don't want to be holden

the following is not, in any way, meant to be an attack on women or the women's movement. i love women.

before 1960 or so, sexual promiscuity accompanied with it a scarlet letter and was more or less unheard of. then came the female empowerment revolution of the sixties/seventies - women going to work, burning bras, growing body hair, roe v. wade, etcetera. and sex became more of a "do-it-if-it-feels-good" thing. and so it remains, to say the least.

i looked up some info about voting rights. black males had the constitutional right to vote 50 years before all women did. the 15th amendment was passed right after the civil war (1870), giving black males the vote. some states put restrictions on black voting (poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses), but people formerly considered property had the right to vote before women did.

wyoming (of all places) was the first state to allow women the right in 1890, and some other states followed suit during the years up to 1920, when the u.s. constitution was finally ameneded (19th) to give all women the right to vote.

so it's apparent that women have had it rougher than men for a long time, in many ways. that's nothing new.

but the pendulum always swings, and i think that right now sex is a good indicator. it's no secret that women and men "saving themselves" for marriage are increasingly in the minority. one-night stands, pity sex, fuck buddies, paris hilton, prostitution (admittedly nothing new), a "drunken mistake" (my nickname in college), porn, and various amalgamations thereof are relatively recent terms in historical vernacular.

it's like catholic school girls graduating and then fucking everything in sight after years of plaid skirts, knee-socks, and pent-up frustration. they go straight from "hail mary" to "bloody mary".

sidebar - i'm saying all this independently of men's actions over the years. we have always been domineering pigs who think with our dicks and harbor gender double-standards, more or less. i don't think that changes much.

but for a long time sex was always associated with love, or at least marriage or commitment of some kind. and now nothing could be further from the truth.

my own problem is this - as progressive an individual i am and as liberal my thought processes are, for some reason i have a hard time seperating sex and love. when i'm aware of two people i know, or know of, having sex, there's a part of me that recoils, knowing that no feelings whatsoever exist between the two. or three. or sometimes six.

and when i say "love" i mean emotional love. not "love for the vagina" or "love of dick". person-to-person love. and how often is that actually involved in sex acts these days? fifty percent maybe? it can't be much.

so are we on our way to sexual intercourse having nothing at all to do with emotional attachment? how would someone acclimatize themselves to that idea when they've grown up in a religious household and been told all their lives that it should mean something? a "brave new world" was always passed off as fiction, but how far away from that painted future are we?

in all seriousness, i have this caulfieldian insanity in me that wants to protect innocence in people (girls), and it aggravates the ever-loving FUCK out of me. like when i see dancing at the club which is essentially sex-mimicking, or scant clothing, or mardi gras, or wet t-shirt contests, or girls gone wild, or anything on the e! channel and mtv.

even porn - mentally i try to completely objectify the women to make myself realize that sex is completely independent of love. but some small part of me always winces.

none of this is conscious - i don't see such activity and adopt this judeo-christian "look-at-the-babylon-whore" type of thing. i don't judge. i just can't seem to completely desensitize myself to the way our society seems to be moving.

and it leads to alot of depression and sadness, which is why i'm trying to change.

is that maybe bad, that i'm trying to coalesce so? should my goal be to objectify women to avoid getting hurt? what happens to manners and respect and courtesty if that happens? quoting dave chappelle, again (you should check out his hbo special if you've never seen it - great stuff):

women say that chivalry is dead and that men aren't gentlemen no more.'... Well, chivalry IS dead.. and women killed it.

again, this is not meant to lambaste women at all. if i were homosexual or a woman i'd probably feel the same way, only the impetus would be male behavior.

i'm just trying to express my disappointment with the "progress" our society makes in some respects. also that my brain is totally fucked up and that it takes very little to send me spiraling into depression and self-loathing.