It seems it’s now a thing that women feel guilty about desiring a long-term relationship. As per that liberal rag, the Atlantic:
As a sociologist who’s interviewed several 20-something women on their sexual development, I’ve found straight young women aren’t necessarily embracing hooking up because they’re masters of their own destiny, as suggested by Hanna Rosin here a The Atlantic but because they face a new taboo and it’s not about sex or money or power. Instead, it’s a taboo about that traditional province of women: relationships. Ambitious young women in their 20s feel they shouldn’t want relationships with men at this phase in their lives.
I can’t believe this is a thing. I knew some feminists wanted the right to be sluts without shame, but what the hell?
What could possibly possess a person to feel guilty about desiring a human relationship?
But what really got me about this piece was this:
Some young women deeply desire meaningful relationships with men, even as they feel guilty about those desires. Many express the same sentiment again and again: “Why do I, a young and highly educated woman in the 21st century, value relationships with men so highly?” To do so feels like a betrayal of themselves, of their education, and of their achievements.
Really? I can’t even really feel anger over this, just sadness.
Women value relationships with men because humans were created (or evolved) to live with each other, to love each other, and to form relationships. We are social creatures; relationships define who we are.
To not value human relationships is to engage in self-annihilation.* The desire for companionship is the most human part of you, to fight against it is to destroy yourself and your humanity.
Meet a girl named Katie:
Katie, a 25-year-old woman I spoke with as part of my research, confided that she worried her single-minded pursuit of a graduate degree might limit her ability to meet a man with whom she could build a life. This realization—that she might want to prioritize a relationship over a career—felt shocking to Katie, and she did not admit to it easily. She felt deeply ashamed by such thoughts, worried that they signaled weakness and dependence, qualities she did not admire. To put such a high premium on relationships was frightening to Katie. She worried that it meant she wasn’t liberated and was still defined by traditional expectations of women.
Read that again: “She worried that it meant she wasn’t liberated and was still defined by traditional expectations of women.”
This women is destroying herself, destroying the things that are real in her life (relationships, family, and her desires for such) over ideological cant.
Dear Katie, if you are not pursuing what you truly desire because you are worried about signalling weakness and dependence, then you aren’t liberated and you are weak. If you are denying your human desire for companionship to “signal” independence, you are a slave, not of the body, but much worse, of the mind.
You are still letting others define you, you have just changed which group is doing the defining.
Also, which do you think you will value more in a decade: a man who has loved you for the last decade or an over-priced piece of paper that you are still paying off?
I have heard Katie’s dilemma from countless young women. Many feel ashamed about being too relationship-oriented in their 20s. Parents warn, “Do you really want to settle down so early? We just don’t want to see you miss out on any opportunities.” Friends intone, “How will you know what you like and want if you don’t play the field? You’re only young once. Now’s the time to explore.”
I think these parents and “friends” are going to have a lot to answer for on judgment day. What kind of idiotic advice is that?
Like Hamilton and Armstrong’s respondents, many young and aspiring women with whom I spoke felt as though it were counterproductive to their development to prioritize a relationship with a man.
Because human relationships are not a part of self-development?
This is a new phenomenon that goes against the grain of centuries of female socialization.
Because the desire for human relationships is something socialized?
Anxiety is difficult to tolerate, and rather than experience it, many of the young women I interviewed and work with in my psychotherapy practice split their desire for a relationship off from their professional and self-development desires. Confused about freedom and desire, young women often split their social and psychological options—independence, strength, safety, control, and career versus connection, vulnerability, need, desire, and relationships—into mutually exclusive possibilities in life. Romantic relationships then often become something to be avoided and denigrated rather than embraced.
Wow. Why would any women tolerate this kind of psychological self-annihilation?
Why? Why would women put up with an ideology that required them to destroy themselves?
I find this more sad than maddening, but if I were a women, I would be pissed over this.
****
Slate XX commented on this. Read:
How can you want a relationship if you have no prospects? Unless you’re actually casually dating someone (or have a secret crush on someone you interact with regularly), actively “wanting” a boyfriend seems rather silly to me.
Really? It’s silly to desire the basic human need of companionship?
Ellen Tarlin: I disagree. I think it’s almost unavoidable. Relationships are so romanticized and overvalued in our society! We are plagued by images of them.
Materialistic nihilism on full display.
Laura Helmuth: I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but I am kind of thrilled that this is considered embarrassing among smart young women.Having a boyfriend and/or being well on the way to marriage used to be the default for twentysomethings. It’s fascinating that the social stigma has reversed so dramatically.
I am thrilled that women are denying their basic human desires and needs to pursue empty corporate work and a consumerist lifestyle.
Hanna Rosin: I feel like this moment we’re in now of shame about the boyfriend is great and necessary for progress and all that but will recalibrate and settle down.
Is she a fucking sadist?
Emma Roller: On the other side of this, I feel a lot of guilt for having a wonderful, stable relationship with my boyfriend of two-plus years. I’m anxious about missing out on what the zeitgeist says the 20s lifestyle “should” be (playing the field, etc.), but what if I’m happy where I’m at?
Please re-read that, and just think about it for a minute. “I feel a lot of guilt for having a wonderful, stable relationship with my boyfriend of two-plus years.”
Juliana Jimenez: I hear you. I sometimes get a bit anxious over that as well—that I’m missing my 20s and I’m really living a 30s kind of life with my stable boyfriend and what not.
Again, consider that.
Meg Wiegand: I guess I’m the minority here: I’m in my late 20s, perpetually single, and very much worried about not finding someone. I know I’m absolutely fine on my own, and like Aisha, I’ve rarely met anyone I would ever want to consider being ”attached” to. But I continue to bounce on and off online dating sites and go on dates with friends of friends (mostly just ending up with great cocktail fodder) in hopes of finding someone who could be a partner.
Part of me is embarrassed by this—that I’ve escaped small-town Ohio and lived abroad and have a master’s degree but can’t find a partner. The other part feels that society already tells me that I should be ashamed of my body fat and short legs and hair that isn’t straight and blond, so why should I take this any more seriously? And why is this any different than feeling lonely because my family members and close friends are a plane ride away?
Wow. You could write an entire post just on these two paragraphs. It’s like every manosphere stereotype of modern American women rolled into two paragraphs.
Alyssa Rosenberg: What strikes me as weird about this conversation, and why this shift in priorities doesn’t seem like a complete feminist victory, is that it discounts the idea that a relationship can be an incredible source of support for career and life goals. Having someone who, say, helps with chores to give you more time to study or work, or who encourages you when you’re discouraged, or works in a similar field and helps you with ideas, who backs you publicly, etc? All this stuff can make it much easier to work harder and in a more productive way or to work through difficult challenges. I’m not sure we should get psyched by the idea that young women don’t want relationships but rather by the idea that women want more from their relationships or that we view relationships as part of a larger matrix of things that can work well together.
Alyssa here is comparatively rational. She sounds almost human and not like she had her heart replaced by the archives of Jezebel.
Ellen Tarlin: Because twentysomething men are selfish! (Joke. Sort of.) No, I’d say because these ideas about what women should be or do die hard. Your boyfriend or husband may support the ideals of feminism, but when he gets home, maybe he’d just really like it if you would make dinner, too. (Who wouldn’t?)
Read that again: “No, I’d say because these ideas about what women should be or do die hard.”
Think on it for a minute. You should now realize how insane this whole thing.
These women are sitting around discussing a sadistic, near-psychopathic (feminist) societal expectation that is causing women to annihilate themselves and their base human desires, and celebrating it because it destroys older societal expectations.
Dear women, why do you listen to people like this?
Why do you take the advice of people like this?
Why?
I don’t know, there’s not much left to say. This makes me sad.
****
* Severe autists, clinical psychopaths, and others with a natural inability to form human relations excepted.
So goes the white birthrate
Let them do as they wish. If they want to speed along the destruction of the very world that makes their delusions possible, then let them. Perhaps it is the only way that they might ever learn from their self-imposed nightmare.
The threads are coming together, though. The age of plenty is coming to a nigh, and either God (for Christians) or natural law (for those of a more secular bent) is going to unravel all these distortions.
Sad, very sad. Love is a wonderful thing, and men want it as well. Women can’t enjoy casual sex as much (which makes men look unromantic in comparison), but desire for love, I would say, it in most people. But feminist brainwashing is very efficient, I see.
This attitude is very off-putting. How good would it be to be a partner to one of these women? She will often check herself, to make sure she doesn’t need you too much, effectively love-starving you just a little bit. Also, constantly look over her shoulder in fear that she is missing out on casual sex with other men. I know she’s been fooled, and it’s not 100% her fault, but it’s intolerable.
The cracks are getting larger, little by little, day by day.
“To do so feels like a betrayal of themselves,”
Sounds good to me – this means the young women are easily available and not looking for anything permanent when they are at their most desirable, and will come to the realization they have been “had” even later in life. That’s a good thing – fewer women stressing about being in a relationship – that is why 25 is my upper limit with women – not because they aren’t still desirable (they are) but because they start wanting something serious rather than no strings attached sex and that is a hassle.
From a man’s this should be a good thing – attractive women, who aren’t interested in settling down. Men stay desirable much longer so should avail himself of all of those young and lovelies till he’s too old to get them anymore. That will depend on the guy, but I’m 50 and still nailing 18 year olds, so it’s all good to me… I may be able to raise the upper limit to 28 or so, if this thinking catches on… Right now, after about 25 they start talking about “settling down” and “having children” – ack… Gag me… I would never do that in the US anyway, but since I’m planning on being here at least for a couple of more years, the longer I can avoid the “baby rabies” the better…
Yep, as an aspiring pickup artist I agree with Doc and support this new development one hundred percent. This will produce a generation of twenty-something women who feel ideologically compelled to have no-strings-attached sex with guys like me, followed by a generation of thirty-somethings who will put out quickly in a desperate bid to fill a hole in their psyche they do not understand and cannot even name.
And all of it due to that great panty-pryer of our time, feminism. Thanks, feminism!
You knocked this one out of the park. We’re a highly social and gregarious species. Our interpersonal relationships help us define who we are as individuals and our romantic attachments play a large part in this. To characterize our capacity for romantic attachments as a liability or worse flies in the face of our humanity. I’m stunned. This isn’t even misandry anymore, it’s anti-love.
“so goes the white birthrate”.
Increasingly, that’s what femiism appears to be about. Destroying the European caucasian people by telling those women that they shouldn’t focus on husbands, marriage, and HAVING CHILDREN. I bet Hanna Rosin is happy about those low birthrates, too.
Women are just so fucked up. XD
Phil
The only place where responsibility lies is at the feet of the women themselves.
“Feminism” or anything else is just an idea, at best a distraction from the real place to lie blame: The women themselves.
The Machine State, the Great God Leviathan, demands all from his followers; the blood, the earth, the love of the human soul, all are distractions. To commit to Leviathan you must renounce the chest – brains focused upon minutiae and technocracy, loins emptied every weekend with the consistency of bowels, but no chest. Your soul belongs to the state.
Feel guilty, you women who haven’t given this Mechanical God your all!
Aurini, that is poetry,brother.
I’m not even sure what to say. That is some of the worst shit I have come across so far. I’m just glad this sort of thinking has not spread to the backwoods redneck South yet. Here, women are still all about relationships and wanting to get married and have babies.
The women in L.A. are like a herd of buffalo running off the edge of a cliff after being lured there by feminist ideology. They spend their best years living it up like they are celebrities. When they hit 30, the majority have lost their luster. Some become un-marriagable they are so unattractive.
What is really alarming is their universal complete lack of self-awareness. None of them have the slightest idea that their looks have declined.
Women are killing men on job sites slowly, little by little and then wonder why they can’t find anyone attracted to them.
Why do you take the advice of people like this?
Why?
Men get attention and women want it. Think about it. On average, men are better at the things that get people noticed and respected. STEM, sports, CEO, hell even your ability to age extraordinarily well. We want that and it is not in our natures to have it. So, instead of doing the smart thing and going out and working toward our strengths and going for the slow burn of happiness and contentment in a marriage and family, we go for the quick flameout of major attention in achieving graduate degrees (that we often cannot see are worthless), no strings attached sex with desirable men who can give us that quick attention buzz but will leave in the morning, etc.
This validation that is quick and dirty is intoxicating and makes the slow burn of a happy and lasting relationship pale in comparison . . . until the possibility of that lasting happiness is nearly gone. Women have a choice of a lifetime of a steady flame with the occasional wonderful roaring of the flames . . . or . . . . a few years of the burn as from a jet engine only to have a complete flameout at the end. Deep down women know this, hence this anxiety, though they still choose the latter.
The need for validation and the herd are difficult things to overcome, so is natural biology. Much anxiety ensues.
Anti-Sex. This is truly Orwellian. I doubt they can grasp that fact, much less the implications.
Reblogged this on Notes Of Man and commented:
A good read and evidence on how most women do not think for themselves but instead allow group and social thinking to dominate them. Very sad and scary thought. Choose your wife carefully.
Related:
Zenpriest #67 — The Baby Bomb: How the Boomers Were Used to Demolish a Culture
Check out erin callan’s op-ed regarding career vs. Family.
Wow, this got popular.
@Doc & PR: That is one way to look at it, but from the non-hedonist perspective, it bothers me. Although, the hedonist perspective has become increasingly tempting over time.
@ Aurini: Very poetic, I like it.
@ stingray: It’s kinda sad when people choose short-term pleasure at the cost of self-destruction.
@ retrenched and titanium: Thanks for the links, I’ll give them a read.
Well, sad and funny. The funniest (most deceitful) remarks were from the lone shemale on the panel, Bryan Lowder. Patently just there for the eunuch’s perspective, he managed to slide in an observation of such extraordinary obsequiousness / self-serving creepiness in response to the 20 somethings pseudo anxiety that it took my breath away:
“And if you’re worried about missing out on the growth-potential of sex/flirtation/lover-having, there are all kinds of open relationship arrangements that allow for that…”
Of course there are, Bryan. That the likes of you and Hugo Schwyzer would happily indulge in subverting the relationships of other men (or be willingly cuckolded by the likes of Hugo) speaks volumes. The fact that the 20 somethings on the panel would indulge genuine creeps like you whilst labelling the average Joe as being “creepy” merely heightens the absurdity of their bubble.
And talking of the pseudo-anxiety of the 20 somethings, wasn’t it instructive to see female competition in action in such a supposed sistah-friendly environment?
Both talking about the “troubling” nature of their STABLE RELATIONSHIPS WITH STABLE BOYFRIENDS whilst half the (older) panel were single and alone? Whatever could they have been getting at?
Free Northerner,
What’s even sadder is the fact that women, deep down, do know this. Only they allow their hamsters to spin it away. They want to believe the lies, so they let themselves forget and rationalize away all the cognitive dissonance they feel.
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