50 years of social change for women

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting:

Megan Mullally:
I had a lot of boyfriends and a lot of flings. I think flings are great. That’s something women should investigate a little more thoroughly. The trick is, you have to not care. I was in my late 30s when I first started having successful flings and didn’t get emotionally attached to the guy. But you have to be at a point in your life when you’re not needy, when you’re not looking for a husband or a long-term boyfriend or anything.

I feel one of the last taboos is for women not to have children. I’m not going to say I never wanted to have children, but I never had a burning desire to have children. When I met my husband and we got serious and were going to get married, I tried. I was 44, and it was a little bit late in the day. But he was the first guy I was going to try with. I just didn’t have that burning desire. If you don’t have it, you should honor that. Having children isn’t something you should do just because everybody else is. To be in the slim minority of women who don’t can be a little unsettling and make you feel like, Well, is there something wrong with me? But I never felt that. My life has been about trying to entertain people. In my own paltry way, trying to entertain people is my service. My service is not raising a family. I know you can do both, but that just wasn’t my thing….

Miranda July:
Unless you’re being overtly erotically sexual as a female, people almost don’t clock it as sex. What I said to her was that the territory feels so wide open to me; it feels, surprisingly at this point, that still not much has been done with sex. We’re seeing the same things done again and again, so it just feels fun, like it’s not hard to think of something no one has ever done. And that’s not true with most things that are so much a part of life. A lot of smart people have walked all over everything else. And also, it’s an intersection of power and intimacy and shame and vulnerability, and boringness, potentially—all these things that are interesting to me. It’s not even necessarily that sex is so interesting; it’s that you can get at all these interesting things through it. That has evolved, I think, initially coming out of being a child. I was focused on the sexuality of children, which is pretty impossible to do anything about.

With my first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, I was thinking there should be, that that should exist as its own thing, separate from what we think of as real sex, like adult sex. Children have their own ideas of that, and in some ways that’s part of children’s right to have their version of sex, whatever that is in their heads. I remember thinking this is such a debatable idea, it needs its own sort of branding and logo. I was consciously thinking that when I came up with the “back and forth, forever” symbol, ))<>((, that we used in the movie. I was thinking it could be like the Coca-Cola or Nike logo but for children’s sexuality. So it can have humor in it, because it is funny. It gets less funny as you get older. Kids can see what’s funny about all that. I think that has its own power. And it did kind of work. I think managing to brand children’s sexuality is pretty radical and could even be potentially threatening in a way. Especially a woman doing that—because I’m supposed to be maternal, or I’m just so caught up in my own orgasm.

Aisha Tyler
Comedian, actress, television host, author
I think people have an unrealistic expectation of marriage. I think they have an unrealistic expectation of their spouses. I think most people don’t know what they’re getting into, and they’re more excited about the wedding than they are about the marriage. A lot of people are just not cut out for it. Marriage is not for pussies. It requires an infinite amount of patience, not just with the other person but with yourself. And it requires a willingness to allow someone else to be flawed, and their willingness to allow you to be flawed as well. What makes a great marriage is finding someone who is willing to see the best in you at all times. That doesn’t mean they are a Pollyanna or blind; it just means they see what in you is equivalent to greatness.

I am probably not your typical woman. My husband and I play Xbox together, I love video games, I engineer my own podcast, I love computers and I’m an early adopter. I own probably seven devices. So for me, technology has been great. You know, I probably should spend more time having sex and less time looking at people have sex on the internet, but I think that’s probably everybody’s case nowadays. We all have our problems.

I hope men realize now that that picture of their penis is never not going to be on the internet. When society has crumbled and humans have vanished from the earth, cockroaches are going to walk in on iOS 972 and this picture is still going to be on the internet. So just don’t do it! Unless you want your great-grandchildren to see your cock, don’t do it. It’s not going to work out well for you.

Now people are realizing even if you post something and delete it immediately, it’s too late. As soon as you press tweet, that is the last time you will ever have control of that image. And I think guys should realize that, for better or for worse, our half of the species is not particularly interested in seeing a picture of your penis anyway. Unless it’s a medical marvel and you should be in a museum or a circus, we’re not interested. Take a picture of your bank account or your car or your IQ. Or maybe send away to 23andMe and send us a picture of your genetic makeup that shows you don’t have any cancer precursors and will never have a heart attack. Send us information we can use. A picture of your dick is not going to get it done.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://playboysfw.kinja.com/12-feminists-on-the-best-and-worst-of-sexual-liberation-1498856419
Source