Dating – Page 3 – Feministe

The Sexual Appeal of Non-Gender-Conformity

This is a guest post by Rebecca Katherine Hirsch.
Hello! Have I a disclosure for YOU (and you and you and you): I am attracted to men who do not hew unbendingly to unrealistic–that is to say, “traditional”–templates for male behavior. I am similarly heartened by all gendered people who work to find the courage to map out their own internal and presented identities in the face of omnipotent, implicit and explicit gender stereotypes!

So There’s a Woman Dressed All Sexy-Like: Your Role as Observer

There’s a lot of ongoing debate about what, exactly, a woman is looking for when she goes out dressed all sexy-like (which is itself a subjective concept). Men (and women) get ideas about exactly what that woman wants, what she welcomes, how they should behave toward her, what her all-sexy-likeness indicates. And guys, in particular, can come up with a thousand excuses for publicly ogling a woman’s goodies–They’re right there; I can’t help but look. She’s doing it for attention–she wants men to look. If she didn’t want guys to look, she shouldn’t put them out there. They’re so ubiquitous, I hardly notice them anymore, and when I do I generally dismiss them with rolled eyes and an unladylike snort.

There is one excuse that, while common, is sufficiently uncommon to draw my attention: Some girls get their feelings hurt if you don’t look/whistle/comment/shout/grope. Seriously. Seriously? Your personal approval is paramount to them, and you’re doing them a service by sexually harassing them. They pass you by at a bar, ladypillows pushed up to their chin, and when you don’t hazard a pinch they look back at you with a single, crystalline tear rolling down their cheek. Your unsolicited grunt is really your generous way of seeing to their emotional health, you saint, you. (Whether the gentleman offering this service is the same one who wanted custody of our metaphorical dog, I shall not say.)

And so I provided him a list, albeit not a universal or comprehensive one, of things to do when you see a woman dressed all sexy-like.

1. Admire, if it’s your thing. I mean, why not?

2. Don’t stare. It’s rude. And it’s not like the view is going to change from minute to minute–generally, women don’t spontaneously disrobe or hyperinflate their breasts or turn into lizard-people such that you’d miss it if you turned away. The view ten seconds now will be pretty much the same as the view you’re getting now, so it’s safe to look away.

Modern Dating

Via the Awl:

“After a first date on a Saturday night, if it gets past 11.48am on Monday without a text or call then there’s not much chance of a second outing, a survey has found.” Even better: “The three-day rule might have worked when all we had were landlines, but technology has revolutionised how we date. When everybody takes their mobile phone everywhere, waiting three days to get in touch just makes you look snooty or, worse, like you have run out of credit.”

True story: I was in Germany a while back, talking to a nice young German man about dating and cultural differences.

He said, “The way Americans date is weird.”

I said, “Well yes, but how so?”

He said, “The whole waiting three days until you call rule. Is that REALLY a rule? Do people actually do that? They always do it on TV and it seems weird.”

I said, “I hate when people do that, and I think it’s less common now than it used to be? But yes, some people actually do that. I think they learned it from Swingers, which seems like a bad way to learn anything. They don’t do that here?”

He said, “No, they don’t. I had never heard of it until I was watching American TV. And I have no idea what Swingers is?”

I said, “Don’t worry about Swingers. Anyway, dating in real life isn’t exactly like TV, even in the U.S. where it is indeed super weird. If someone waits three days to call me, I’m going to assume they’re not interested.”

He said, “Ok. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, how accurate is How I Met Your Mother?”

Straight to the heart

Mindy Kaling, are you eavesdropping on my life?

Until I was 30, I dated only boys. I’ll tell you why: Men scared the sh*t out of me. Men know what they want. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before.

OK, maybe men aren’t exactly like this. But this is what I’ve cobbled together from the handful of men I know or know of, ranging from Heathcliff Huxtable to Theodore Roosevelt to my dad. The point: Men know what they want, and that is scary.

What I was used to was boys.

Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who “totally knows how to cut hair.” Boys can pack up their whole life and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have “gigs.” Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival.

Boys can talk for hours with you in a diner at three in the morning because they don’t have regular work hours. But they suck to date when you turn 30.

At least I have a couple more years of diners and music festivals. I can’t deal with alarm clocks.

(via)

Let Auntie Jill solve all of your dating problems.

Someone should pay me to be an advice columnist. I will definitely stay under the word limit. Here, let me help you all out:

My fiance wants to marry a virgin. DUMP HIM. Ohmygod dump him. Especially dump him since you’re not a virgin and he thinks women who aren’t virgins are filthy whores.

Your boyfriend jackhammers you for four minutes before falling asleep, and won’t make an effort to sexually satisfy you even when you’ve been asking for several years? DUMP HIM, ohmygod dump him, and quit saying he’s amazing and selfless. He is the worst.

He strongly disagrees with your right to have an abortion and he does stuff that you aren’t comfortable with or consenting to? DUMP HIM, because Christ, what an asshole.

You’re welcome.

New York leads in never-married women — but what about the men?

New York state has the highest percentage of never-married women in the country, and in New York City it’s even higher. 34.8 percent of New York state women over the age of 15 have never married; in the city, it’s 41.7 percent. That’s not particularly surprising — culturally, it’s odd to get married before you’re 30 in New York. The only friends of mine who are under 30 and married don’t live in New York — they’re folks who I went to high school with, or college friends who left the city before getting engaged. The only people I know who are under 30 and live in New York and are married are other lawyers — something I suspect ties into an existing risk-aversion, desire for stability and personal (not political) conservatism amongst people who go into law, as well as the fact that the people I know from law school and work have entered into steady careers that make marriage and family more feasible.

But what’s more interesting to me is the reporting on the survey. The headline over at WNYC is “New York Leads in Never-Married Women.” Fascinating, sure, but more men than women in New York have never married — 46.7% of dudes in this city haven’t ever tied the knot. I don’t have time to click through every state in the American Community Survey, but I’m going to wager a guess that we also lead the nation in never-married men. So why are all the headlines focused on single ladies? Folks are saying that New York is a terrible place to move if you’re looking to get hitched, and I suppose that’s true if you’re 22 and want to get married tomorrow. But actually, it’s a pretty great place to find lots of interesting single people who spend their 20s focusing on their own personal development and interests, instead of hunting down a life partner. It’s not for everyone, sure — some people put finding a life partner as Priority Number 1, and that’s ok too — but for those of us who want to delay marriage until we’re in our 30s (hi!), New York is a fantastic place to do it. And hey, almost half of the population is single — that seems like a better chance at finding love than a place like Wyoming, where only 20% of women over the age of 15 have never married.

Also, we have really low divorce rates — I suspect because people who get married later have a more fully-developed sense of themselves and their needs and desires, and because later marriage is correlated with higher education rates, and higher education rates are tied to greater financial stability, and financial stability makes marriage a hell of a lot easier.

So good job, New York. But let’s not take men out of the picture on this one. Amped-up reporting on The State Of Single Ladies is fun because we all enjoy being terrified with weekly threats of our impending cat-ladydom if we don’t find a husband yesterday, but really, lots of women aren’t chomping at the bit for a diamond ring — and about the same number of men as women want to get married someday. The OMG THERE ARE SO MANY SINGLE WOMEN IN THIS TOWN reporting feeds into the idea that we’re single by default, and that the stats on single women are more newsworthy because duh, we all want to be married. Men, well, if a bunch of them are single it’s probably because they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Of course, I personally can’t wait to get wifed and then send my cat straight to the glue factory when I no longer need his companionship. I know I’m getting a little close to my sell-by date, but I’m really only single because no one has bought me this ring yet. Obviously.

What romantic comedies can teach us about ourselves

God, I hate romantic comedies with a fiery passion. It’s a cliche, I know–look, the bitter, humorless feminist hates love and laughter–but they make my teeth itch. I don’t fault anyone else for enjoying them, if that’s their thing, but I can’t get over the repeated implication in every single movie that I’m supposed to identify with the inevitably vapid/obtuse/obsessed/otherwise undateable (yet gorgeous, under the ponytail and glasses) woman who will find love at last in the third act.

Christina H., over at Cracked, is with me, and her list of 6 Obnoxious Assumptions Hollywood Makes About Women hits some of my high points: We default to irrational anger on first meeting. We’ll turn on each other at the drop of a hat. We love us some shopping. But with such a wretched expanse of film stock already dead at the hands of such cinematic terrors–just Kate Hudson and Katherine Heigl have nearly 20 between them–there’s no reason to stop at six Obnoxious Assumptions.

Thus:

7. If we’re happy in our careers, it’s only because we don’t know what we’re missing.

If a movie opens up with a woman on the job, whether she’s cleaning hotel rooms or running a company, you can bet she’s a social-lifeless workaholic who will soon be taught to love life through the introduction of a guy and/or kids. (If it’s a man on the job, he’ll generally just be driven, although he might be presented as a workaholic if he will later be saved by the intervention of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.)

The Cracked piece mentions the Catherine Zeta-Jones movie No Reservations, which I loved because it was basically cooking porn–all bustling around and adding ingredients without measuring them and arranging things on plates. In the beginning, Kate is shown as this Gordon Ramsay-type head chef/badass who rules her kitchen with an iron fist (such that she’s been ordered into therapy by her boss), and she obviously knows and enjoys her stuff. She takes pride in the quality of her work, she talks and thinks about it all the time, she spends early-morning hours in markets tenderly fondling the vegetables–I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy at any job in my life. Then there’s the stuff with the kid and the guy, and montages and a bicycle built for three, and then the charming bistro and the happy ending.

But if you run it backwards, Kate ditches the distracting boyfriend, her apartment gets clean, her sister comes to pick up her kid, and she’s able to focus on the work she loves.

8. We’re suckers for public humiliation.

Women love it when you bring it all out in public. If you’ve screwed up with a woman and she won’t talk to you, the way to her heart is to corner her in a public place and pour your heart out in front of Jesus and all Manhattan. If she’s marrying someone else, crash the wedding. A woman will never feel pressured to accept a public proposal or a public apology simply because the surrounding crowd–who know nothing about you–think you’re swell and romantic. So grab that mic at the wedding reception and start pouring your drunken heart out. We’ll definitely pull you aside, just to keep you from further spoiling the event, thus giving you an opportunity to win us back. We certainly won’t turn red and walk out. Or turn red, yell obscenities at you, and then walk out.

(Exception: Lloyd Dobler, but that might be only because John Cusack is on my List.)

9. We’re just not that bright.

The one we’re meant to be with? That perfect match? Our soulmate? Has been right there all along, and we didn’t even see. (Made of Honor, Someone Like You, The Ugly Truth, etc. ad nauseam.) You’d think we’d be self-aware enough to see what’s right there in front of our faces, but no. Here’s a person we’ve always seen as a friend, waiting patiently–sometimes even giving us romantic advice–while we pursue one failed relationship after another, and we’ve never looked at him/her with anything but the most platonic eye. It can’t be because we’re just not that attracted to them. Or that they’ve had romantic feelings toward us forever and have never spoken up, apparently expecting us to just smell their devotion like an aftershave, be turned on by it, and make the first move. It’s because we’re not attentive, we’re not smart, we’re not observant, and we’re always too busy going after the assholes. Think of all the Nice Guys™ who could have been saved if we’d only recognized their perfection 35 minutes in while we were crying about that jerk from the office. Thanks, Hollywood.

10. Twilight.

Dating Advice for the Modern Lady and Gentleman

This dating guide from 1938 is pretty amazing — ladies, you should wear a bra, don’t talk too much, don’t put on make-up in front of men, focus entirely on what he wants to discuss and don’t get so drunk on the date that you pass out. As someone who has made every single one of those mistakes on a date, let me tell you, the more egregiously you behave, the more likely it is that the modern man will call you back and ask you out again. It’s one of those bizarre rules of the universe, like how when you go through a long celibate streak and you make an effort to consistently look great and shave your legs and wear cute lingerie you will not find a single person who has any interest in seeing you naked — until you decide to quit showering and you’re wearing graying period-stained underwear and you didn’t even bother putting on deodorant and you’re out at a bar only because you cannot take one more miserable night on your couch watching the Real Housewives and drinking wine from the $10-and-under table, and that’s when you’ll meet a super-hot dude who wants to lay you right then.*

That’s how the universe works for everyone else, right?

Anyway, this is all very good advice for the modern woman in 1938. “Don’t tug at your girdle” is definitely crucial to not blowing a date. But it’s a little unbalanced. Modern ladies get so much great dating advice (don’t talk too much, but make sure you talk some so that you aren’t boring! ask him questions but don’t badger or interrogate him! have a job, but make sure you don’t reveal that you make more money than him! wear make-up but not too much! wear a short skirt but not too short! wear heels because they make your legs look great but don’t wear heels because then you look high-maintenance!), and modern men get very little. So allow me to assist. From my own dating archive, my advice to the modern man looking for love from the modern woman:**

Do wear clean clothes to the date, but probably not your favorite over-sized fur coat.

Women don’t like men who leave their iPhones or Blackberries on the table during dinner.

If she’s dancing, get up and dance with her, for when a woman dances, she wants to dance.

Driving stick is sexy. Manage to hold her hand AND drive stick and the lady-boners will be poppin’.

Don’t discuss your bitch of an ex-wife.

If you take her to a dive bar and a drunk possibly homeless man hits on her, do not fly into a rage, and especially do not fly into a rage at her.

That story about how you once pooped your pants on the Jenny Jones Show? Save it until you know each other better.

It’s ok to mention that you also date dudes, but hold off on the part about how you primarily enjoy sex with men and only date women because you want to get married and have babies.

If you have an awkward sexual experience, you will not make her feel better by saying, “It’s ok, it’s definitely not as bad as the time I got puked on.”

Babies are nice, but a first date is not the time to mention that you want many babies, and you want them yesterday.

Pleat-front khakis? Burn them.

“I know this great little Italian place” is a great way to get a date, but the Olive Garden is not a great little Italian place.

If you ask her to dinner, don’t pick a place you can’t afford and then expect to split the check. The Modern Lady doesn’t mind paying half the bill, but she does mind an unexpected $200 dinner tab.

“What is this thing?” is not the proper response to a silk Isabel Marant body suit.

Be sure to mention your serious girlfriend before the end of the date.

Read books, or at least pretend to.

If you get a call during the date, don’t answer it. If you do answer it, don’t disclose that it’s a debt collector harassing you because you went on too many Barney’s shopping sprees.

Take off that gold chain.

_______________________________________________________________
*And if you’re me, you will not lay him right then because one-night stands scare you, so he’ll get your number and he’ll call and text you a dozen times and you’ll respond once before starting to ignore him because you’re embarrassed he met you in such a dilapidated state with your matted hair and probable body odor and oily t-zone, and you will also conclude that something is clearly wrong with him if he likes that sort of thing, and you’ll talk yourself out of going out with him by deciding that it will be extremely weird for you to show up to any potential date with clean hair and mascara on, because no matter what basic effort you make it will look like you are trying Extremely Hard next to the Garbage Pail Kids version of yourself that he initially met. And as you pet your cat and drink your wine and watch Bravo, you will wonder why you are single.

**This is heteronormative as all hell, but I primarily date dudes. Non-heteros, feel free to add your dating tips in the comments.

Dealbreaker: He Has An Asian Fetish

Love this piece by Lena Chen:

Though I could excuse his penchant for cultural appropriation, I couldn’t overlook his peculiar dating history. All of his exes, I soon learned, were Asian. A handful of data points aren’t enough to constitute a trend, but even my 18-year-old self realized that there was a very low statistical probability that this could have unfolded in an arbitrary or unconscious fashion. Pierre, who didn’t exhibit much self-awareness to begin with, claimed that his dating disposition could be explained by the qualities he sought in a partner. Asian girls just happened to be more likely to possess his preferred traits: According to him, we weren’t nearly as loud, crass, promiscuous, or out of shape as white women.

Luckily for Pierre, my dating history was beginning to exhibit a pattern, too. In fact, Pierre was emblematic of the spectacularly bad taste in men I’d cultivated in my young adulthood. Prior to meeting my now-boyfriend of three years (my fluke success story), I dated several serial cheaters, at least one confirmed homophobe, and way too many Asian fetishists to count. I cringe at the memory of each of these illustrious gentlemen, but years later, it’s the latter group that continues to make my skin crawl. An enthusiasm for Asian folks might not seem so bad, especially next to an irrational hatred of gay people. But my personal experience has taught me that even “positive” stereotypes are frustratingly reductive.

Though Pierre clearly meant what he said about “white women” as some sort of compliment, I was far from flattered. Actually, I was confused. At age 18, I shared more in common with the flighty, unkempt women of Pierre’s nightmares than I did with his geisha girl fantasy. I was, in fact, the very embodiment of all of the things he supposedly hated—loud, crass, promiscuous, and out of shape. Somehow, my race managed to obscure all of these qualities. There are many faults for which I administer free passes (timeliness and hygiene, to name two), but I’m rarely capable of overlooking generalizations about my race, no matter how positive. My heritage, though a part of my identity, hardly says much about me as a romantic partner.

Dealbreakers

I am unhealthily obsessed with GOOD’s Dealbreakers features — it’s nice to see articles that discuss boundary-drawing without finger-wagging “you’re so shallow” commentary. Because you know, I also won’t date anyone who is anti-choice, or who insists that their dog watch us have sex, or who has very strict dietary preferences. Some people would date all of those people; some people would date an anti-choice gluten-free vegan with an ass-licking dog. And that’s great! Being a judgmental bitch is not the worst thing when it comes to picking a partner (being a judgmental bitch who is open to dating outside of one’s comfort zone is actually the best thing, I think). Lots of people won’t date militant feminists who sing the praises of period sex on the internet, or thick-thighed New York lawyer/writers who would like cheese and wine with every meal and will always order the weirdest thing on the menu. The world is a big place and there are lots of interesting people in it; hetero women, unfortunately, are not often reminded that the world is a big place with lots of interesting people in it, and are instead routinely told that men are the ones doing the picking, and we should settle for the first nice guy who wants to wife us. I say no! I’m not saying reject anyone who doesn’t fit 100% into your Barbie and Ken Wedding Fantasy Dream Set. No need to reject a blond because you usually date brunettes; no need to judge a guy because he likes videogames and you’ve never played a single one other than Duck Hunt (a fact that some of you may be horrified to learn is true about me, since my parents would never let me have a Nintendo and I’m still unclear on what kinds of videogames came to be after that). But if a dude has some characteristics that you absolutely know in your gut you cannot tolerate? Don’t feel guilty about it. No one is entitled to date you, and you aren’t obligated to spend time with someone you don’t actually want to spend time with. Totally out-there advice, I know, but not exactly the Dating Manual Gospel these days.

Draw lines! Have deal-breakers! And then date people who are outside of your normal to-do pool and see how interesting things can be when you combine “having standards” with “being open and adventurous.”