Thank goodness! FOBG Mary Beth Williams at Broadsheet explains this article from yesterday’s New York Times, which struck me as just so strange that even someone with a Breakup U. education couldn’t figure it out. Now, I wasn’t a math major, but all I could think was, I understand that 45 percent is less than 55 percent, but do still-nearly-half-male campuses really, REALLY, make all institutions of higher learning feel “women’s colleges”? And, more to the point, does this EMERGENCY!!!! man-shortage really drive smart co-eds to make foolish choices?
We think not. From Williams’s awesome fight song:
According to yet another of those scare tactics stories that makes my weekend coffee seem just a little more bitter, when women outnumber men in colleges, they’d better lower their uppity-ass standards, stat!
Take, for example, the heartache unfolding at the University of North Carolina. On yet another “tiresome” evening out, writer Alex Williams explains, the girls are forced to “slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another,” because as one future spinster bemoans, “there are no guys.” “With a student body that is nearly 60 percent female,” it’s “just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges.” And at the University of Vermont, where it’s 55 percent female, locals “sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as ‘Girlington.’” I’m sorry, I’m just a set of knockers who can’t do math, but a 45 percent male enrollment makes for a no-man’s land?
Sure, Williams throws us the bone that all this education “is hardly the worst news for women” (no, it’s your withering love box that’s the bad news). But all that fancy book learning comes with a price – “it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.” And that’s an inevitable tragedy that shouldn’t have to happen until you’re at least 35.
But no, women barely above drinking age are hooking up for desperate one-night stands. “A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” explains one desperate little hussy. You read right, New York Times readers: College women! Having easy sex! Because they are lonely and sad. And if they’re lucky enough to land one of those precious boy thingies, they’d better be wiling to put up with his shit: Cheating is described as “a thing that girls let slide, because you have to.”
Well, what do they expect, really? This is what happens when a university is “obligated to admit the most qualified applicants, regardless of gender.” Paraphrasing W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the unnaturally 57 percent female University of Georgia, the Times explains, “Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them.”
No, it’s OK. Go bust your ass on the SATs and take out loans you’ll be paying until well into your 40s, as long as you don’t mind paying the price and being victimized and all. Happy now, girls? HAPPY NOW? No you are not, that’s the answer. And “the loneliness can be made all the more bitter by the knowledge that it wasn’t always this way,” Williams writes, sadly citing a girl who tells of her roommate’s parents, who met (siiiiiiiigh) in college. Dammit, why did they have to ruin everything with stupid learning? Now they’ll never have babies!
But brace yourselves: Not all young women are looking for serious boyfriends. Psssst…. not all young women are into boys, period. (Note to the Times: it’s pronounced lez-be-in.) Never mind that drinking and hooking up and heartache and occasional insensitive behavior are part and parcel of the human experience. Never mind that the number of men in colleges is actually holding pretty steady. Nope, outnumbering the menfolk, even slightly, is a romantic death sentence. And if you can’t trust the people who helped sell us the Iraq war to get it right, who can you believe?
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 9:42 am
MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. Meaning that you can find MSN/Match.com’s “Ask Lynn” columns –penned by BG’s alter ego — over at Happen now as well.
This week Lynn advises a gal who has become close with the boyfriend of her friend who died of cancer. Now that its turning romantic, she worries what others will think:
we also have another friend who was best friends with the deceased and she seems upset by the fact that we like each other and are becoming romantic.
Obviously she should be sensitive to the friend’s feelings, but, as her signature puts it, “Do I Have To Lose Him, Too?” Read Lynn’s advice at Happen, then tell us in the comments how you would handle this less than ideal situation.
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 11:30 am
Still stings on March 16, 1998…
Dear Breakup Girl,
My fella, who I adored, was transferred to another city. We agreed to try a long distance relationship. All I ever asked was that he tell me if he found someone else. Within a few weeks there, he was sleeping with a much younger woman who he had HIRED for his department. I found out after about a month and threw the book at him. I don’t want him back, but I so want to stop thinking about him and stop feeling so hurt. I’ve filled my life with a lot of new things…going to college, golf, country dancing, etc. I’ve met a few men, but the thought of being hurt like that again is too much…it makes my stomach turn over. It’s been almost a year and I am still feeling the sting. Any ideas?
The brainiacs over at OKCupid – a dating site incubated by a bunch of Harvard math geeks in ‘04; also where I met my music-nerd future-hub in ‘09 after being a member for all of a 48 hours — recently crunched a few numbers to analyze the effectiveness of users’ profile pics. (Effectiveness = how many contacts were received monthly.)
What they found, which they’ve published in a lengthy, graph-dense screed, blew them away: “In looking closely at the astonishingly wide variety of ways our users have chosen to represent themselves, we discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong.”
Specifically:
* It is not better to flash a pearly grin; instead, keep lips sealed and upturn your mouth corners coyly-yet-half-assedly. Females should do this while making “flirty eyes” at the lens; males should do this while gazing off-camera.
* By all means, do use a self-shot pic taken on a cell or webcam; what you forsake in high-pixel polish you’ll recoup with “an approachable, casual vibe that makes you feel already close to the subject.”
* Chicks especially can cash in big-time with the cell/webcam pic’s stylized subset: the “MySpace shot,” which even OKC can only put into words as “taken by holding your camera above your head and being just so darn coy.” Like porn — which, c’mon, that’s what the MySpace shot is, right? First cousin to an American Apparel ad? — it’s hard to define a MySpace shot, but you know it when you see it. And when dudes see it, “the MySpace shot is the single most effective photo type for women,” annihilating the second most effective (in bed) by about 3-to-2. (And it’s not just because of the shot’s down-the-shirt angle, according to OKC’s stats.)
* Males fare better not wearing a shirt than wearing one… gah, hard to read much past this without short-circuiting my keyboard with the tears I weep for the future. The second half of the article talks about how old dogs (i.e., me, 35yo) should not learn these new tricks, as the backfire ratio swoops skyward the older you get.
AKA, OKCupid is not OK for “cougars.” Unless (and yes, I unfortunately do speak from experience here*) you do not mind being bombarded with IM requests from Fordham sophomores (and UPenn juniors and NJIT frosh…) to come see their dorm rooms tonight, because they’ve slept with tons of older women and they know just how to push your buttons and maybe they can show you how to use a webcam since when you were born phones actually had dial tones.
* Actually, it was pretty entertaining chatting with them.
Author (and FOBG) Lori Gottlieb appeared on the Today Show this morning to discuss her — to me, bizarrely — inflammatory book, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, which basically urges women to be picky about the important stuff (kindness) and not picky about the not-important stuff (height), and which Lemondrop summarizes rather equitably here. What it’s left in its wake is a lot of women feeling very rankled and defensive about being told they should “settle,” which is not really what Lori is saying. That said, I understand the defensiveness. Women, rightly, do not like to hear, which they often do, over and over, that they are “too picky.” (Yes, picky. About the person you are going to spend your life with. Urr?) Not that there aren’t women (and men) who are indeed “too picky.” But to be told that, or to get that message from our culture, which single women do, over and over, can be insulting, dismissive, unsympathetic. For one thing among many, it puts the dating onus squarely and only on the woman, whereas it’s not like every still-single woman is surrounded by terrific uncomplicated men on bended knee, just waiting for her to get over her thing about bowties or “no lawyers” or whatever. Women who have gone on a million dates with and given a million chances to a million perfectly nice guys who for whatever legitimate reason leave them lukewarm do not want to hear that they are “just being picky.” They are tired. They are trying. Go away. That’s part of my theory, anyway, for why Lori’s message, fairly or not, has left so many women so totally steamed.
I also wonder this: to the degree that men are paying attention to this tempest in a coffee-date, how does this message make you feel? If I may render it in the shorthand of stereotype, it’s basically “give the short bald poor guy a chance.” Do you feel that Lori’s advice, for those who follow it, could spell triumph for the common man? Let us know in comments!
Filed under: News, issues — posted by Breakup Girl @ 11:49 am
The New York Times reports that a study of middle-school students has “found for the first time that abstinence-only education helped to delay their sexual initiation.” Uh oh? The finding “is already beginning to shake up the longstanding debate over how best to prevent teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.”
Okay okay! Nobody panic! Keep reading.
“[T]he abstinence-only classes in the Jemmott study…unlike the federally supported abstinence programs now in use, did not advocate abstinence until marriage. The classes also did not portray sex negativelyor suggest that condoms are ineffective, and contained only medically accurate information. [This] abstinence-only course was designed for the research, and is not in current use in schools.” [Emphasis added.]
Well, there you go. Look, the debate has never been about abstinence-only vs. “…and, for your homework, please have sex this afternoon.” It’s moralistic, inaccurate abstinence-only vs. comprehensive and realistic: please wait; if you don’t, please be responsible. Though there are those who will misrepresent this research as surely as they misrepresent the effectiveness of condoms, it’s actually yet another vote in our favor.
Update: This (PDF) just in from our heroes at Guttmacher: “While the evaluated program is the first abstinence-only intervention to demonstrate this positive impact in a randomized control trial, it was not a rigid ‘abstinence-only-until-marriage’ program of the type that, until this year, received significant federal funding. The evaluation, therefore, adds important new information to the question of “what works” in sex education, but it essentially leaves intact the significant body of evidence showing that abstinence-only- until-marriage programming that met previous federal guidelines is ineffective.”
Filed under: Treats — posted by Breakup Girl @ 10:41 am
BG’s alter ego joins a distinguished panel…
Thursday, February 11, 2010
7:30-9:30 p.m.
FREE
Full Spectrum and Greenlight Bookstore
present
THE STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
“Is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?”
A panel discussion with four creators who explore the bittersweet nature of romantic love.
Join us when poet/author/playwright Mo Beasley, musician/singer-songwriter Trevor Exter, author/journalist/advice columnist/BG alter ego Lynn Harris, and musician/composer Tamar-kali discuss the ideas and experiences behind their work, and the prickly thorns that can bloom with desire. Moderated by musician/transformational counselor K. Neycha Herford.
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street
[@ South Portland, in Fort Greene]
Brooklyn, NY 11217
C to Lafayette Ave; G to Fulton;
2/3, 4/5, D, Q to Atlantic Ave;
D, M, N, R to Pacific St
About Full Spectrum: Conversations Among Artists, Activists, Explorers & Thinkers
Held at cultural venues throughout New York City, Full Spectrum explores complex social issues through a prism of arts and culture. Each event features four creators in a one-hour discussion on a topic that links their work, followed by an audience Q&A. Panelists are drawn from the worlds of dance, fashion, film, literature, music, theater, visual art, and more. The forums are free to the public, and their impact lasts long after the conversations have ended.
Co-Founders/Co-Producers:
Brian Tate & Danny Simmons
Co-Directors: Lacy Austin, Vanessa Chakour, K. Neycha Herford
Advisors: LaRonda Davis, Malissa/Masala
FS Partners
Our 2010 Season is presented by Con Edison, with generous support from Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, The BRMC Group, Inc., and Bill de Blasio. Our venue partners are Danny Simmons’ Corridor Gallery, Greenlight Bookstore, and powerHouse Arena.
Filed under: Advice — posted by Breakup Girl @ 9:27 am
MSN.com, Match.com, HappenMagazine.com: they’re in a healthy and satisfying 3-way relationship. Meaning that you can find MSN/Match.com’s “Ask Lynn” columns –penned by BG’s alter ego — over at Happen now as well.
This week Lynn deals with a letter from a 51-year-old woman who feels like she’s Back in Junior High because her best friends are making her choose between her boyfriend and them. And with good reason:
He is manipulative, a “dry drunk,” selfish, immature, etc. They accuse me of staying in an “abusive” relationship because I am addicted to the drama.
I recently parted ways with my boyfriend of five months, over (as far as I can tell) a spaghetti dinner. In any case, shortly after splitting, we met again and promptly hopped into bed. I unwittingly believed that this encounter would mean something to both of us. Apparently I was wrong. I called him up to talk about the situation, and he was completely nonchalant, and became irritated with my repeated question of “is that all you have to talk about?” Anyway, the conversation ended with me being fairly hurt and confused, and him being generally clueless. Was it wrong for me to expect more? Please help me out.
- Tory
Dear Tory,
What you have here is Classic Relapse. See, breakups can be right up there with oysters, figs, and The Red Shoe Diaries in terms of their aphrodisiac qualities. It’s like, “Wow, you look great without … commitment.”
So, a Relapse and a Reunion are two entirely different animals. People: safeguard your feelings — and don’t toy with those of others. Either break up or don’t; act accordingly. But if you are going to break up, you might as well be eating spaghetti at the time
Breakup Girl
is the superhero whose domain is LOVE or the lack thereof!
Her blog combines new comics, observations and dating news with
classic advice letters--now blogified for reader feedback!
e-mail to a friend in need
Thank goodness! FOBG Mary Beth Williams at Broadsheet explains this article from yesterday’s New York Times, which struck me as just so strange that even someone with a Breakup U. education couldn’t figure it out. Now, I wasn’t a math major, but all I could think was, I understand that 45 percent is less than 55 percent, but do still-nearly-half-male campuses really, REALLY, make all institutions of higher learning feel “women’s colleges”? And, more to the point, does this EMERGENCY!!!! man-shortage really drive smart co-eds to make foolish choices?
Still stings on March 16, 1998…
, which basically urges women to be picky about the important stuff (kindness) and not picky about the not-important stuff (height), and which Lemondrop summarizes rather equitably 
