Okay, so. Since I am a Feminist Commentator ™, many folks have asked my opinion on a piece that recently ran in “The Atlantic” called “All The Single Ladies“, by Kate Bolick. Many of you have probably already seen Bolick’s piece — I’ve got a roundup of a few relevant links and snips at the end of this post. Here are my thoughts about the article, in order:
1) Wow, I dealt with many of these issues and did a better job several weeks ago, when I wrote my piece: “Chemistry“. I’m also going to examine a lot of these issues in my upcoming eBook Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews With Hideous Men. (I know, I’ve been plugging the eBook a lot lately. What can I say — I’m a starving artist and I use the platforms available to me.)
2) Well … okay. I’ll try to be more fair. I am coming at this question from the perspective of a 27-year-old woman, who is just starting to think about getting married — and I have considerable experience in liberal sex subcultures. Kate Bolick is coming at this question from the perspective of a 39-year-old woman who has clearly thought a lot about getting married — and who was somewhat influenced by second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem … but is clearly uncomfortable with liberal sex-positive feminist perspectives.
(If Bolick weren’t uncomfortable, then when she tried to get a grip on the modern dating scene she might have talked to lefty feminists, rather than speaking only to the relatively conservative Susan Walsh. As a matter of fact, Susan Walsh has openly insulted and attacked a number of high-profile modern feminists, including women who I greatly respect. Personally, I find Walsh to be somewhat interesting and mostly harmless; during our brief exchanges, I’ve gotten the impression that she feels the same way about me. I have found some of Walsh’s critiques of sex-positive feminism echoed in my own experiences, and I try to take such critiques into account during my ongoing project of building more flexible and universal sex-positive feminist theory. But I 110% disagree with where Walsh takes those critiques — for example, Walsh has been known to assert that we ought to do more slut-shaming. Which is just no. The last thing we need is more slut-shaming.)
3) Given that Kate Bolick is a bit more conservative than I am, and given that she has very different experiences, it’s not surprising that she has taken such a different journey in her thoughts about this topic. What’s more interesting is that she arrives at very similar conclusions. Like many other commentators, I liked where Bolick was going at the end of the article, when she talks about potentially building collective lives with like-minded people, rather than depending on marriage to create our family structures.
Unlike many other commentators — and unlike Bolick, apparently — I already have a great deal of experience with collectives and cooperatives. I don’t usually write about this, because it’s not directly relevant to sex & gender, but I’ve mentioned it before, like for example in my old post “Grassroots Organizing for Feminism, S&M, HIV and Everything Else“. I hate to sound like a true believer, but I really think that cooperatives can be the wave of the future … if we let them.
Building an intentional living community with like-minded people is very difficult. But there are thousands of examples of cooperatives around the world — some dealing with housing, some dealing with other matters. Most of my experience is with housing cooperatives, and I can attest that participating in even a very functional housing cooperative can be infuriating, heartbreaking, and scary by turns. But functional housing cooperatives have also taught me an enormous amount about humanity, relationships, grassroots action, interdependence, efficiency, and sharing. (Awww. I know. It’s so sweet.)
And I fully expect that my experience in building intentional “family” will be great for me as I grow older and my life takes me either into marriage, or not into marriage. Cooperatives are living communities that do not depend on these outmoded ideas of nuclear families. And, by the way? Living in a cooperative does not preclude marriage. Plenty of married couples live in cooperatives together. Some have kids in the cooperatives!
I wish that Bolick had wound up her article by doing some serious research on the cooperative movement. But she didn’t, so I’m going to give you some resources off the top of my head right now. If you want to learn some basics, then definitely check out the website for the non-profit organization North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO).
As it happens, NASCO is about to host its yearly educational Institute, which is a totally awesome opportunity to learn more. I wish I’d thought to post this sooner, because I just realized that today is the last day you can register for NASCO Institute. The conference will happen from November 4-6 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Another great resource is an old article by a gentleman named Jim Jones, who used to work for NASCO. This article is called “Death in the Co-op” and it’s a brilliant exposition of Jim’s thoughts on why co-ops go under — what the potential weaknesses of co-ops are. As far as I know, this paper has basically been passed hand-to-hand for years, but has never been posted openly on the Internet. I view it as required reading for anyone with a serious interest in housing cooperatives, so I’ve put it up on my own site for download.
4) Aaaand back to Kate Bolick’s article. Do I have any other thoughts? Just one: at least it wasn’t another article by Caitlin Flanagan.
* * *
Here’s some other coverage of Bolick’s piece. I sent these links to some non-feminist friends, and one of them characterized them as “haterade”. I don’t think they’re “haterade”, but as I already said, Kate Bolick pretty much blatantly snubbed the liberal feminist sphere, and she cited Susan Walsh, who has blatantly attacked the liberal feminist sphere. So, you know. There’s gonna be some snideness in the coverage.
* A snip from analysis at L’Hote:
I think Bolick is on the cover of “The Atlantic”, and in pictures inside the story, because she is writing about her superior desirability to the men whom she might potentially partner with. And I think that in order to make that possible, she and “The Atlantic” need to show that she’s attractive. And she is [conventionally attractive]. If there were no pictures of her, that would be the question on most people’s minds: what does she look like?
That, in and of itself, tells you a lot. Bolick can convey socially-relevant information about the relative desirability of the men she’s talking about in the article, with words. She can write about education and ambition and drive and money and whatever else, and that says enough to make the point. But Bolick’s desirability can’t be meaningfully conveyed without showing what she looks like. For all the talk of the declining fortunes of men relative to women, and how women are gaining the upper hand in the romantic and sexual marketplace, women’s desirability continues to be largely determined by their physical appearance. I wish Bolick’s accomplishments were enough to convey her desirability, but the cold calculus her editors performed in putting her on the cover says otherwise.
As with Hannah Rosin’s “The End of Men,” this strikes me as an article that superficially details victory for women while the context in which it emerges reminds us of how far we still have to go.
(Please note that I, Clarisse Thorn, am all for deconstructing ideas about what “attractive” means and what “attractive” looks like. One of my recent posts had a bit of a blowup about this, and I can see places in the above snip where the author is assuming that “attractive” = “conventionally attractive”. So I just want to say that, again, I’m all for questioning and deconstructing ideas of “attractiveness”. There’s more discussion about sexiness and performing femininity over on Alas, A Blog, if you’re interested.)
* A snip from Amanda Marcotte’s discussion at Slate:
What’s interesting about these non-stop media musings about how women are getting to be “too good” for men—again, disproven by the research!—is that one specific area where women probably are getting pickier about who they date is getting overlooked. Call it the “feminism gap,” if you will; as women gain more economic power and self-esteem, their willingness to put up with a bunch of crap from men is declining rapidly. We see this in ways big and small, including the fact that women are more likely to sue for divorce than men and some research indicates that the “hook-up culture” that causes so much anguish may have partially developed as a way for women to get laid without going through demeaning and sexist romantic rituals. My favorite statistic regarding this surge of women being able to ask more of men and of life: the rate of women murdering their husbands has declined dramatically in the past 30 years, which is largely a direct result of women leaving men who beat them earlier in the relationship, long before the abuse reaches the point where they feel their only escape is to kill their abuser. I think women are beginning to have higher standards for how they’re treated in a relationship, and while many men have caught up, there are probably more women who won’t tolerate sexist treatment than men who are willing to stop being sexist. Give it a generation, and I bet it evens out significantly. Already the divorce rate is going down, suggesting that a lot more men are embracing the mutual-respect model of marriage than they did a generation ago, when a sea of marriages cracked under the pressure of trying to shove modern people into traditional patriarchal marriage.
* A snip from thoughts at What Would Phoebe Do:
Bolick went from being told (by her mother) not to settle down, to hearing from friends, at 28, that the clock’s a’ticking. In college, she and her female friends “took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30. That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith.”
That, right there, is the window of opportunity problem. Girls and young women are discouraged (from a feminist perspective) from even having boyfriends, then all of a sudden, at some juncture determined by one’s (allegedly still feminist) set, one is determined on the cusp of too-old, and then, if no engagement is announced within two minutes of that juncture, a too-old can be declared. If you’re 16-21 (say), it’s, don’t make your mother’s/grandmother’s mistakes! If you’re 21-25, maybe think about finding a husband, but you’re also too young, so maybe not? 25-30, where’s that husband? 30 and up? Missed that boat.
Meanwhile, of course people meet at 15, at 45 … and things work out. The window of opportunity merely governs expectations. Right, right, no one intelligent cares what others think, but this isn’t even on such an explicit/conscious level. Women really do go, and quickly, from feeling “too young” to feeling “too old.”
And of course, if you wrote about Bolick’s piece, then feel free to link yourself in the comments.
I found my opinion of both Bolick’s article, and of her as she portrayed herself, frequently shifting throughout my reading. Being close to her age at 35, and having heard plenty about what dating is like right now for women in our age group, I felt myself sympathizing with her frustrations and confusions – especially the ones coming from seemingly mixed messages delivered by feminists of various stripes. She also accurately points out how the history of marriage is not at all the fairy tale nuclear family narrative that social conservatives love to uphold as the “biblical truth.”
At the same time, there was something off about the article. She seems to want out of the “traditional” marriage framework, but then uses that exact framework to suggest that men are “declining” in terms of marriage partners, and women are basically screwed if they don’t get lucky and find one of the decent guys before they get “too old.”
Meanwhile, she herself seems to be constantly dancing between deeply desiring commitment and running away from guys who express early on being ready for commitment. (Obviously, a guy who proposes marriage after a first date, even if in half jest, is one to run away from.) But her examples run the range from proposal guy to her walking away from a relationship with a “commitment-minded” man for no real reason other than some sense of being fed up and done. In one paragraph, she says she has dated mostly “commitment minded men” in recent years. And in the next, she’s saying “marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either players or deadbeats.” I don’t know what to make of this, but it’s this kind of flipping that makes me think that a lot of this article really isn’t about a “declining marriage market,” but is more about deep dissatisfaction with the way relationships and marriage have been marketed and arranged in recent generations. Personally, I’m all for busting up the nuclear family monopoly and celebrating any relationship arrangement that works to support and enhance the lives of those living it. Furthermore, the more we collectively expand the culturally sanctioned ways marriage can be expressed, the better.
Bolick, though, displays an odd mixture of melancholy about the seeming decline of nuclear family marriages with a disdain towards the nuclear family narrative (bringing up all this history and some current examples of others forms of relationships and marriage). Which leaves me to wonder what it is she wants for herself, and how to read both her take on men, and also how her article ends. Does she really want to deeply examine how she/we think about romantic love? Are these groups of women living and sharing together to be seen as a positive development, or are they to be seen as “settling” or even as “having given up”?
I felt like Bollick was developing a thesis and this just dropped it because she ultimately didn’t have a point to make. Ultimately “All the Single Ladies” has no point and is just a whimsical essay on her anxieties about aging as a sexual woman.
I read this article and did indeed think, “Wow, I’ve read all this before, only written with more nuance and in a way that might actually be relevant to me.”
I also have to admit that I found the placement of cooperatives (and, it seemed implied, persons who valued platonic friendship equal to or above romantic relationships) at the very end rather. . . dismissive? The way it came off to me is that it was only something she thought of after she had exhausted all her other options (sarcasm).
I think Amanda Marcotte caught one of my concerns in her critique above: “I think women are beginning to have higher standards for how they’re treated in a relationship, and while many men have caught up, there are probably more women who won’t tolerate sexist treatment than men who are willing to stop being sexist.” Bolick’s article, as I recall, didn’t even really pay lip service to the idea that some/many people/women are really, seriously HAPPY to be single (especially when the alternative is submerging yourself in bullshit culture that tries to dictate what/who you should want and how should go about finding/enticing that person.) Even the old lady she interviewed at the Dutch cooperative was in a relationship. :P
Well shoot I just lost an epic yawp ( thanks droid keyboard) from the bottom of my 45 yr old heart, the essence if which was that if people knew how much of themselves they’d have to submerge to be a part of a traditional nuclear family, they might never marry. On the other hand, there is a lot of joy that comes from a constant and enduring relationship. Worth it? I can’t say. I’ll tell you in another 30 years, should I be fortunate to last that long.
“… my ongoing project of building more flexible and universal sex-positive feminist theory”
Interesting post. And not to derail. But just a small note: why a “universal” sex positive feminist theory?
As one of the dread sexy sex workers out there, personally, I have experienced nothing but endless grief from trying to universalize sex positive feminism, and have given up. (To be fair, I’ve almost given up on feminism as well… almost.) I have no desire to try to make sex positivity relevant to people who don’t experience sex or sexiness as positive. I just wish they’d leave me alone to do my thing, make my living, and stop treating me like a deluded brainless cog of the Evil Empire. It would be nice if we could someday march together, but just not being f*cked with would be enough at this point.
If you can find a way to universalize it in a way that allows for a multiplicity of experiences, particularly criminalized experiences / lives (ahem…), all power to you. I just wonder why any theory needs to be universalized in order to be useful. Seems many successful social movements / cooperatives / poor and criminalized peoples have been “picking what works” at a certain time and given a certain set of circumstances, in what is sometimes a spirally path towards greater freedoms, and then discarding what doesn’t work any more, and then picking it up again if it’s useful again. I personally don’t feel like I owe any theory my allegiance. I just want my existence.
/derail. Genuinely curious, tho.
[...] the article here: Marriage, Singledom, Social Evolution, and that Kate Bolick piece in … google_ad_client = "pub- "; google_ad_channel =""; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; [...]
[...] Bolick at The Atlantic: All the single ladies. A great response from Clarisse Thorn at Feministe: Marriage, Singledom, Social Evolution, and that Kate Bolick piece in “The Atlantic”. And another response from Amanda Marcotte, writing at Slate: “Marriage Market” [...]
Two big reasons:
1) I think that marginal sexual subcultures have a lot of important lessons to offer the mainstream, in part due to our interesting “outsider perspectives”.
2) I think one of the best ways to destigmatize consensual but marginal sexualities is to get the mainstream to recognize how much they have in common with us.
Related posts I’ve written:
* There Is No “Should” and the Sex-Positive “Agenda”
* The Annotated Safeword (with Thomas MacAulay Millar)
* (sex worker relevant, specifically) Whore Stigma Makes No Sense
Clarisse you stated “As with Hannah Rosin’s “The End of Men,” this strikes me as an article that superficially details victory for women while the context in which it emerges reminds us of how far we still have to go.
” You also quotedAmanda Marcotte “What’s interesting about these non-stop media musings about how women are getting to be “too good” for men—again, disproven by the research!—is that one specific area where women probably are getting pickier about who they date is getting overlooked. Call it the “feminism gap,” if you will; as women gain more economic power and self-esteem, their willingness to put up with a bunch of crap from men is declining rapidly.”
As a man in his early 30′s, I think the above comments could be applied to men as well. As with women today who are choosing to stay single and happy as opposed to being unhappy in a marriage, young men to are opting out of marriage. Most of my friends who are all reasonably happy and comparatively successful in their careers are choosing to stay single. Men in their 20′s and 30′s have seen the horror of divorce and bad relationships the last few years.
One thing I liked about Bollick’s article is she implied that women do not need a man today. Inasmuch as women have caught up to men in salaries and are exceeding men in education, women have options today to remain single. Women can now have babies via artificial insemination and do not need to get married.
Similarly, men today are discovering they do not need a woman to take care of them or nurture them. Many mens magazines have articles on cooking, clothing, and ways to improve self esteem. The whole metrosexual movement exemplifies this. Clearly, men and women do not need each other anymore.The growth of the sex positive pornography movement, allows men to obtain sexual pleasure without needing a women.’
I believe the decline of men as Rosin and Bollick imply, could be viewed as a good thing. If men and women are choosing to opt out of marriages( for example, the “marriage strike” movement amongst men) people will learn how to nurture themselves, be independent and learn to not need another person to make them happy. It affords women to be pickier since many have had bad or abusive experiences with men. Likewise, men have seen other men suffer financial and emotional devastation as a result of a divorce. This is why men and women are saying “no” to each other.
I think the number of people choosing not to marry will increase in the next decade. Some people call this poor economy today the “mancession”. Since it is wise to avoid marriage if one’s economic situation is poor, men are facing the reality that they will remain single. Statistics have shown that men make up less than half of college enrollments and boys are lagging behind girls academically. What this means is more and more Professional women will also choose to remain single.
Perhaps, as you stated Clarisse some type of communal intentional communities may be a viable option for some. However, there are some problems with that model. My Uncle who is 75, and married 50 years, told me that he thinks it is tragedy and crisis today that the new generation of men are not getting married as much. He believe’s as Hanna Rosin and Kay Hymowitz does that men should “man up” and get married. In the last decade, many women such as Kate Bolick have decided to postpone or not get married. More recently, men are doing the same thing. Clearly, this this new decade is the beginning of “The end of men”.
Uh, the ageism is unwarranted here. I’m 38, and Gloria Steinem is well before my time. You should know your history a little than that. The sex positive feminist movement began in the 1980′s, when I was a child, and I was exposed to it rather than Steinem, who I’ve only ever read brief quotes from.
The quote about Hannah Rosin’s “The End Of Men” was part of the snip from analysis at L’Hote — you can tell because it’s italicized. I didn’t say that, so please don’t attribute it to me.
As for ageism, I thought I was just acknowledging that she was older than me and had different influences? I don’t see anyplace where I said that she had different influences because she was older than me. I mean I guess strictly speaking I didn’t have to point out Bolick’s age, but it does seem relevant in the context of an article about marriage, especially given the excellent point that I snipped at the end about the “window of opportunity” problem.
Actually, my question is when has Steinem been negative about sex? She was thrilled about the slutwalks, most recently, and has spoken about how separating sexual pleasure from reproduction is essential for women’s freedom.
FFS! I didn’t mean to imply that Steinem was sex-negative, just that she’s very different from the feminist viewpoints I’ve been exposed to.
And now I’m going to take my trashily Halloween costumed self to a party.
I can’t believe this wasn’t titled Never Mind the Bollick, Here’s the Sex-Positives.
In the hands of a more conservative writer, in another time, this definitely would have veered off into hand-wringing territory. At certain points in the article, it was building up to that. I even thought at one point Bollick would pour out how devastated she was and how no one should ever make the same mistakes she did, yada yada. Mercifully, it didn’t. Refreshingly there’s an acceptance that things are changing and that they’ll never really go back to the way they were– as she writes in the beginning, the so-called traditional nuclear family was a ‘flash in the pan’.
Bolick was lucky to have a feminist mother who encouraged her not to settle and to support herself. Not all of us are so lucky…. some of us have been raised by families and cultures where a woman’s worth depends on her marital status. And that the idea of woman living an independent life in unthinkable.
While there were many aspects of Bolick’s article that were a bit too “feminazi” for me, her overall message that marriage is not longer about life-or-death was reassuring.
So, I’ve been thinking more about this, specifically with respect to the age difference between Bolick and Clarisse. I can’t speak to universals, of course, but I can say that the idea of setting up a committed household with unmarried friends seemed a lot more feasible when I was 27 than it does now that I’m 35, especially because I want to have kids, or, at this point in my life, given my age, a kid. For one thing, all the friends my age are married and are either producing nuclear families or don’t want kids. I am not making this up. I am the only single woman in her mid-thirties that I know. And aside from whether or not my friends want a family structure other than the nuclear, my loving them and having faith in the idea of living with or raising kids with them does not mean that I feel the same way about their partners. I mean, for the most part, their partners are perfectly nice people with whom I can easily pass a pleasant evening, but that’s not quite the same thing. There’s also the fact that I know myself a bit better now than I did then, and one of the things I know is that I hate living with people. Really, really hate it. If past experience is any guide, I will adore my future child so much that living with it will be a pleasure, at least until it becomes a snotty teenager, and reliable friends and family do assure me that living with a partner of one’s own choice, whom one loves and wants to make a life with, is different from living with family or roommates…but the idea of living with other people, more than one especially…will not work for me.
So while I think the age difference Clarisse notes is relevant, I don’t think it’s relevant for the reasons she mentions, i.e. different outlooks on feminism. For one thing, I’m not convinced that feminism changed so radically in twelve years as to have that effect. But mainly, in my experience, which I hasten to emphasize is not going to be everybody’s depending on how one acquires one’s friends etc., possibilities and options for family structure seem significantly narrower at 35, and I bet even narrower at 39, than they do at 27.
Again, my intent was not to imply that Bolick’s perspective on feminism is different because of her age. I think her age played a different role.
EG, I have often wondered what will happen if I end up (a) wanting to have kids with a guy who doesn’t get along in cooperative spaces, or (b) transitioning into spaces where cooperatives are seen as less normal and awesome by the time I want to get married/have kids. It’s a conundrum. I have a “leg up” in a certain way, inasmuch as I already spend lots of time in cooperative spaces and meet lots of guys there. But attraction can’t be fully controlled no matter how hard we try, and we don’t get to build mates to meet our preferences.
Interesting takes, I’m a little late to the discussion but it’s one that never will go away. So – I teach a CE class in Writing Creatively and have students from age 18 to 70 and during discussion, the subject of perspective came up which is laced throughout this discussion. Everyone agrees that the past has influence on the present, but many don’t know how much the present influences the past. The point is – a “well-adjusted” learner keeps learning through out the lifespan & so age has relevance to “what happens- happened.” Bolick’s perspective is rare b/c of who she is, and is worth paying attention to. For my take on The man/woman/ happiness/freedom thing you can read more here.