All posts tagged "Jessica"

I'm sure you all have seen the ads for the new Anna Faris movie "What's Your Number", which is built around a head-scratchingly outdated premise, that a woman who has slept with 20 guys would quite literally believe that pushing that number to 21 would push her out of the marriage market forever (and that she would believe it's better to be married to some random dude you have already determined you're not in love with than to not be married at all). Or I would have thought it was an outdated premise---the movie's poor box office showing suggests that may be the case---but Jessica Grose has convincingly argued that there's still a lot of anxiety about women having "too many" partners, and for men there's a lot of anxiety about having "too few". She also starts to crack open the eternal statistical mystery of how men can routinely claim to have more sex partners on surveys than women, which is so consistent that there basically has to be fudging going on, because the men couldn't be having this much sex if the women weren't into it, unless they were having it with each other. (Even the usual explanation---that a small handful of women are the "excess" partners for all these men, doesn't hold up---a greater percentage of men than women claim to have more than 15 partners.) Jessica discovers that part of what's going on is women round down and men round up to meet expectations. Men count oral sex and mutual masturbation as sex and women don't as much. 

Sorry if my blogging is sparser than usual. I'm still in New York, and will be until Friday. But everything will be back to normal next week!

[rebelmouse-image 24748958 original_size="1024x768" expand=1]To my fellow free-wheeling, sex positive feminists, I have to beg you once again to prioritize intellectual honesty over proving your bona fides of non-prudery. In the long run, being scrupulously honest about certain sexual practices is more sex-positive, for reasons I'll detail. But let me start with the links that brought this on. It all started with Jessica Wakeman writing a defense of facials (that is, acting out this pornographic trope in your bedroom), a defense she issued after she wrote a piece for the Frisky where she implied that taking a shot to the face is a minimum entrance requirement to being a good girlfriend. As for the latter piece, well let's just say that it's not my experience that every guy desires to have his girlfriend admit to being a bad girl for liking sex and then punishing her in a demeaning way for it. In fact, while it's still a minority thing, a lot of men get off on the idea of unapologetic female sexuality.

From Jessica comes the news that not only do 70% of Americans think that women should take their husband's name, 50% of them said, "Yeah, sure" if asked if it should be legally required. It gets worse!

Kate Harding and Jessica Valenti both have pieces up defending themselves for marrying, and about the difficulties of crafting a feminist wedding, which are apparently the same exact problems trying to craft an individualistic wedding, which is a mandate that comes down on people just as hard as the one to conform, which creates the industry of everyone copying everyone else's cute unique touches.* I enjoy going to weddings, but have to say that as a guest to many, I think that what really impresses people is if you have good food, a good bar, and if you can get people to dance for hours at your wedding, that matters more than almost anything. But I digress---both Kate and Jessica talk at length about how merely deciding to get married means patriarchal creep into your lives. Jessica found herself taking on most of the planning, and Kate found that even eloping didn't mean she got to escape the horrible wedding beast.