It's the Drudgery, Stupid!

A New York Times essay today laments the fact that dating, as we know it, has ended (“The Demise of Dating,” by Charles M. Blow, Saturday, Dec.13). Anyone who reads The Love Goddess knows that dating–e.g., courtship, i.e., the orderly ritual by which a man and women get to know each other in order to proceed to intimacy and, it is hoped, marriage–ended ages ago. The writer’s point is that hooking up–that is, having sex (usually with a friend) before getting to know him or her, and with no plans to continue toward emotional intimacy– is a sad way to conduct the getting-to-know-you process, even as he admits that “hooking up emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating” and also takes away the negative part of being in a group and not having a date.

Here are some pros to this new scenario: One, that a woman can have sex with the same casual feelings about it (“I’d like to sleep with that guy!”) as a man. The single female high achiever, working her head off, is everywhere and, to put it bluntly, she needs sex just as much as the male high achiever does. Hooking up, unromantic as it is, reflects the fact that a strong woman now makes her own choices about how she wants to live and with whom she feels like sleeping at the moment, and there’s no strict societal consensus on how she should conduct herself–despite how many of us feel in our hearts.

Of all the things this “new “paradigm has going against it, though– like the fact that in the end it’s still men who choose whom to see AFTER the hooking up and hanging out (Yes, still. He decides, finally, whom he’d like to date); and the fact that women are the ones who get a bad reputation for hooking up too often (Yes, still. She’s called “a slut” and he isn’t); what irks THIS goddess most among these old, old hangovers from the old paradigm is the one element that so sadly reflects the dreariest part of it. The part where women do the double shift, powering ahead in the workplace by day and working in the home by night. Study after study confirm that in coed dorms, where the whole notion of hooking up and hanging out began and continues to flourish, it’s women who can’t stand the mess men leave and inevitably do the cleaning up. Yes, still! It’s women doing the laundry and making the breakfast. Women washing their socks and the men’s, too. Women vacuuming the rooms, changing the sheets, putting flowers around. Women trying to bring some elegance and charm to these new nests of sexual equality.

So, young women beware. The equality part is great. The economy part is great. The age-old drudgery part is not so.

TLG