The no time for a boyfriend brigade

Hanna Rosin's Atlantic story about how the hook-up culture benefits - and is perpetuated by - young women is kind of great. Finally, someone is acknowledging that not all female-desire-for-a-man is desire for a boyfriend/husband/father-of-future-kids. Often, especially when young, girls desire boys, women men, for the very same reason as straight men lust after women, gay men men, bisexuals you-get-the-idea. It is, or long was, socially unacceptable for the ladies to express desire in these terms, so they would often profess to wanting a relationship when they really just want some dude. If young women no longer feel they have to do a whole charade of pretending they want every guy they kiss to be their husband, that's wonderful!

And what Rosin describes might be the Léon Blum idea in action: men as well as women who've seen what's out there end up in more stable marriages later on, because they have a sense of what they want, and because they don't find themselves wondering what another person - any other person - could possibly be like. Otherwise, Madame Bovary happens, which everyone but Lori Gottlieb agrees isn't ideal.

But the piece brings up some window-of-opportunity questions. One female college student interviewed, for example, is all live-and-let-live, but adds, as if it's no big deal, that she intends to be married by 30. Clearly lots of women (and men!) do manage to keep things casual until The Official Age, whatever that may be, and then conveniently enough manage to change their Facebook statuses to "engaged" in unison with the rest of their cohort. But that's a lot of pressure, to go from ugh-no-boyfriend-please to must-find-husband-now within the span of, oh, five minutes. Why not accept that some women will meet the loves of their lives at 19 (after having dated others - 19's not that young), while others will never want to settle down? As life plans go, this one's better than most, but it's still restrictive and still has its problems.

As it stands, what Rosin describes as the default for ambitious young women is certainly what women of my generation were advised to do by women of our mothers' generation back when we were in high school and college. The worst thing any of us could do would be to settle down too early and put a man before our educations/careers. Of course, the need to move for one's career doesn't magically stop at age 30, and often enough, what will happen these days is, a woman will have nobly resisted sacrificing her potential by marrying at 19, only to give up a career at 30 or 35. So I suppose it would be interesting to see if that's going to change, if college women who didn't dare have boyfriends because Career end up staying in said career even once the requisite marriage-at-30 takes place.

Which brings up one last concern, namely that there's something awfully depressing and maybe even retrograde about women embracing the "hook-up culture" in order to have time to do internships (!) and the like. It implies that these young women would prefer relationships, but fear hurting their futures by having them, a kind of junior version of the women who wait to have kids until they're 45 because they want to first be sufficiently established professionally. Depressing, then, both because it suggests that women aren't simply interested in exploration/variety/etc. while young (thereby once again casting doubt on the existence of female desire), and, more importantly, because there's no corresponding narrative about how if a guy meets the woman of his dreams at 20, staying with her will mean curtailing his ambitions.