After six years of the security, support, and occasional suffocation that comes with a long-term monogamous relationship, I recently became single for the first time as an adult out of college. I knew dating again would be a strange and possibly emotionally difficult experience after so long with one person. But what I didn’t expect, and what nobody warned me about, was the sexism.
With feminism almost universally embraced, I had long assumed that anyone I’d be interested in hanging out with would know that the traditional, heterosexual dating rules are ridiculous. And why play some outdated game when you’ve absolutely no intention of starting a serious relationship?
The first time I met someone I was interested in post-break-up, none of those rules were relevant. We had sex, texted, and hung out without counting the hours between messages or playing hard to get. The second time, however, I was not so lucky. In a scenario familiar to millions of people, yet honestly surprising to me, I had sex with a guy (we’ll call him Dan) and never heard from him again. I didn’t know him well and certainly wasn’t emotionally invested, but the interaction still rankled me. We’d got on incredibly well and, for all the nonchalance endemic to casual hook ups, sex is an unavoidably intimate experience. The radio silence post-coitus seemed strangely cold.
Guys who are rude to women they sleep with aren’t jerks. They’re sexist
The shift in his behavior was particularly striking because it runs so counter to most conventional adult behavior. In general, it’s pretty easy to read relationships. I can tell when a connection over drinks turns a colleague into a friend, or when you’re putting in the time with a family acquaintance and you just don’t jell. Even when the spark’s not totally there, polite society dictates a certain common courtesy. Hence the friendliness that oils our interactions with fitness instructors, former co-workers, friends-of-friends, and hairdressers. So why not people we sleep with?
But while friends were quick to call Dan a jerk, it’s not fair to wave off this behavior as straightforward rudeness. He didn’t seem klicka fГ¶r mer particularly like a jerk, and almost certainly doesn’t think of himself as one. Ultimately, it seems women-whom-you’ve-had-sex-with are the only category of people straight men aren’t expected to treat cordially. This deep-seated sexism comes alongside various other problematic assumptions-that sex is something women give to men, that women always want relationships, that talking about emotions in connection to sex is “crazy”-that still seem to permeate heterosexual sexual relations. And that left me, a hard-core feminist in 2016, feeling like a cow that had given away the milk for free.
Yup, those sexist dating rules are still around
Perhaps it was naive of me to assume dating culture had sorted out its sexist hang ups while I was blithely enmeshed in my own monogamous relationship. Kathleen Bogle, a sociology professor at La Salle University who has written about hook-up culture , confirms that despite progress on some feminist issues, misogynist sexual standards remain the norm. Tinder may have revolutionized how we meet people, but those threads of sexism have stubbornly remained the same.
This refusal to move past patriarchal stereotypes is surprising given young people’s progressive attitudes on other social issues, like LGBT rights. “It’s like day and night the conversation it would’ve been 20 years ago versus now when it comes to gay rights,” Bogle says. “But with the conversation on dating, hook-up culture, and sexual behavior, you still see that mentality of calling someone a slut, calling someone a hoe.”
Indeed, dating today still reflects some attitudes from when the practice first began in the early 1900s. Moira Weigel, a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Yale University, has written a book on the history of dating . When it first began, she says, dating was a way for working-class women of limited means to find husbands. Men had the wages to buy dinner (and, ultimately, a lifetime of financial security), so dating became a way for women to attract male attention and gain access to wealth.