#article response
I’m going to be honest: this reading made me feel literally sick to my stomach. I wanted to throw up. Which, whatever. As someone who has been in a relationship, and has talked to a lot of people who have been in sustained relationships, I am honestly repulsed by some of the comments of these young women. I don’t mean to say it as a judgement thing - what irritates me most is the culture that causes such sentiments, but I’ll get back to that. I also don’t mean it targetted against women; I would be just as angry at men who voice such opinions. Society giving men leave to be sexually promiscuous is completely ludicrous, and the biology they base it off of is severely flawed (I also hate most scientific arguments for things - if there’s a social bias available, I stay skeptical of the argument; science is much less telling than the 20th century has convinced us it is, and any real scientist should acknowledge that).
The arguments used by the women to justify cheating are so revealing of the privileged middle+ class view of love. Delaying adulthood? What a joke! The refusal to take responsibility in one’s life and DO SOMETHING is what is driving this world down the drain. Not that it was better before or after, but that doesn’t make it less of a major problem, and it’s easier now to do it. But that is not the central conversation. Basically, I agree with Alison: cheating is bad, period. I found it interesting that the writers mentioned her “strict conservative views on sexuality, positioned her outside of the collegiate culture of delayed adulthood” because honestly what does that mean? What conservative views? How do conservative views immediately connect to delayed adulthood? If anything, I would argue that her early marriage - which may have been influenced by conservative views on sex - and making that work, or trying to, is probably what puts her outside of the culture of delayed adulthood. Which, frankly, I don’t think is a bad thing.
Again, drawing back to my point earlier this term about “enacted age” and “comprehensive age” - I think these women sound very immature, and it makes sense because this is a sampling of class-privileged women and they have been able to afford to be selfish. Don’t get me wrong, people who are underprivileged can also be selfish, but less easily, and generally with different motivations (I don’t want to go in-depth about privilege/race/class, but I think a rough idea is hinted at in my discussion of Not Under My Roof). Most of them have not yet been through a string of divorces and not yet realized that “the perfect one” that “you won’t want to cheat on” doesn’t exist in a way that women who grow up in communities of fatherless households might. I’m completely generalizing, but that is the sort of statement I expect to hear from people who have not actually talked to couples about the struggle that marriage often is.
I don’t mean to be offensive or super critical - I’m just listening to P!nk and venting - this is just something that I care a lot about because, again, my own expectations about love really set me up for a lot of pain, and I honestly think society’s twisted standards does the same for our relationships. Let me explain.
Wilkins describes how the women interviewed unanimously agreed that they valued monogamy and shamed cheating. But they also saw a validity for cheating in certain circumstances, and half of them had cheated. I really agree with Wilkins conclusion, which was that:
“Women’s cheating occurs in a context of persistent gender inequality in heterosexual relationships, in which women are not expected to control relationship progression or to be direct about their relationship desires. College women’s cheating behavior, then, may be less an indication of collapsing distinctions between men and women’s sexuality than of continued inequity in dating relationships. Women cheat, in part, because they have less power to enter, leave, and negotiate satisfactory dating relationships, and because relationships and femininity continue to be coupled in public understandings. In the context of both relationship inequity and continued pressure on women to sustain relationships, infidelity becomes a strategic option for exiting unwanted relationships.”
Really, a wonderful summary analysis. And I think she’s really right: we have set up this desire for this perfect relationship, via romantic comedies and stories and then given girls no way to get there. Which is extraordinarily frustrating. Women are told we will be in a sexually fulfilling, emotionally rich relationship and that we’ll “know” when we’re in love and it’ll be happily ever after, but men are told that they are wired to just be after sex, and we’re all told that college is no place for a relationship and we’re too young. Many times relationships were described in the paper as “greedy” - which I wonder if it’s a term interviewees actually used, or was something just created by the writer…
Because honestly, the struggle doesn’t get better. It doesn’t get easier. Just because you have an established job down the line doesn’t mean that you’ll be willing to give it up or whatever. And yes, college is an extraordinarily busy time, and yes, people do change a lot, and there are many different opinions about it, but I honestly just wish we policed our scripts less. Yes, relationships CAN be “greedy”. And yes, honestly, being an adult and having responsibilities and taking them onis really scary and not a lot of fun, and yes, a lot of us don’t really get to have a lot of “fun” very often because of the fast pace of society, but it really is about the goals and intentionality with which we approach life, depending on our values. I think that sexual exploration should be able to happen within relationships, and that women should be able to exit relationships; I also think that both men and women should be held responsible to be faithful. As the women discuss, it can be extremely emotionally painful to your partner, and it is often emotionally motivated, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.
