Senior Washed Up Girls at Yale

Parents Forum
101

<p>LoremIpsum - what ever happened to him? Just curious…</p>

<p>My D goes to a school that is at least 70% female and she also got frustrated with the lack of dateable men. This was after she had an experience with a man who was “polyamorous”, meaning he will have as many girlfriends as he likes and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to be one of them. I’m sure there’s a different, less flattering name for that.</p>

<p>Anyway, her school is in a city, and there are other schools there, so she went online and started looking. I’m not sure what service she used or what parameters she used or how long she looked, but she found someone and they’ve been happily together now for almost a year. He’s two or three years older, a recent grad and he was looking for a committed relationship too.</p>

102

<p>This thread is getting creepy, IMO.</p>

<p>We usually had a snappy comeback to bad, tacky or obvious come-on lines. My favorite was something to the effect of “sorry you cant get in my pants. I already have one a’hole in there”.</p>

103

<p>jym626, ick. :eek:</p>

104

<p>Yes, Nrdsb4-- that response was reserved for the creeps who had a come-on line that alluded to, or directly said they wanted to get in one’s pants. The tamer response (back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth) when they asked for a phone # was to say “its in the phonebook”. Sometimes they’d then say “but I dont know your last name”, to which one would respond “its in the book too”. I think we rarely if ever said any of these things-- but thought about it and were prepared, if necessary.</p>

105

<p>

</p>

<p>I don’t really know. I think he dropped out of college – being a lover was a full-time preoccupation with him. I can’t even remember his name, just his smile and his flowing mane of blond hair – think a young Richard Branson without the facial hair.</p>

<p>If I had to guess I’d say he became a trophy husband for an older well-to-do woman. Or maybe he became a top salesman. After all, what is selling but yet another form of seduction? If you can read the non-verbal clues accurately, you are golden.</p>

106

<p>

</p>

<p>That’s your beta-male geek approach. He’ll get shot down repeatedly but sooner or later he will stumble across a woman whose boyfriend just cheated on her or one who’s sick of “anything you want, darling” or whatever. It’s like the test monkey repeatedly pushing the same lever for that rare reward of cocaine. </p>

<p>Successful rogues have more elegant approaches.</p>

107

<p>^ maybe it just means there is someone for everyone, LI. I am unconvinced that these “rogues” are as slick and successful as they think they are. Unless they are famous or filthy rich.</p>

108

<p>Here’s a humor video which may shed some light on commonplace gender stereotypes:</p>

<p>[Adam</a> vs Eve. Epic Rap Battles of History Season 2 - YouTube](<a href=“Adam vs Eve. Epic Rap Battles of History - YouTube”>Adam vs Eve. Epic Rap Battles of History - YouTube)</p>

<p>Note: Contains crude language and themes which may be offensive to some.</p>

109

<p>I have to say this:</p>

<p>I just read the article. The author is a sorority girl who seems to look for male companionship mainly among varsity athletes and frat boys. At a college where fraternities and sororities are something of a fringe culture. It turns out to be kind of shallow? Shocker! Might it occur to her that the solution is to hang out with people who don’t have the most superficial values imaginable? Apparently not.</p>

<p>I had classmates like this 35 years ago, just not very many of them. They were silly as freshmen. Most grew out of it long before they were seniors, but some, like the author, never fully shed the silliness while they were in college. Luckily, they all pretty much wound up fine. Kids develop at different speeds, that’s all.</p>

110

<p>I went to a college reunion last year, and saw quite a few familiar faces, and yes, there were a number former classmate were ahead of their times in the hook up culture. Or it was called “free love” or whatever back then. Some are doing just fine, some are have had problems in staying in a committed relationship. Nothing striking here, so predicting any of this is not easy to do. There are some folks who can carry this off.</p>

<p>But the more you have any relationships with more people, and the more misunderstandings and emotional impacts one can have from such relationships, the higher the chances that someone will get hurt,</p>

111

<p>It sounds like “sowing your wild oats” became “one night stands” became “free love” became “hook-up culture.”</p>

112

<p>And hook up culture came to imply some sort of constant promiscuity? Bothers me that the concepts and terms used for males are different than for females. I have to wonder if the idea women need and seek “relationships,” that it’s a predominant drive, is always applicable.</p>

113

<p>Free love was radical because it included sex before marriage, even polyamorus relationships & homosexuality.
:eek:
It wasn’t advocating sex with strangers as a regular diet, Erica Jongs daydreams notwithstanding.</p>

114

<p>Watching Bridesmaids with my college-bound daughter (I know, I know, but I didn’t know what the movie was about before we watched it), we witnessed this conversation:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>I was going “No! Not necessary! Don’t need any slutty stuff in college!” D2 just laughed at me. “Settle down, Mom, no cause for alarm.”</p>

115

<p>In my “one night stand” era, there was a shame element present. Remember “the walk of shame?” One-night-stands certainly happened, and we all knew they did, but we didn’t flaunt them or talk about them, probably for two reasons: sex was still considered a private matter, and it was not socially acceptable for women to sleep around outside of relationships.</p>

<p>The “hook-up” culture seems different: there does not appear to be the same effort to hide the evidence, and it is looked upon as women being unbridled by societal moral standards and thus empowering. </p>

<p>Whichever perspective one prefers, I think it can be a dangerous, or at least risky, way to conduct one’s sex life.</p>

116

<p>Hook up culture is nothing new either. Remember the book and movie, “Looking for Mr Goodbar”? Now it’s “friends with benefits” or just hooking up with people you happen to meet, not even so much looking for the person, but when meeting any person, including it along with all of the possibilities and activities of the relationship, but without any thought of anything more than casual sex. </p>

<p>Yes, it is risky in a lot of ways…</p>

117

<p>But the whole point is that, in many ways, what’s wrong with it is how un-risky it is. We oldsters more or less keep saying, “You can’t separate sex from emotions, or at least young women can’t. If you keep doing this it’s going to end in tears.” (OK, we don’t say exactly that, but I think it’s a fair summary of what many of us believe. And it’s a fair summary of what I said to my kids a few hundred times.)</p>

<p>The hook-up culture counter-argument, which in our generation was Erica Jong’s “zipless [you-know-what],” and in the generation in between us and our kids was Liz Phair’s “[Same word] and Run,” is that what hurts is the emotions, not the sex, and that if you can separate emotions from sex everybody has fun and nobody gets hurt. Everybody enjoys the wonderful equipment God gave them, with its amazing wiring, at the time it functions best, and no one deals with jealousy, recrimination, walks-of-shame, possessiveness, anger, debt, expectations, disappointment, abandonment, where you are going to work and vacation, who likes whose friends, or what anyone’s mother wants. (I will insert here that in my world as a student “walk of shame” was almost entirely ironic. It was more often “strut of pride,” except for those occasions when there really WAS something to be ashamed of, like obvious cheating on what was supposed to be a committed relationship, or sleeping with someone you had been pretending to hate. That’s not to say shame didn’t exist, but it tended to be entirely internal, not socially imposed.)</p>

<p>I’m skeptical – and so, ultimately, was Erica Jong, and Phair was moaning “I want a boyfriend” by the middle eight – but I understand the argument and its attractiveness. The real problem is by attempting to eliminate emotional risk from their sex lives, kids wind up with an awful kind of safe sex, in which something potentially really meaningful (and for that reason really emotionally risky) is rendered officially meaningless. And that winds up being less fun that it sounded initially, less like being wild and free and more like going to the bathroom in an over-complicated way. </p>

<p>And, of course, those pesky emotions keep slipping in anyway. So it can only end in tears. And the shame isn’t that you have devalued yourself; the shame is that you can’t stop caring.</p>

118

<p>^^^very well said.</p>

119

<p>So we put post-pubecsent kids now starting at age 12 into hothouse hormonal environments (that were designed for kids hitting puberty at 1-16) where they learn from their peers because few adults will touch the subject, and then make it rare for the kids to support a family before their late 20s (if that), and then don’t give them the tools to deal.</p>

<p>Given that, I think the kids are doing pretty darn well, all things considered.</p>

120

<p>From the perspective of women who want a relationship, the old fashioned way of withholding sex until the couple sufficiently became acquainted and reached a certain level of trust, seemed to work well. The man was (very strongly) incentivized to put some effort into meeting such woman’s needs, and both parties ended up with what they needed.</p>

<p>If more women are now willing to hook-up without a courtship, then that leaves the women who are craving a relationship at a severe disadvantage. It also seems likely that more women may encounter physical risks from frequent hooking, if not emotional ones.</p>