It was never easy. Dating, having sex with a new flame, figuring out the protocols. Now there’s a new reason for being happy you’re old: you’ve figured out sexual navigation. Not like the kids. They’re all screwed up. In Frank Bruni’s latest column, The Bleaker Sex, he says,
Young women are trying to feel the whole liberation thing by having the same meaningless, indiscriminate sex as men have always had.
Bruni quotes Ms. Lena Dunham, director of a new HBO series called Girls:
…modern cultural cues exhort her and her female peers to approach sex in an ostensibly “empowered” way that she couldn’t quite manage. “I heard so many of my friends saying, ‘Why can’t I have sex and feel nothing?’ It was amazing: that this was the new goal.”
This is why we burned our bras? Okay, nobody ever really burned bras – that’s an urban legend – but I was hoping that Women’s Lib was about being true to yourself, not imitating men.
But to my point, and I did have one: Thank God I’m no longer young, and embroiled in the sexual turmoil of dating and all that follows. If you’re ever tempted to feel bad about being old, consider this: apparently, the abundance of high-def pornography is tricking the brains of young men into preferring their online “relationships” with porn stars over that of their girlfriends. A 41-year old lawyer, single, describes the shift:
I don’t like to believe that porn is replacing anything I have with my girlfriend,” he says, “but she asked me recently why she always has to be the one to initiate things. And she was right; I guess I’ve been fading from her. It’s like all that time with these porn stars was subduing any physical desire for my girlfriend. And, in some weird way, my emotional need for her, too.
Imagine being a young woman, intrigued by a new man, and finding out the first time in the sack that he’s overcooked rigatoni, and then your girl buddies tell you that it’s happening to them too.
It turns out that being twenty or thirty-something, with taut, smooth skin and thick hair isn’t enough. Now young women are expected to compete with porn stars.
Here’s what you’re up against, according to Bruni:
…the buffet of fetishistic porn available twenty-four-seven has made age-old sexual practices seem unexciting. Insufficient, somehow.
Every now and then you see a letter in the advice columns written by a lonely wife whose husband comes home from work and spends the evening in front of his computer screen, checking stocks. (That’s probably code for “pants around socks.”) He’s addicted to porn, the wife laments. How do you compete with that? In my day, porn was found in magazines, and later, the adult section of the video store. Men were happy just to have someone to go to bed with. Now they expect – well, I can’t say it. This isn’t that kind of column.
However, in researching this issue I learned that there are real men out there, guys who are sophisticated enough to know the difference between a real woman and the screen version. (I also bookmarked this website – it’s geared toward young men, so for me it’s like spying on the other side. Fun!)
So here’s my question: have you heard of this new preference of young men for digital girlfriends as opposed to the living, breathing, real thing? Do you think it’s just young men, or is it Boomers, too? What do you think?
I can’t tell if my post was posted… I just wanted to say that bra burnings are not urban legends. The most famous – the first? – was in Atlantic City at the Miss America Pageant, 1968. Easy to Google.
While I’m at it, I have a website called boomersrememberwhen.com. I’m trying to pull together first person observations on the Boomer experience rather than the mediated stuff we always get from TV, magazines, etc. I have some great stories collected already and always looking for more. I want to tell our story in each individual’s words. Thanks. Great blog here!
I think you’re right, Robert, about Atlantic City, but Google isn’t a solid reference source. Anyway, thanks for dropping by and I’ll check out your blog. Best wishes.
Well, google isn’t a “source,” it’s a directory. But here’s NPR’s take on it… nothing actually was burned because of fire laws… but pretty good demonstration.
Of course there was bra burning… the most famous incident being at the Miss America Pageant in 1968.
Good article on women’s addiction to porn. http://karen-stephenson.suite101.com/female-porn-addiction-a90676
Older men often become addicted to on line porn, too, boomers and beyond. Porn is not only a young man’s past time. AND, there are a surprising number of women of all ages addicted to on line porn.
Let me say this about that. Any man who believes the woman is the aggressor as in porn, has not experienced the real life. The dating that goes on in high school and college and after is certainly more liberal in results than when I was there, but with few exceptions, women act like women and men like men–meaning the man starts the action and is responsible for it and how it turns out. Good grief, I would hate to be dating as a teen now.
Recently I went to a Celebrate Recovery meeting with my brother who is a recoveriing alcoholic. This group deals with addictions of all kinds. I was surprised at how many at the meeting spoke about their addiction to porn. Their stories of hitting rock bottom and loosing everything to their addiction (jobs, families, etc.) were no less affective than those of drug and alcohol addiction. However, I have yet to hear of a woman who suffers from this type of addiction.
Now, that’s a new twist. So hooked on porn you hit bottom like that? Amazing.
Pornography of any kind, taken in abundance, causes changes to the brain. That is a given. It does not surprise me that this happens to men (probably of all ages). Good post.
All I can say is “Amen”, Lynne to the beauty of the aging process. Plus, our high tech,digital world has affected the way we communicate (or not). Just look around in any restaurant and watch couples sitting across from each other staring into their cellphones rather than at each other..GEEZ!
Kathy, every now and then when Bill and I are out, I have to do something with my “phone” (these days, they’re more like computers). I always apologize! I feel like one of those people you’re describing.
So glad I don’t have to deal with any of that. The upside of being older 🙂
Time spent in front of the computer is distancing us. Distancing results in lessened ability to engage in any meaningful way with real people. This is evidenced in new postgraduates being unable to interview successfully, and sounds like in sexual partnering too. There’s a couple dozen Ph.D. dissertations in the making here perhaps! Interviews conducted via texting? Skype? Bra burning was more than urban legend! Google images has the evidence.
Hi Zig, Snopes says it’s a myth (my source) but because I know you’re a smart woman I checked further just now. I saw pictures relating to bras and fire, but nothing specific to the Women’s Liberation movement, although I could go out in my back yard right now, make a sign about liberation, set my Wonderbra on fire and contradict history for all time.
However, as I kept reading, I saw that in 1968 at a Miss America pageant, demonstrators tossed their undergarments in a trashcan intending to burn it. (This incident is the entire source of the bra-burning legend.) The area had just suffered a rash of fires, though, and the authorities talked the women out of using actual flame. From this point there is some question as to whether or not there was a fire – it seems there was a bit of a smolder which someone hastily extinguished, although reporters disagree on whether it was a flame and whether the protesters set it. But if we credit the women in 1968 with intent, even if they didn’t carry it out, they were pretty determined in spirit to make their inflammatory point!
So that’s my history brush-up for the day. Month. Okay, year.
I know!! It was bad enough when I was a teenager in the 70s. But now – yikes.
It seems to me that the more sex is out there (in all forms), the less meaning it has. And from the data I’ve seen, the tsunami of sex in our society hasn’t done anything to increase peoples’ satisfaction with sex. Regarding Boomers, I’ve seen mixed data. Some studies show greater satisfaction with sex after 50, some show less. One thng I do know is that I’m glad I’m not coming to sexual awareness now. I can’t even imagine dealing with the mixed messages young girls get now.
Oy- quite a post Lynne! And quite frankly this is one subject I don’t have an opinion about!