BRIMFUL OF ASHES

'Get Mine, Get Yours': Sexual swagger and slang do not mask a generation's loneliness. (Janice Shaw Crouse, 05/07/2003, Christianity Today)

Watch MTV and odds are you will see Christina Aguilera's new Grammy-nominated video, "Dirrty." Aguilera says her new album, Stripped, represents the "real her," stripped of all pretense. (Not to mention her clothes.)

With a studied air of blase indifference, Aguilera says she wrote Stripped after having found, and lost, her first love. In one song, "Get Mine, Get Yours," she sings: "We have a physical thing. We'll make love, but don't fall in love." This is the siren song for today's new "hookup" culture. Dating and romance for many today has been replaced by casual, serial hookups. According to one federally funded study, one-third of 11th graders who had engaged in sexual intercourse said their sexual partner was merely "a friend."

In the midst of this ostensibly cavalier coupling is a strange outbreak of "reality" television shows that are obsessed with, well, courtship and marriage. Commentators were stymied by the popularity of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Joe Millionaire. Feminists claimed the programs degraded women. The problem is that they don't remember the story of Cinderella?these programs, however crass, are all about fairy tales and the haunting echoes of romance.

And they haven't listened carefully to what participants said. Anticipating her "prize"?a single date, rather than a group date, with the bachelor?one woman said, "This is a magical moment." Another dreamily sighed, "I see the house, the white picket fence."

Kim Cattrall and other single women today are not finding an adequate substitute for a diamond and a wedding date?not from supposedly forever-loyal girlfriends or from hip, witty, gay male pals with exquisite taste in shoes. Tellingly, many of those women are searching for a soul mate with the intensity of the newly converted. The Washington Post recently reported that the latest "meet" market for upwardly mobile singles is the personal ad section of Harvard University's alumni magazine. Some women are paying up to $125 per hour for a professional writer to craft their personal description, hoping to catch the attention of Mr. Right.

Today's Cinderella, lured by "get mine, get yours" slogans, keeps waking up beside yet another fake prince, only to find she hasn't become a princess. She wonders about her "freedom" and what it is exactly that she gained, and at what cost. She feels merely dirty, with a distinct taste of ashes in her mouth, her dreams a swirl of soot under her feet.

Here's how Tom Wolfe described the phenomenon in Hooking Up:

Meanwhile, sexual stimuli bombarded the young so incessantly and intensely they were inflamed with a randy itch long before reaching puberty. At puberty the dams, if any were left, burst. In the nineteenth century, entire shelves used to be filled with novels whose stories turned on the need for women, such as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, to remain chaste or to maintain a facade of chastity. In the year 2000, a Tolstoy or a Flaubert wouldn't have stood a chance in the United States. From age thirteen, American girls were under pressure to maintain a facade of sexual experience and sophistication. Among girls, "virgin" was a term of contempt. The old term "dating" -- referring to a practice in which a boy asked a girl out for the evening and took her to the movies or dinner -- was now deader than "proletariat" or "pornography" or "perversion."In junior high school, high school, and college, girls headed out in packs in the evening, and boys headed out in packs, hoping to meet each other fortuitously. If they met and some girl liked the looks of some boy, she would give him the nod, or he would give her the nod, and the two of them would retire to a halfway-private room and "hook up."

What's remarkable about this is that we've managed to create a culture that combines overweening self-centeredness with a complete lack of self-respect. People are obsessed with, but despise, themselves. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2003 9:21 AM