Some old, white male trained in two of the most modernist disciplines – Western medicine and psychotherapy – is concerned that teenage girls are postmodern. As quoted in this Macleans interview:

You’ve got 14-year-old girls essentially presenting themselves as a brand, trying to create a public persona, polishing an image of themselves that’s all surface: how you look and what you did yesterday, not who you are and what you want to be. And that leads to a sense of disconnection from themselves, because in most cases, these girls don’t even realize that their persona is not who they are. They’re just focused on striving to please their market and presenting the brand they think will sell.

This is coming from a guy who has been doing a speaking tour to promote his new book and who cites his own credentials to support his point! Why would what you want to do tomorrow be a more important part of your identity than what you did yesterday? Especially when the desires of teenagers are mostly externally imposed.

Girls who see themselves as brands will likely go on to be more successful than girls who want to be loved for their authentic selves. And having “anorexia of the soul” is at least as healthy as the chronic existential crisis that strikes the “authentic” people in our society.

Dr. Sax shows his hand by applying premodern morality and seeming hopelessly out of touch with the historical reality of being a woman:

I find it troubling that so many girls are using their sexuality in an instrumental way, in order to accomplish some other end such as raising their social status, but not as an expression of their own [feelings and desires].

If a burqa-clad young Muslim woman tells you that only being seen by her husband makes her feel sexy, you don’t believe her. You say she’s been brainwashed by her cultural upbringing. She has Stockholm Syndrome.

Why would you think any differently if a young Canadian woman says that dressing as a slut is “celebrating her sexuality”?

Poststructural literary analysis is based on the “death of the author”. It doesn’t matter what the author claims or thinks they’re writing about: what matters is how people interpret it. Authors do not have a priviledged position with respect to their own work. If someone writes a novel that’s obviously about young Hitler but claims that’s not what it’s about, who cares what the author says?

So when I “read the text” that is a woman’s slutty Halloween costume, I don’t care what she claims she’s doing. In fact, I’m less likely to believe her analysis: she’s too close to the material to read it critically. She has too many incentives to convince me that she’s not being oppressed. I also don’t care what people who benefit from a slutty world say.

Sex-positive feminism may be possible, but it needs to be backed in theory. It’s not enough to just say “I’m sex-positive and I’m a feminist!”

I wrote this hetero- and cis-normatively because I’m lazy.

The family-planning decision table that Fred posted a while ago may abstract away a lot of nuance, but it also drew my attention to something interesting:

Wouldn’t it be nice if, when a couple gets pregnant, the man could choose to raise a child that the woman didn’t want? The world isn’t that way because the woman has to gestate the fetus inside her body, and she has jurisdiction over her body.

Nobody likes power asymmetry, especially men. So the natural response to this state of affairs is to try to gain control of the means of reproduction. Either by interferring with women’s jurisdiction over their bodies (anti-choice) or by controlling women more broadly.

I believe as long as this power asymmetry exists, men will try to oppress women. That means there are only three ways to achieve equality:

1. remove the desire to reproduce from men (negate the power)
2. make oppression of women impossible (entrench the power)
3. give men the opportunity to make their own reproductive choices without impacting women (share the power)

Society is working on the first and second options, but what about the third? Ex utero reproduction will set us free!

Naomi Wolf has written an essay on Angelina Jolie for Harper’s Bazaar, which is ironic because that’s one of the magazines she criticizes in The Beauty Myth. I read the essay as a deconstruction of the Angelina brand (because surely the sign is very far from the real person), but Wolf has also been criticized as just having a crush. Either way, it includes some good summary of third-wave feminism; eg:

Consider how patriarchal civilization has managed to keep women in hand for all these millennia. Among other methods of social control, women are almost always given a series of either-or choices. The deal is usually that they may realize one aspect of their personality but at the expense of many others. And the deal is usually that if they choose “too much,” a terrible punishment one way or another awaits them.
…
The magic of Jolie’s self-presentation? She makes the claim, with her life and actions, that, indeed, you can get away with it. All of it.

Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw was based on Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown. Brown is best known for writing Sex and the Single Girl in 1962. Peggy Olson in Mad Men (set in 1960 – 1962) somewhat embodies the book:

• don’t get married
• be your career
• be realistic about your looks but put effort into looking better
• enjoy sex
• get your boyfriends to buy you things

This pragmatic feminism was heavily criticized by 2nd-wave feminists but Brown’s work can now be interpreted as 3rd-wave feminism. But just because it’s on the 3rd-wave spectrum doesn’t mean it’s entirely positive, as Naomi Wolf notes (emphasis mine):

[Individualist 3rd-wave feminism is] ahistorical and apolitical… the world isn’t going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered…a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make…What we lack is a grass-roots movement that will drive the political will. “Lipstick” or lifestyle feminism won’t produce that movement alone.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that differences in optimal mating strategies between men and women lead to widespread differences in behavior. These theories have been widely popularized and have a huge impact on folk psychology.

The most cited difference is the energy investment in growing an immature ovum to a baby. This is said to explain, for example, why women are choosier with their sexual partners.

Another difference that might be far more deeply ingrained in our culture, is the reproductive window: babies are optimally produced by young women. This is said to explain, for example, why almost all heterosexual men are ephebophiles.

My entire life plan relies on the fact that I can continue to date women I find attractive: greater than 50% of such women are younger than me at any future point in time. But the NY Times has reviewed a number of studies that find a correlation between father age and child malfunction. The article briefly considers the question: what if these science facts become integrated into our culture and the reproductive window is applied to men?

Like every other gynosexual man (and, I suspect, most if not all of everyone else) in my culture, when I look at a woman I employ The Male Gaze. This isn’t intentional, I don’t say “hey, look, it’s a woman: I’d better turn her into an object! shoop-da-whoop“, it’s just something I’ve been trained to do by being raised in this culture. On an intuitive level I consider it somewhat harmless (just because I briefly consider having sex with you doesn’t mean I don’t respect you), but rationally it’s rather repulsive.

This New York Times article titled What Do Women Want? has been widely circulated in the blogosphere. The first two-thirds of it are modernist science stuff that you’ve probably already heard: vaginal lubrication does not equal mental arousal, etc. The bottom section, though, summarizes a surprising theory from a Canadian (now teaching at the University of Nevada) social-constructionism psychologist named Marta Meana: women get turned on when they are regarded as sexual objects. In fact, women get turned on by observing other women being sexually objectified or when they themselves have the potential to be sexually objectified.

This says that womens’ eroticism is not primarily in the mind, as is commonly supposed. But it’s not in the body exactly, either. Instead, as the existentialists would say, woman’s erotic identity is in her relation to The Other. And because he is more different, the “best” Other is Man.