Secrets of the Male Psyche

Make of this what you will, but our friends at the Daily Mail report this morning that when a man is involved in a relationship with a woman he will be demoralized by her success. If a woman is involved in a relationship with a man she will be thrilled by his success.

Apparently, the difference between the sexes is not so easy to overcome.

Take a normal couple, husband and wife. If the woman succeeds the man thinks less of himself. If the man succeeds the woman thinks more of herself.

Subconsciously, he reads her success as a sign of his inadequacy. She reads his success as a sign of her success.

As it happens, if you ask the men how they feel about their female partners’ success, they will respond positively. But when researchers measured these men’s subconscious reactions, they discovered that the men were, effectively, lying to themselves. Apparently, the workings of the male psyche are occasionally hidden from men themselves.

The Daily Mail reports:

Men feel worse about themselves when their female partners succeed, according to a new report. 

Men’s subconscious self-esteem is related to their female partners' successes and failures, the study showed.

However, the same does not ring true for women - they do thrive in the shadow of a successful husband.

It made some sense that a man would feel despondent if he lost out to a woman when both were working on the same task.  The researchers expected that a man would feel demoralized when his partner beat him in a competition. But, they were surprised to see that men subconsciously think less of themselves when their wives succeed at tasks in which the men have little interest.

I assume that the validity of the studies depends on which tasks we are talking about.

A study of Dutch men and women compared the two situations: a woman succeeding at a task where the man had participated and a woman succeeding at a task where the man had not. They wanted to measure the effect of success or failure on relationships. They reached this conclusion:

In one study, participants were told to think of a time when their partner succeeded or failed at something at which they had succeeded or failed. 

When comparing all the results, the researchers found that it didn’t matter if the achievements or failures were social, intellectual or related to participants’ own successes or failures - men subconsciously still felt worse about themselves when their partner succeeded than when she failed. 

However, men’s implicit self-esteem took a bigger hit when they thought about a time when their partner succeeded at something while they had failed.

Researchers also looked at how relationship satisfaction affected self-esteem. 

Women in these experiments reported feeling better about their relationship when they thought about a time their partner succeeded  than when they thought about a time when their partner failed, but men did not.

We will offer some reservations here. One finds it difficult to imagine, despite the study's conclusion, that a woman’s success as hostess of a dinner party will lower a man’s self-esteem. Or that a man will feel worse about his marriage if his wife is a great mother.

On the other hand if a woman decides to work harder and to gain more career success because she does not want to depend on her husband for support, one accepts that he will feel that she is telling the world that he is inadequate.

At some level and to some extent, the male psyche is hard wired to see his woman’s success as a sign of his own inadequacy. A woman who succeeds, who can provide for herself will be depriving him of a vital male function: protector and provider.

Does this make him feel like less of a man? To some extent, it does.

One wonders whether the results are different between men who are very successful and men who are not. How does Tom Brady feel about Gisele’s success? How does he feel about the fact that she earned more than he did last year?

The results tell us that, for example, girls who outperform boys in school are not putting themselves on a relationship track. It suggests that women who follow Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and “lean in” to career success will be demoralizing their husbands and probably damaging their relationships. How many men would really want to be married to Sheryl Sandberg.

Take the situation in schools, where girls are clearly doing better than boys. Are the underachieving and outperformed boys more likely to feel hostile to their female competition? Are they more likely to act abusively toward these girls?

If the dating culture is dead and if many of the most successful college women are most prone to engage in hookups, are they thereby paying a price for their academic success?

[Addendum: For those who prefer to get their news from New York Magazine, here's a story about the study, published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.]

Unsafe Sex

Why, oh why, have the rates of sexually transmitted diseases been rising? In Canada the rate of syphilis has been increasing dramatically among the male homosexual population. In the United States the syphilis rate has increased in percentage terms but its incidence remains relatively rare.

Far more people have chlamydia and herpes. The increase in the number of cases of chlamydia has been astonishing.  In 2009 more than 1,200,000 cases were reported. That would make over 400 per 100,000 of the population. In 1997 there were 540,000 cases. In 2009, by way of comparison, 300,000 cases of gonorrhea and 40,000 cases of syphilis were reported. Link here.

Researchers who look at these numbers are puzzled. They are especially puzzled that the safe sex message is not working.

Everyone knows because everyone has had it drummed into them, through public service messages to childhood sex education, that they must practice safe sex. That means, they must use a condom.

And yet, far too many people don’t. Canadian researchers are especially alarmed at the number of new cases of syphilis among gay men. If this group has not gotten the message, then what hope is there for the straight community? If the group at the highest risk is ignoring the safe sex mantra, it must mean something.

In America STDs seem more to be afflicting women. However many sexual partners women have, if they are still contracting chlamydia and herpes then clearly they are not using condoms.

If they have heard the message, then clearly they are ignoring it.

By implication, more STDs among women suggests that more and more women are experimenting with multiple partners. If so, they are following another of society’s messages to young women: explore your sexuality, live it to its fullest and its most spontaneous.

If society is sending two messages, then clearly many young people believe the sexual expression message to be more powerful than the safe sex message. In truth, they seem to be taking the safe sex message as lip service.

If the culture were really interested in preventing the spread of STDs, it could start by placing more value on monogamy and sexual exclusivity. Isn't monogamy even more effective than condoms in ensuring safe sex.

If the culture is not promoting monogamy as a deterrent to the transmission of STDs, then why should young people take the safe sex message seriously?

If you are telling women to explore their sexuality you will want to downplay the risk that more sexual partners and more kinks will expose them to. If you are telling women to explore their sexuality with men who are the most experienced sexually you are also telling them to hookup with the men who are most likely to be carrying STDs.

The drunken hookups that the sex-positive feminists are touting usually do not involve condoms.

It makes sense. Most women are disinclined to hookup under normal circumstances. To do something that they consider abnormal they often need to get drunk or stoned. They use chemistry to turn off their moral sense. 

A woman who is doing something she knows she shouldn't be doing will not be thinking of safe sex. If she is thinking at all she will be thinking about getting it over with.

Young people have also received the message that they should aim at passionate intensity in their sexual encounters. Taking risks can be exciting, especially for young people who have desensitized by exposure to internet porn. If they are aiming at spontaneity, they are less likely to use a condom. 

If the message of sexual liberation is at fault no one seems willing to say so. And no one is going to blame it on the individuals who practice unsafe sex.

The Canadian researchers who are alarmed by the spike in the number of cases of syphilis would rather blame it on internet dating.

They believe that when randy young people meet on line they are less likely to think about whether their partners are infected with STDs.

Obviously, this is appallingly lame thinking.

If you read through the National Post report you will see that there is very little, if any evidence, of a causal relationship between internet dating and STDs.

For example, if the research is focusing on the behavior of gay men it would need to demonstrate that before internet dating gay men were inclined against anonymous random sexual encounters.

If it should be the case that gay men were engaging in anonymous hookups before online dating, the causal relationship would fail.

Reporting on Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan finds the Canadian explanation more persuasive than I do. Of course, she, like the Canadians, is puzzled to discover that the safe sex message has not produced a tidal wave of safe sex. 

But she is willing to entertain the idea that it has something to do with internet dating.

In her words:

Researchers in Canada are flummoxed a puzzling set of statistics — despite the fact that most people had a safe sex message shouted at them from a young age, instances of certain sexually transmitted diseases have increased dramatically in the last decade or so. According to some experts the STDstravaganza can be blamed on online dating, and the false sense of intimacy and trust meeting people online can foster. Because nothing says "I don't have the clap" like a flirtatious email exchange.

Here she almost sounds ironic, and let’s hope that she is. I fear, however, that she is not.

Those who favor the internet dating explanation tend also to refer to the sexual behavior of an older cohort. That would be older, just divorced, women who do not use condoms because they cannot get pregnant.

These women tend to be especially apt to use internet dating sites. Ergo…

If we are looking for a catchy concept to comprise this group, let’s call them Cougars. It seems to amuse everyone to think of these women as sexual predators.

Surely, these women are old and wise enough to know the risks of unsafe sex. Yet, they too are receiving a mixed message. Yes, they should practice safe sex, but in the media and on television show after television show they are being told that they are unspeakably hot and that they should seek sexual fulfillment in the bed of a much younger man.

Hot sex with a younger man is a Cougar’s consolation prize after divorce. It seems that these women have been more than happy to embrace the message.

Apparently, they have decided that the hottest of hot sex is somehow going to be less piping hot if a condom enters the equation.

If they are dating older men, that is, men who are less than piping hot, then they are likely to avoid condoms for fear of turning their aging partners off.

Safe sex is one message that is out there. It has not gotten through because it is not the only message out there.

The culture has been promoting the message that sex is a good thing, that sex defines who you are, that more sex is better, that sex is merely about feeling pleasure, that more sexual experimentation is a good thing, that sex contributes to your emotional and physical well-being, that sex need not take place within a committed relationship, and that the risk of contracting an STD can be trivialized by using a condom.

The safe sex message has been drowned by the sex-is-good message. It has also been drowned by the sex-is-good-for-you message.

Culture warriors cannot promote more sex by scaring people with discussions of health risks and venereal infections. They are not going to emphasize the dangers that lurk in sexual experimentation. They are going to send a mixed message that will end up obscuring the cost of sexual experimentation. And yet, their safe-sex message will serve one purpose: they will not have to feel responsible for the bad things that happen when people follow their advice.

Mind Control In and Out of School

We all consider ourselves to be independent free-thinkers.

We refuse to bow down to the authority of religious leaders or politicians.

Defiantly, we think for ourselves.

If anyone tries to tell us what to think or what to do, we rebel. We would rather make our own mistakes than to follow someone else’s advice and get it right.

I have occasionally noted that the free thinkers who inhabit the central precincts of the great cosmopolitan metropolis all think the same thing.

Sorry to have to say it, but when you think like everyone else, you are not thinking.

As for our putative rejection of authorities, the truth is we spend a considerable amount of our time bowing down to the authority of so-called experts, especially when they wrap themselves in the mantle of science.

We allow psychologists and psychiatrists to tell us how to conduct our relationships, how to manage our lives, and even how to bring up our children.

We are convinced that we have made a great leap forward by rejecting right and wrong. In their place we worship the concepts of sick and healthy.

You cannot be wrong; you cannot be bad; you cannot even commit evil actions. You are sick. You don’t need to change your ways. You need help.

If you are having problems in your marriage-- who isn’t?-- you might well be referred to a psychiatrist.

And yet, is the marriage sick? Does it need medication? Would surgery be a better option.

Why do we think that years of medical training gives anyone a special qualification to guide an unhappy couple toward martial comity?

Medical school does not give anyone any special knowledge about right and wrong, good and bad, how to behave and how not to behave.

Nor does the science of psychology offer any real training in what would count as ethical or unethical behavior.

No one should be surprised to learn that couples counseling has a dismal success rate, or that American marriage has been in dire straits ever since therapists declared it to be sick and turned it into a profit center.

Of course, therapists have opinions. Unfortunately, they believe that since they are men and women of science their opinions have scientific validity and ought to be respected as scientific fact.

Considering that a vastly larger proportion of therapists lean markedly left, the advice they dole out, when they deign to do so, tends to come to us from the playbooks of leftist cultural warriors.

Buy into the left’s cultural agenda and you are pronounced to be healthy. Reject it and you are called sick, even a hater.

One wonders how many true-blue liberals are afraid to espouse conservative principles because they do not want to be diagnosed as mentally ill?

I am not at all saying that therapists have set out to indoctrinate their patients in leftist ideology. Many of them are well-meaning souls living normal lives. Some of them are my friends.

Yet, you can transmit leftist thought without knowing that you are doing so. You could be what the medical profession calls a “carrier,” someone who transmits a disease without manifesting any of its symptoms.

It’s perfectly possible for a carrier to teach errors that will cause troubles for other people without suffering the same troubles.

And then there’s the matter of allowing others to tell us how to bring up our children.

Not just psychologists and psychiatrists, but especially teachers. As a nation we consign our children’s minds to teachers, to the point where we are often afraid to object when these teachers abuse their authority.

Teachers have great power over any child’s future. With great power comes great responsibility. But, with great power comes the opportunity for great abuse of power.

A teacher hands out grades. The grades count toward college admissions and job opportunities. Most pupils figure out at a young age that good grades are often handed out to pupils who think as the teacher thinks.

Since pedagogues no longer seem to believe in objective standards, they gain even greater power over their pupils’ minds.

Worse yet, a teacher can encourage or discourage a pupil, to the point where a brilliant child can be beaten down until he hates school and hates schoolwork.

Similarly, a mediocre child might receive praise that has so little to do with his aptitude that he becomes socially dysfunctional.

A while ago feminists decided that the school system was prejudiced against girls. If boys did better than girls in math and science, for example, that could only mean that there was an unconscious bias against girls.

So they set out to redistribute mental aptitude. They induced teachers to encourage girls and to discourage boys.

If you have an educational establishment that systematically beats down the morale of boys, the result will be a cohort of young men that feels lost in the workplace.

Among those who are charged with hiring new employees for companies, it is fast becoming received wisdom that young men are not worth hiring, but that young women work harder, take more initiatives, and complain less.

I heard from more than one source that the young men who are graduating from the best of America’s institutions of higher education are dusfunctional.

What happens to young men who have been systematically demoralized by their teachers? What becomes of them when they discover that they are ill suited for the world of work and manly achievement?

They become a very nasty and unruly bunch of hooligans.

You might think that we would be seeing outraged parents rising up in protest against what the way their children are being treated in school. We are not. Apparently, they are afraid of being called misogynists.

And then there’s the matter of the way sex education is taught in schools. If we are to believe Robin of Berkeley-- and I have no reason not to-- sex education has become a preferred way to undermine sexual identity and to promote what are called alternative lifestyles.

Children as young as five are encouraged to think that they can be whatever gender they want and that they should feel free to experiment with alternative sexual behaviors.

Sex education has gone well beyond the birds and the bees. Schools have taken it on themselves to expose small children to details about adult sexuality that have no relevance to their experience.

It is fair to say, as Robin of Berkeley does, that exposing young children to explicit sexual materials, materials where pride of place is offered to homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality and the like… should count as child abuse.

A five year old does not need to hear about or to see sexually explicit materials. A nine year old does not need to learn how to use a condom. If, as Robin says, an adult male were to start explaining sexual matters to a five year old or an eight year old, he would be instantly identified as a pedophile.

Why are they doing this? I imagine that these educators are trying to promote a form mind control that they believe to be therapeutic.

If gays or transsexuals feel badly because they are different from everyone else, then some teachers believe that everyone else should be obligated to make them feel better.

And the rest of the human race should do so by acting as though they have gay or bi or trans tendencies. Or by exploring alternative sexual lifestyles.

Anyone who objects is likely to be denounced as a bigot.

Call this the tyranny of sameness… it’s ostensible reason is to reduce the amount of discrimination against people who have a different sexual orientation.

But, what is wrong with being different. Being different is not necessarily a stigma, and it does not go away by teaching a five year old that gender reassignment surgery is yet another lifestyle choice.

As you might have guessed, the reasoning behind this exercise in child abuse is specious, to the point of absurdity.

If we accept that some gays are gay by nature, and that it is bad for therapists or anyone else to try to convert them to heterosexuality, would it also not be true that most heterosexuals are heterosexual by nature and that it violates their integrity to try to persuade them to try out homosexual experiences.

Whatever the ostensible reason behind this new sex education, it produces sexual traumas, and thus makes relationships more difficult, to the point of undermining the institution of marriage.

You may or not think that Robin of Berkeley is being alarmist, but you should keep in mind that the current campus hookup culture mimics behavior that has been a staple of gay men.

They, more than any other group, is most likely to engage in random, anonymous sexual encounters. When you teach girls that, if they are attracted to men, they are just like gay men, and if you allow them to believe that they can best fulfill their sexual potential by acting as though they are gay men, you are doing them serious damage.

You would think that parents would be outraged about all of this, to the point where they would rise up in protest and put an end to it.

Unfortunately, this is only rarely the case.

Illiberal Universities

Back in the old days college students went on dates.

Going on a date meant following a series of unwritten rules.

The rules were designed to allow the young men and women to show mutual respect for each other. A man was required to ask a woman out on a date, plan an evening, show up, pay for most of the entertainment, escort her home, and even open doors for her.

No one expected that a first date would lead to any lewd behavior. Respectable women, women who respected themselves and women who were treated with respect, did not end their first dates on their knees.

At some point in the not-so-recent past feminists decided that showing respect for women was an ultimate indignity. College women, who are most susceptible to such siren songs, rose up and rejected the dating culture.

After all, they were just like men, they liked sex as much as men did, they were as strong as men. They were feminists; how dare men treat them like women.

It took a few years, but the dating culture broke down. It is no longer considered acceptable to show respect for a woman by following the rules of dating, or even, courtship.

Feminism was not fighting the fight alone. The therapy culture chimed in to explain that true passion could never be bound by rules. If you wanted true love you needed an injection of spontaneity.

None of the rules of dating and courtship were written down. None were enforced by the police or by the threat of lawsuits.

Still, the culture that promulgated these rules did provide an orderly way for young people to develop relationships.

It may not have been perfect, but it was not, in retrospect, a bad thing.

People fell in love; people discovered carnal delights; people even got married.

Today, the dating culture is moribund on America’s college campuses. In its place, we have the hookup culture, where young people get drunk, dispense with the intermediaries, and get right to the point.

Apparently, they feel that it’s better to have intimate relations with people they do not know, have never conversed with, and are not likely to encounter on a regular basis.

When the culture is broken down, when people no longer follow rules, conditions become anarchic.

Yesterday, we were discussing the breakdown of British culture. When people no longer know how to stand in line and wait their turn, when they cease to follow the rules of good behavior, they risk falling into patterns of crude, vulgar, loutish, and violent criminal behavior.

Then, order will be restored-- because order will always be restored-- by stricter rules and more vigorous policing.

Apparently, a similar situation is currently happening on American college campuses.

As everyone knows, the hookup culture is almost an invitation to abuse women. No one knows how they should or should not behave. Expectations are confused. Signals are misread. Worse yet, many women consent to perform actions that might normally be considered abuse.

In the chaos and confusion, people are inevitably going to get hurt.

Surely, it‘s a problem. The hookup culture has made it open season on women. Women who decided that they did not need the ritualized gestures of respect prescribed by the dating culture now require something like police protection.

Robert Shibley explains some of the more recent college codes of sexual conduct.

He writes: “Princeton, for example, absurdly says that you can’t consent to sex if you are merely ‘under the influence‘ of alcohol. Not drunk — just ‘under the influence.’ This goes for both partners, rendering huge numbers of students the unwitting rapists of one another. Even married students, if they both drink a glass of wine before a romantic interlude, are guilty under Princeton’s rules of sexually assaulting one another. These kinds of rules are not only foolish; they are damaging the credibility of campus administrators working to stop actual sexual assault.”

Shibley correctly points out that these efforts to police personal conduct are easily subject to their own kind of abuse. They are so vague they are nearly unenforceable. Also, they turn just about all college students into potential criminals. Or, should I say, all male college students.

The great minds who run universities and who form our illiberal elite have broken down a culture based on shame and replaced it with one that tries to control people by criminalizing vast areas of human behavior.

It cannot be done. First, a guilt culture approach makes everyone a potential criminal. Second, the restrictions are so unreasonable that they will inspire disrespect, if not overt criminality. Third, codes of sexual conduct target men, and  define womanhood as victimhood.

Unfortunately, illiberal administrators are not simply interested in the way students conduct themselves. They also want to control what students are thinking. Especially, the way male students think.

In their belief system the thought is father to the deed, and thus, the best way to control behavior is to exercise mind control.

Shibley reports: “At Hamilton College, male freshmen were required to attend a seminar called ‘She Fears You,’ which was billed as a ‘cognitive and emotional intervention‘ that would address male-driven ‘rape culture‘ on campus and make clear what beliefs were ‘no longer acceptable‘.”

Since they also believe that the thought is father to the word, these same administrators have devised strict punishment for any language that they, or anyone else, deems offensive.

In Shibley’s words: “Speech codes are one example of this. Columbia, for example, deems ‘offensive conduct or comments‘ to be sexual harassment. Is it possible for anyone to live in one place for four years without making a comment that someone could find offensive? Northern Illinois University bans ‘Intentional and wrongful use of words, gestures and actions to annoy, alarm, abuse, embarrass, coerce, intimidate or threaten another person.’ NIU’s students, if this absurd and unconstitutional code were widely known across campus, would most likely respond with their own annoying or alarming gestures‘.”

I trust that you noticed that the universities who are promulgating these repressive rules are among America’s finest.

Apparently, it is not enough for them to educate students. They feel that it is their sacred duty to turn them all into potential criminals, to lard on the guilt, and to prosecute those who have offended their ideology.

We are not talking about a bureaucracy that is trying to “nudge“ people in a positive direction. We are talking about a group of people with a totalitarian mindset that wants to impose its ideology on college students by force.

Let Them Eat P#$&%

Everyone knows that young men today don‘t have it so good. Mark Regnerus agrees. Link here.

Young women are racking up impressive achievements in school and on the job. By comparison, young men seem to be a slacker generation.

Regnerus describes the plight of young men: “Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women's: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships.

"When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just isn't so bad.”

Let’s see if we understand this correctly. In most of the activities that denote manly success in the civilized world, men are losing out. Their manly pride, such as it is, cannot be in very good shape. God will punish me for saying it, but  you don't feel like more of a man if you are getting beaten by a woman.

But, don’t feel so bad, Regnerus tells young men. They get to receive a consolation prize. They receive the booby prize or the booty prize, or both.

But, let’s try to be more serious . Let’s be historical. As I reflected on this dire reality, I had a vision. It came to me from 18th century France.

In my vision a courtier barges into Queen Marie Antoinette’s salon. He is at his wits end.

He exclaims to the Queen: “Angry young men are marching on the palace. They have no jobs; they have no career prospects; no woman would ever marry them; they might never have a family. These men are hungry. And we just ran out of cake.“

The Queen looks up from her needlepoint and declares: “Well then, let them eat p#$&%!”

Aside from the fact that this sounds like it would make a pretty good Super Bowl add, it has a more serious point. Most if not all men want more out of life than cheap sex.

To think that men can be bought off with cheap sex is grossly insulting.

Men might console themselves with cheap sex when it is offered. They are unlikely to reject a woman who offers it, but most of them, I hope, do not think that they a woman’s willingness to perform a sexual favor for them makes them alpha males.

All of this notwithstanding, Regnerus is right when he says that the terms of the transaction called hooking up are markedly friendly to men and unfriendly to women.

In his words: “But what many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we'd be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on. Instead, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (which collects data well into adulthood), none of these things is occurring. Not one. The terms of contemporary sexual relationships favor men and what they want in relationships, not just despite the fact that what they have to offer has diminished, but in part because of it. And it's all thanks to supply and demand.”

I would only qualify the point by saying that these women are allowing men to believe that they are in charge. It’s a way of lulling them into complacency while women are eating their lunch.

There are many reasons why women might hookup. Most of them are bad for women. I have often outlined them, and I hope that my arguments have resonated for some women.

Now, we know that hooking up might also be a ploy to trick men into thinking that they are more manly than they are. While they are sitting back feeling like the ultimate dudes, they are losing their competitive spark. If they do not have to work to have sex, if they do not have to expend any energy to get laid, then they are going to be less capable competitors.

Of course, it may also be that meaningless impersonal sex is the best that this slacker generation has to offer.

Susan Walsh on Why There Are Too Few Good Men

One of the joys of the blogosphere is the free trade in ideas. 


Today, Susan Walsh of HookingUpSmart has an excellent post about the Kay Hymowitz piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. She kindly refers to some of the remarks I posted about it on Saturday. Link to Susan's post here.


If you do not know Susan's blog, I will tell you that each of her posts elicits an exceptionally interesting and wide ranging discussion. She has a wonderful community of commenters. So, it is always worth while to go back to the post and check out the new comments... and even to participate.

Body Language

Their education over, most young men set forth to conquer the world. Among the males in today’s cohort of emerging adults, another likely scenario has them setting forth to pick up girls in bars.

Some young men are hard at work honing their skills as market participants. Others are attending seminars on how to become pick up artists.

For those who care about such things, I will tell you the deep, dark truth about pickups. If she doesn’t want you to pick her up, you won’t. And if she does, she will not only allow you to sweep her off her feet and out of her clothes, but she will let you feel like you are the ultimate dude.

Think about all of those Duke athletes who picked up the famous Hookup Queen, Karen Owen. When they read her thesis, extensively analyzed here and elsewhere, they will come away with the sense that they were not doing the choosing; they were chosen. They might have felt that they were in charge, but, when push came to shove, she was in control of the situation.

This does not mean that publishing it all, or even doing it all, was a good thing for her, but it would be a mistake to think that she was not running the show.

Men make a mistake then they base their manly pride on their ability to pick up girls.

Because if they think that they are the ultimate dudes, then one day some girl is going to let them know that they are really not as cool or as manly as they think.

The ego boost that a man gets from thinking of himself as a great seducer or pickup artist is a mirage.

Over the years I have known men who are masters at the art of picking up girls in bars. Some of them do not even need a bar to ply their talents.

Not a one of them learned how to do it by attending a seminar. In all cases they learned it from women because they have been willing to allow women to teach them.

Also, true masters of the game can walk into a party and know within minutes which woman is available for a hookup and which one is not. No seminar is going to teach you that.

A true pickup artist is an instinctive economist. He will calculate how much time and effort it will take to seduce her, and he will avoid women who require too much time, effort, or money.

One more thing to keep in mind: the great pickup artists are never world beaters. If a man's mind is pondering his last or next female conquest, he is going to be less focused on his work.

The more time he spends working on his pickup technique the less he is spending on his business project. This may be one reason why married men are generally more successful than single men.

When I read that women are complaining about not being approached in bars, as they do in a column by Meghan Casserly, I want to know whether they are there to be picked up or to meet a man and develop a relationship. Link here.

I applaud the effort to teach young women how certain kinds of body language make them appear to be unapproachable, but without further information we cannot really judge whether they are self-sabotaging or are simply looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

A woman who crosses her arms and leans against a bar is going to appear standoffish, but it might well be that she understands instinctively what the young man wants from her and she does not want to play his game.

I recall one young woman who explained what happened when a young man tried to pick her up at a bar. She answered him: “If you want a pickup, buy a truck!”

Not very approachable, you will say, but not inappropriate under the circumstances either.

In my opinion Casserly and her experts place too much of the onus on young women. That can only make them more self-conscious and less self-confident.

For my part, I suspect that most women, left to their own devices, know how to get picked up in bars.

I am sure I am going to be corrected, but there are no seminars and workshops that teach women these skills. Call me old fashioned, but it does not feel like a very great challenge. Witness Karen Owen.

We need also to take account of the fact that in a hookup culture, in a culture where dating has gone out of fashion, the signals are going to get mixed, especially when young women are confused about what they should even expect a relationship.

The real question for young women today is how to find a durable relationship when the cultural climate, to say nothing of the economic climate, is militating against it.

While I agree that people should learn the kind of body language that makes them more approachable and less standoffish, I do not think that the best use of such skills is in teaching girls how to get picked up in bars.

But what if the issue is more about making friends and less about getting laid? What if the lessons are more about how to connect with people and less about how to have more cheap sex?

If you want to make friends and influence people, it is useful to understand some elementary body language.

Casserly’s article defines the two wrong ways to make friends and influence people.

First, if you cross your arms and evince disinterest and boredom your posture will denote defensiveness. You will be saying that you feel threatened.

Most of us will not approach someone who is withdrawn and scared. It would simply be impolite.

And if you are scared of me without knowing whether I am a threat, then you are likely taking me for someone I am not. In itself, this is rude and offputting.

The opposite is not an improvement. Some people are so anxious to make a connection, not just a casual encounter, but a deep and meaningful connection that they share too much information too soon.

They pour out their heart and soul to strangers. They treat them as intimates even before they exchange names.

When confronted with such a person you are going to turn away, because the person is not relating to you. He or she is relating to an image, a phantasmatic being that seems to fulfill a wish that does not concern you.

Whatever you believe about love at first sight, making a meaningful connection with another human being takes time. Rush it, and it will disappear.

You are not going to connect with people who do not know who you are and do not care to find out.

The wrong body language can involve the closed fist of defiance, the closed off posture of fear, or the excessively intimate hug.

What is the right body language? The open hand that offers friendship. In Zen it's the sound of one hand clapping

Why the Kids Aren't Alright

Now that we know that the kids are not alright, we want to know why.

How did it happen that college freshmen rate their mental health so poorly? Why, in particular, are college girls so likely to be depressed and demoralized?

What happened to all of those lessons in heightened self-esteem?

Kristina Dell attempted to explain it in the Daily Beast. Link here.

Dell she went out and interviewed experts to discover why so many college girls where having so much trouble holding it together.

Some of the explanations are almost comical: boys play stress reducing video games while girls are out socializing and volunteering.

In which planet do video games make you less depressed than socializing? Why didn’t they say that boys are less stressed because they watch more porn?

Dell also discovered that psychologists and counselors agree that girls are more easily wounded than boys, that they are more sensitive to slights, and that they take everything more personally and seriously.

I am not going to object to this as a description of young women who are suffering depression or who are feeling demoralized. It describes how it feels to be thin-skinned and in despair.

But, it does not explain anything; it simply describes an experience.

If we want to understand why, we need to look elsewhere.

Writing in the New York Times, John Tierney offered more of an explanation. In his words: “But, my sense is that most of the students at this school spend enormous amounts of time watching television, checking out Facebook, and otherwise engaging in totally unproductive activity. They certainly don't read anything!  In fact, I would say that the number one problem in contemporary American education is that students do not read enough.  Their reading comprehension is horrible.  Their vocabularies are impoverished.  They cannot talk about anything outside their own closed little worlds.”

That’s a better idea: young people are depressed because they are addicted to unproductive activities. They do not read books and do not know how to converse with their friends.

Be truthful, that would make you depressed too, wouldn’t it?

Of course, wasted time and energy are really a sign of poor character. These young people are suffering because they have no self-discipline.

This suggests that their parents have not taught them good ethical principles in them.

Tierney offers an interesting coda in his column, one that will, I am sure, brighten up your day: “But I have the uncomfortable feeling that this larger problem -- the waste of time on television and Facebook and video games, and, worst of all, the absence of any reading life -- is endemic among young people today.   If so, we're in big trouble.  They don't know anything and, worse yet, they seem uninterested in anything.

“What to do about this? The Tiger Moms of the world may, or may not, have the right approach.  But the rest of us haven't exactly figured it out, either.”

For other explanations of this psychological phenomenon, let’s look at the simple fact that most colleges and universities are majority female these days.

The experts applaud this, but throw up their arms in wonderment at the fact that this brave new gyno-centric world has not produced happier and healthier young women.

They ignore the fact, noted by many, that this disparity actually works to the detriment of girls… especially in the dating marketplace.

Yes, I know, college students do not date any more; they just get drunk and hook up.

But still, in a world where women outnumber men, the marketplace will grant men power over women.

If men are scarce and women are overabundant, each woman will have to compromise more often than she might like if she wants to receive male attention or to sustain male romantic interest.

The more women there are the more difficult it is for any individual woman to maintain her power in a dating or relationship.

Thus, the best laid feminist plans seem to have disempowered young women in the dating market. Who knew?

The moral of this story tells us that it is a bad idea to manipulate markets in order to produce specific outcomes.

The other part of the problem is something that some women recommend as part of the solution.

A group of women who call themselves sex-positive feminists recommend hooking up as a solution to emotional despair. After all, if you feel that you have low self-respect, why not act as though you do not respect yourself? That makes a lot of therapeutic sense.

I have opined on this topic before (link here); I believe that sex-positive feminists ought really to be called women-negative feminists.

Their advice, as every woman I know has told me, is detrimental to the emotional well-being of women. For that reason, I have been at pains to recommend that young women ignore it.

Beware of zealots who claim to be your friends. They are far too attached to their own ideas to be friends with any real human being.

The surveys tell us that young women need confidence boosters; they need to regain their pride and self-respect. The sex-positive feminists have told them how not to do it.

Recently I was reading an interesting article by Amelia McDonald-Parry, editor of a website called The Frisky. Link here. Via HookingUpSmart.

McDonald-Parry is apparently a graduate of the Jaclyn Friedman School of Heartbreak Repair. After her fiance broke off their engagement and their relationship, she decided to restore her wounded pride by drinking a lot and sleeping around.

When Jaclyn Friedman did the same thing--- thought perhaps with less alcohol-- she declared that she was getting in touch with her inner sluthood, which she had apparently been oppressing because the  patriarchy that is terrified of promiscuous women.

Anyway, Amelia McDonald-Perry seems to have missed my posts on Friedman, or else she decided that I was wrong. She decided to find out for herself.

She describes her experience, thusly: “ In the last six months, I have dated up a storm. I’ve slept around and, for the most part, had a good time. Magically, drinking on dates has given me the confidence I lack in my daily life. It gives me liquid courage, but more importantly, it gives me liquid confidence. It relaxes me, it makes my fears of rejection and abandonment melt away, it makes me feel like the kind of woman that would never happen to again.”

She is saying that drinking gave her back her confidence; it gave her “liquid courage.” In fact, she is self-medicating her depression. It gives her a boost in false pride, nothing more....

And McDonald-Parry also seems to have tried to add feelings of being in control by engaging in random, anonymous hookups.

She actually claims that such sex is a great ego boost:  “Sex takes that up about 10 notches. In bed with someone, I feel like a f**king goddess. I feel hot, smart, funny, sexy, beautiful, all of it. I feel in control. Control is what I have been grasping for ever since I was blindsided by my fiance calling things off. And I don’t feel like I’m lacking anything. In bed with someone, I feel whole.”

I can't speak for women here, but I do know something about men. I can share with all of you the fact that for a man you just men to go home with you and to have sex with you... you do not really have to be a goddess.

Anyway, McDonald-Parry describes this as a thoroughly therapeutic experience. In much the same way that most controlled substances make you feel good. You would not be tempted to become addicted to them if that were not the case.

The problem is the aftershocks. Somehow or other McDonald-Parry always seemed to want more than just another hookup. And when she did not get what she wanted, she reacted badly: “After bawling my eyes out last night after the pattern repeated itself once again, I’ve finally come to a conclusion. I have to take ownership of my feelings and behavior. It’s not enough to acknowledge that I’m an extreme emotions junkie. I need to figure out and manage why those extreme emotions come up. I need to feel confident completely in who I am without a drink in my hand or a man in my bed. I need to really see and believe, 24/7, that I am a whole person who is lacking nothing, rather than depending on a man or a buzz to give me that validation.”

Does this tell us why the kids are not alright? Does it tell us at least why the girls are not alright?

It does tell us that the path to cure involves going cold turkey on alcohol and hookups. That is McDonald--Parry's solution, and it is vastly superior to Jaclyn Friedman's.

Were she to ask my advice-- she didn’t-- I would tell her that if her goal is marriage, then she would have done better not to regale us all with her adventures in the land of the hookups.

Having Sex With Your Friends

Apparently, the practice has become so prevalent that it merits its own movie. Or two.

Today everyone is rushing out to see Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman hook up in “No Strings Attached.”

Soon enough we will be watching Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis hook up in a film called: “Friends with Benefits.”

If this confluence of cinematic endeavor means something, it may mean that the trend of “friends with benefits” is peaking and about to decline.

But, what does it mean to be friends with benefits? When two people who are otherwise friends engage in sexual activity that is, by mutual agreement, meaningless… they are, as I understand it, friends with benefits.

But why was it necessary to choose a term that completely obscures what is going on. “Benefits” is not a word that you would normally associate with libidinous pleasures or orgasmic rapture.

If these young people are so proud of what they are doing, why not call it by a more appropriate name: having sex with your friends.

These arrangements are a subcategory of hook ups, since hook ups refer generally to meaningless sexual acts that are random and anonymous.

As opposed to sex with benefits, hooking up has more power as a visual metaphor. Still, it hides the nature of the acts in question.

While a friends with benefits arrangement does involve hookups, other kinds of hookups do not require that the parties involved be friends, or even acquainted.

However it takes place, hooking up represents a denial that sex has any meaning, on an emotional or a physiological or social level. It is asserting that sex is about pleasure, and nothing but pleasure.

To be clear, it asserts that procreative and non-procreative sexuality are indistinguishable. Young people who hook up or who are friends with benefits are making a political and ideological point; they are asserting that they can have pleasurable sex without there being any relationship involved. Thus they are sacrificing their sexuality to a cause.

Friends with benefits are not involving themselves in a relationship; they are not expressing any emotion for each other; they do not project a future together; and they are not intending to present themselves in public as a couple.

In principle, friends with benefits agree to keep their dalliances a secret. If neither person is committed to the other, then both are looking for a real relationship. Telling the world that you are friends with benefits would not improve your prospects for finding a romantic relationship or commitment.

If the arrangement is a secret, however, public and private selves will be split. These two people will be presenting themselves as one thing in public and acting as something else in private. They will be living a lie.

Of course, we recognize that some couples go from being friends with benefits to being lovers and even spouses. Yet, the truth remains that friends with benefits is a simulated relationship, a sham, if not a scam. If it’s a scam, then the chances are quite good that the woman is the one who is being scammed.

Practices like anonymous hookups and friends with benefits exist within the world of youthful idealism. Under the aegis of certain philosophers, young people learn that pleasure is the only real meaning of sex, and that if two people agree to use each other for sexual pleasure, then they are not really using each other.

As it happens, they are wrong. Your consent to abuse does not make it less abusive. Even if someone has accepted that you use her for your sexual pleasure, that does not mean that you are not really using her. It simply means that she has agreed not to file any grievance you, whether legal or moral.

In other ways, these people are reinventing the wheel. Since they refuse to follow the lessons of the experience of past generations, they seem fated to learn these lessons the hard way.

Eventually, the ruse will out and they discover, in the best of cases, that there is more to a meaningful relationship than having sex with a good friend.

Karen Owen and the Duke F#%k List

Enquiring minds want to know….

They do not merely want to know what makes Karen Owen f#%k, but they want to understand why she wrote it all up in a mock thesis that mimics the pages of the National Enquirer.

I have offered some of my own analysis here and here, but, for now I want to examine the brilliant essay that Caitlyn Flanagan just wrote for the Atlantic. Link here.

Given that sex-positive feminists have made Karen Owen into something of a heroine, it is worthwhile to study Flanagan’s analysis of the situation. As opposed to the zealots who write in the name of feminism, Flanagan is perfectly attuned to the real-life experience of Karen Owen.

Caitlin Flanagan is the bane of feminists. We should not be surprised that her article has already provoked a counterattack.

Read what Hanna Rosin writes: “But her [Owen’s] sexual exploits are a fact the culture has to accommodate in its understanding of women,….A woman who loves sex – even one who describes her sexual exploits as pleasantly violent – is not in a state of 'ruin.' She is in control.

“What Flanagan’s analysis leaves out about Owen’s Power Point is how funny and subversive it was, how it takes male porn conventions and turns them on its head.” Link here.

At a time when every mother of a teenaged daughter is horrified at the prospect that her daughter will turn into a Karen Owen, Rosin’s remarks are reprehensible.

The culture does not have to accommodate anything, certainly not the ideological zeal of feminists.

Rosin and her like provide us with even more evidence-- if it had been needed-- of the fact that feminists are responsible for creating a culture in which a young woman like Karen Owen might imagine that her behavior is liberated.

As it happens, Flanagan does not have any psycho credentials to her name. Therefore, she has a decided advantage over those of us who do.

Better yet, Flanagan has read and reread the content of Karen Owen’s foray into sensationalist journalism, thereby sparing the rest of us the pain. I confess that when I wrote about Owen before, I did not read every last word in her thesis.

Why? Because they are painful to read. And because there is no great virtue to feeling someone else's pain. It is painful to watch a young woman (or anyone, for that matter) humiliate herself and a series of other people.

Here is how Flanagan analyzes Owen’s behavior and motivation: “Clearly the very last thing Karen Owen would want is for a reader of her thesis to perceive her as a vulnerable creature whose desire for sex with campus big shots was at least partly motivated by a powerful and unmet desire for affection. But in the sheer amount of anecdotal detail, and in particular in her relentless descriptions of the anatomical shortcomings of various partners, she reveals that the thesis is motivated by the same force that has prompted women through the ages to describe with savage precision their liaisons with men who discarded them: revenge.”

When you turn your life into a story, you take the risk that someone place it in a literary genre. Here, revenge narrative.

If we want to know what made Karen Owen chronicle her exploits and subject herself to inevitable humiliation, Flanagan tells us that it was clear and simple: revenge.

More than that, hers was a special subgenre of the revenge narrative, one where the avenger willingly sacrifices herself in order to hurt others.

Owen sacrificed her own reputation and her good name to humiliate the men who had hurt her. Perhaps, she felt that she had very little dignity left, so why not sacrifice it to reveal the damage that lay in being the Hookup Queen.

Whatever she thought, and whatever the feminists think, Owen’s story is cautionary.

Flanagan sees Owen as a lost soul, a girl who lived outside of the sorority culture, who had few friends, but who discovered that she could use her sexuality to gain a small taste of popularity, and even notoriety.

In Flanagan’s words: “The overwhelming sense one gets from the thesis is of a young woman who was desperate for human connection, and who had no idea how to obtain it.”

The hookup culture provided what Owen sought. Also, as you read her entries, as Flanagan has, you get the impression that the more she did it the better she became at it.

Sex can be a skill like another. Experience can be an excellent teacher. Owen was an apt pupil.

One of the reasons why women continue to hookup, regardless of the shame they feel, is simply that they get better at it.

Should we consider Karen Owen a feminist hero? Flanagan says No.

In her words: “If what we are seeing in Karen Owen is the realization of female sexual power, then we must at least admit that the first pancake off the griddle is a bit of a flop. What rotten luck that the first true daughter of sex-positive feminism would have an erotic proclivity for serving every kind of male need, no matter how mundane or humiliating, that she would so eagerly turn herself from sex mate to soccer mom, depending on what was wanted from her.”

Clearly, Flanagan disdains Karen Owen and her ilk. Disdains her for acting out a male fantasy, for compromising her femininity in a misguided attempted to feel equal to men.

Flanagan is correct to see Owen as: “… one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while.”

Better than that, she identifies the moment when Owen was launched into her career as Hookup Queen. It occurred after her hookup with Subject 2.

Before having sex with him Owen had taken off her earrings. Afterwards, she forgot them at his place. When she noticed, she called him to ask if she could recover them. He replied by offering to leave them outside of his building.

In Flanagan’s words: “The story of Karen Owen is the story of those forgotten earrings. Imagine the moment in which she paused to take them off—her favorite earrings, the ones that came all the way from South Africa and that she took care to remove before going to bed, because that’s what you do if you’re a responsible girl with a nice pair of earrings. You keep them safe. At the very least, she must have imagined that Subject 2 was inviting her to do what Subject 1 had done—not just to have sex with him, but to hang out with him. And then to be turfed out so rudely, so quickly, to be treated with such ugliness afterward. Imagine having been so young and so hopeful, being used sexually and then held in such contempt that rather than see you again, a young man leaves your jewelry outside his building, where anyone could come along and take it.

“Being rejected by Subject 1 was hurtful and embarrassing, but being treated like a whore by Subject 2 is what broke her heart and her spirit, and if you are the kind of person whose heart and spirit can be broken by a one-night stand, then you may not be the brave new face of anything at all.”

So, the Duke F#%k list is the aftershock of a trauma. Hopefully, young women will grant more credence to Caitlin Flanagan than they are prone to grant to her feminist detractors.

If you have to choose between a woman who is sensitive to the experience of another woman and a group of women who care more about disseminating their ideology than about what happens to you, do the right thing and choose the former.

Looking into the Male Mind

I will save the larger philosophical issues for another post, but today I want to direct your attention to Susan Walsh’s post on the male mind, on her blog Hooking Up Smart. Link here.

Some will find it interesting because they are involved in dating and mating games. Others are looking for some insights that will help them to guide their children.

Where did Susan garner her insights? Simply, from the males who have contributed to the comments section of her blog.

Like any comments section on a blog, hers is an open forum, sometimes sensible, sometimes raucous, sometimes  signed, sometimes anonymous.

It’s nothing if not a marketplace of ideas.

When the concept of a marketplace of ideas was first introduced into jurisprudence, we were told that free and open discussion was the best path to the truth.

This is not quite the same thing as asking experts for their opinion; it is not even the same as doing a survey.

At a time when many of our more liberal friends are trying to tar the marketplace of ideas as a bad thing that needs regulation, if not censorship, it’s valuable to look at the wisdom that one can garner from a free and open discussion… here, of male dating behavior.

The Company They Keep

I do not much like blanket statements, but I’ll make an exception for this one: your success in life will depend in very large part on how good you are as a judge of character.

In other words, the therapy culture has gotten it wrong. If you want to succeed, you need to be judgmental, to be very judgmental, especially in choosing your friends, your associates, and your spouse.

I wrote about this topic before, two years ago, when I joined those who were arguing that we would do well to judge the character of then-candidate Barack Obama in relation to the company he kept.

Whatever you thought or felt about Obama, however much his dulcet tones moved you, you would have had a better idea of his character by considering how close he was to Jeremiah Wright.

I was reminded of this point when reading Susan Walsh’s post about the same topic today. Link here.

Walsh has dedicated her site to issues of dating and hooking up. To her credit she continues to try to explain to young people that dating is a better option than hooking up.

Her post yesterday addressed the problem of judging the character of men who maintain friendships with cads, with men who use women for mere sexual pleasure.

No one approves of anyone using anyone else for anything, no less free sexual favors.

And yet, the hookup culture exists, to the point where it appears to have supplanted the dating culture, and the reason is that women allow it to exist.

If all college girls decided tomorrow to pull a Lysistrata, the hookup culture would vanish. When it comes to dating and mating, women are very largely in charge. Most men are barely aware of what is going on in this realm.

I have my own suspicions about how and why the hookup culture persists. Whatever the causes, as long as coeds are handing out free love, college guys will want in on the action.

Yet, these free goodies are not being handed out equitably. Some guys are getting more than their fair share; others are not getting anything at all.

Which, of course, leads us to question whether or not there should not be a better way to redistribute sexual favors… in the interest of social justice.

Women should do some thinking about why they have allowed themselves to be tricked into treating their intimacy like trick-or-treat candy, to be given away to whomever has the best costume.

Given these extreme circumstances, how are we to judge the character of men who are cads or players. If a woman invites a man to have sex with her, is he a bad person if he agrees? He probably knows that if he refuses he will be hurting her feelings.

So, let’s say that she takes an initiative, and he responds. Now, let’s add that they have a pretty good time and they keep hooking up. She might be the instigator; he might be the one making the booty calls.

They do not date; they do not really have a relationship; but they are having a pretty good time. Until the day when he finds someone better. Is he a cad for playing the game that she has designed and not knowing that she sees their hookups as something more than he wants or has ever agreed to?

In any case, judging character is not the easiest thing to do.

As Walsh reminds us, we choose our friends freely. With the exception of our spouses, we do not choose our families.

People do better if they judge our character more by the friends we choose than by siblings or parents we did not choose.

I cannot tell you whether it is still common practice, but in olden days no one was hired for a high executive position until the hiring committee met the candidate's spouse.

The rationale: your free choice of a spouse offers critical insights into your character.

And that means that when you are at the point in your life when you are choosing a mate, you should again defy the therapy culture and should not put the entire emphasis on whether or not the two of you are really in love.

The culture seems to have taught us that being really in love will solve everything. You cannot receive a more misleading message.

Your subjective feelings for the other person matter, but objective judgment should also weigh in your decision-making scales.

You can make such a judgment by looking at the friends he or she has chosen, the company he or she keeps, and then, to how your friends and family react to him or her.

Next, you should ask yourself whether he or she is trustworthy, loyal, responsible and reliable... based on everyday behavior. As the old ethical saw would have it, anyone can run into a burning building to save a child, but only people with the best character always keep their word and always show up on time.

Hooking Up Is Bad for Your GPA

Does abstinence education produce greater abstinence? Is it an exercise in futility to encourage children to abstain from sex?

Framing the questions in these terms tends to ignore the more salient question: is it better or worse for a child, that is, a high school student, to abstain from sex.

And, how can you measure the advantages or disadvantages of an early introduction to sex?

Today, the New York Times reports on a study that proved, unambiguously, that children are better off if they abstain: “A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found a decided link between celibacy and good grades. Among high school students who earn mostly A’s, 32 percent have had intercourse, compared with 69 percent of their peers with D’s and F’s.” Link here.

The study also shows that children who get higher grades are significantly less likely to lubricate their hookups with alcohol or drugs.

Of course, it may be that smart children are smart enough to work harder on their studies, to gain more satisfaction from their schoolwork, and therefore have less time or need for hookups.

The Times also emphasizes another study that does not just limit itself to a comparison between abstinence and hooking up, but that extends the question to include children who are sexually active within relationships.

And here, the answer is unsurprising: “Another cautionary tale — a new study called ‘Sex and School: Adolescent Sexual Intercourse and Education,’ from sociologists at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Minnesota — concludes that while teenagers who hook up have lower grades and college aspirations, sex within a romantic relationship is generally ‘academically harmless.’ Romance, it seems, prevails: committed lovers and abstainers were statistically alike.”

The next time a sex positive feminist tells you that hooking up is   therapeutic, as we debated a while back on this blog, send her to these studies. Of course, that assumes that she will be swayed by the facts.

The Pain of Rejection

We would all agree that you are not going to get very far in this world if you cannot handle rejection.

But, we would also agree that you are not going to get very far in this world if you hand out too many rejections.

If we can make these two statements make sense we will have learned something important about social behavior.

Some people are completely impervious to rejection. Or at least that is how it seems.

Think of a man who makes cold calls for a living and another man who tries to pick up every women who crosses his path.

But are they really that impervious? One could easily argue that they have found a way to avoid rejection. How painful is it really when you are rejected by someone you do not know and have never met?

Surely, it takes a certain amount of courage to make a cold call or to ask fifty women to have a drink with you, but I fear that people who do this for a living are not quite as thick-skinned as they think.

You handle the lowest level of rejection, but how will you do if you feel rejected by people who are very close to you, friends,  family,  or loved ones?

Being rejected by those who know you best is considerably more painful than being rejected by a stranger at the other end of a telephone line.

Let's expand the example. Which is worse, being rejected by someone you have loved and been involved with or being rejected by a random hookup?

Clearly, the former is going to be more painful than the latter. If a young woman has decided to postpone marriage in the interest of building a career, would it not be somewhat logical for her to believe that not getting too involved in a relationship would limit the risk of relationship failure and feelings of rejection?

While no one would want to preclude the possibility that those nearest and dearest to you would reject you for reasons that are entirely of their own doing, most outside observers  assume that someone who is rejected by his intimates is being  judged harshly indeed.

This form of rejection applies to divorce. It explains why the rejection implied in divorce is so difficult to process. 

The same rules apply to acceptance. The fact that you are accepted into the company of certain people speaks well of you. The closer are the more you will look better for having been included in a prestigious group.

Something similar happens in business. Let's say that you are trying to land a new account? If you put everything you have into your presentation and are still not chosen, you are going to feel rejected.

But is the rejection personal; does it reflect on the quality of your work; or are there other reasons? And if it does reflect on the quality of your work will you be able to make the rejection into an incentive to improve yourself and make a better presentation the next time?

According to Susan Walsh, we can develop a no-fault theory of social rejection. Considering that we all want to learn not to take rejection personally, this theory will surely be of value.

In a world where social anomie is prevalent, and where people move around so much that they often do not know who they are or where they belong, serial rejections can help you find your way.

As Walsh puts it: "If you fake it in some scene where you don't belong, you're not going to make it. You will be sniffed out as an impostor and you will be rejected, repeatedly. Peer pressure is built on the power of fear of rejection." Link here.

In that situation, you are not being rejected for a moral failing, but because you are socially out of place. Feelings of rejection should thus propel you to seek out groups that are more congenial to your skills, your customs, and your talents.

It may not be the case that you are too good for them or they are too good for you. It may just be a bad fit.

The same might apply to your work at a specific company. You may be too talented; your talents may not lie where the company needs them; your style may simply grate on that of the other employees. 

Will you feel rejected when you are let go? Surely. Will you feel that you do not want to walk away from the job because you will feel as though you had been forced out? Yes, you will. Is this a reason to stick with it even though it is a bad fit? Of course, it is not.

All of this to say that most rejections should not be taken personally, and should not be considered to be a meaningful reflection on who you are or what kind of person you are.
An honest man might be rejected for membership in a gang of thieves. This does not reflect on him. It reflects on them.

Clearly, rejection can only tell you that you do not fit if you are willing to accept the message. Someone who makes cold calls for a living might end up being unable to accept rejection. He may feel that if the first application has been denied, he needs merely to apply again and again and again.

We all need to learn how to deal with rejection. But it is impossible to deal with rejection if you feel rejected all the time about everything. 

If most of your life involves feeling like a competent member of a community or a company or a group, then you will have a much better chance of dealing with rejection. Better than if you are assaulted by rejections on a daily basis.

Which is one reason why most of us try, whenever possible, not to reject people unless it is absolutely necessary. 

If someone asks you to have a drink and you do not want to go, you ought not to say that you do not want to go. You ought not to declare forthrightly that  you do not want to improve your relationship with the person. You ought to say that you are too busy or otherwise committed.

Most people do this. It is basic to human etiquette. It has become customary because we have all learned that it is not worth the effort to provoke a confrontation or an angry reaction over something very small. It wastes time and energy, and it might create an enemy unnecessarily.

Openness and honesty, especially when it is rejecting, is simply rude. You are not doing anyone a favor by giving him yet another opportunity to thicken his skin.

Of course, in our open and honest age, some people will make it very difficult to refuse an invitation politely. They will insist and insist, aggressively, to the point where you will feel that you have only two choices: giving in or being extremely rude.

In other words, your good manners and your good character can get you exploited. This is not a reason to develop bad manners and bad character. It does mean that even the person with the best character will sometimes have to do something that is just plain rude.

One can only wonder how many young women have said Yes to hookups because they knew that if they said No their words would have been felt as a rejection and would have provoked anger or confrontation.

How many women have said Yes to hookups because the young man who was begging for it looked so pathetic that they could not stand seeing him in such a state of public abjection?

Let's call this a form of psychological coercion. It teaches you that if someone puts you in the position where your only choice is between rejecting him and giving in to something that you do not want to do, you are going to have to find  your inner rudeness. 

You might think that someone who cannot handle rejection needs you to help him to save face. In reality, by the time he reaches the begging stage he has no face to save.

What Makes Karen Owen #&*$?

Alexandra Petri's comments on Karen Owen, stand out for doing a great job analyzing the issue of public exposure. Link here.

As you may  know, I believe that the thoroughly modern tendency to expose your private life is deeply problematical. Many of those who are involved in sexting and other forms of internet self-exposure do not really understand the consequences of their actions. My comments here.

Note how Petri frames the issues: "The universal human impulse to autobiography stems, in large part, from the desire to be the protagonists of our own lives."

She continues:  "Karen Owen's wry, often witty, self-deprecating, self-aware voice takes control of her 'raucous life.'"

And also: "By recounting the story, you claim agency! You craft your own narrative and become the wry, ironic storyteller, rather than the drunk girl doing shots in the corner with Name Redacted, ignoring the whispers as she walks out of Shooters with another guy."

And finally: " Karen is single-handedly giving that girl stumbling down the steps of your dormitory at noon with someone else's socks on a better name."

I hope I have allowed Petri's argument a full presentation, because I am going to take some slight exception to it.

I believe that its brilliance lies in the fact that it  uncovers a connection between what students learn in college classrooms and how they conduct their lives.

If you take a few courses in women's studies or in critical theory or deconstruction or even in some forms of therapy, you will learn exactly the lessons that Petri articulates so clearly and so accurately.

I can think of a serious psychoanalyst, named Roy Schafer,who once argued that therapy should be about becoming the author of the narrative of your own life. See his: A New Language for Psychoanalysis.

If you have been taught that there is, as Petri suggests, a universal human impulse toward autobiography, you can expose your life and feel that you are standing tall with St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Of course, there is no such universal human impulse. There is, in fact, a universal human impulse toward modesty, toward covering up your private parts and functions.

Today's professoriat does not accept it, and Karen Owen is suffering the consequences.

Surely, it is possible that Karen Owen also learned at Duke that she should take ownership of her own experience by writing her own narrative, by becoming the protagonist in her own story. After all, Duke used to be the world epicenter for postmodernist criticism.

I hope that Petri is being ironic when she says that Owen has taken control of her own experience. In fact, her life has just spun completely out of her control. Whatever her prior ambitions, the only path that seems open to her now is to make a career of celebrity.

As for her final point, the implication that Owen has single-handedly given that coed on the walk of shame a better name, I also hope she is being ironic.

You may not like it, and you might not consider it to be theoretically correct, but Karen Owen has just dragged her name through the mud. Do you think that her parents are proud of her? Do you think that the parents of a prospective husband would be happy to welcome her into their family? Do you think her siblings are proclaiming their pride in her college achievements?

Just some thoughts for a Friday morning.