osewalrus (osewalrus) wrote,
osewalrus
osewalrus

What's the deal on Laura Sessions Stepp

I confess I am sufficiently old and out of the mainstream that I am having enormous trouble assessing whether Washington Post reporter Laura Sessions Stepp is accurately reporting on the current sexual and emotional lives of twenty-something women.

If so, it's intriguing and raises a host of fun sociological questions. Her whole description of the "hook up" culture with the deliberate desire to avoid emotional intimacy and commitment is almost a complete duplicate of the stereotypical male attitude of an earlier generation.

I'm also wondering about the male sex and relationship studies, if any.

The notion of sex being divorced from emotional intimacy is, of course, hardly new. But even in societies were sex, marriage, and emotional intimacy might have nothing to do with each other, there were other emotional and economic drivers for pair bonding and breeding.

A society in which both men and women avoid emotional intimacy, have no economic incentive to pair-bond or breed (and, in fact, strong economic incentive not to), and have ready access to non-intimate sex would be, I believe, a wholly new phenomena.

OTOH, her Washington Post Valentine's Day column seems to me much the stuff of right-wing fodder in the "feminists killed Cupid" mode, so I'm not entirely sure what to think. OTher than that I am old.

Now excuse me, I need to, as John Hodgeman might say, scurry upstairs and make like a parrie vole.
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