Single women on a new trajectory

Salon’s Rebecca Traister offers her perspective on the recent spate of memoirs by single women in their 20s and 30s. Most interestingly, she writes:

“Men, dating and heartbreak float in and out of these stories. But they are not the narrative force. These are books about chicks, but worlds away from assumptions about the chick-lit genre in which plots hinge and characters orbit around the question of whether the heroine gets or loses a guy. The romantic interests here are given no more weight or import, really, than the mothers, fathers, sisters, bosses, roommates, drinking buddies and Bridezilla girlfriends who give these books, and the lives of the women who write them, their shape and rhythm. Perhaps more tellingly, romantic foibles or successes are not treated as a measure of the value of the protagonists’ lives, a circumstance that is so recent and yet now so common that we forget how disruptive to the social order it still is.”

It will be fascinating to see the result of this social disruption in 10 or 20 years. I wonder how women’s lack of desire to marry will affect the population. More important, I wonder how it will affect men’s behavior toward women. Who knows? Maybe the few male politicians lucky enough to have a wife won’t be so fast  to bang strangers like an orangutan.

(A new book, not of the single women memoir genre, has come out explaining to us that men more easily separate sex and love, while women require some sort of emotional attachment to have sex. Having known women for whom this is just not so, I believe it’s learned behavior for those it is; after all, in certain parts of the world, they ritually mutilate the part of a girl’s body where she feels sexual pleasure — not emotion.  My feeling is that books based on these theories serve to help women justify crappy treatment from their husbands and boyfriends — or decide not to risk getting overly involved with any man in the first place.)

But check out Traister’s piece on memoirs by single women here.