Newsflash! Women are Real People!

This just in from the Globe: Women have sex! Sometimes even (gasp) casual sex!

Not that we would know if they enjoy it, or not, because as the Dig so brilliantly pointed out , the Globe didn't bother to interview a single woman who is taking part in this "new trend" called "hooking up." (We won't even get into the fact that the Globe is about twenty years behind the curve. Reading this article, I felt as though some old woman was asking me "what is this 'hip-hop' that all the young people are listening to these days? )

No, instead they interviewed overly paid shrinks and authors of bullshit books to find out that hooking up "causes young women to be emotionally unhooked from a partner and from themselves" and makes them "pick up a lot of bad habits that makes it hard to sustain a long-term commitment."

No mention, by the way, of the young men all these young women are purportedly hooking up with. (Unless they're all hooking up with each other...but this being the Globe, I highly doubt that). The sexual habits of young men is of no concern to these authors, despite the fact that if girls are having guilt-free sex with partners they barely know, chances are good the guys are also having sex (guilt-free, or not) with partners they also know. (Although I am amused by the ridiculous scenario of women sleeping with men they barely know but who somehow know them very well.)

Of course, we all know that young men are hard-wired for casual sex, while young women are not. (See the scientific reference to oxytocin in the story...we're not sexist, it's scientific!)

So while the Globe thinks that it is breaking news that in our culture "young women take pride in guilt-free sex with partners they rarely know," we all know that if the sentence had read "young men...." it wouldn't have been news at all.

Oh, but it gets better. Because, you see, not only can women not handle sex outside the confines of a relationship (or maybe we can't handle it at all), "the irony is that girls aren't equipped to handle love."

So, to back up for a second, we can't handle sex, and we can't handle love. So, what exactly are we equipped to handle, besides baking and child rearing?

Expert shrink Laura Sessions Stepp goes on to chide us ladies. "Most girls," she says, "say they want to be in love eventually, they want to marry eventually. My question is, 'Will hooking up get you there?'"

I have no idea, Ms. Stepp, if hooking up will get me to love & marriage eventually. I sort of hope said marriage will include a lot of hooking up, preferably before and after those vows are exchanged, but who knows? I do know that, in the meantime, hooking up (casually or not; to each their own) fulfills a few other needs beyond love and marriage that, shockingly enough, women occasionally have.

I've been on a rage against this article all day. (Those of you who received outraged emails and IMs from me forwarding the link should know.) Every time I think of it, I find another reason to get angry.

I'm not even sure what I should be most mad about. Is it the blatant double standard? The outright sexism? The implication that women hooking up with men outside a serious, marriage-bound relationship are all sluts? The assumption that all women are looking for one thing and one thing only...and that is marriage? The fact that the Globe couldn't be bothered to interview a woman or two who has had great experiences with NSA sex... with no messy "emotional entanglements" that she "didn't know how to handle"? The complete denial of the very real sexual desires of many women? The idolization of these two nice young girls who have found themselves boyfriends (and ones who will pay for dinner!!)? The assertion that women who "hook up" are ruining themselves and will be unable to commit to a serious relationship at another date? The implication that all women under, say, thirty, are running around fucking anything that breathes...and that you can make any sort of generalization about "all young women" in the first place? The Globe's complete lack of knowledge or understanding of, for lack of a better term here, "youth culture"? Or just the pure, Puritan sanctimony of it all?

I'd like to kindly suggest that the Globe take the stick out of its ass, take a look at the calendar (it's not 1957, folks), and offer a sincere apology to its readers for the piece of complete and total bullshit they for some stupid reason elected to publish today.

Just a thought. Not that I can be trusted with anything so complicated as thinking.

The Department of Stupid Things to Complain About

I've been losing weight lately. Nothing major - a pound or two every couple of weeks - but it's been happening pretty steadily for a couple of months now, and my pants are all starting to fall off, and I'm frankly a bit confused.

See, I'm not actually trying to lose weight. Oh, I'm certainly not complaining...and I'm not exactly in danger of becoming unhealthily thin any time soon....but I just don't get it. Losing weight, in my experience and in those of people I've seen try to do it, requires effort. Serious, concentrated, long-lasting effort. Maybe not for those lucky people with great metabolisms, but for people like me who usually gain weight by just looking at a brownie, actually losing weight is hard work. And I haven't been working.

In fact, I have never once been able to lose weight by trying. There have been times in my life when I have counted calories and dutifully gone to the gym three times a week and held off on dessert and all the rest, and not lost a single pound.

Which might explain why I find it so confusing, frustrating, and even upsetting when I go to the gym sporadically at best, eat whatever I feel like eating, and keep getting smaller. I've got one question for my body:

What the fuck?

It's a control issue for me. I like to think that I have control over my body, and that my actions influence how it functions. I can accept the physical consequences of my poor choices, just so long as they actually result from my choices. For example, if I eat poorly and don't get enough sleep and stress myself out, I am not surprised when I get sick. If I drink way too much wine, I am not surprised when I am hung over.

But when I treat myself well but suddenly find myself knocked on my ass with a cold...well, I get annoyed. When I wake up with a splitting headache and vague nausea after just a couple glasses of wine spread out over hours, I get sort of pissed at the grand unfairness of it all. I behaved myself; why can't my body? I don't like it when my body acts like an unpredictable teenager, acting capriciously, flying off the handle at the mildest provocation, not listening to reason. I'm an adult, damn it, and it's about time my body learned to act like it.

So while it's great that my moody, stubborn little body thinks it's fun this year to lose weight without trying, I'm a little worried about the day when it changes its mind and decides it is actually way more fun to watch me eat nothing but carrots and slave away at the gym as my ass gets bigger and bigger.

A little rationality. A little cause-leads-to-effect. Body o' mine, is this really so much to ask ?