Love is Like the Ocean Part II: May Yield Wet T-Shirt

I realize the hackneyed gender stereotypes I noted in my last post don't even scratch the gnarled skein of American sexuality. I blame my reductive cultural analysis on being forced to read this book when I was 14. My foibles notwithstanding, Time did a nice piece on how what we used to assume was alcohol-induced hedonism is really just feminine aggression abetted by alcohol. I like it because it speaks to one of my pet peeves when discussing sexuality: causality. The feminization of men and the masculinization of women do not comprise a zero-sum game. Our culture likes to alternately demonize and celebrate its vices: cigarette manufacturing were among America's first businesses and, legislation notwithstanding, smokes persevere as avatars of cool. Alcohol is little different - these days we see something of a renaissance of choice if not one of advertising. Those Bacardi and Cola Miami Vice lookalikes may be racist and misogynist but they sure do move product. (Subscription required) That men and women alike use booze as an excuse to explore their ids more freely is not causally related to alcohol's inherent evil. It's my same argument for sex, death metal, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth, etc. I mean, kids want to be bad; if their intemperance causes them to turn out BAD! that can hardly be the fault of their chosen indulgence. If we're hellbent on attacking drinks with deleterious effects, I've got some fresh candidates. Pun intended!
I suppose the way to think of the sexual challenges America's facing is similar to the problem biologists have in explaining emergence. We're faced with women becoming more like men and men becoming more like women, creating weird interstitial cultures that exhibit bizarre behavior that do not conform to antiquated definitions of pink for girls and blue for boys. Now, I'm not saying we should celebrate the emergent tendencies unequivocally; Girsl Gone Wild, for example, is exploitative and a shameless front for the hardcore porn industry. (My roommate freshman year of college ordered the very first video; within a month he received weekly deliveries of beige, unlabeled videos that read XXX on the spine. Everything was charged to his credit card he'd used to make the first purchase. His buddy would come over and they would drink a case of Schlitz and watch while I wrote papers. Good times) But it's far better to ride out this wave of recklessness while fixing the roots of the "problem," namely all the stuff Mary Pipher wrote about in this book. Ten years can make a world of difference for a sensitive young man, you see.