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by Helen Rittelmeyer
How bad is the modern dating scene? Apparently, it's so bad that young men are going around handing City Journal fellows quotes about how much they hate dating hot women. A world turned upside-down!
I can imagine an anti-feminist response to this startling information that puts full blame on the feminists—Hymowitz tiptoes down that path when she brings up how easy it was when everybody knew the rules of courtship and how hard it is now that everyone hates roles and roleplaying. Fine and fair, Kay, but not enough. Men used to like women who put out early, sat in bars, and had hot bodies, and I can't imagine anything less than a revolution making them stop. My own explanation: America is no longer producing femme fatales, or, as Florence King calls them, world-class hussies. An old King column lays out her reasoning:
I like to do things well; if I were young again and embarking on the primrose path, I would want to be what Ross Perot would call a world-class hussy, but current standards of dissoluteness have fallen so low that nobody would know the difference.
. . . Today's pseudo-hussies are nothing more than updated versions of that put-upon figure of Victorian melodrama, the "little shop girl." There are millions of them in every age and they invariably get caught in sexual tragedies because they lack the personality trait that identifies a bona fide hussy: a bandit streak.
Conservative that I am (not that King wasn't one), I mourn the demise of the world-class hussy, too. Used to be that, when you went home with such a girl, you were placing yourself in the hands of a professional—I don't mean that she was a literal whore, but that she approached the task of casual sex with a certain professionalism. Nowadays, the woman you meet at a bar might simply be a frightened amateur. Such a green girl might, in earlier times, have expressed her nerves by jumping nine feet in the air when a man lunged for her at date's end. Men used to have to talk them down from the tops of bookcases, like skittish cats. It was good practice.
Their modern equivalents are caught in confusion and anxiety, and can't think why. After all, they know exactly what they want! World-class hussies could tell them the secret, if they had ears to hear: Romantic success takes knowing what you want and having the "bandit streak" to do what it takes to get it. If it's obvious that a man wants a one-night stand (a give-away if you met him in a bar), give it to him or don't; just don't half-[way] it. If you want to be a mistress—all the gold, none of the commitment!—you can do that, too, but it takes more than physical satisfaction to make a man spend his coin; it takes an aura of feminine mystery. That mystery must be cultivated, and you'll never pull it off if you act like a seventeen-year-old, if you're asserting your equality (mystery is about inequality, girls), or if you regard your every emotional swing from wanting a gentleman to wanting a gigolo as Relationship Law.
Feminists thought they knew what they were doing when they eliminated the word "slut" from the lexicon. Now it seems that, by eliminating the word, they've killed the concept. If you don't want women to be crucified for their sex lives, that's fine, but don't scrub out the danger, the allure, and the man-eating ambition along with it; they're crucial ingredients of healthy casual sex (which has always existed, Puritanism notwithstanding).
If you want to be a nice girl, commit to being one. If you are hanging out in a bar, you are a hussy and should commit to that. Hymowitz's SYM's think romantic entanglement is a raw deal; no man thought so while the world-class hussy breathed.
UPDATE: How did I neglect to mention Joe Jackson's "It's Different for Girls" and Nina Simone's "The Other Woman?" Go forth and listen. Who said anything about love...
