Вычитала. Страница 19
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@forgetenotreads
Канал «Вычитала» опирается на вычитанное (в книгах и статьях) — но этим не ограничивается. Ключевые слова: литература, уважение к разнообразию мира, самоисследование, Петербург, самоирония.
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Занятная история о том, как digital natives решают проблему постоянной подключенности, когда родители «пасут» их через телефоны, переживая, всё ли у них в порядке. -
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«Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex» by Angela Chen:
“No means no” and “yes means yes” are false binaries. These popular models of consent offer only two options. An overhaul to thinking about consent will require many changes in perspective, beginning with the necessity of thinking instead about different levels of willingness.
One useful tool is a framework created by sex researcher Emily Nagoski, author of «Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life», and amended by aces.
Nagoski suggests using the categories of enthusiastic, willing, unwilling, and coerced consent, although the last two are consent mostly in the extremely literal sense that someone did not yell out “no.”
ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT:
When I want you
When I don’t fear the consequences of saying yes OR saying no
When saying no means missing out on something I want
WILLING CONSENT:
When I care about you though I don’t desire you (right now)
When I’m pretty sure saying yes will have an okay result and I think maybe that I’d regret saying no
When I believe that desire may begin after I say yes
UNWILLING CONSENT:
When I fear the consequences of saying no more than I fear the consequences of saying yes
When I feel not just an absence of desire but an absence of desire for desire
When I hope that by saying yes, you will stop bothering me, or think that if I say no you’ll only keep on trying to persuade me
COERCED CONSENT:
When you threaten me with harmful consequences if I say no
When I feel I’ll be hurt if I say yes, but I’ll be hurt more if I say no
When saying yes means experiencing something I actively dread
Nagoski’s model is better than “no means no,” which assumes that someone is saying yes unless otherwise stated. Unlike models that emphasize enthusiastic consent (“yes means yes”), it doesn’t imply that aces who can’t give enthusiastic consent are unable to consent at all, which would wrongly place us in the same category as children and animals. It expands the “yes means yes” slogan by pointing out all the possible varieties of yes.
Nagoski’s model has been popular in the ace community because it makes room for sex-indifferent or sex-favorable aces and takes into account the practical realities of aces in relationships with allos. The balance between willing and unwilling can be delicate, but distinguishing the two is imperative. “I’m not horny, but I’m glad to have sex to feel closer to my partner” and “I’m not horny, but I said yes so you’d stop pressuring me” both have elements of being consensual but unwanted. Neither is a perfect yes or a perfect no. Nagoski’s model marks them differently, making room for the exceedingly common experience of maintenance sex, or sex for the sake of a relationship.
#книги -
Вычитала
В книжке про асексуальность была затронута тема серой зоны насилия. Лена @budniL делала материал о ней на русском, а в книге пишут на английском — в том числе применительно к асексуальным персонам.
Анжела говорит, что фраз «нет значит нет» и «да значит да» недостаточно.
С одной стороны, понятно, нужно слушать, что говорит партнёр: если нет, то надо останавливаться. С другой стороны, даже «да» не всегда означает наличие энтузиазма. И после секса можно осознать, что «да» было не очень-то искренним. В чем партнёр не виноват, если спокойно спрашивал и внимательно слушал. Виноваты могут быть перекос власти, страх разочаровать себя и партнера, а также путаница с тем, что для кого секс значит (я привлекательна? Партнер доволен нашими отношениями?).
Анжела приводит более подробную линейку согласия, сформулированную Эмили Нагоски. -
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Поразмышляла в сентябре на Патреоне про сканерство — какие проекты у меня были пять лет назад и какие есть сейчас — и в сокращенном виде принесла в блог.
https://authenticityfirst.ru/personal-projects-2020-vs-2015/ -
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А это процитированный в книжке “A Prude’s Manifesto” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, слэм-стихотворение со слета Button Poetry.
Вот кусочек:
“here is a list of things I like more than sex
reading
lying flat on my back staring at the ceiling
peeling back the skin of a grapefruit
watching the old man who lives in my backyard smoke weed ’till he becomes his lawn chair
oatmeal
wet paint
strong coffee
cheap whiskey
riding my bike away from parties
how night swallows me like a dragon
the wet heat of one body alone
etc etc etc”
Посмотреть целиком: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nInAqWF0tt4 -
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В сентябре вышла новая книжка про асексуальность — «Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex» by Angela Chen. А я её уже прочитала и несу две новости.
Во-первых, она сама по себе классная.
Во-вторых, Анжела дает в конце список книг, которые можно почитать на эту тему дальше.
Мне кажется, это всё очень круто; книжек про асексуальность нужно больше 🎉
Вот список рекомендованного Анжелой чтения:
• Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality by Ela Przybylo
• Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks
• Asexuality and Sexual Normativity: An Anthology, edited by Mark Carrigan, Kristina Gupta, and Todd G. Morrison
• Big Pharma, Women, and the Labour of Love by Thea Cacchioni
• Boston Marriages: Romantic But Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians, edited by Esther D. Rothblum and Kathleen A. Brehony
• Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life by Benjamin Kahan
• Frigidity: An Intellectual History by Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
• The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality by Julie Sondra Decker (я пересказывала выдержки из неё два года назад)
• Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture by Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey
• Race and Sexuality, by Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Brandon Andrew Robinson, and Christina Khan
• Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays by Leonore Tiefer
• The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality by Rachel Hills
• Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires, edited by Tom Shakespeare, Dominic Davies, and Kath Gillespie-Sells
• Understanding Asexuality by Anthony F. Bogaert -
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#размышления
Иногда ко мне приходит настрой пересмотреть какой-нибудь фильм из прошлого.
Например, «Крепкий орешек», первую часть.
Или там «Назад в будущее».
Или «Клуб «Завтрак».
В моих воспоминаниях просмотр этих во многом милых и уж как минимум довольно знакомых фильмов — это приятная штука.
Иногда хочется погрузиться во что-то понятное, известное и безопасное.
Правда, по факту просмотр этих (и многих других) фильмов прошлого никакой приятности мне не приносит.
Вместо приятности я трачу время на неминуемый анализ того, почему тогда эти фильмы ощущались интересными, милыми и крутыми, и почему сейчас они выглядят как минимум уныло.
Вспомнить хотя бы «Реальную любовь», как плохо она постарела.
И становится очевидно, что смотрела эти фильмы тогда какая-то совсем другая персона. Вернуться в которую нет возможности.
И мир вокруг был другой, и ожидания мои были куда более простыми (и наивными). Хотелось верить во всё хорошее против всего плохого. Не хотелось видеть системных несправедливостей (и своих привилегий). Было проще ассоциировать себя с вымышленными героями.
Казалось, наконец, что стоит вырасти — и всё непременно исправится, станет приятным и понятным. Я смогу сделать что-то достойное, «найти себя», с кем-нибудь крепко подружиться и вообще. Вот же у людей получается.
Тот оптимизм пооблупился. Да и те фильмы я теперь вижу структурно: вот что работает, вот что говорит о культуре того десятилетия, вот почему он стал известным, вот что я прочитала на Кинопоиске.
Я смотрю на тот же фильм новыми глазами. И фильм, бедняга, совершенно не даёт мне прошлого ощущения уюта, интереса или безопасности.
Я надеялась на машину времени, а ее даже на полтора часа не бывает. -
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Why do we open our mouths?
Out of necessity. There’s such a deluge of cultural content, we cannot parse it on our own. In the 1980s, researchers began talking about the “information-load paradigm,” which refers to the saturation limit after which people can’t absorb more information. This was a new conceit in the eighties—a response to the maelstrom of material suddenly being produced. Today we can likewise talk about our “culture-load.” There are only so many songs, books, movies, memes we can take in and form opinions on before the culture-load buries us under a mountain of must-reads and essential videos.
Thus squashed, we encounter what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice. We thought that more options would produce more freedom, and thus more happiness (215 soda options = American Dream). But the reality of such splendorous choice is quite different. In fact, according to Schwartz, the flood of choices that a screen age citizen faces “produces paralysis rather than liberation.”
Consider, for example, the art and music and literature being shared online in the one minute it takes you to read this paragraph: 72 hours of YouTube video will be uploaded; 5.5 million Snapchat videos will be viewed; and 216,000 photos will go up on Instagram. Simply glance at the streaming content of a single minute, all of which you missed while you were focused on these sentences, and your gut tightens—you’ve already fallen grievously behind. You cast about for something—anything—to make sense of all these scraps of art and heritage and supposed beauty. But the Tower of Babel has become a City of Babel. We race desperately from door to door.
Mostly, I’ve been happy to let wayfinding systems like his guide me through Babel City. What book should I read? Easy: Amazon purchasing patterns have (for the moment) led to the promotion of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. And which songs would make the best soundtrack for my run? Nothing simpler: I type “running playlist” into the YouTube app and click one that half a million others found useful. But the more I think about the aggregating forces in my life, the more I wonder how they shape my ideas about what is worthwhile and what should be ignored. Where is my own taste? And just how easy is it for a crowd to change a person’s mind?
#книги -
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Nowhere is this creepier than the arena of taste. If we think that a computer program—so much more rational, so much better informed—believes one thing to be better than another, then the choices we make online about what books to read, what songs to listen to, what movies to watch become less independent and more manipulated. Suggestions on Netflix and iTunes and Amazon—all crowd-sourced and data-crunched—start to feel natural and neutral. If you believe a piece of technology can have a belief, then it’s only a tiny step before you start to believe its belief is more important than your own. We’ve all acquiesced at some point to the “you’d like this” suggestion of an algorithm.
Pine or teak? Polyester or silk? Carrie Underwood or Antonio Vivaldi? By such superficial choices do we formulate our ideas of each other—and of ourselves. Recently, moored on the sofa, Kenny and I came to the agreement that we could not abide any further episodes of Chopped. We started scanning iTunes for a movie and this happened: One of us would say, “What about the armadillo doc? You love armadillos.” Then the other would shoot the idea down by citing its aggregated rating. “Two stars? We need some standards.” I can’t call it a debate. It was merely navigation; it didn’t involve our opinions, our critique of the trailer, our knowledge of the director—it was just the repetition of a highly prescriptive rating system.
At the same time, we were picking through containers of Thai food from a restaurant that had been selected from the top of a Yelp list and we were loosely listening to a playlist sponsored by the curatorial geniuses behind the Mr. Clean products. Nothing we were consuming appeared to be directly related to our personal taste—rather, we were gumming some kind of sanctioned cultural porridge. The question was: who cooked it?
Was it my choice when we finally settled on Pitch Perfect 2? Was it the collective decision of some swarming crowd? Or, stranger yet, was the decision made by an algorithm’s own alien aesthetics?
When we allow sites like Rotten Tomatoes to decide which movies, dinners, and songs we consume, we go along with the myth that our decisions are being made by neutral and unbiased guides. Perhaps we think this is a cure for elitism—a flattening of the critical landscape. It’s rational, it’s the crowd, and so it’s undeniably what is best. We find ourselves nudged toward the quantifiable. Our aggregators of taste have allowed for this myth to grow so strong, in fact, that it becomes invisible: a myth of natural, inarguable taste, doled out in star ratings and unimpeachable bestseller rankings.
But we forget: taste is never natural. If we aren’t making aesthetic decisions for ourselves, then someone or something else is doing it for us. Bestseller lists have guided readers since the nineteenth century, and mass media has influenced everything from pet food selection to travel destinations, at least since the invention of newspapers. But a new and more pernicious level of taste management now prevails. The world leans across the table, holds a spoon an inch from your closed lips, and gives you a determined smile: You have to taste this. -
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Michael Harris, «Solitude: In Pursuit of A Singular Life in a Crowded World»:
John McCarthy, the American computer scientist who coined the term artificial intelligence, had the gall to insist that pieces of technology could hold opinions and beliefs. This was 1979, and he was one of the middle-aged wizards of the computer boom; at the time many exaggerated claims were bouncing down the halls of MIT and Stanford (McCarthy taught at both). In a paper, he wrote: “Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs.”
John Searle, the American philosopher, was less of an optimist and found the notion hard to swallow. One day he asked McCarthy to be precise: “What beliefs does your thermostat have?” And he was surprised by the ready answer: “My thermostat has three beliefs,” said McCarthy. “It’s too hot in here, it’s too cold in here, and it’s just right in here.”
Can a piece of technology have a preference for one thing or another? The distinction between human and computer intentions is growing hazy. That much was obvious when my friend showed off his new Nest thermostat, which was patched into Google’s cloud and had been tracking his whereabouts in order to optimize his house’s energy consumption. “Nest doesn’t like it when I come home early,” said my friend, tapping at the glowing black puck on his living room wall. “It really likes me to have a pattern. That way it can make better decisions.”
This tiny slip—it can make better decisions—is crucial, because if we begin by allowing a thermostat to have a belief, we start to allow more complex technologies to have more complex beliefs, and just as my friend feels swayed to regulate his patterns because a trumped-up thermostat has a certain preference, we can find ourselves swayed in all sorts of places where we once made more personal choices. -
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Поделюсь с утра отрывком Майкла Харриса про груз выбора — и про то, могут ли механизмы обладать убеждениями (а также как это отражается на нашей жизни) -
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#перечиталавбумаге
Первый пошёл.
«Однажды он сидел в этом самом кресле, а мы сидели рядом, на траве, и читали разные книги, да, доктор, вы же в курсе, нам трудно читать долго одну книгу, мы читаем сначала одну страницу одной книги, а потом одну страницу другой. Затем можно взять третью книгу и тоже прочитать одну страницу, а уже потом снова вернуться к первой книге. Так легче, меньше устаешь»
Убаюкивающая, витиеватая, меняющая форму проза, напоминающая то Михаила Шишкина, то Андрея Битова, то какие-то старые фильмы, то тропинку в лесу.
Фем-оптика на эту книжку не накладывается. Женщины либо объекты вожделения («как бедны наши чувства к женщине, как циничны мы» — мы тут всегда мужчины, конечно), либо объекты наблюдения (упавшая с молоком старуха, болезненная девочка-соседка), либо мама, либо учительница в школе.
«Да, вот именно, ты давно инженер и читаешь книгу за книгой, сидя целыми днями на траве. Много книг. Ты стал очень умным, и приходит день, когда ты понимаешь, что медлить больше нельзя. Ты поднимаешься с травы, отряхиваешь брюки – они прекрасно отглажены – потом наклоняешься, собираешь все книги в стопку и несешь в машину. Там, в машине, лежит пиджак, хороший и синий. И ты надеваешь его»
Нот рилейтебл эт ол. Что в целом не очень удивительно — это семидесятые годы прошлого века.
Про «Школу для дураков» с литературной стороны писали на Полке: https://polka.academy/articles/529
И всё равно перед сном почитать уютно и спокойно. Последить глазами и сердцем за тем, как одно в тексте перетекает в другое.
«Видите ли, человек не может исчезнуть моментально и полностью, прежде он превращается в нечто отличное от себя по форме и по сути – например, в вальс, в отдаленный, звучащий чуть слышно вечерний вальс, то есть исчезает частично, а уж потом исчезает полностью» -
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“It’s harder for high achievers,” she says. “The more accustomed you are to solving problems, to getting things done, to having a routine, the harder it will be on you because none of that is possible right now. You get feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and those aren’t good.”
“In this case, it is a loss of a way of life, of the ability to meet up with your friends and extended family,” Boss says. “It is perhaps a loss of trust in our government. It’s the loss of our freedom to move about in our daily life as we used to.” It’s also the loss of high-quality education, or the overall educational experience we’re used to, given school closures, modified openings and virtual schooling. It’s the loss of rituals, such weddings, graduations, and funerals, and even lesser “rituals,” such as going to gym. One of the toughest losses for me to adapt to is no longer doing my research and writing in coffee shops as I’ve done for most of my life, dating back to junior high.
“These were all things we were attached to and fond of, and they’re gone right now, so the loss is ambiguous. It’s not a death, but it’s a major, major loss,” says Boss. “What we used to have has been taken away from us.”
While there isn’t a handbook for functioning during a pandemic, Masten, Boss, and Maddaus offered some wisdom for meandering our way through this. Maddaus’ approach involves radical acceptance. “It’s a shitty time, it’s hard,” he says. “You have to accept that in your bones and be okay with this as a tough day, with ‘that’s the way it is,’ and accept that as a baseline.”
But that acceptance doesn’t mean giving up, he says. It means not resisting or fighting reality so that you can apply your energy elsewhere. “It allows you to step into a more spacious mental space that allows you to do things that are constructive instead of being mired in a state of psychological self torment.”
Most of us have heard for most of our lives to expect more from ourselves in some way or another. Now we must give ourselves permission to do the opposite. “We have to expect less of ourselves, and we have to replenish more,” Masten says. “I think we’re in a period of a lot of self discovery: Where do I get my energy? What kind of down time do I need? That’s all shifted right now, and it may take some reflection and self discovery to find out what rhythms of life do I need right now?”
I might have intellectually accepted back in March that the next two years (or more?) are going to be nothing like normal, and not even predictable in how they won’t be normal. But cognitively recognizing and accepting that fact and emotionally incorporating that reality into everyday life aren’t the same. Our new normal is always feeling a little off balance, like trying to stand in a dinghy on rough seas, and not knowing when the storm will pass. But humans can get better at anything with practice, so at least I now have some ideas for working on my sea legs.
#некниги -
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Tara Haelle, Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful:
In those early months, I, along with most of the rest of the country, was using “surge capacity” to operate, as Ann Masten, PhD, a psychologist and professor of child development at the University of Minnesota, calls it. Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.
“The pandemic has demonstrated both what we can do with surge capacity and the limits of surge capacity,” says Masten. When it’s depleted, it has to be renewed. But what happens when you struggle to renew it because the emergency phase has now become chronic?
I know depression, but this wasn’t quite that. It was, as I’d soon describe in an emotional post in a social media group of professional colleagues, an “anxiety-tainted depression mixed with ennui that I can’t kick,” along with a complete inability to concentrate. I spoke with my therapist, tweaked medication dosages, went outside daily for fresh air and sunlight, tried to force myself to do some physical activity, and even gave myself permission to mope for a few weeks. We were in a pandemic, after all, and I had already accepted in March that life would not be “normal” for at least a year or two. But I still couldn’t work, couldn’t focus, hadn’t adjusted. Shouldn’t I be used to this by now?
“Why do you think you should be used to this by now? We’re all beginners at this,” Masten told me. “This is a once in a lifetime experience. It’s expecting a lot to think we’d be managing this really well.”
It wasn’t until my social media post elicited similar responses from dozens of high-achieving, competent, impressive women I professionally admire that I realized I wasn’t in the minority. My experience was a universal and deeply human one.
While the phrase “adjusting to the new normal” has been repeated endlessly since March, it’s easier said than done. How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty?
“This is an unprecedented disaster for most of us that is profound in its impact on our daily lives,” says Masten. But it’s different from a hurricane or tornado where you can look outside and see the damage. The destruction is, for most people, invisible and ongoing. So many systems aren’t working as they normally do right now, which means radical shifts in work, school, and home life that almost none of us have experience with. Even those who have worked in disaster recovery or served in the military are facing a different kind of uncertainty right now.
Research on disaster and trauma focuses primarily on what’s helpful for people during the recovery period, but we’re not close to recovery yet. People can use their surge capacity for acute periods, but when dire circumstances drag on, Masten says, “you have to adopt a different style of coping.”
It’s not surprising that, as a lifelong overachiever, I’ve felt particularly despondent and adrift as the months have dragged on, says Pauline Boss, PhD, a family therapist and professor emeritus of social sciences at the University of Minnesota who specializes in “ambiguous loss.” -
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Брене упомянула в подкасте Unlocking Us статью Тары Хаэль Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful.
Тара (Tara Haelle) — научная журналистка, написавшая книгу «Vaccination Investigation». В начале пандемии профессиональный опыт (она пишет об инфекциях и медицинских исследованиях последние десять лет) её укреплял. А потом перестал.
В статье Тара рассказывает о том, что «Surge capacity» (способность быстро и эффективно перестраиваться в критические моменты, собирая эмоциональные и физические силы на борьбу с катастрофой) работает только на короткой дистанции.
А наша пандемия — это критический момент, который длится почти весь год и пока что не собирается заканчиваться.
И тут нужны уже какие-то другие механизмы выживания. Потому что те, что «быстро перестроились и потащили в другом направлении», уже истощились. А конца-края пандемии не видно. -
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Книжка классная, тем более на эту тему прям мало пока что написано. И подкаст Call your girlfriend мне понравился. -
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Ironically, this new emphasis on sexuality meant that same-sex behaviors that previously had been perceived as merely affectionate—like holding hands or falling asleep on the breast of your good friend—were now sexualized. This dealt a huge blow to close same-sex friendships, which suddenly became less acceptable as they came to be viewed as a threat to male-female romantic partnership.
“In the early twentieth century [there was] a huge campaign by the so-called experts to wipe out the idea of these girlish crushes that used to be considered perfectly acceptable and kind of fun,” Coontz says. “And men found themselves under suspicion if they walked down the street the way they used to, with an arm around each other’s shoulders.” Women in close relationships with other women could be labeled lesbians—and some of them undoubtedly really were lesbians. This was before the gay rights movement made it safer to come out. It can be really hard to tell which historical bestie pairs were indeed platonic pals, which were, in fact, romantic partners, and which fell somewhere in between.
Some of the old ideas about gender difference persisted, giving a conflicting set of messages to women seeking friendship: get close to other women (you’re built for friendship), but not too close (you don’t want to be seen as lesbians), use those friendships to provide support until the day you find a man to marry, then abandon those relationships on your wedding day, when you will be expected to fully devote yourself to hearth and home.
Coontz interviewed many women who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s, who told her that their youthful friendships with other women revolved around trying to meet a husband. These women expressed sadness that, once everyone was married off, they had little to talk about with their old friends anymore. “So this was the real low point in the history of female friendships,” Coontz says, “and of course, by that time, male friendships were really off the table. Men were increasingly expected to get any emotional support they needed from their wife, not from other men.”
By the 1970s and ’80s, as middle-class women returned to the workforce and sought political and economic equality, they began to reject the idea that they should abandon their friendships upon getting married. And people of all genders started figuring out how passionate romantic love could coexist with passionate friendship bonds.
It’s pretty clear to us that, as a society, we are still working on this. We are trying to let go of a lot of outdated ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman, a friend or a spouse. On a personal level, the two of us have always wanted to be independent women who don’t center our conversations on men. We want people of every gender to be free to feel the expansive joy of intimate friendships. We want to have a supportive network of friends, fulfilling romantic relationships, and strong family bonds—while still charting our own course in the world.
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Our choice to show up at weddings as a family unit wasn’t just a cute stunt. It was an extension of our political beliefs that friendship is a relationship that’s equal in importance to romantic and family bonds.
The historian Stephanie Coontz, who studies marriage and family structures in America and Western Europe, notes that, in the same way that societies have changed their definitions and expectations of family and romantic relationships over time, the expectations for friendship have evolved over centuries. (Until we called her, Coontz, who makes her living studying intimate relationships, had never been asked about how marriage and family structures affect friendships!) She gave us a brief history of how powerful people in Western society have set the standards for friendship, and how people of other class and racial groups often developed their own variations on those standards.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, marriages tended to be arranged to make political or economic alliances or to create community solidarities. “Love was nice if it came afterwards, but it was not considered a good reason for marriage,” Coontz says. “And so friendships were very different and perhaps more emotionally central to people.”
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, when it became common to marry for love, middle-class people began worrying that the couple would have no reason to stay married if their affections dissipated. With more men working outside the home, women were newly responsible for domestic life, and the idea of separate spheres developed. This was an early version of the notion that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, with different sets of inherent skills and social roles. All men were now supposed to be ambitious, hard-nosed, and interested in public matters. And women were supposed to be sexually pure, emotional, and nurturing.
If men and women are two sides of a coin, the theory went, they must get married and stay married in order to access the supposedly innate traits of the other. You complete me. “So this led to this intense romanticization of the other,” Coontz says, “but also it opened the way for a real flowering of male/male and female/female friendships, because those were the people that you had everything in common with, supposedly.”
In letters to each other during the 19th century, some women refer to men as “the grosser sex.” Friendship, not romantic relationships, were a place where women felt free to be themselves and express their emotions. And intense female friendships, even those that might seem erotic to modern eyes, were accepted because women were supposedly so pure that they wouldn’t have sex with each other, even if they slept in the same bed all night.
If a woman professed to have a crush on another woman, it wasn’t seen as commentary on her sexuality. “Men also had very intense friendships,” Coontz says. She points to letters in which men who identified as heterosexual “talk about falling to sleep with their head lying peacefully on the breast of their good friend.”
Toward the end of the 19th century, middle-class Americans began to recognize that these ideas made it hard for men and women to construct intimate marriages. Gradually, middle-class Americans adopted the practice of dating, which had already emerged in the working class. It became more acceptable for women to appear in public, even to work. This led to the rise of what was called “companionate marriage.” It was not yet the era of “I married my best friend,” but it became accepted that women and men should share activities—though emphasis was still placed on women adapting to men’s interests—and pursue a mutually fulfilling sex life.