Monday, June 28, 2010

Another area of broad agreement: adults aren't sexualized enough

Camile Paglia says that upper middle class adult culture isn't sexualized enough, which is the same point that many conservative religious movements do. Femininity has been devalued, different roles for men and women has taken out the mystery and magic of relationships, we oversexualize young people and undersexualize adults. Young people are having sex before marriage, and older people are not marrying or not having sex in marriage. These points appear in many evangelical Christian, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish assessments of culture, and in dating books from across the spectrum. (An example of the latter: Rachel Greenwald, a secular Jew who did a qualitative study of 1000 men about their dating histories, found in her study that one reason that men cite for not continuing a relationship past early dates is that the women dress and behave on dates in the same way as they do in the office.)

We can keep in mind that every model is wrong, but some models are useful: these statements are of course oversimplifications and generalizations. But it's really interesting to see a point where some from the left and some from the right can agree, when they would agree on so little else.