Basically, parents are refusing to let their kids do anything without a safety net. It's driven mainly by the parents' desire to be seen
by others as a Good Parent. The twisted part of it is because what's seen as playing without a net is different between men and women.
For men, they will have had it drilled into them from an early age not that Rape Is Bad as such, but rather that having sex Before You Get Your College Degree is dangerous because you could Knock Up A Girl And Wind Up Having To Support Her. Most middle- to upper-middle- class men are more or less instructed to go to university after school; there isn't an actual choice for men when you get to it. Total Dad's car after a drink and you might get grounded, threaten to not go to university and you'd better know where Dad's shotgun is kept. They are trained to believe that success is being a College Student, and therefore are browbeaten into not having sex. "Don't settle down, wait until college is over."
For women, it's the opposite. "Don't have sex early, you can wait until college is over. You don't want to Waste Your Potential." So women go on the Pill and they don't have to settle, so they never do.
All of this also contributes to men and women not wanting to do something that imperils their brand: College Student. Single Girl. Everyone else is just ... supporting cast. That's narcissism. Narcissism means you will do almost anything to protect the image of yourself that you want people to accept. And narcissism brings with it one lethal fruit: an inability to emotionally connect. How can you connect with someone who's just not as fully realised a character as you are?
The Last Psychiatrist was writing about this literally ten years ago (and about how The Atlantic always, always gets it wrong on issues that matter, just like Time Magazine does, albeit The Atlantic never gets quite as hilarious bow-bow moments as Time does publishing its Trump "meltdown" covers.).
The Atlantic article, for example. Ask yourself: what does the writer want to be true?
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Over the past 20 years, the way sex researchers think about desire and arousal has broadened from an initially narrow focus on stimulus to one that sees inhibition as equally, if not more, important. (The term inhibition, for these purposes, means anything that interferes with or prevents arousal, ranging from poor self-image to distractedness.) In her book Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski, who trained at the Kinsey Institute, compares the brain’s excitement system to the gas pedal in a car, and its inhibition system to the brakes. The first turns you on; the second turns you off. For many people, research suggests, the brakes are more sensitive than the accelerator.
If this last assertion were anything near remotely true the human race would have died out thousands of years ago. Arousal and the reproductive impulse does not work that way, period. This is aimed at trying to say it's not your fault that you suck at relationships or having a civil conversation with someone, it's just you're actually just more inhibited than anyone else.
Again, what does the author want to be true?
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When, over the course of my reporting, people in their 20s shared with me their hopes and fears and inhibitions, I sometimes felt pangs of recognition. Just as often, though, I was taken aback by what seemed like heartbreaking changes in the way many people were relating—or not relating—to one another. I am not so very much older than the people I talked with for this story, and yet I frequently had the sense of being from a different time.
Sex seems more fraught now. This problem has no single source; the world has changed in so many ways, so quickly. In time, maybe, we will rethink some things: The abysmal state of sex education, which was once a joke but is now, in the age of porn, a disgrace. The dysfunctional relationships so many of us have with our phones and social media, to the detriment of our relationships with humans. Efforts to “protect” teenagers from most everything, including romance, leaving them ill-equipped for both the miseries and the joys of adulthood.
None of this hits the mark, though it's the last thing that comes closest. It's not protecting teenagers, it's because you won't let them jump without a safety net. When you don't let someone risk rejection, risk taking a punch in the schoolyard, when you drill into them that their identity is to be a college student, a cardboard cutout of a person, you turn them into a narcissist. Not a violent one, just the kind that inhabits the entire West in mass numbers.
You raise a normal kid by showing him lots of mirrors. This is what you look like. You are shorter than Dad, but taller than your sister. You are better than Joe at maths, but not better than him at track and field. You came all over MaryJo's leg when she first ran her hand down your chest, but after about the third week of fucking her daily you had her screaming like a banshee at the 5 minute mark. But you still don't get as much pussy as Uncle Bob, and likely never will.
Or as Clint Eastwood once put it in one of his movies: A man's got to know his limitations.
If you don't do this, you risk, like Narcissus, that when your child sees a mirror he will be so enamoured of what he sees in it that he will waste his entire life sitting and fantasising the boundless possibilities and never living with the realities.
Take a closer look at the article. You'll see the same thread, over and over, never spoken unsaid, always disguised as just a lack of social skills, or sex incompetence, or porn functioning as the instruction manual.
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These shifts coincide with another major change: parents’ increased anxiety about their children’s educational and economic prospects. Among the affluent and educated, especially, this anxiety has led to big changes in what’s expected of teens. “It’s hard to work in sex when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion,” said a man who was a couple of years out of college, thinking back on his high-school years. He added: “There’s immense pressure” from parents and other authority figures “to focus on the self, at the expense of relationships”—pressure, quite a few 20-somethings told me, that extends right on through college.
These are all
branding exercises. No sane parent puts their kids through all these extracurricular activities because they believe the kid is a polymath, they do it
to put on a kid's college resume. To brand them.
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Nonetheless, she believes that many students have absorbed the idea that love is secondary to academic and professional success—or, at any rate, is best delayed until those other things have been secured. “Over and over,” she has written, “my undergraduates tell me they try hard not to fall in love during college, imagining that would mess up their plans.”
What fucking "plans?" Their parents' plans, in short. Most very successful people took opportunities and then leapfrogged a career, making the shit up as they went. These ones are just obeying the brands they have been given by their parents.
I swear to God I did not see this quote before writing the above paragraph:
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The conversation proceeded to why soup-bringing relationships weren’t more common. “You’re supposed to have so much before you can get into a relationship,” one woman offered. Another said that when she was in high school, her parents, who are both professionals with advanced degrees, had discouraged relationships on the grounds that they might diminish her focus. Even today, in graduate school, she was finding the attitude hard to shake. “Now I need to finish school, I need to get a practice going, I need to do this and this, and then I’ll think about love. But by 30, you’re like, What is love? What’s it like to be in love?”
Bullshit they're going to diminish your focus, they're going to interfere with your parents' brand as Parents Of Successful College Kids!
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Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”
The logical question is: awkward for
who? "Boorish" is something that
other people use to
describe you. And you will never, ever want to imperil your own brand.
Understand: all those iPhones, the Tinder apps? They're not mirrors. They're shields. They are one-way glass: I can see you, but you can never see me. If you did, you might fuck with my entire identity, you might blow your lines as an extra in my personal movie.
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As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward.
Of course they don't like the "Is he into me?" moment. That's the only point where rejection has to be confronted head-on, where you have to stop fantasising about the possibilities and confront the reality that the guy doesn't want to fuck you. Tinder apps allow you to avoid that moment. Oh sure, you might wilt a little when you get no matches, but it's not the same as being one on one with a person where that uncertainty is present and reality hangs heavy in the wings ready to smash you with the fact that other people have an existence as real as yours.
Because that's what intimate, relationship sex is about. It is about two bodies conceding for each other, guards down, no barriers, complete trust. Narcissists can never trust. It risks throwing a stone into the pool, or cracking the mirror.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm