All posts tagged "Jessica Grose"

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you all have seen the ads for the new Anna Faris movie "What's Your Number", which is built around a head-scratchingly outdated premise, that a woman who has slept with 20 guys would quite literally believe that pushing that number to 21 would push her out of the marriage market forever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 Or I would have thought it was an outdated premise---the movie's poor box office showing suggests that may be the case---but Jessica Grose has convincingly argued that there's still a lot of anxiety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. 

The debate about marriage continues to rage at Double X, though of course it's moving as these things do towards a romantic defense of the institution. This is where something seemingly inevitable kicks in, with both Jessica Grose and Bonnie Goldstein arguing that marriage is great because it's so nice to have a partner to live with. They're doing this in response to Caitlin Flanagan, who wrote a typically incoherent defense of marriage (we need it because of the children! but divorce---which can only happen if you get married---is bad for children!) Goldstein's response in particular befuddled me.