Ruth Institute Blog

Caitlin Flanagan has an interesting article in the Atlantic.  In it, she discusses the narrative some proponents of the sexual revolution had in mind when they promoted the new sexual morays to the next generation of girls.  That narrative can be called “The Boyfriend Story.”  What is the “Boyfriend Story”?  It is “the gossamer-wrapped quest for true and perfect love.”

Flanagan describes how her mother was one of those who hoped her daughter would attain happiness via the “Boyfriend Story.”  (Emphasis added).

[M]y mother became one of those kindly, kooky older ladies whose dedication to volunteering at Planned Parenthood bordered on the unseemly, given the distance between their age and their own need for the services provided. She was part of a generation of women who helped build an infrastructure not just of attitudes but of medical services (from birth control to abortion) rendered to teenage girls and built on a host of assumptions: that a girl is capable of great sexual desire, and that this desire should not cause her to lose her chance at an education or an independent life; that a huge number of modern mothers were committed to helping their daughters incorporate sexual lives within a normal teenage girlhood, one in which sex did not cleave the girl instantly and permanently from her home and her family. These mothers were willing to run as much interference as was needed to make these things possible—with dads, who tended not to be as enthusiastic about the prospect of a cherished daughter’s becoming sexual; with PTAs, which often balked at the kind of sex education these beliefs would require; with the long-entrenched double standard that said a boy could have sex and retain his good reputation, but a girl who went all the way was ruined.

But no matter how forward-thinking, no matter how progressive, those long-ago women might seem to us now, they shared one unquestioned assumption about girls and sex, a premise that, if expressed today, might cast doubt on one’s commitment to girls’ sexual liberation: all of them, to a woman, believed in the Boyfriend Story. This set wasn’t in the business of providing girls and young women the necessary information and services to allow boys and men to use and discard them sexually. Their reaction to the kinds of sexual experiences that so many American girls are now having would have been horror and indignation.

So, girls, how did it work out for you?  Women dissatisfied with the hook up culture may be tempted to say that it didn’t work out quite as planned.

Why not?  Well, as usual, human nature got in the way.   It seems that those sexual revolutionaries who believed in the “boyfriend story” didn’t reckon on what type of men would inhabit the dreams of their naive charges.

Women, you see, are most attracted to a certain type of man, the so called “Alpha Male.”  These types of men tend to have their pick of women.  You might expect such men to confine their attentions to the most attractive of women.  Men who are somewhat less “Alpha” would date women somewhat less attractive, and so on down the line.  You would figure wrong.  For short term flings, Alphas will lower their standards.  They wind up having flings with a disproportionately large share of women.  This explains why the Centers for Disease Control reported as the statistically unbalanced situation where 10.4 percent of men have had three or more female partners in the previous 12 months versus the 79 percent of men who have had one or less.

Don’t believe me?  Check out the CDC’s statistics on rates of herpes infection. Notice anything?  Well, here’s something: twice as many women are infected with the disease as men.  That is what you would expect to see if large numbers of women were competing for the attentions of a smaller number of men.

What happened to the Boyfriend Story?  Well, the men who were the goal of women’s “gossamer-wrapped quest” were spoiled for choice.  Women, competing for their affections, granted them short term flings.  Hence the hookup culture.  The rest of the guys?  Well, the women wrote them off as losers.  Bye bye, boyfriend story.

I bet the next batch of sexual revolutionaries pitching the next fairy tale will be similarly wrong.  They always have been.