Chris Abraham » seducer

Top 21 Social Media and Blogging Insights

Chris Abraham — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:48:56 +0000

Before you jump into the world of online community, blogging and social media whole hog, please feel free to benefit from my experience in the space. If you read throught the following 21 short articles — and also explore my additional Insights and Ideas — and you’ll avoid many of the misconceptions and pitfalls surrounding new media, social media, and online community engagement:

38 Articles About Social Media Strategy and Techniques

Chris Abraham — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:41:48 +0000

I have collected a number of thoughts I have had on social media, blogging, social networking, blogger outreach & engagement, blogger activation, astroturfing, and other fun stuff I call Insights — 38 in all — that I just stumbled upon and I thought it would be lovely to share:

Bratislava, a City to Watch, from AdAge GIN

Chris Abraham — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:13:58 +0000

Another one of my weekly blog posts over at the AdAdge Global Idea Network came out today, Bratislava, a City to Watch — check it out:

Bratislava, a City to Watch
Residents of the Slovakian Capital Coming to Grips With Credit and Many Eye-Level Ads
I was invited by Zuzana Zentková of In Form Slovakia to travel from Berlin to Bratislava, Slovakia, to keynote the Daily Web Conference. Not only had I never been to Slovakia, I had never really thought about the country, focusing mostly on the Czech Republic instead of the Slovak Republic. My tickets were booked from Berlin to Vienna because, I discovered, Vienna is only 63 kilometers away from Bratislava — only a half-hour away by some fast highways.
So, here are my impressions after a few days there, having lived the high life. The organizers of the conference drove me from the hotel and back, they kept me in a gorgeous room at MaMaison residence and the conference was at the stunning Rotunda pod Slavínom building at the highest point in Bratislava.
Bratislava is a town to explore on foot, bus and tram. There are some very new cars but I am told that Slovakians are having a tough time adjusting to loans, credit and leasing. When they buy cars, they pay cash. In general, Slovakians only buy what they can afford, which means that there are very aggressive “no cash down” and “no money for a year” incentives to seduce Slovakians into buying on credit. The same goes for mortgages and other forms of borrowing.
As a result, there are many taxis, trams and buses on the road. Mostly, though, people walk. I didn’t see a lot of motorcycles, scooters or bicycles. There isn’t a subway system, but there is a world of pedestrian underpasses linking sidewalks together, freeing up the roads for traffic. As a result, there is a strong reliance on very modest-but-plentiful, eye-level advertisements. In Bratislava, the biggest ads are for car insurance, cars, telecoms (especially T-Mobile and Orange), banking, credit, Christmas and for upcoming events. It seems to me that you can make a lot of assumptions based on the sort of ads you can see on the street. By far, the biggest advertiser in downtown Bratislava is Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile.
One of the most impressive ads in the entire city sheaths the National bank of Slovakia. A Euro coin emblazons the entire site, with the base encircled with all the bill denominations of the Euro available. It is pretty impressive to behold. Slovakia, is a member of the EU, currently accepting both euros and Slovak koruna. Come Jan. 1, the Slovak Republic will complete its conversion over to the euro. There is no longer any border between Austria and Slovakia. You can easily see the wind farms of verdant Austrian farms from Bratislava high ground. Even though Bratislava is close to Western Europe, Slovakia is so far truly a world away. This is still a country in development. It felt to me like lots of people don’t have a lot.
Still, Bratislava has leapfrogged from simple technology to a very strong and ubiquitous 3.5G telecoms infrastructure — and this leapfrogging often bypasses laptops, DSL and even home computers, I am told by the savvy and world-class high-tech participants of the conference.Jan Horna, the Daily Web conference moderator, told me that there are over two GSM SIM cards for every Slovakian.
I only had three days in Slovakia so my experience is limited; however, Bratislava is a city to watch, especially as the Euro becomes the official — and sole — currency of Slovakia in less than a couple months.

How Do You Use Google Trends?

Chris Abraham — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:30:49 +0000

My friend Phillip loves to surf Google Trends as a way of seducing Google Search love. I would love to use Google Trends as a tool for analytics; however, I think that Google Trends doesn’t focus enough on the long tail to be useful for me. I need more granular information. That said, it seems to work just fine for ShoeMoney:

I noticed today in Google trends you can get website data. The Google toolbar is installed by more users then any other toolbar and no doubt has the most accurate data.

Do you use Google Trends? If so, do you use it for site comparison, for trend surfing, something else? Let me know in the comments.

More Nostalgia About Hawaii Nei, My Hawaii

Chris Abraham — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:40:17 +0000

I bumped into Michelle Santos on Facebook yesterday and we Kama’ainas got super nostalgic all over each others’ Facebook Walls, and here are some excepts:

Michelle:

Aloha oe, Chris!! Pehea `oe? E pili mau na pomaika`i ia `oe!!!

Chris:

Aloha kakahiaka, Michelle. Mai ka’i no au. Aloha mai e!!

Michelle:

eh, howzit, Brah? Whaddsdascoops? when we do talk story? I miss da kine local grinds…opihi and combomeals…onolicious, man…Fo´real. Been back to da Rock lately?

Chris:

It’s been since 1998, which has been a decade, which is very sad. I don’t even know if I would move back if I had all the money in the world, although I have become very very nostalgic recently so I might try to make a trip this year or next year. I miss Zippy’s and Graces and I miss Kona and Manoa. I miss Sans Souci Beach right in front of the New Otani Kaimana Beach Hotel and I miss hanging out with my Kama’aina friends at Outrigger Canoe Club. I miss Scuba diving in Waianae and eating burgers at Kua Aina burger at North Shore. I miss North Shore and driving the circle island in my Triumph TR6. I miss talking pidgin and wonder if I am even fluent any more. Rap Replinger is still my favorite comedian of all time. How about you?

Michelle:

i came back 2006. It is a rough place if you are a local. But as a tourist it is fine…I miss the beaches. I lived next to Ala Moana Shopping Center where my apartment penthouse was across the beach. I missed swimming there every morning..Lanikai, North Shore, Waikiki night life, Hanohano Restaurant on Sheraton´s penthouse, Snorkeling, sharkdiving, skydiving (it´s warmer there than in Norway for this activity…brrrrr) I miss my moped ;) I had my car parked all the time and just zoomed with that everywhere. I also miss Tantalus where I used to live since I picked fresh Hawaiian flowers there every weekend. I miss the pancakes at Ken´s house in Big Island, the lilikoi pancake sauces, chocolate and caramel macadamia nuts, fresh kona coffee…Ward Center Theater…

Chris:

Everything is flooding now. I miss Volcano National Park. I miss Molokai and all the Duduois. I miss Manele Bay on Lanai. I miss the Parker Ranch and what Hilo used to be. I love love love taking the drive up to Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. I miss looking at the snow and the crazy telescopes up at the top of the world. I miss Madam Pele and Maui and Manapua and the Punahou carnival and I miss Kolaipuhaku and Kaimuki and the drive along Kalanianaole highway. I miss being tan and I miss freediving off of Diamondhead and of being a Divemaster. I miss using Velvia film and shooting beaches and bikinis. I miss seducing women by packing picknics and taking either the motorcycle or the convertible roadster on the circle island, stopping for shave ice with ice cream and azuki beans in Hale`iwa. Wow, lau lau — now I have to sing to you….

Michelle:

aaaawww…i can tell you miss it very much. I know…i miss taking my dates on private beach picnics. I have this private beach that I always get and have awesome sunsets by Gold Coast. Man, lau lau??? hehhehehe, it certainly better than poi. I have to put so much sugar on that poi. Double-whammy on the carbs! Yikes! You should see my picture in Diverse and see how tan I was…I miss that too. I didn´t even have to lay on the beach…I just get cooked…;)

Well, Michelle Santos has herself a blog, a firm, MJS Strategies, and actually blogged about our chat as well, Aloha oe! (Part 1).

Eat Pizza in Berlin at Due Forni

Chris Abraham — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:11:01 +0000

Eat Pizza in Berlin at Due Forni, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

If you’re hungry, thirsty, and want to look at hipsters in their native environment — and cute girl-hipsters, too — then you need to drop into the Kreuzberg watering hole, Due Forni, which is Italian for “two ovens.” It is delicious and cheap and fresh and yummy. It is also loud and large and vibrant and always full. Make sure you visit at least once and don’t be afraid of making it your home. Berlin waiters need to be dated and seduced — the longer the relationship the better they will treat you, no matter how well you tip. (Adresse: Schönhauser Allee 12, 10119 Berlin)

If you want a feel for the restaurant, you should read this lovely and delicious menu board. While this does not do Due Forni justice, it does show you some of the daily specials. They told me I couldn’t photograph in the restaurant immediately after I shot this. What are they thinking. Luckily, my 5MP camera is handily disguised as a camera. Thank you, Nokia n95 8GB!Here’s a brilliant example of what a night out at Due Forni, the best pizza restaurant in Kreuzberg. Well, it is the only pizza joint I have been to in Kreuzberg. The pizza is pretty good but it is the scene that is so keen.
They don’t like photos taken at Due Forni for whatever reason but I got some lovely and nice ones here of the late night dinner crowd. It is really a lovely place to dine and super-easy to fine and afford.

What Ever Happened to Feminism?

Chris Abraham — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:54:25 +0000

I am a feminist. I studied postmodern feminist theory at Uni and felt confident that the progress and passion behind feminism offered by deconstructionism — the cultural and linguistic tools a women would need to redefine her story and her self — would result in a female self-empowerment much more substantial than the hyper-sexual self-objectification of Manolo Blahnik feminism. I am not the only one asking the question, “What Ever Happened to Feminism?” Check out Body Politic by Ingrid Sischy from the T Style Magazine (yes, I read it).

“Body Politic
By INGRID SISCHY
Published: February 25, 2007Last fall I was stopped in my tracks as I walked into a show in Milan during the collections, and a male friend, who’d just witnessed the same debacle that I had, raised his eyebrows and asked, “What happened to feminism???? It’s a question that is being asked repeatedly these days, and for good reason. The only word for the fashion collection we’d just seen was “bimbo??? — clothes put out on the runway without irony, without quotation marks, without any raison d’être other than saving money on material. Over the course of the next two weeks I gave myself a little assignment. I’d watch the runways in Milan and Paris and check off those clothes that signified a throwback to the long past of objectifying women. And on the other hand I’d put a little star down when the designer seemed to be wanting to take us into the future with a view of women that reflected self-possession.
Good thing I still like swings. Of course there were exceptions, designers who were true to the present, but by and large it was backward and forward and backward and forward. Then there were the designers who left earth entirely and showed a universe of female droids and cyborgs. These were the ones who, intentionally or not, illuminated the big challenge facing women’s fashion, best described by tweaking the famous tag line from “Star Trek???: women’s fashion, the final frontier . . . to boldly go where no one has gone before.
That’s easier said than done. As Miuccia Prada said to me, “The problem with new ideas about feminism is that there has been so little public discussion of the subject.??? Well, that’s changing, big time — if not in fashion at least in the art world, which has historically been the first place where a new perspective begins. In fact, after it seemed as though the subject of feminism had been put on simmer, the art world is cooking with gas again, not just for a new generation of feminist artists but in retrospect too. The year started out with a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, once such a perfect target for feminist critics, who felt it was stuck in the Stone Age as far as the representation of women goes. Now there are bicoastal extravaganzas planned for this spring: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will stage “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution??? from March 4 to July 16, and the Brooklyn Museum opens “Global Feminisms??? on March 23. The show celebrates a new center for feminist art, anchored by the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s famous “The Dinner Party.??? How these exhibitions will loop back to fashion and the creative/commercial balancing act that designers have to do is anybody’s guess, but bets are that there will be a trickle-down effect, as there often is.
What’s interesting is that if one goes through the iconic works of the first, second and third waves of feminist writers, there is so little that actually addresses fashion. Rereading Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin and so many others, I was struck by the dearth of attention to this subject, which after all has everything to do with how identity is constructed for the outside world. There’s no lack of thinking when it comes to inner life, working life, creative life and public life, but when fashion comes up, the attitude tends to be knee-jerk and programmatic. Take Greer’s climactic moment at the end of “The Female Eunuch,??? where she creates a sort of bill of rights, inciting women to: “. . . refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness.??? In fact some of the most powerful, liberated women I know choose to hobble around in the craziest skyscraper shoes. “The higher the heel,??? they say, “the better I feel.???
But the other part of Greer’s declaration — that women have the right to control their own bodies — is as resonant today as it was when she wrote it nearly 40 years ago. One can see that drama being played out in the fashion arena right now, with the debate over skinny models brought to a head by the deaths last fall of two South American catwalkers from complications of anorexia. The hysteria that resulted led to a spectacle of ignorance, hypocrisy and bureaucracy. If the issue weren’t so serious, some of the solutions proposed by bureaucrats — like models being weighed in like boxers or jockeys — would be funny. But unfortunately they don’t just infringe on everything that we are supposed to hold dear in the department of human liberties, they also display so little understanding of the disease they are trying to combat that it is frightening. So is the tendency to lump together girls who are naturally skinny with those who are sick, two very different realities. Hey, as someone who likes her fries, I’m all for bringing back a Rubenesque shape as the height of fashion, but the fact is that perceptions of beauty cannot, and will not, be dictated by laws. That’s where consciousness comes in. At the center of it all, for anorexics, but also for each of us, lies the issue of control, or as Barbara Kruger wrote in one of her most unforgettable artworks: “Your body is a battleground.??? Hopefully you win.”

Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s

I call the new feminism Manolo Blahnik Feminism, which is a super-sexual, super-sexy, and super-confusing form of self-empowerment. Ariel Levy calls it “raunch culture” and I believe that it is going to blow up in American women’s faces.
I believe very strongly that there are too many dangerous contradiction in the new feminism, in the new American woman.
I attended a panel on gender differences in the new feminism and my question to the panel was, “I understand how empowering strappy stilettos, butt jeans, bare bellies, and camisole tops are for the modern woman. It is all about taking back the sex, taking back the gaze, reclaiming the control of what is cute, what is hot, what is sexy, it about taking back control, reclaiming feelings of pride in the body, pride in the shape and tan earned from an active, outdoorsy life. That’s all fine and good. Unfortunately, we men never got the memo. I never got the memo.”
In fact, I feel sort of like a fox in a hen house. Why? Well, all of my old-world, unenlightened, seduction techniques work now better than ever! In fact, the truth is, I am really too nice for the Manolo Blahnik k feminist.
The Manolo Blahnik feminist wants to be taken, wants to find a real man, wants to take risks and have a great time; she pursues a doctrine of devil may care.
Well, no matter what the Manolo Blahnik Feminist thinks she wants and no matter what she thinks she’s doing, she is actually walking into a very dangerous trap.
We men are not responding to this self-empowerment with amazement and respect, we’re responding to it by licking our lips, by taking advantage, by rubbing our hands together, and by trying not to jinx this out of being. We are pretty well convinced that what is happening won’t last: the Manolo Blahnik feminist fancies herself the aggressor, the buyer, the pursuer, the seducer. And we men are what she is after.
All we see is, “man that girl is fine — I’d like some of that.”
As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. We can date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe. The three-date rule? Ha! That’s the official rule, but now the first date counts from the night we first met. Oral sex on the first date has sort of become de rigueur — if you want a second date.
Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik Feminist has relinquished control to us men.
And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. We men are bigger, stronger, and not all of us are so nice. I personally have a lot of experience with women who are survivors — survivors not just of dating or their 20s, but survivors of sexual abuse and rape.
I have loved them, I have befriended them, and I worked through relationships with women who have survived sexual abuse and rape.
Its always an ugly story and the world is never the same. We just have not received the memo. This kind of exciting, naughty, passionate, irresponsible, reckless indulgence in “raunch culture” is going to result in one hell of a cultural hangover.
Many women will be unable to recover from this self-indulgence with any semblance of faith, trust, hope, or intactness.
And many men, too.
When it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?
Not I.
I am not sure if modern women have it very good. Not nearly as good as would be expected. I attended college at a high point for feminism an academia, when a woman would still identify with being a feminist.
Not any more.
Not Liberating, After All
How did feminists end up in bed with Hugh Hefner?
BY WENDY SHALIT
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.
It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?
Ms. Levy is baffled. “Why,” she wondered, “is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?” Why did female Olympic athletes pose for Playboy before the summer 2004 Games? Why did Katie Couric feel the need to point to her cleavage and gush “these are actually real!” when she guest-hosted “The Tonight Show” a couple of years ago?
Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires “everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars.” Ms. Levy describes the perfect distillation of this impulse–a social group called CAKE that hosts steamy, hooking-up parties in New York and London. CAKE makes big bucks advertising “feminism in action”–it claims to be the place where “sexual equality and feminism finally meet”–but its events are indistinguishable from those held at the Playboy Mansion.
The surface logic of such conduct is fairly simple, notes Ms. Levy. “Women had come so far,” or so the thinking went, that “we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny.” If male chauvinist pigs “regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.”
Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: “Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don’t love . . . that is not liberation.” It isn’t? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she “used to get so hurt” after a night of sex that didn’t yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: “I’m like a guy,” she brags.
How did this happen? Why did feminism sell its soul to the sexual-liberation movement in the first place? After all, the original feminists were fighting to be taken seriously. Hugh Hefner, by contrast, said that his ideal girl “resembles a bunny . . . vivacious, jumping–sexy.” There seems to be a contradiction here.
Ms. Levy’s answer is that, after a brief and failed fight against pornography, feminism joined forces with Hef & Co. to fight for abortion rights. This is a plausible explanation, as far as it goes. Abortion has indeed assumed a primary importance in both feminist “rights” thinking and in the whole culture of soft-core libertinism: Mr. Hefner is a big fan of abortion, for obvious reasons.
But something else may be going on. Feminism grounded itself, in its early days, in the idea that there were no differences between the sexes. A girl wanting to keep her virginity was bad, for sexual reticence amounted to asserting a separate standard, a Victorian one at that. To Hef, modesty was a “hang-up,” and to the feminists it was a “patriarchal construct.” Ms. Levy believes that feminism was on the right track but then veered off-course: “What has moved into feminism’s place . . . is an almost opposite style, attitude, and set of principles.”
But maybe feminism’s foundations were weak from the start. Everyone in Ms. Levy’s book–whether it’s middle-class girls who feel anxiety about appearing “hot” or grown women who confess to Ms. Levy that “accumulating sex for its own sake . . . is not that sexual”–shows that a woman’s experience of sex and love is very different from that of an adolescent boy or a man. Indeed, the more a woman imitates a man, the clearer these differences become.
Paris Hilton tells Rolling Stone: “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.” (Ms. Levy reports that on one of the infamous videotapes she takes a cellphone call during intercourse.) Plainly, the sexual revolution has not brought fulfillment for women. Even its mascots experience boredom, and for the civilians there is distress and heartache.
It may be that, like Ms. Levy, a lot of feminists now regret getting in bed with Mr. Hefner. Yet if you mention the word “modesty” within 20 feet of them their heads spin around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” This is where they get stuck. Only if feminism can embrace the more traditional ways that men and women have courted throughout the ages can it have anything practical to offer young women. To the extent that feminists dismiss as worthless anything that is perceived as “backtracking,” they only help to perpetuate the “raunch culture”–even as they deplore its effects.
Take a beach scene that Ms. Levy recounts, when the male “friends” of two girls pressure them to take off their suits. Soon surrounded by a circle of 40 screaming men, the girls say “no way!” but eventually give in and spank each other to appease the crowd.
Such a girl requires, in addition to perhaps Mace, a compelling alternative to the Female Chauvinist Pig. Otherwise she may well give in to social pressure–not to mention professorial nonsense–and then wonder what’s wrong with her when she is not happy with the pig in her bed or the pig she has become.
Ms. Shalit is author of “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” You can buy “Female Chauvinist Pigs” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
September 20, 2005
Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ex=1127966400&en=3f7348e314a603ee&ei=5070&emc=eta1
By LOUISE STORY
Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.
So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.
“My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.”
At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.
There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.
Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.
Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.
“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing,” said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”
Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.
Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.
“Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all,” said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.
“Men really aren’t put in that position,” she said.
Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.
“I’ve seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn’t, and it’s kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it,” said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.
While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.
The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.
Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.
The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.
In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni – both men and women – to play in society.
For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: “The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word ‘leadership’ conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.’s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that.”
She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.
In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: “There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities.”
Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.
“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s.
It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.
It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person’s expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.
University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students’ minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.
“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”
There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.
According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity – a gap that was small among alumni in their 20′s but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40′s, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.
A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40′s, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40′s, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.
A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30′s and 40′s.
What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.
“It never occurred to me,” Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. “Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time.”
Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. “People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family.”
Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children.
“A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great,’ ” Ms. Currie said. “One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’ Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30′s now.”
For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.
“My stepmom’s very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable,” said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. “It justified it to her, that I don’t look down on her for not having a career.”
Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother’s choice to work full time the “greatest gift.”
“She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career,” Ms. Sullivan said.
Some of these women’s mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.
Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu’s roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.
Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. “I do have this bias that the parents can do it best,” she said. “I see a lot of women in their 30′s who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best.”
For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation’s top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.
“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.
“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”
Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu’s roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.
“Parents have such an influence on their children,” Ms. Ku said. “I want to have that influence. Me!”
She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.
“I’ll have a career until I have two kids,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily matter how far you get. It’s kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do.”
Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.
“I accept things how they are,” she said. “I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.”
After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.
“It worked so well for me,” she said, “and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.”
Thanks to Carrie for sending me this article.
My dear friend commented on this part of the article, “And when it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?”
Her response was, “….Therein lies the pitfall…. Once you start tasting of that forbidden apple, the garden of romance can all too easily dissapear! This, i think, is why many parents of our generation divorced — lack of faith in love is a direct result of the “free love” movement. Someone needs to warn the young!!! They need to be made aware of the booby-traps. Otherwise we are all just walking around with broken flowers, feeling numb to the pain we don’t even realize we are entitled to have.”

Lacrosstitution and Manolo Blahnik Feminism

Chris Abraham — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 13:28:08 +0000

The awful mess going down in Durham with Duke brought to the forefront of my mind the essay I wrote, Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choos. Inspired by CJR Daily

Of Duke, and Princeton, and Jocks, and Sluts by Liz Cox Barrett

“With nearly a month to go before the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape have a hearing in court on May 15 — how many cable TV talking head hours between now and then? — we’re confident that bad reporting on the case will not be in short supply.
To date, however, this piece by ABC News’ Adrienne Mand Lewin gets our vote for most regrettable. It is the sort of story that might provoke a good guffaw, were one reading The Onion (indeed, it reads like an Onion story, though perhaps with less thorough reporting).
But on ABC News? Not so funny.
Everything about this piece is iffy, starting with its raison d’être.
Lewin’s lede: “They’re on every college campus where sports teams succeed: groupies who want to date athletes — or at least have sex with them.” And? Is this news?
In paragraph nine, Lewin more or less confesses that, no, it is not news, but that she is using the Duke situation to pretend that it is. “It’s certainly nothing new that college students have sex or that athletes are popular. But in light of the rape allegations at Duke University and the cancellation of the men’s lacrosse team’s season there — while a separate issue — players’ behavior and the impact it can have on a team are now at the forefront of many college students’ minds.”
But what is actually “at the forefront” of the minds of the six college students Lewin interviewed for her article (three of who would provide only their first names) is not “players’ behavior and the impact it can have on a team” but rather the behavior of those sex-crazed jock groupies we met in Lewin’s lede.
Lewin writes: “At Princeton University, where the men’s lacrosse team is regularly ranked as one of the best in the nation” — and, we’d add, where Lewin apparently started and ended her reporting on what’s on “college students’ minds” — these jock groupies are known as “laxtitutes or “lacrosstitutes.” (Eat your heart out, Onion writers! Either that, or start recruiting from Princeton). Distracted by these “laxtitutes,” Lewin spends most of her article focusing on their behavior rather than on “players’ behavior and the impact it can have on a team,” as initially promised.
So how do “laxtitutes” behave? Writes Lewin: “Candi Arner, a Princeton freshman, said her friends knew three girls who between them had slept with nine players on the team.” You know, sort of like how Simone in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” knew that Ferris was sick because her “best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.”
This, as Salon’s Rebecca Traister has noted, is “journalism hearsay.”
It’s going to be a long 27 days.”

Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s

I call the new feminism Manolo Blahnik Feminism, which is a super-sexual, super-sexy, and super-confusing form of self-empowerment. Ariel Levy calls it “raunch culture” and I believe that it is going to blow up in American women’s faces.
I believe very strongly that there are too many dangerous contradiction in the new feminism, in the new American woman.
I attended a panel on gender differences in the new feminism and my question to the panel was, “I understand how empowering strappy stilettos, butt jeans, bare bellies, and camisole tops are for the modern woman. It is all about taking back the sex, taking back the gaze, reclaiming the control of what is cute, what is hot, what is sexy, it about taking back control, reclaiming feelings of pride in the body, pride in the shape and tan earned from an active, outdoorsy life. That’s all fine and good. Unfortunately, we men never got the memo. I never got the memo.”
In fact, I feel sort of like a fox in a henhouse. Why? Well, all of my old-world, unenlightened, seduction techniques work now better than ever! In fact, the truth is, I am really too nice for the Manolo Blahnik k feminist.
The Manolo Blahnik feminist wants to be taken, wants to find a real man, wants to take risks and have a great time; she pursues a doctrine of devil may care.
Well, no matter what the Manolo Blahnik Feminist thinks she wants and no matter what she thinks she’s doing, she is actually walking into a very dangerous trap.
We men are not responding to this self-empowerment with amazement and respect, we’re responding to it by licking our lips, by taking advantage, by rubbing our hands together, and by trying not to jinx this out of being. We are pretty well convinced that what is happening won’t last: the Manolo Blahnik feminist fancies herself the aggressor, the buyer, the pursuer, the seducer. And we men are what she is after.
All we see is, “man that girl is fine — I’d like some of that.”
As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. We can date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe. The three-date rule? Ha! That’s the official rule, but now the first date counts from the night we first met. Oral sex on the first date has sort of become de rigueur — if you want a second date.
Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik Feminist has relinquished control to us men.
And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. We men are bigger, stronger, and not all of us are so nice. I personally have a lot of experience with women who are survivors — survivors not just of dating or their 20s, but survivors of sexual abuse and rape.
I have loved them, I have befriended them, and I worked through relationships with women who have survived sexual abuse and rape.
Its always an ugly story and the world is never the same. We just have not received the memo. This kind of exciting, naughty, passionate, irresponsible, reckless indulgence in “raunch culture” is going to result in one hell of a cultural hangover.
Many women will be unable to recover from this self-indulgence with any semblance of faith, trust, hope, or intactness.
And many men, too.
When it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?
Not I.
I am not sure if modern women have it very good. Not nearly as good as would be expected. I attended college at a high point for feminism an academia, when a woman would still identify with being a feminist.
Not any more.

We Men Didn’t Get the Memo

Chris Abraham — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:56:32 +0000

I call the new feminism Manolo Blahnik Feminism, which is a super-sexual, super-sexy, and super-confusing form of self-empowerment. Ariel Levy calls it “raunch culture” and I believe that it is going to blow up in American women’s faces.

I believe very strongly that there are too many dangerous contradictions in the new feminism, in the new American woman. And, what is to become of the more traditional American woman of Faith? And more importantly, what will become of us, the more traditional, American men of Faith?

I attended a panel on gender differences in the new feminism and my question to the panel was,

“I understand how empowering strappy stilettos, butt jeans, bare bellies, and camisole tops are for the modern woman. It is all about taking back the sex, taking back the gaze, reclaiming the control of what is cute, what is hot, what is sexy, it about taking back control, reclaiming feelings of pride in the body, pride in the shape and tan earned from an active, outdoorsy life. That’s all fine and good. Unfortunately, we men never got the memo. I never got the memo.”

In fact, I feel sort of like a fox in a henhouse. Why? Well, all of my old-world, unenlightened, seduction techniques work now better than ever! In fact, the truth is, I am really too nice for the Manolo Blahnik Feminist. In my recent dating life, I have been drawing the line in the dating sand too conservatively for many of my dates. The Manolo Blahnik Feminist wants to be taken, wants to find a real man, wants to take risks and have a great time; she pursues a doctrine of devil may care and she wants her man to be worthy of pursuit.

Well, no matter what the Manolo Blahnik Feminist thinks she wants and no matter what she thinks she’s doing, she is actually walking into a very dangerous trap. It is dangerous because it assumes that we men are good, generous, and stable men. Men who may be able to party, to drink, and to indulge in very passionate, very realistic sex-play while still maintaining a level of respect, of fair treatment, and composure that can guarantee that when no means no, no means no. That is a lot of responsibility to unload onto anyway, no less an unknown entity, a casual date, a new friend.

We men are not responding to this self-empowerment with amazement and respect, we’re responding to it by licking our lips, by taking advantage, by rubbing our hands together, and by trying not to jinx this out of being. We don’t want any responsibility either, it seems. We don’t want to feel like it is our responsibility to mind our Ps and Qs when we’re being pursued ourselves. We no longer have the muzzle on and we have shaken off the choke chain, and we men in general are not a save environment for this kind of soul-searching, this kind of self-empowerment. There, I said it: we men are not a safe environment for raunch culture. And we are taking advantage because we are pretty well convinced that what is happening won’t last: the Manolo Blahnik feminist fancies herself the aggressor, the buyer, the pursuer, the seducer. And we men are what she is after. All we see is, “man that girl is fine – I’d like some of that.”

What is our responsibility as men and women of Faith? What is my responsibility as a man of Faith? I know that many of my female friends are desperate, lonely, and discouraged by this seller’s market. I know that I am war-weary and deeply fatigued by this constant over stimulation, both visually and situationally. What can I expect from my relationships? How to I keep to the tiller and steer my ship straight and true? In my life, I have to not only consider the more pedestrian issued of sexually-transmitted diseases and pregnancy, but my principles, my conscience, my morals, my values, and ultimately my soul!

And it isn’t easy. As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. If things don’t work out to our liking, we can just date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe – than I could ever believe. The three-date rule now starts not on the first date but from the drunken night we first met at a bar. Oral sex on the first date has become de rigueur – that is, if you want a second date.

Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik Feminist has relinquished control to us men. To men, women become fungible assets and women of faith become invisible, blending into the wallpaper. Not because they’re ugly – they’re beautiful – but because in a world of of bellies, of thighs, of knees, hip-huggers, butt jeans, padded bras and camisole tops, anything but the bling is effectively invisible.

And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. This kind of exciting, naughty, passionate, irresponsible, reckless indulgence in “raunch culture” is going to result in one hell of a cultural hangover.

Many women will be unable to recover from this self-indulgence with any semblance of faith, trust, hope, or intactness. And many men, too, will be unable to choose just one woman, be able to really and truly commit to marriage.

When it comes right down to it, what modern man or woman could be expected to have the right stuff to have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?

Not I. And all of this is taken out of the context of faith. This is all from the point of view of people, relationships, self-empowerment, feminism, and sex – all very humanistic concerns. As a man of faith, I have to admit that all of this is very discouraging to me and all the men I know like me. But even I have to admit, I have become desensitized, I have become desperate, and I am sorely over-stimulated myself.

I am not sure if modern women have it very good. Not nearly as good as would be expected. I attended college at a high point for feminism an academia, when a woman would still identify with being a feminist.

Not any more.

(Ed Note: This article is a rework and extension of Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s)

Manolo Blahnik Feminism: The Right to Choo’s

Chris Abraham — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:41:51 +0000

I call the new feminism Manolo Blahnik Feminism, which is a super-sexual, super-sexy, and super-confusing form of self-empowerment. Ariel Levy calls it “raunch culture” and I believe that it is going to blow up in American women’s faces.

I believe very strongly that there are too many dangerous contradiction in the new feminism, in the new American woman.

I attended a panel on gender differences in the new feminism and my question to the panel was,

“I understand how empowering strappy stilettos, butt jeans, bare bellies, and camisole tops are for the modern woman. It is all about taking back the sex, taking back the gaze, reclaiming the control of what is cute, what is hot, what is sexy, it about taking back control, reclaiming feelings of pride in the body, pride in the shape and tan earned from an active, outdoorsy life. That’s all fine and good. Unfortunately, we men never got the memo. I never got the memo.”

In fact, I feel sort of like a fox in a hen house. Why? Well, all of my old-world, unenlightened, seduction techniques work now better than ever! In fact, the truth is, I am really too nice for the Manolo Blahnik feminist.

The Manolo Blahnik feminist wants to be taken, wants to find a real man, wants to take risks and have a great time; she pursues a doctrine of devil may care.

Well, no matter what the Manolo Blahnik Feminist thinks she wants and no matter what she thinks she’s doing, she is actually walking into a very dangerous trap.

We men are not responding to this self-empowerment with amazement and respect, we’re responding to it by licking our lips, by taking advantage, by rubbing our hands together, and by trying not to jinx this out of being. We are pretty well convinced that what is happening won’t last: the Manolo Blahnik feminist fancies herself the aggressor, the buyer, the pursuer, the seducer. And we men are what she is after.

All we see is, “man that girl is fine — I’d like some of that.”

As men in such a seller’s market, we don’t have to choose. We can date another willing girl every night. We can push sex much faster than we ever could believe. The three-date rule? Ha! That’s the official rule, but now the first date counts from the night we first met. Oral sex on the first date has sort of become de rigueur — if you want a second date.

Instead of getting control, the Manolo Blahnik Feminist has relinquished control to us men.

And even worse, this is a very dangerous game. We men are bigger, stronger, and not all of us are so nice. I personally have a lot of experience with women who are survivors — survivors not just of dating or their 20s, but survivors of sexual abuse and rape.

I have loved them, I have befriended them, and I worked through relationships with women who have survived sexual abuse and rape.

Its always an ugly story and the world is never the same. We just have not received the memo. This kind of exciting, naughty, passionate, irresponsible, reckless indulgence in “raunch culture” is going to result in one hell of a cultural hangover.

Many women will be unable to recover from this self-indulgence with any semblance of faith, trust, hope, or intactness.

And many men, too.

When it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?

Not I.

Not any more.

Not Liberating, After All
How did feminists end up in bed with Hugh Hefner?
BY WENDY SHALIT
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.
It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?
Ms. Levy is baffled. “Why,” she wondered, “is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering?” Why did female Olympic athletes pose for Playboy before the summer 2004 Games? Why did Katie Couric feel the need to point to her cleavage and gush “these are actually real!” when she guest-hosted “The Tonight Show” a couple of years ago?
Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires “everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars.” Ms. Levy describes the perfect distillation of this impulse–a social group called CAKE that hosts steamy, hooking-up parties in New York and London. CAKE makes big bucks advertising “feminism in action”–it claims to be the place where “sexual equality and feminism finally meet”–but its events are indistinguishable from those held at the Playboy Mansion.
The surface logic of such conduct is fairly simple, notes Ms. Levy. “Women had come so far,” or so the thinking went, that “we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny.” If male chauvinist pigs “regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.”
Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: “Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don’t love . . . that is not liberation.” It isn’t? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she “used to get so hurt” after a night of sex that didn’t yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: “I’m like a guy,” she brags.
How did this happen? Why did feminism sell its soul to the sexual-liberation movement in the first place? After all, the original feminists were fighting to be taken seriously. Hugh Hefner, by contrast, said that his ideal girl “resembles a bunny . . . vivacious, jumping–sexy.” There seems to be a contradiction here.
Ms. Levy’s answer is that, after a brief and failed fight against pornography, feminism joined forces with Hef & Co. to fight for abortion rights. This is a plausible explanation, as far as it goes. Abortion has indeed assumed a primary importance in both feminist “rights” thinking and in the whole culture of soft-core libertinism: Mr. Hefner is a big fan of abortion, for obvious reasons.
But something else may be going on. Feminism grounded itself, in its early days, in the idea that there were no differences between the sexes. A girl wanting to keep her virginity was bad, for sexual reticence amounted to asserting a separate standard, a Victorian one at that. To Hef, modesty was a “hang-up,” and to the feminists it was a “patriarchal construct.” Ms. Levy believes that feminism was on the right track but then veered off-course: “What has moved into feminism’s place . . . is an almost opposite style, attitude, and set of principles.”
But maybe feminism’s foundations were weak from the start. Everyone in Ms. Levy’s book–whether it’s middle-class girls who feel anxiety about appearing “hot” or grown women who confess to Ms. Levy that “accumulating sex for its own sake . . . is not that sexual”–shows that a woman’s experience of sex and love is very different from that of an adolescent boy or a man. Indeed, the more a woman imitates a man, the clearer these differences become.
Paris Hilton tells Rolling Stone: “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.” (Ms. Levy reports that on one of the infamous videotapes she takes a cellphone call during intercourse.) Plainly, the sexual revolution has not brought fulfillment for women. Even its mascots experience boredom, and for the civilians there is distress and heartache.
It may be that, like Ms. Levy, a lot of feminists now regret getting in bed with Mr. Hefner. Yet if you mention the word “modesty” within 20 feet of them their heads spin around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” This is where they get stuck. Only if feminism can embrace the more traditional ways that men and women have courted throughout the ages can it have anything practical to offer young women. To the extent that feminists dismiss as worthless anything that is perceived as “backtracking,” they only help to perpetuate the “raunch culture”–even as they deplore its effects.
Take a beach scene that Ms. Levy recounts, when the male “friends” of two girls pressure them to take off their suits. Soon surrounded by a circle of 40 screaming men, the girls say “no way!” but eventually give in and spank each other to appease the crowd.
Such a girl requires, in addition to perhaps Mace, a compelling alternative to the Female Chauvinist Pig. Otherwise she may well give in to social pressure–not to mention professorial nonsense–and then wonder what’s wrong with her when she is not happy with the pig in her bed or the pig she has become.
Ms. Shalit is author of “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” You can buy “Female Chauvinist Pigs” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
September 20, 2005
Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ex=1127966400&en=3f7348e314a603ee&ei=5070&emc=eta1
By LOUISE STORY
Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.
So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.
“My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.”
At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.
There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.
Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.
Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.
“At the height of the women’s movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing,” said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. “The women today are, in effect, turning realistic.”
Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.
Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.
“Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all,” said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.
“Men really aren’t put in that position,” she said.
Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.
“I’ve seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn’t, and it’s kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it,” said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.
While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.
The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.
Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.
The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.
In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni – both men and women – to play in society.
For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: “The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word ‘leadership’ conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.’s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that.”
She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.
In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: “There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities.”
Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.
“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s.
It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.
It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person’s expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.
University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students’ minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.
“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”
There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.
According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity – a gap that was small among alumni in their 20′s but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40′s, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.
A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40′s, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40′s, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.
A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30′s and 40′s.
What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.
“It never occurred to me,” Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. “Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time.”
Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. “People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family.”
Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children.
“A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great,’ ” Ms. Currie said. “One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’ Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30′s now.”
For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.
“My stepmom’s very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable,” said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. “It justified it to her, that I don’t look down on her for not having a career.”
Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother’s choice to work full time the “greatest gift.”
“She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career,” Ms. Sullivan said.
Some of these women’s mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.
Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu’s roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.
Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. “I do have this bias that the parents can do it best,” she said. “I see a lot of women in their 30′s who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best.”
For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation’s top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.
“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.
“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”
Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu’s roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.
“Parents have such an influence on their children,” Ms. Ku said. “I want to have that influence. Me!”
She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.
“I’ll have a career until I have two kids,” she said. “It doesn’t necessarily matter how far you get. It’s kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do.”
Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.
“I accept things how they are,” she said. “I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.”
After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.
“It worked so well for me,” she said, “and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.”
Thanks to Carrie for sending me this article.
My dear friend commented on this part of the article, “And when it comes right down to it, who would have any of the right stuff to even have faith in marriage, the family, and children after indulging in such self-destructive, self-loathing chaos?”Her response was, “….Therein lies the pitfall…. Once you start tasting of that forbidden apple, the garden of romance can all too easily dissapear! This, i think, is why many parents of our generation divorced — lack of faith in love is a direct result of the “free love” movement. Someone needs to warn the young!!! They need to be made aware of the booby-traps. Otherwise we are all just walking around with broken flowers, feeling numb to the pain we don’t even realize we are entitled to have.”