Hana Rosin revisited

I promised to come back to her and never did.

Anyway, I think it is pretty well established that Rosin's argument is neither logically sound nor terribly well backed up. Before leaving her, though,  we need to see that Rosin's arguments are not just wrong but detached from reality. Her writing is fantasy journalism and not reporting.

For example, read the following anecdote, which opens her piece:

The porn pic being passed around on the students’ cellphones at an Ivy League business-­school party last fall was more prank than smut: a woman in a wool pom-pom hat giving a snowman with a snow penis a blow job. Snowblowing, it’s called, or snowman fellatio, terms everyone at this midweek happy hour seemed to know (except me). The men at the party flashed the snapshot at the women, and the women barely bothered to roll their eyes. These were not women’s-studies types, for sure; they were already several years out of college and proud veterans of the much maligned hookup culture that, over the past 15 years or so, has largely replaced dating on college campuses and beyond.

One of the women had already seen the photo five times before her boyfriend showed it to her, so she just moved her pitcher of beer in front of his phone and kept on talking. He’d already suggested twice that night that they go to a strip club, and when their mutual friend asked if the two of them were getting married, he gave the friend the finger and made sure his girlfriend could see it, so she wouldn’t get any ideas about a forthcoming ring. She remained unfazed. She was used to his “juvenile thing,” she told me.

Now the business of proving things with anecdotes is a complicated one at the best of time. That said, I think that most people would read the story above and see a pretty typical story of college-aged boys behaving like college-aged boys and college-aged girls grudgingly tolerating it. Notice, however, the way Rosin frames the anecdote:

I had gone to visit the business school because a friend had described the women there as the most sexually aggressive he had ever met.

Seriously, do you see anything in the above paragraph that speaks to the sexual aggressiveness of women?

Again, the ground here is fairly well tread and other feminist writers are bewailing that men, especially young men, have gotten the upper hand in the sex game. That may or may not be true but the more interesting thing here is that college boys have not changed. That Rosin doesn't see this is a function of her not wanting to see it.

Now Rosin does have one solid point to make and she makes it well: girls are not the tender little flowers they are so often made out to be. Faced with this frat-boy world where boys seem to have all the power, a lot of girls are coping just fine, for now anyway. That said, I'm sure there are scarred victims out there too and a writer keen to prove that girls are suffering horribly could easily come home with anecdotes to "prove" her point too.

Rosin is keen to prove that something different is happening and so she keeps missing the evidence that some things haven't changed at all. To return to the anecdote at the top, is it news that boys will act like pigs. There were guys at my college in the 1980s who liked to do things like flashing pornographic images at girls too. I surprising number of them also had girlfriends too.

Another thing that Rosin does not seem to be interested in seeing is  how obsessed women are with sexual status. There is no evidence that girls are having more sex than they used to. The best evidence suggests the exact opposite, but there is plenty of evidence that they are dressing in ways that display their sexuality far more aggressively than used to be the case.

Look at the following quotes pulled from various parts of Rosin's article, and I think you will notice something else that hasn't changed much:

“I want to get secure in a city and in a job … I’m not in any hurry at all. As long as I’m married by 30, I’m good.”

“He fits my needs now, because I don’t want to get married now,” one said. “I don’t want anyone else to influence what I do after I graduate.”

“Now I’m like, I don’t even need to be getting married yet [or] have kids,” one of the less privileged women told the researchers in her senior year.

She doesn't want to get married "now" or "yet". Whatever their short-term goals, these women all see themselves as married in the long run. 

Now one issue Rosin doesn't raise is what the prognosis for marriage is like for these women in the long term. And that is surprising because the answer, so far anyway, is that it's pretty good. Upper middle class women who get college degrees and marry later have the best record, collectively, for getting married and staying married. They also tend to do better at life by most other measures as well.

Now let's take a look at something that has changed that Rosin does acknowledge but, again, she frames the issue rather oddly. I mentioned last time that Rosin cites a rather dubious on-line survey to back up some of her argument but she also cites some good data sources as well:

And in fact, the broad inference that young people are having more sex—and not just coarser sex—is just wrong; teenagers today, for instance, are far less likely than their parents were to have sex or get pregnant. Between 1988 and 2010, the percentage of teenage girls having sex dropped from 37 to 27, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By many measures, the behavior of young people can even look like a return to a more innocent age.

As I said last time, the obvious conclusion is that the whole hook-up culture is a myth. But notice Rosin's word choice, "... can even look like ...". How about "it does look like" Hanna? Because it does.

What Rosin is missing is that there are winners and losers here. She wants to believe that our cruder sex culture has been good for women so she went looking for evidence of that. And things are going well for some women. Other evidence, not examined by Rosin, suggests that class divisions are becoming more pronounced as a result of the changes we see.

What will actually happen in the future is anybody's guess. Right now, what we are seeing is a youth and young adult culture where no one is putting any restrictions on young people's behaviours. As a consequence, we've seen an explosion of  poor risk assessment such as getting tattoos but, and this should fascinate us, we've seen sexual behaviour get more controlled. The real point of Rosin's won research is this:

You could even say that what defines this era is an unusual amount of sexual control and planning.

Again, the reticent word choice is telling: "... you could even say ...." Why not just say it then?

All I see evidence of here is that human nature hasn't changed. Boys are still behaving like boys and girls are still behaving like girls. It's still the same old story ....  But I'll tell you what is missing here: an honest discussion of what makes for success.  It's no great surprise these girls talk about getting married later, the most successful people in our society are the ones who get married and stay married. What are those people like? And what kinds of behaviour in your college years are most and least conducive to that sort of success later in life?

I don't think the problem is that Hanna Rosin doesn't know what the answers to those questions are.