From Front Porch To Back Seat--Beth Bailey

Like many of you, I have heard a lot over the past month about Laura Sessions Stepp's new book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose At Both. I'm 9th in line on CPL's waiting list for it, so in the meantime I turned to this book. I remembered reading it in high school or college and being favorably impressed. On rereading it, I have to say that I'm awfully disappointed that NPR did not think to get Beth Bailey and LSS on air together for a critical thinking skills smackdown on dating through the ages.

Here is the thesis of Unhooked as I have gleaned it from the media coverage: Younguns these days don't have relationships, they just have indiscriminate sex. And they talk about it openly, which is bad. If you want sex, you should be discreet and sneaky about it. And the hookups are bad because they don't allow for the learning curve of how to decide what you want in a partner which is why dating around is such a marvelous thing. Or, girls get themselves into these exclusive proto-marriages in which they stagnate. Oh, and by just having sex you don't learn how to handle negotiation and the relationship skills you need in a long term relationship with a single person. And why women losing out on these valuable skills is something we should be concerned about (as opposed to any relationship skills gap men might have) is because women are the sexual gatekeepers.

No, I am not making this up. Go look up some of the coverage on this book. To complicate matters, LSS's book is supposedly based on some sort of private survey research combined with in-depth interviewing, so it sounds awfully anecdotal, but I haven't read the book.

Bailey's book is historical in nature--she's taking her evidence from articles, college archives, and the like. Like LSS, she concentrates her research on how young people (high school and college aged) dated and courted from about 1900-1960, and what the changes in custom and practices reflect about America and personal relationships. The main thrust is that by about 1920, courting had moved from a practice that took place in a girl's home under her parent's eyes and was a fairly serious step on the course to marriage (think the fundamentalist Christian dating practices of the modern age) to an activity that took place outside the home and involved the purchase of entertainment, food, and the privilege of being in a public space. Therefore, dating becomes less about any personal sparkage than a popularity contest in which girls compete to prove to boys that the pleasure of her company is a valuable commodity worth paying for. Keep in mind, this popularity contest can only function in a stratified and regimented society, hence youth culture. Because really, once you're out of college, you are competing in a different level about different things, no? Mostly.

Also worth noting is that dating is a serious activity that determines a girl's worth, but the goal is to have a lot of beaux for the early part of the century. Then in the 1950's there's a shift, and exclusive relationships are the ideal. Why? WWII. The US didn't lose a whole generation of the men the way Europe did with WWI with 5 years of war and a flu epidemic, leaving a lot of single women with no eligable marriage partners. WWII and the GI Bill brought a lot of men back into an artificial youth culture of the college campus, where men were a scarcity and needed to be snapped up. Plus with the general tone of the time pushed marriage and settling down and rebuilding the country to a generation who had grown up with first the Depression and then the war, and who were frankly tired and exhausted, and the young just adopted the values being pushed on their elders.

But sex! People weren't having all this premarital sex, right? Bullshit!. Sexual activity has always gone along with dating. What has changed is a) what people do (Bailey charts the changes in what is considered acceptable--the Victorians thought that handholding pushed boundaries, but by the 1930's necking and petting are commonplace practices) b) where they do it (namely the car--lookout points and parking spots emerge as a way of using public peer pressure to not let activities go too far) and c) what consequences you face for your activity.

Bailey's book is concise, very enjoyable and illuminating. So far she kicks LSS's ass on the research and thesis, but I'm still waiting for Unhooked.