Girls will be girls and boys will be boys

And mistakes will be made. I love this little bit in the NYT article from Kelly Lynch (who has the excuse that she is still just a junior at North Carolina):

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”
Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

I love the classic opening line "A lot of my friends". From the moment I first started paying attention to girls many decades ago this gambit has always predominated. It's never what the woman talking to you has done; it's always some un-named friends who are out there doing these dumb sexual things.
And then there is the "more than they're comfortable with" being forced on them by boys. Because it just couldn't be that women are in direct sexual competition with one another and therefore feeling the pressure to match what they know other women are offering.

And, pardon my crudeness here but reading this sort of stuff you'd almost get the impression that there are no girls out there who actually, you know, get really turned on when a guy pushes the limits of what they are comfortable with. And we all know that no girl in the entire history of the world has ever dumped a nice boy for a guy who is a bit of a creep in a lot of ways but she goes with him anyway because "he really opened me up." (And, yes, a lot of women "unconsciously" use expressions with that sort of crude and obvious double entendre to describe these experiences. Why, it's almost as if they know what they are saying.)

And let us consider this observation:

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

The evil of us boys never fails to astonish me. It's not enough that we pressure women into doing things they are not comfortable with at the end of the evening, why no, even before the evening starts we're over at their dorm rooms holding guns to their heads and forcing them to dress provocatively. And we must be because,well just look at the way women dress nowadays: they wouldn't do that willingly would they? And, the poor dears, they are so innocent it never occurs to them that this clothing is (incorrectly of course) taken by boys as sending some sort of sexual signal.
(My all time favourite excuse, almost inevitably offered by older women on behalf of a girl who is really flashing it around, is "she is just looking for attention and doesn't really appreciate the way this is being taken by others." Uh huh, she is utterly unaware that drawing attention to her breasts and crotch might be taken as sending sexual signals. That much condescension can be toxic.)

And I think the following is a good place to wrap it up:

“It causes girls to overanalyze everything —text messages, sideways glances, conversations,” said Margaret Cheatham Williams, a junior at North Carolina. “Girls will sit there with their friends for 15 minutes trying to figure out what punctuation to use in a text message.”

Okay. Ms. Williams, let me disabuse you of a few things. Women did not start intensely analyzing everything with your generation. You're just not that special. Read Pride and Prejudice again and watch Miss Elizabeth Bennett go at it for a while—you'll feel like a piker by comparison. Women typically spend more time analyzing conscious messages than men do. (At the risk of hurting your feelings, because he knows how analytic you are about the messages you are sending, he'll spend more time looking for your unconscious expressions—the look on your face, the way you position your body and the tone of your voice—than he will spend listening to exactly what you are saying. In fact, he will spend a lot of time trying to filter out the things he thinks you are consciously trying to say.)

But, why, why, why do you see this tendency to analyze as a weakness? Why, when you see women doing more analyzing than men do, do you immediately jump to the conclusion that this analyzing is "over-analyzing"?

I know you didn't ask for advice but here it is anyway. Take a hint from Elizabeth Bennett and turn this analysis on yourself. Take a good long look at yourself the way a good but critical friend would do.

And please, you are young, attractive and going to a good university. You have nothing but promise ahead of you. Cheer up.