{"id":111,"date":"2006-01-15T10:44:31","date_gmt":"2006-01-15T14:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=111"},"modified":"2006-01-15T10:44:31","modified_gmt":"2006-01-15T14:44:31","slug":"blow-jobs-and-doom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=111","title":{"rendered":"Blow jobs and doom"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is an extraordinary<\/a> and very thought-provoking piece in1<\/a><\/sup> the Atlantic<\/em> magazine this month about the sexual habits of American teenage girls. It seems to be widely reported, and may even be true, that they offer blowjobs as we used to offer cigarettes — a non-commital gesture of recognition within the peer group. What makes the piece worthwhile, though, is the way that Caitlin Flanagan sees this as evidence of a wider depersonalisation of society.<\/p>\n\n

… kids who seem adrift in the increasingly isolating family culture that was being born in the nineties. They speak of family members who have televisions in their own rooms, who never eat dinner together, who live with one another in the sepulchral McMansions of Conyers the way people live together in hotels: nodding politely as they pass on the stairs, aware of one another’s schedules and routines but only in a vague, indifferent manner. These are kids—girls especially—who have developed a dull, curiously passionless relationship to their own sexuality, which they give of freely.<\/p>\n\n

… The question is this: How, exactly, in the course of thirty years, did we get from Katherine to Gin? How did we go from a middle-class teenage girl (fictional but broadly accurate) who will have sex only if it’s with her boyfriend, and only if her pleasure is equal to his, to a middle-class teenage girl (a gross media caricature reflective of an admittedly disturbing trend) who wants to kneel down and service a series of boys? Katherine and her mother (who still enjoys a pleasurable sex life with her husband) represent two points on a continuum. In the mother’s generation sex was contained by marriage; in the daughter’s it was contained by love and relationships. The next point on this progression ought to be a girl who feels that nothing save her own desire should control her choice of sexual partners. Instead we see a group of young girls who have in effect turned away from their own desire altogether and have made of their sexuality something that fulfills all sorts of goals, but not the one paramount to Katherine and her mother: that it be sexually gratifying to themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

No wonder thoughtful parents want to home school. I don’t think that we can understand creationism unless we see that worrying about “Darwinism” is a proxy for worrying about these sorts of changes in society — and that they are worth worrying about.<\/p>\n\n

1<\/sup> It may be paywalled. I can’t tell from here, as I am a subscriber.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is an extraordinary and very thought-provoking piece in1 the Atlantic magazine this month about the sexual habits of American teenage girls. It seems to be widely reported, and may even be true, that they offer blowjobs as we used … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}