Monthly Archives: May 2010

“A relentless catalyst for the other’s growth”: a positive definition of monogamy

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What does monogamy look like?

I got that question, phrased precisely that way, from a friend recently. He wasn’t asking for a definition, and he wasn’t asking for a defense of the institution. He was asking about living it out in practice.

I told my friend I wasn’t necessarily the best person to ask; though long a defender of the principle, until well into my thirties I proved capable of honoring monogamy only in the breach. Fidelity didn’t come naturally to me, something I’ve noted before. My friend told me that this was precisely why he was asking who it was he was asking — I had a “before and after” story he found moderately compelling, and he trusted that my relationship with my wife today is as it appears to be: faithful on both sides.

I’ve touched on this issue before in various posts, but I’ll summarize a bit today. First off, monogamy needs a positive definition. It can’t be summed up by what one doesn’t do with other people. I’ve never liked the “I’m monogamous because when I’m in a relationship I’m not sexual with other people” stance, not because I disagree with the statement, but because it’s far too limiting. Monogamy is about where we direct our physical and emotional and sexual energy, and not just where we don’t. In other words, monogamy is as much about single-minded devotion to one other person as it is about scrupulously avoiding sex (or emotional affairs) with others. If the energy isn’t flowing towards our partner, then we can’t claim we’re really monogamous if all we’re doing is keeping it bottled up. Monogamy and sexual self-denial are very different beasts.

Bottom line: monogamy is as much about how I love my wife as it is about how I don’t express that particular kind of love to others. It is defined by intensity as much as by exclusivity. That intensity has waxed and waned over our nearly eight years together; it has been profoundly impacted by the birth of our daughter. But it remains more than shared bank accounts and parenting duties and the enduring pledge not to be sexual or romantic with others. Our relationship is, at its core, a contract of mutual support and a pledge to act as a relentless catalyst for the other’s growth. And if you know me, or you know my wife, you know just how relentless we can be.

Virtue coerced, or virtue chosen: on abortion, contraception, happiness, and Ross Douthat

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Ross Douthat made waves last year when he joined the New York Times as a columnist. A social conservative, Douthat’s views are generally well to the right of both the paper’s editorial positions, as well as those of its star pundits such as Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman.

Today, Douthat wrestles with what must be an uncomfortable truth for any righty: “blue states” tend to have a better track record on family values than “red ones.” (For background, see this Pew report and this National Journal article). Douthat:

…from divorce rates to teen births, nearly every indicator of family life now varies dramatically by education, race, geography and income.

In a rare convergence, conservatives and liberals basically agree on how this happened. First, the sexual revolution overturned the old order of single-earner households, early marriages, and strong stigmas against divorce and unwed motherhood. In its aftermath, the professional classes found a new equilibrium. Today, couples with college and (especially) graduate degrees tend to cohabit early and marry late, delaying childbirth and raising smaller families than their parents, while enjoying low divorce rates and bearing relatively few children out of wedlock.

For the rest of the country, this comfortable equilibrium remains out of reach. In the underclass (black, white and Hispanic alike), intact families are now an endangered species. For middle America, the ideal of the two-parent family endures, but the reality is much more chaotic: early marriages coexist with frequent divorces, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate keeps inching upward.

Douthat and his allies are in a pickle. Clearly, the widespread availability of abortion and contraception have not led to the decline of those families whose members are most likely to support access to these two critical rights. The dichotomy is stark: those most likely to pay lip service to family values (and to vote Republican) are those whose personal choices are most at odds with those same values. Those most likely to delay having children — but to have children in wedlock — are those whose politics lean left. Even more simply, the evidence is stark that access to safe and legal abortion and effective methods of contraception have strengthened rather than weakened “traditional families”. What a painful conundrum for conservatives to confront!

To be clear, I don’t agree with Douthat that the rise in single-parent households is lamentable. The reality is more nuanced. To the extent that the rising numbers of babies born to unmarried women reflects the happy reality that the stigma against “illegitimacy” is waning, that’s cause for at least as much celebration as sorrow. To the extent that community networks and social programs can reduce women’s reliance on unstable or abusive male partners, this is also a good thing. (When it comes to understanding poor women’s choices about reproduction and marriage, there’s no better resource than the magisterial Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage , which I reviewed here.)

From the progressive perspective, marriage ought to be a choice rooted in mutual desire rather than a necessity rooted in desperation. Better fewer marriages, but happier ones — that’s a reasonable goal. And it’s a goal that, as Douthat notes, a fair number of “blue state” Americans have pursued successfully. But he suggests that the price of all of this stability and happiness has been too high:

Liberals sometimes argue that their preferred approach to family life reduces the need for abortion. In reality, it may depend on abortion to succeed. The teen pregnancy rate in blue Connecticut, for instance, is roughly identical to the teen pregnancy rate in red Montana. But in Connecticut, those pregnancies are half as likely to be carried to term. Over all, the abortion rate is twice as high in New York as in Texas and three times as high in Massachusetts as in Utah.

So it isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, both morally and practically, depending on who and where you are.

Shorter Douthat: you liberals may be healthier and wealthier and happier, but y’all had to kill your poor blessed babies to achieve these fine things, so you ought to feel ashamed of yourselves. Continue reading →

The UK ought to stay left

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One note on the UK general election. Though the Conservatives have finished as the largest party, it’s worth noting that well over half of the UK electorate voted left-of-center. Add the vote totals for the Liberal Democrats, Labour, and the Greens and you’ve got nearly 55% of the national vote. Throw in the left-leaning Celtic nationalist parties like Plaid Cymru (Wales), the Social Democratic and Labour Party (Northern Ireland), and the Scottish National Party, and the number creeps closer to 60%. Put together a coalition of Liberals and Labour plus the single Green MP and the Ulster/Wales/Scotland left-leaning nationalists, and you’ve got a working majority in the Parliament.

From that perspective, on what basis could the centre-right Tories claim a mandate to govern? The right — defined by the Conservatives, the xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party, and the loathsome racists in the British National Party — are together at about 40% of the vote, while nearly six in ten voters in the UK want a left-of-center government.

They ought to have one.

And for what it’s worth, I do appreciate that Conservative leader David Cameron — who believes in cap-and-trade, who believes in legalizing same-sex unions, who believes in supporting the single-payer National Health Service — is in some respects to the left of Barack Obama.

Here endeth the politics.

Lectures on birth control history, liquid feminism, and incremental sexuality

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Tuesday’s lecture on contraception and the history of birth control is available for download here.

Yesterday’s lecture on liquid feminism and incremental sexuality is here.

I’ve been exhausted all week, and so neither reflects me at my best. Thanks as always are due to Mon-Shane Chou for faithfully recording and posting them.

A note on the UK Election — and on gratitude for Britain

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Too much to get done today, and not enough time in which to do it. If I have any readers in the UK who have not yet voted, I urge a tactical vote against the Conservatives wherever possible. Here’s a good guide as to how to do that.

My nearest and dearest in Britain are voting Green; were I there, I would likely cast my vote for the Liberal Democrats. I like the latter party’s commitment to environmentalism, civil liberties, and capitalism with a human face. And from a psephological perspective, I am passionate about proportional representation and instant run-off voting, the sort of innovations that strengthen democracy and which only the Lib Dems support.

My brother and I were born in the States to an American mother and to our father, the son of Austrian war refugees who had spent his childhood and young adulthood in rural Oxfordshire. My father was 24 when he emigrated to California; he lived in the States for two-thirds of his life. But he was always culturally English. In one of those curiosities of families, my brother Philip (whose most recent book has just been released) always felt more at home in the UK than in America. More or less the first chance he got, he moved to the land our father called home; my adored younger sibling has been a professor at the University of Exeter for the past decade.

For reasons I’ve written about before (here and here and here), I’m most at home in California, particularly in L.A. But I love Britain, and I never forget that in my father’s family’s darkest hour, as the Nazis closed in after the Anschluss in 1938, it was Britain (not America) that gave them safe refuge. It was the British government who made it possible for my Viennese-born father to grow up milking cows on a bucolic farm near Wantage rather than perish in Auschwitz, as many other relatives did.

My late father made his life in America: two marriages, four children, a fine university career that spanned more than four decades. What stood out about him to so many was his astonishing gentleness, his kindness, his sincere interest in other people. The best aspects of him were, in no small part, nurtured by the people he grew up with. He never forgot the simple figures of his childhood; the dairymen and teachers and shopkeepers who welcomed his family and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that he — a half-Jewish refugee — belonged. I heard their voices in his, and still do.

I carry a British passport as well as an American one for many reasons. Not least to honor that heritage, and to honor those people — who in some way are my people — whose simple decency saved my family and formed the man who did so much to form me.

My father’s parents are buried in the tiny village of Kingston Lisle, a half-hour from Oxford, in the Vail of the White Horse. We recently had their graves restored. The names Georg Clemens Schwyzer and Elisabeth von Schuh might seem out of place there, a splash of the Teutonic in this very English graveyard. But England made them welcome, so very welcome, in life. And they remain so in death.

Thursday Short Poem: Moxley’s “Fountain”

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Jennifer Moxley, who teaches English at Maine and is a celebrated poet and translator, is a master of the use and subversion of traditional poetic form. She’s subversive in other ways, and this slightly longer piece from her most recent collection, Clampdown, will make a few readers stir in both recognition and discomfort. Been there, lived it, have the scars and the memories and the now-faded regrets. The last line is marvelous.

The Fountain

Women do not love
as men do –
or so we’re told
by adults, who
do not remember
the gelatinous
yearning of twelve-
year-olds, not for
proposals but just
to get off. As a girl
I cruised like a boy
in daylight and
open-air spaces
looking
for willing partners.

I can’t help but think
that, though I was
sent indoors long ago,
domesticated by age,
they are out there still:
young boys
by the hundreds
awaiting seduction.
When I turned eighteen
I could no longer
see them: the street,
the parking lot, the
convenience store –
all empty. Unconcerned
about return I longed
for access to their
bodies. What I knew
about desire
was its weakness,
the droopy beauty of
an embarrassed youth
when, late on a
Sunday afternoon
you make him break
into the school john
in order to cuff
his girlish ankles
in a sea of
moist denim.
Who he is
doesn’t matter.
The public policing
of money and morals
destroys beauty
such as this –

for most of us
to “grow up”
means learning
to loathe what’s cheap
and what’s free,
when to value
the latter is
surely to be it.
The pleasure of
tonguing a pink-
lipped stranger
does not accrue,
it can be repeated
endlessly and yet
feel quite new.
How stupid then
to fetishize
the few who blew it.
They remain singular:
I still regret that
wasted night when
in my sleeping bag
with the stars as
bored witness
I gave up my ways
and suffered passively
next to his gorgeous
stillness. When the
sun’s light destroyed
the night I awoke
untouched and filled
with shame at the
thought that I’d missed
an arc of existence
that I might not now
ever reclaim.

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Rejecting the narrative of male sexual indispensability

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This subject came up in my Queer History class today, and I thought I’d repost it. A link to the excellent original comments section can be found here.

This post first appeared in December 2008.

One of my former youth group kids came to talk to me last week after reading last week’s post about sexual identity. Louisa, 19 years old, has been “out” as a lesbian since she was in ninth grade, and has been with her girlfriend for two years now.

Louisa is in love with her gal. But lately, she finds herself questioning her self-identification as a lesbian. Though she describes having always hated the label “bisexual” for what she saw as its “wishy-washiness”, she talked about her growing curiosity about what it would be like to be (sexually, if not romantically) with a man. Louisa has never done more than simple kissing with a guy, and she finds herself wondering whether she ought to “try something” with a man just to find out what it’s like. She admits she’s been driving her girlfriend crazy with this hemming and hawing about having an experience with a fellow. But her curiosity, more so than her libido (though she’s savvy enough to know that those two are often enmeshed) is causing her to be, in her words, “mildly obsessed” with knowing what it’s like to be sexual with a man.

Louisa has taken my gay and lesbian studies class. She has read her Adrienne Rich; she knows about the reality (not just the theory) of growing up in a culture of “compulsory heterosexuality.” And she knows very well that if she were with a man, she might feel far less psychological pressure to experiment with a woman. “We don’t make straight women prove their straightness by having sex with girls”, Louisa said, “so why do I feel so compelled to ‘prove’ I’m lesbian by trying something with a guy? It’s like I feel I have to earn my queer credentials.”

Louisa, who has known me since she was 13, wanted one thing from our conversation last week, and it’s something I don’t know if I was able to give to her. She wanted help discerning whether this fascination with trying “it” (specifically, losing her heterosexual virginity) was something rooted in her own psyche or whether it was a response to the dominant cultural narrative. I pointed out the obvious — that for most of those, those two things (“natural” or “inherent” longings on the one hand and the socially-conditioned ones on the other) are incredibly difficult to separate. A lot of us spend a great deal of time working through this process of discernment; it’s one of the toughest tasks of young adulthood, and not a task everyone succeeds in completing. But the fact that it’s difficult doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Clearly, most of us believe that our internal “bundle of desires” has innate and cultural-constructed elements. For example, we might say that for someone like Louisa, an attraction to women is largely innate while her attraction to partners who have dark eyes and like anime is largely conditioned. Continue reading →

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We are always on the record: how the most interesting man in the world gets it very, very wrong

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Driving to school on Monday morning, I passed a billboard on Robertson Boulevard. Part of the immensely tiresome “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign for Dos Equis, a Mexican beer, the slogan on this particular sign read “The Bulk of Your Life Should Be Off the Record.”

I’ve loathed some of the Dos Equis slogans. The worst one so far features an image of the hirsute interesting man and the words “He wouldn’t be afraid to show his feminine side, if he had one.” My favorite: “At museums he’s allowed to touch the art.” Clearly designed to appeal to young men (though one suspects the boys most easily amused by this sophomoric humor are under legal drinking age in the USA), the Dos Equis campaign is typical of much modern advertising: it plays on young men’s longing for reliable, hyper-masculine father figures. The Most Interesting Man in the World dispenses something even more valuable than tips for how to get rich or get laid: he offers certainty about what it means to be a man. He is notable for a complete absence of self-doubt. Given that so many young men are crippled by the absence of mentors and a nearly paralyzing degree of uncertainty about their lives and their roles, the appeal of this sort of advertising is obvious.

But while most of the advice in the Dos Equis campaign is silly and puerile rather than truly misogynist, the suggestion that the bulk of one’s life should be off the record infuriated me.

At the very heart of what it means to be an adult — for those of you who like to gender everything, a man rather than a boy, a woman rather than a girl — is the commitment to matching one’s language and one’s life. To be a grown-up means to live with integrity; integrity literally means “wholeness” or “congruence.” Put another way, an adult lives his or her life as if they are always on the record, with no disconnect between public pronouncements and private practices.

This commitment to congruence doesn’t mean one speaks to toddlers the way one speaks to one’s lovers. It doesn’t mean one doesn’t save some behaviors for behind closed doors. To put it another way, the rest of the world doesn’t get to know what my wife and I do in the bedroom. The point is, if they were to find out or stumble in, they would see that how we connect intimately and privately is radically compatible with the public aspects of our lives.

The world needs grown-ups. And grown-ups know the shabbiness and the heartbreak of a life lived in compartments. They know that young people — and all of us, really — need role models whose words and actions match. And whether in the public eye or not, they’re always on the record.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from my comments as a response to those who think I’m taking this much too seriously:

As we all know, irony gets lost in translation (especially with American adolescents, who tend — despite their affected sophistication — to live in an irony-free zone). Think about the old Miller Light “Man Law” ads; the boys I knew in youth group adored them, quoted them, and, despite their awareness that the commercials were tongue-in-cheek,tended to take them very seriously.

All advertising is didactic. It teaches something, even as it flatters the audience into believing that they are in on the joke. That’s the thing about ads like this: they aren’t ironic. They appear to be; Dos Equis may want an urban educated audience to think “Hah, look at how we’re playing around with the problem of contemporary masculinity in a hyperbolic way”, but they know damn well that a substantial percentage of folks out there aren’t going to be able to do that kind of rapid meta-analysis. Particularly teens, who are always the target of alcohol ads, as they are the ones whose brand loyalties have yet to be firmly established.

And though I was never much of a beer drinker in my day, I drank a lot of Dos Equis in college. It was, for a long time, my favorite beer.

Seventeen May 4ths ago — a dream fulfilled, a friendship lost

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Tra la! It’s May!
The lusty month of May!
That darling month when ev’ryone throws
Self-control away.
It’s time to do
A wretched thing or two,
And try to make each precious day
One you’ll always rue!

-Camelot

Seventeen years ago today, I started dating the woman who would become my second wife. I’d met Sara at a Twelve Step meeting in the summer of 1991. I was a year into my troubled first marriage and, at the time, just over a year clean and sober. Sara and I shared the same sponsor, and we became fast friends.

I fell in love with Sara very quickly. I’d had affairs while engaged to the woman who became my first wife, and that behavior hadn’t stopped after we’d gotten married. (This raises the excellent question of why I wanted to get married in the first place, which is another story). I never attempted anything with Sara, however. Rather, from the summer of 1991 until the summer of 1992, I spent as much time as I could with her and our friends in the program, minimizing my time in what was a very unhappy and frustrating marriage. (For which I take full responsibility. I was a wretched, manipulative, passive-aggressive, dishonest cad. I operated under the noxious principle that my own pain was so great it served to exculpate me from any pain I might cause others.)

Sara and I talked on the phone daily; I became her confidante and best friend. She figured out that I had a crush on her, but made it clear (in subtle and unspoken ways) that she didn’t reciprocate. Eventually, I left my first wife at the urging of the sponsor whom Sara and I shared; my sponsor told me, wisely enough, that I needed to find a way to be faithful in my marriage or I needed to end it. I chose to end the marriage in July 1992.

Sara and I grew closer, but even after I was single, I never attempted to start a relationship with her. I was terrified of losing the friendship, and was certain that her love for me was entirely platonic. So I pursued other romantic adventures, TAed classes, prepared for my doctoral exams, edited UCLA’s Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and lost a lot of weight. I dreamed about Sara at night, fantasized about a life with her, and kept it all to myself. ‘Twas a familiar story of unrequited graduate student longing.

On May 4, 1993, Sara invited me to her apartment in Brentwood, a few miles from campus. We had a weekly Tuesday night dinner arrangement, and these occasions were the highlights of my week. Sara and I would laugh and talk and gossip about the program; we would read poetry together and eat fat-free cookies for dessert. (Remember the “fat-free” craze of the early 1990s, long before the Atkins outbreak of a few years later?) That Tuesday night, Sara took my hand as soon as dinner was finished, and in a gentle, trembling voice told me that she had feelings for me. She explained that she’d always known how much I’d loved her, but while I was married, she’d blocked them completely. As we’d become closer friends in the months since I’d been separated from my wife, Sara explained that she’d begun, slowly, to reciprocate the feelings I had for her. She was in love with me, she told me that night, and wanted to know if we could start seeing each other in a new way.

I made it home to my apartment a little before five the next morning. I wrote in my journal as soon as I got in: “Yesterday was the best day of my life. I have never been happier.” And for the next week or two, I was walking on air. The dream of everyone who has an unrequited crush on a friend is that that friend will suddenly fall in love with them as well. It rarely happens. But it happened to me, and I was over the moon with joy.

The relationship, I’ll note, was an utter disaster. Sara and I had been magically close as friends; we were awful as lovers. It’s not that the sex was bad, but that our capacity to communicate seemed irrevocably compromised by romantic intimacy. What had flourished so easily in our platonic relationship collapsed very quickly under the weight of something very different. But we persevered. We were both — and here is the point of the post — desperate to make things work because to admit failure would have been to lose the friendship that had been the relationship’s genesis. Sara and I both felt we had no choice but to keep trying. And we spiraled downwards fast.

We were engaged before my first divorce was final, and we were married in a lavish Palm Springs wedding in the autumn of 1994. We were separated twenty months later, following my relapse after more than six years of sobriety. I haven’t laid eyes on Sara since she kissed me goodbye in a hospital in June 1996, and she remains the only ex of mine to whom I have been unable to make amends or even attempt closure. I do know that Sara ended up coming out as a lesbian a few years after our divorce. Where she lives now, I have no idea, and in this technology-saturated age, have resisted the temptation to find out.

A few years after we separated, a psychic told me that Sara and I were supposed to be brother and sister in this lifetime. That, the psychic explained, was the source of our intense platonic bond — and the explanation for why our romantic relationship had proved so catastrophic. “Your souls knew you were committing incest”, the psychic said, “even if you weren’t consciously aware of it.” That sounds like a lot of woo, but the point was a fair one. Sara and I had been such dear friends, so devoted to one another, that each of us had developed the fantasy that we could easily transition into an equally devoted and intense love affair. I developed the fantasy early; she developed it late, but we both came to believe in it.

And when we found that the chemistry we’d had as platonic friends turned poisonous in a sexualized context, our disillusionment and bewilderment was profound. I’ve never said such hurtful things to a partner as I said to Sara; nor have I ever been on the receiving end of hateful diatribes like the ones my second wife delivered to me. But our rage, I came to see years later, was rooted in a profound sense of mutual betrayal. Each of us blamed the other for not keeping the initial relationship as it ought to have been. Each of us clung to the illusion that we could make things work. It ended very badly.

One of the many small blessings of that second marriage was that it ended my habit of getting crushes on female friends. It’s a common dynamic: boy meets girl, boy projects a huge fantasy onto girl, girl just wants to be friends, things muddle on in a state of awkwardness. (Lots of boys in these instances have “Nice Guy” syndrome, rooted in a sense of frustrated entitlement.) I had these unreciprocated crushes and obsessions on and off for years, from 16 to 26, on perhaps half-a-dozen close female friends. Finally, with Sara, my most fervent wish came true. And the aftermath was sufficiently ugly that it served to cure me of the habit.

I could have posted about other things today. But for some reason, the date echoed in my head when I woke up this morning. More traditional posting coming soon.

Your body is never the problem: a letter to a sixteen year-old on clothing, style, and creepy old men

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Rachel, who blogs at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, poses this question from her 16 year-old self: how do I stop creepy old men from hitting on me? Rachel writes of a recent encounter with her favorite advice columnist, Melissa Hoyer:

Me: “OMG, I loved you column! When I was 16, I was going to write in to asking for advice. I wanted to know how I could dress differently to stop attracting creepy old men and start attracting guys my own age instead.”

Melissa Hoyer: “Er, I don’t think I would have been able to help you with that one.”

Rachel explains:

At the time, I had come to the conclusion that the reason I was attracting more attention from men who were 18 or 20+, right through to 40 or so, than guys my own age (the ones I was actually interested in) was because I dressed in manner that was too “adult”. I wanted to write to Hoyer because I was searching for a way to reconcile my desire to dress in clothes that I felt an aesthetic affinity with, with my desire not be designated an “adult” – an identity I was far from ready to take on at 16 – or a piece of meat because of it.

It was a question that was about far more than fashion, though – and I suspect that’s the reason Hoyer told me she wouldn’t have been able to answer it (although I like to think she would have been touched had I ever sent it off). At its heart, it was a question from a girl/young woman trying to come to terms with and navigate her own objectification.

As a feminist and a father, a professor and a former youth leader with years of experience working with teens, I thought I’d take a shot at answering Rachel’s query.

If I were writing to a 16 year-old named Rachel, I’d say:

Dear Rachel,

I wish that I could offer you specific fashion tips that would guarantee that creepy older guys wouldn’t hit on you. For that matter, I wish I could share with you how to dress in a manner that would assure that your peers wouldn’t frequently judge you, either to your face or behind your back. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to ensure those things — because the sad truth is that no matter how you dress, no matter what you wear, you will be perceived by some men as a target for their unwanted advances.

You may have heard people say things like “girls who wear short skirts are asking for ‘it’”. By “it” they may mean anything from rape to crude comments and penetrating stares. But as you may already have noticed, girls aren’t immune from harassment when they’re wearing simple or “modest” garb either. I’ve had plenty of students who’ve been accosted while wearing sweatpants or long dresses. I’ve had Muslim students who chose to wear head coverings, and they’ve been harassed both religiously and sexually. The bottom line is that there’s nothing you can wear that will guarantee respect from others. And the reason is that the root of this problem isn’t skin or clothing, it’s our cultural contempt for women and girls.

Have you noticed the way this works yet? If a girl is thin, she’s accused of being “anorexic”; if her weight is higher than the cruelly restrictive ideal, she’s “fat” and “doesn’t take care of herself” or “has no self-control.” If she wears cute, trendy clothes she “only wants attention” and if she wears sweats and jeans, she “doesn’t make an effort.” If she’s perceived as sexually attractive, and — especially — if she shows her own sexual side, she’s likely to be called a “slut.” If her sexuality and her body are concealed, she’s a “prude.” As you’ve probably figured out, the cards are stacked against you. You cannot win, at least not if you define winning as dressing and behaving in a way likely to win approval (or at least decent respect) from everyone.

The advice I’m going to give may sound clichéd, but it’s important nonetheless: you should dress in a style that makes you comfortable. Continue reading →