Booty calling
I had heard the term “booty call” before but wasn’t quite sure what it was. Nor had I spent a particle of time finding out. But now I know, at least according to this article’s definition:
They’re casual, brief, sexual relationships arranged through text or call, often between friends or former partners. While the timeless one-night-stand is a chance occurrence hatched with an acquaintance, the booty call involves a bit more forethought and emotion.
How romantic.
It’s a trade-off:
Fundamentally, the booty call is a compromise, [researcher and psychologist] Jonason says.
“For men who engage in this type of relationship, a booty call offers sexual access at a low, although not minimal, cost. For women, a booty call relationship offers more affection than a one-night stand.”
“More affection than a one-night stand”—now, there’s a consummation devoutly to be wished. Forgive me if I don’t think this represents an advance for women or men in the long run, much less for society.
People have always had one-night stands, and they probably always will. But I think I’m on firm ground in saying that they were far less common in my youth, and the booty call was something most (not all) woman would have shunned. And that wasn’t because we didn’t like sex, either. It was because the sort of market described here had not yet gone into effect:
As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships”¦commences only when women decide it does. And yet despite the fact that women are holding the sexual purse strings, they aren’t asking for much in return these days””the market “price” of sex is currently very low. There are several likely reasons for this. One is the spread of pornography: Since high-speed digital porn gives men additional sexual options””more supply for his elevated demand””it takes some measure of price control away from women. The Pill lowered the cost as well. There are also, quite simply, fewer social constraints on sexual relationships than there once were. As a result, the sexual decisions of young women look more like those of men than they once did, at least when women are in their twenties. The price of sex is low, in other words, in part because its costs to women are lower than they used to be.
But just as critical is the fact that a significant number of young men are faring rather badly in life, and are thus skewing the dating pool. It’s not that the overall gender ratio in this country is out of whack; it’s that there’s a growing imbalance between the number of successful young women and successful young men. As a result, in many of the places where young people typically meet””on college campuses, in religious congregations, in cities that draw large numbers of twentysomethings””women outnumber men by significant margins.
The booty call is described by Jonason as a compromise. But it seems to me to be a compromise that skews more towards the adolescent male ideal of a sexual encounter than the female one. But if I were to do a poll of present-day young women, I wonder whether they’d agree with what I just wrote. It’s my impression that many young women today believe it is part of their liberation to accept and even desire sex without strings, and to consider it a badge of modernity and emancipation. But they have been raised in a society that imparts that notion to them, and have probably been greatly influenced by it. Female sexuality hasn’t changed, but female attitudes towards it have.
Men are hardly sitting pretty, either. Just take a look at all those discussion boards full of disgruntled and/or rageful men who feel (no doubt some of them with great reason) that they’ve been used by the women in their lives, either financially or sexually or both.
If you get Amazon Prime Instant Video there’s an entertaining new series called “Mozart in the Jungle”. The heroine is a 26 year old oboe player trying to make it as a symphony musician in NYC. Late one night as she’s going out to visit a guy her roommate asks if it’s a booty call. First time I’d ever heard the phrase. But then, I’ve been married a long time…
Generally, if people are giving something away, it’s not worth much.
Heard the phrase long ago.
Ignored it as I do most of popular culture.
I recently saw a movie made a few years ago, Bridesmaids, that introduced me to another charming term for the same sort of thing — a f**k buddy. But it wasn’t held up as an ideal, or even a good thing. Instead, the main character falls in love with a traditional, faithful kind of guy, a cop even.
Can’t say I’d recommend the movie to many, though, because it’s got way too much of the vulgar and gross stuff so popular in movies these days. But it was refreshing to see the booty call/f.b. culture presented in a critical way.
However unlikely it seems, ever the twain shall meet.
Matthew M:
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Several ways, actually.
Then, of course, there is the delightful term, “friends with benefits.”
It is true that sexual “liberation”–sold and justified by the totally fraudulent but enormously influential pseudo-science of Masters & Johnson and Margaret Meade–coupled with the success of the parallel Gramscian attack against and the decline in strict religion-based moral codes, along with widely available and effective contraception and abortion–all made much more powerful by the dope and sex soaked general “just do it” atmosphere of the 1960s, was a devastating shotgun blast that essentially tore a large hole in the old traditional sexual dynamic, causing a large portion of our traditional value structure, and its attendant family structure and dynamic to be shredded along with it.
This, too, part of the cultural, social, and moral subversion, undermining, and replacement of the fundamental supports for our traditional culture and mores that have been the fundamental task of Gramsci’s decades long “Long March Through the Culture/Society/Institutions.”
Neo. The term has been around for a long time. It used to actually require that a call be placed! Now I understand you simply text. Use of the word booty was popular among my black high school friends (I graduated in 1980), but I don’t recall hearing “booty call” until maybe a decade later. I question the theory that porno lowers the demand for real sex. Can you compare the two? I doubt that porno is a rampant as they say. I think it is part of an agenda to claim so – it fits the war against women narrative somewhat. Or at least the objectivization of women, but I think this can be blamed as much on women as men.
So very glad I’m married and have missed these current dating trends.
I’m thinking it’s no coincidence that women have recently expanded their definition of sexual assault and out-of-bounds male behavior to include things like morning after regret, the unwelcome male gaze, and “slut-shaming.” So women still expect expressions of respect and recognition of their control within the relationship (as was previously demonstrated through chivalry), it’s just been twisted into bizarre expectations in an age of nearly no-strings sex.
Lizzy: You put it so well. I’ve had the same thought about the “rape culture” campus craziness. It seems clear that it’s a panicky reaction to the vulnerability of women after the breakdown of traditional social constraints on sexuality.
Neo,
It’s hook up culture.
I suggest this explanation by Hanna Rosin:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/boys-on-the-side/309062/1/
I also suggest this related article based on UPenn students:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/fashion/sex-on-campus-she-can-play-that-game-too.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0
It also emphasizes that young women are the drivers.
Neo:
From what I gather, the reality of hook up culture is falling short of the ‘adolescent male ideal’ for most young men. Apparently, with the relationship component taken out, a larger percentage of young women are choosing to have sex with a smaller percentage of men. So greater promiscuity by young women has counterintuitively reduced sexual access for many young men who in the past relied on a wider distribution of young women in committed relationships.
Reading comments on Dr. Helen’s blog and other blogs that deal with modern relationships always induces a deep sadness in me. The young people of today may be sexually liberated but they have lost the ability to form lasting, loving relationships with members of the opposite sex.
My dating/mating years were from 1945 to 1956.
The young women I dated were always in control. No meant NO! The price of a sexual relationship was normally marriage. It resulted in both men and women getting to know one another beyond their physical attractions. There was a belief that our destiny was to have a marriage and family. It was a serious pursuit. No young man I knew wanted to marry a woman who was easy when it came to sex. In fact, becoming intimate quickly was almost guaranteed to lower the man’s esteem for a young woman.
Unfortunately, that horse has left the barn. We are now a society where families are not the desired ideal. Where young men are bitter that they are held in such low esteem. Where the fear of the financial consequences of divorce drive men away from the idea of marriage. Where women are told they can be successful in a career and successful as mothers – that they can have it all. It’s the new ideal. The fact is that only a very few can have it all. Those who fall short feel like failures.
I wish I had some idea about how things could be changed back to a more family oriented society. I don’t. We are in uncharted territory. And it makes me very sad.
JJ: “Where women are told they can be successful in a career and successful as mothers — that they can have it all. It’s the new ideal. The fact is that only a very few can have it all. Those who fall short feel like failures.”
I feel most sorry for the women who want to be moms and intend to be moms, but opt to follow the modern success plan of career first, children second. And why wouldn’t they? They’ve invested their whole young lives to school and more school, resume-building activities, networking, pre/professional programs that place them all-in on the career track. They’ve excelled at it. The years go by on their career pursuits. It’s exciting, absorbing, rewarding, well paid. But suddenly they’re in their 30s.
Nature is forgiving for some but not all of them.
J.J.:
It makes me very sad, too. It does not seem like an improvement or an advance to me at all.
But it seems to me to be a compromise that skews more towards the adolescent male ideal of a sexual encounter than the female one
And here I thought Nancy Friday and Erica Jong (among others) had conclusively disproved this.
Perhaps I mingle with exceptionally traditionally-minded people (although few of them would accept this characterization), I may be sheltered without registering it and my experience as far removed from the mainstream as it gets, but within that admittedly limited experience, the situation truly is much less bleak than usually presented.
I am 24 years old, presumably I would be right in the middle of all of that degenerate debauchery allegedly gone large-scale in the decadent West, European and American alike. Yet, what I actually observe as NORMAL (statistically prevalent as to the actual behavior and widely regarded as the proper state of affairs) is that people are getting married as they always have, sometimes at even earlier ages than our parents’ generation; that they tend to form stable committed relationships before becoming intimate and that the number of such relationships, before they land on the one culminating in marriage, is rather small; that there are still young women (presumably men too) determined to remain chaste until marriage; that most people want a family; that libertines of both sexes are tacitly excluded from polite society, as they have always been; that sexual matters, even by implication or allusion, are normally not a topic of conversation even in female-only company, a fortiori in mixed company where propriety is more strongly upheld, as it has always been.
I am TOLD of the hookup culture, rampant pornography use, marriage crisis, “friends with benefits”, mistrust and contempt between the sexes etc. I READ about these things online (and interestingly, mostly written by people who are not in the relevant age group and/or who have a professional interest in it, such as therapists).
But what I actually OBSERVE, in my circle of friends, family, and general acquaintances does not confirm the gloom and doom. One can never know what truly goes on behind other people’s closed doors, but giving up the unlikely hypothesis that most people I know lead double lives and are very skilled at keeping me entirely ignorant of it, I can only conclude that either I have consistently stumbled upon the rare oases of normalcy in a world gone crazy, OR the situation must not be as apocalyptic as usually presented.
The degeneration that I do notice can hardly be peculiar to our generation – I have been suspecting for a while that what we are witnessing is primarily greater public exposure of what has always been around in some form, but more hidden, so now it gives an *impression* of a novelty or of a greater prevalence than it actually occupies. I am not sure I would consider it “normalized” (if anything, I notice a push for re-marginalization). Most people I know are not, and will not associate with, libertines. I do not know anyone who would condone “friends with benefits”, drunken hookups or other such behaviors.
Again, call me exceptionally lucky, overly sheltered or seriously deluded and naive. For what I know I may be any or all of these things. And there certainly are days when it seems to me that the world is going to Hell. But, when I pause to analyze my own little microcosm, that same world seems much better than usually credited.
“As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships…commences only when women decide it does.”
To have a rational discussion we need to state the premise correctly. This statement is accurate but incomplete. Lets restated this sentence. In a consensual relationship sex commences only when women AND MEN decide it does. Men can be just as selective about sex as women.
Men may not acknowledge their need for emotional bonds since they risk societal scorn for displaying their vulnerability but they do need it. That is a major reason why “there’s a growing imbalance between the number of successful young women and successful young men.”
Today’s matriarchy is very treacherous for a young man since the women hold all the power. In some ways a modern male who becomes involved with a woman is taking the same risks that a male black widow spider takes who risks everything and may end up as her meal. There are a lot of nasty women out there and it is much safer for a male to have a one night stand and not get too emotionally involved than to risk everything in a one sided relationship.
Traditional society was successful because it set up boundaries in order to protect the interests of both women and men. Modern society has torn down those boundaries and everyone loses.
Anna–These are all battles in the general “Culture War,” fought to determine what our “reality,” what our culture is and should be.
It may well be that what we are all seeing in the MSM, in the Entertainment Industry, on our TVs, in our plays and books and in many online discussions and postings is a deliberately manufactured series of “Potemkin villages,” all designed to convince us that today’s reality is of a particular character and shape when, as you point out, from your vantage point it isn’t i.e. we are being “nudged” into accepting an alternative reality that doesn’t really exist; all this propaganda designed to make us accept and to “accommodate” to that “reality,” and to adjust our expectations and behaviors accordingly.
This is similar to the false notion that is universally pushed by the Left, the “gay community” and the usual suspects named above that “gay” people are everywhere, and that there is a large percentage—the usual claim is that around 5% to even 10% is the “normal” percentage of our population that is just “gay”–when in fact recent serious studies attempting to accurately measure that percentage put that percentage at around 1.3 to 1.7%, not solidly within but out on the thinly populated end of the Bell curve.
Again, if we accept the far higher percentage, we accommodate to and knuckle under to their deliberately created false reality and to the demands of the “Gay community,” giving them the political and cultural power, the legitimacy that they do no actually have.
Similarly, there is today’s current propaganda about the “police’s violent war against innocent young black men” and a whole host of other manufactured and illusory memes coming from the Left in our society.
Anna, thank you for providing an alternative look at today’s young people. I sincerely hope your experience is the majority one. Your comment is like a breath of fresh air to me. May you live long and prosper.
A debased currency along with a debased population. Human resources may be renewable, which is why it isn’t worth much to necromancers.
i.e. we are being “nudged” into accepting an alternative reality that doesn’t really exist; all this propaganda designed to make us accept and to “accommodate” to that “reality,” and to adjust our expectations and behaviors accordingly.
Aka, gaslighting or mind control or psychotherapy based regressive hypnosis.
Eric, it’s ironic that the Left’s sexual congress based economy produces the same kind of upper echelon power aggregation as Islamic Jihad’s polygamy. Coincidence or feature?
Islam only has their large army of fanatics because of the promise of sexual rewards in Heaven, after all. Perhaps the Left’s civilian security force is secretly admiring of that resource.
Anna:
That’s good to hear. I’ve heard something similar from certain other young people I know. Perhaps there are two circles, one more or less as you describe and the other more or less as the articles describe, and the two circles don’t intersect socially all that much.
The experts quoted have it bass-ackwards. The market price of sex hasn’t gone down. It’s skyrocketed. At least for men. There has been almost a complete inversion. Women can have all the consequence free (on the surface, the emotional damage is constantly downplayed) sex they want. Men can’t. Very few men prefer porn over live sex. Porn, however, is very low risk, especially compared to live sex with a feminist. The ONLY area where the risk is equal is STDs. Risk of pregnancy? She can get an abortion, or not. He’s stuck with her choice. Morning after regrets? He can be painted as a rapist, whereas if HE has regrets the next morning? “Shoulda kept it in his pants.” IF she gets a reluctant man drunk and has sex with him, he’s on the hook for whatever happens. Reverse it and he’s guilty of date rape, or worse.
The market cost to HER is low, to HIM, it’s very high.
We’re in a period of rapid technological change. Societal norms change because they can. The sexual revolution was based on a smug and condescending view that men were forcing them into defined roles. I have yet to hear women ask how it is that society changed so quickly. Maybe men were not against them after all. Maybe birth control and the reality that the economy increasingly supported service jobs that do not require manual labor were the underlying reasons that women did not want to continue with ‘traditional’ roles. And was the wife staying at home and raising a family and men going to work in the city really ‘traditional’ when just a few decades earlier the vast majority of people lived and worked on farms?
Gotta disagree with the “researcher”, and this is not even in my wheelhouse.
Progressives and academic elites have worked diligently at the idea of sexual neutrality.
In doing so, there is no real difference in the “costs” nor the “risks” nor the “price”, whatever one wants to call it this week.
In the state of Nebraska educators want to jettison labels; “boy” and “girl”? Passe. It implies distinctions. What do they propose instead?
“Purple Penguins”:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/purple-penguins-and-the-radical-gender-agenda/
Here in Colorado, similar assaults on gender have been manifested in eliminating boys and girls bathrooms. Everyone is welcome everywhere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UdwG7_g_cA
Sold as appeasement to transgender equality it also appeals to the feminist agenda wanting young women to further progress; grasp “empowerment” at least equal to their male counterparts in sexual arena.
Neo says:
“It’s my impression that many young women today believe it is part of their liberation to accept and even desire sex without strings, and to consider it a badge of modernity and emancipation.”
Of this, I agree completely.
A symptom is that Americans are not making new Americans. From
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/28/us-birthrate-plummets-to-record-low/?page=all
“We’re in a period of rapid technological change. Societal norms change because they can. ”
I don’t think the impact of technology on women can be overstated as an explanation of where we are today. Technology impacted maternal and reproductive health, the home maker was freed up from hours of drudgery by appliances, the skill sets that came to be required in the work place gave women an advantage , the automobile and communications opened up a world of possibilities.
BIOLOGICAL: maternal mortality reduced and the emergence of effective feminine hygiene products
BIRTH: infant mortality reduced and the increased survival of children into adulthood(vaccines and safer toys, car seats)/ fertility control
MASS PRODUCTION & COMMUNICATION: Consumerism, the commodification of everything/ household appliances/ prepared foods
TRANSPORTATION: the freedom generated by automobiles; automatic transmissions, power steering and brakes/ where as, in the past, millions of people lived fairly isolated lives on farms
EMPLOYMENT: Significant changes in skillsets required for employment, the old skillsets that contained a physical or dangerous element or skills based on hard won knowledge and years of experience have not been taken over by women; they have disappeared and been replaced by service and clerical employment; jobs that give women’s skill sets an advantage