Girls in their early 20's have the most interest from guys, while guys in their early 20's are at a disadvantage in the dating pool. This shifts at around 26.
Posted on 06/19/2018 9:52:38 AM PDT by DeweyCA
In the same way that the show had an outsized influence on women’s fashion, so too did it influence their behavior. The latter didn't work out so well.
“Some people are settling down, some people are settling, and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.”
“The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you find someone to love the you you love, well, that’s just fabulous.”
— Carrie Bradshaw
This month marks the twenty-year anniversary of the iconic television series “Sex and the City.” With smart writing and fantasy fashion, it’s easy to see why the show was beloved. It featured an irresistible ensemble of women strutting down the street, heads thrown back in laughter, looking forward and looking fabulous, unmoored, but somehow seemingly on course. Carrie Bradshaw was winsome, witty, and chic — imperfect, yet perfectly enviable. In watching her, fans had a sneaking feeling that they might be living the wrong life, and that somewhere bright city days filled with brunches and purses, brownstones and love affairs awaited them.
In the same way that the show had an outsized influence on women’s fashion, so too did it influence their behavior. Inevitably, there was a vast gulf between how Carrie’s life seemed and how it translated into reality for her fans. Casual hook-ups after a night of drinking Cosmos is decidedly less glamorous in real life. The material aspiration encouraged by the show is imprudent for all but an elite few. Even fewer can sustain the licentious sexuality without lasting physical and emotional wounds. The societal physics of a growing hookup culture result in an increasing number of men who are coarse and entitled and women who feel used and discarded.
Sophisticated moderns think of “Leave it to Beaver” as a contrived reflection of a societally imposed, but ultimately unfulfilling domesticity. We should now see “Sex and the City” as the “Leave it to Beaver” of the sexual revolution: a glossy representation at odds with the sad reality on the ground. Our new conception of the good life for women as highly ambitious sexual libertines has created a generation of Stepford single girls pantomiming a life of glamor that can feel as hollow as it does harmful.
The show’s stepchild, “Girls,” was in many ways a response to this inauthenticity. While reflecting the real sadness and complexity that stems from a hook-up culture, it reassured women that this is just the cost of their empowerment. But reflecting reality turns into validating it, which quickly becomes normalizing it. What we do not get from either of these shows is a way out of that reality.
If there’s a way out it’s in questioning our presuppositions about sex. What have women gained from this experimental reorientation of our understanding of how men and women ought to live and love? That’s the discussion we need.
The traditional understanding of sex is based on the nature of the act itself which has as its purpose the goal of emotionally and physically uniting two people and establishing families. It’s life-giving both in the way it demands each person give his or her entire life to the other permanently and unreservedly, and in the quite literal way in which lovers give their whole bodies to one another and create children, further bonding the two. Trying to use it as a means of narrowing down potential life partners denies the very nature of sex. Hook-ups confuse our ability to assess potential partners by creating unwarranted emotional attachments and the inevitable trust issues that come with the dissolution of every love affair.
Still, the answer isn’t to simply look backward. Correctives were needed for the “Leave it to Beaver” world. There was surely some repression and dysfunction in the old domesticity, and in certain ways male and female relationships can truly be said to be healthier now. But a corrective that rejected the intelligible nature of the act of sex has left a culture disoriented and dysfunctional in ways that are far more difficult to repair the further unmoored we become.
Yet still the revolutionaries insist it be taboo to even question the tenants of the sexual revolution. They’ve replaced dogmas built on nature with dogmas built on will: the good is determined merely by my act of choosing it. This sets us up for a clash of wills as we’ve seen painfully in the revelations of the #MeToo movement.
But nature has a way of having the last word over even the strongest of wills. Pleasure as a highest good quickly becomes elusive. Any man digging down into a rabbit hole of porn addiction can attest to that. We create a society of boorish men then complain about the diminishing pool of marriage prospects. Virtue is difficult for everyone, but it becomes impossible if it’s not even identified as a goal worthy of pursuit. Without virtue, we lose the ability to freely choose what we ought.
The sexual revolution promised freedom, but ended up enslaving its advocates and their acolytes alike. In its wake are generations of victims and layers of injustice. One bubbly television show is certainly not to blame for all of this. It came years after the revolution had firmly embedded into the culture. But in giving an enticing yet profoundly dishonest picture of what such a life would be like it surely multiplied the revolution’s effects.
Even if they were, the Seinfeld crew surely believed that America west of the Hudson is inhabited by inbred gun toting hicks who voted for Reagan.
You know, I DID attempt to watch a Seinfeld episode. After ten minutes I switched off because the characters were clueless, neurotic, and ineffectual, so maybe you’re right.
;^)
I couldn’t get past staring at that ugly chin wart on that ugly horse-face that the male actors actually had to kiss as if they enjoyed it.
The Happy Hooker myth is a lie from hell.
“The writers were sodomite who hate women profoundly.“
****************
HA! My mom always said that about fashion designers who came up with hideous fashions. “They’re gay and they hate women, that’s how they come up with half these get-ups they try to pawn off as fashion.”
It's more like "Women dress in competition with other women", as in "I'm hotter than you, don't even try to compete with me when I go after a man".
Seinfeld was a super funny show which happened to be set in NYC. I have seen each episode numerous times and the reruns still crack me up. Everybody Loves Raymond is another good one, and so is The Middle.
Most women are at their peak "hotness" in their early 20's. You want to get a man to commit, that's the age to find a potential husband.
The people at dating site OkCupid did an article The Case For An Older Woman; How dating preferences change with age, looking at statistics from their site:
As you can see, a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age. The median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35 — nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.Women in their early 20's have the maximum range of selection. Women approaching 40 have to settle for who's left.
From my experience and talking to all my friends:
Guys in their teens want chicks in their teens
Guys in their 20s want chicks in their teens and 20s.
Guys in their 30s want chicks in their 20s. See what just happened there?
Guys in their 40s want chicks in their 20s but might go for early 30s
Life hands young women all the cards, but time is not their ally. Many don’t seem to grasp that the time to get a nice guy who has his life/career in order....maybe not rich yet but good career path or grad degree.....is in their 20s. If they’re still knocking around with “exciting” bad boy types who are going nowhere and think they’re going to be able to settle down with that nice guy when they’re 32-33, they’re heading for disaster. I’ve seen it several times. They’re always shocked when they discover the guys who were pursuing them even 5 years ago are no longer interested.
Girls in their early 20's have the most interest from guys, while guys in their early 20's are at a disadvantage in the dating pool. This shifts at around 26.
Oh yeah, got that. Similar to: what is the worst faux pas that can happen in a gathering of women or of men & women?
Two women wearing the same dress.
That’s exactly what it was. A bunch of women acting like homosexual men. I can’t understand how anyone could watch it, let alone imitate it.
Good for you. I never watched Sex in the Chickie.
I can well believe it was homoerotic projection.
No, no, no, and definitely not.
A horse face for a whore show!
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