Sex Is Cheap
Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they're failing in life.
Key passage
But just as critical is the fact that a significant number of young men are faring rather badly in life, and are thus skewing the dating pool. It's not that the overall gender ratio in this country is out of whack; it's that there's a growing imbalance between the number of successful young women and successful young men. As a result, in many of the places where young people typically meet—on college campuses, in religious congregations, in cities that draw large numbers of twentysomethings—women outnumber men by significant margins. (In one Manhattan ZIP code, for example, women account for 63 percent of 22-year-olds.)
Yes the alleged topic is young men who are "failing in life" yet "successful" is equated with "typical". OK Mark let me give you a hint. Typically young people are not in college. Many never go (many never graduate from High School). It doesn't last forever either (note typical post secondary education is not a completed 4 year BA plus maybe more).
The young men who aren't univsersity students or yuppies just don't exist in the article even though it is supposed to be about them ! You don't read Slate, Slate won't report on how you mate.
OK OK I'm bitter because youth is wasted on the wrong lazy irresponsible males (I am the lazy irresponsible male who I care most about).
Also the "in bed" in the title makes a promise which is not kept by the article. The article is mostly about the claim that young men have the upper hand in relationships which basically amounts to noting that most relationships of young people don't involve marriage ceremonies. Notably the possibility that women today don't want to commit when they are just as young as their grandmothers were when those grand*mothers wanted to commit isn't mentioned. The possibility that more and more women continuing studies and almost all not only working but caring about their job prospects might maybe make them less eager to marry young is not even considered for one phrase let alone a full sentence. It is just assumed that women everywhere and always want maximum commitment right now (am I allowed to claim it is sexist to assume that alllll women are obsessed with marriage ?). More commitment oriented than contemporary young men and just as commitment oriented as young women were in the 1950s (back when my mom was turning down one wedding proposal after another).
But the "upper hand in bed" part is just "as my colleagues and I discovered in our interviews, striking numbers of young women are participating in unwanted sex—either particular acts they dislike or more frequent intercourse than they'd prefer or mimicking porn." Well that was discrete. I can't claim that Regnerus is mimicking porn in that sentence. I will not admit that I find the passage titilating and am experiencing a strong prurient interest in the hard detailed data, but only because it is so obvious that I see no point in admitting it.
Yes the thought of unwanted sex is horrible (we are not talking rape here but bargaining in which someone agrees to sex she doesn't want in exchange for ... what could be worth that). I'm not 100% sure how men manage to have sex with someone who doesn't want it. I would find it very hard --- uh no I mean very soft ("it" being my more sensitive 0.1% or, as @andrewrgoldman would say my "little Freud")
* prefix added with extreme distress when I realize that the mothers were mostly too young to really get into the free love 60s. Mark Regnerus young man, if you make me feel this old again and I will write a really hostile blog post.
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