one while saving a deposit to buy a home are probably much less significant than for earlier generations--and that couples are perhaps less likely to hook up for economic reasons.
On the other hand, it also seems that upper-middle class women are less likely to have children, or if they do, then fewer of them, because they fear the economic downside of raising children in an age when marriage is often a temporary arrangement.
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Anonymous has a point
It's really true that women get to express traditionally "masculine" parts of their personality, while men really aren't. I know some hypermacho men (one works for the DoD, I think as a contractor) who wear UtiliKilts (coolest things EVER, BTW), which are skirts-cum-cargo-pants, and are way too masculine to be seen as girly-men. I look at the Goth boys with their heavy makeup and wonder why anyone who didn't have to would go to the bother (43 and I don't wear makeup except under duress myself.) But they're definitely considered either freakish or gay, and I'm sorry about that. I think it can only be healthy to be free to express your whole self.
That said, my college experience rarely included formal dating. "Group dating" or "hanging" around campus or at the bars or food places uptown was where you got together with a guy. And you might go home with him or not, depending on the situation (or how drunk you were.) Sounds like what mostly changed was the terminology; we didn't call it "hooking up."
Oh, and guys wore pastel polo shirts then too. I thought it was brave of men to wear pink polo shirts myself, but it was all the rage (yeah, early eighties.) Sometimes it just sounds like "my generation" coming around again.
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Doh!
"It's really true that women get to express traditionally "masculine" parts of their personality, while men really aren't."
I really ought to preview my stuff first. Of course I meant "Men really aren't ALLOWED TO DO THE SAME WITH THEIR FEMININE SIDE."
Sorry.
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I'm sure I'm absolutely positive
I don't want to hear another screed from another woman about what's wrong with men, which ends with the typical "I'm miserable and it's all your fault."
You wanted women, you got women. Men are just defective girls in today's world. You win. So stop complaining about it. And please stop complaining about not having the right things to complain about.
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Any guy wearing a utilikilt needs a khitbash.
nuff said.
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That Post article is just weird
Johnny Depp's foppishness is hardly new -- hello, Prince? Michael Jackson? Elvis? The Beatles? Rocky Horror?
Straight boys have been wearing pastel polos for at least 30 years. Remember the Preppy Handbook? Miami Vice?
I don't know any young women who insist on paying for dinner. Most are just thrilled when a guy can afford to take them out to somewhere other than McDonald's.
But I do know lots of women, young and otherwise, who are frustrated with passive, indirect, slacker guys. Did women, with their insistence on having degrees, jobs and opinions, create these wimpy guys? I don't know, but if so, the male ego is a lot more fragile than I thought.
Buck up, boys.