Thanks for the link. The song was great.

"What would Brooks prefer? A world in which, thanks to social pressures to rush into marriage and motherhood, women stay with the first loser who crosses their path?"

Yes, that's precisely what Brooks would prefer.

Not to mention that the whole premise about songs is ridiculous. After all, Buddy Holly wrote about Annie working on the Midnight Shift more than fifty years ago.

Surprising Brooks didn't somehow work Maureen Dowd into his piece. Dowd's a poster girl for the "decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around" lifestyle, with all its attendant joys.

Please, no one tell David Brooks about Amy Winehouse.

Lets be honest here. What Brooks wants is a world where a successful guy in his 50s (ie Brooks) could just go down to Vassar and have his pick of virginal coeds willing to take care of him during his dottage. Or at least he'd hold out that promise to get them to sleep with him. But now these women will sleep with attractive young men! How can Brooks compete?

I am not sure what Brooks thinks, but he must think that there is some sort of broad social benefit from women marrying early. The thing is, he doesn't seem to care that individuals might have much more fulfilling sex lives because they have multiple partners in their lifetimes. They learn their own bodies better, as well as how to please their partners, and they get out of relationships that won't lead to good marriages without having to deprive themselves of sexual pleasure.

That just doesn't make it onto Brooks' radar screen; all he sees is the supposed societal costs of this lifestyle.

What I find interesting about the Brooks piece is how the Underwood song gets a pass for it's violent imagery. Smashing and trashing your ex's car. How would Brookes feel if say Little Kim rapped a similar refrain.

What a bullshit op-ed! Sorry to share this, but I did not lose my virginity until I was 27. Not that I didn't want to before that . . . but I was profoundly, pathologically shy and didn't even go out on a real date until I was 26.

Anyway . . . after that my sex/dating life was pretty normal. After I broke up with serious boyfriend #1, I dated a couple of other guys. I een had a one-night stand (which was not terribly pleasurable or fun, but was helpful in my sexual education and liberation). Then I dated no one for at least 3 years. Finally met the man of my dreams at 34, and married him at 37. Am still blissfully happy (and, at least for now, child-free) at 44.

So what the fuck is the problem with the fact that I didn't marry until I was 37? (This, I presume, would be Brooks' problem with me). Should I have gotten an abortion instead? Become a single mother? I mean, really . . . !!! Any other choice, besides the one I made, would have made me (and others) deeply unhappy. And slso would have made been morally disastrous to me (and several others as well).

How dare David Brooks presume what would the right repoductive, and mate-choce, course would have been for me. How. The. Fuck. Dare. He.

KG

I'm glad I read this blog post and comments like kaygee's because, to be honest, I wasn't offended when I read Brooks' column this morning. My guess is I'll always be a good deal less sensitive to sexist remarks or feminist bashing than, say, Dana Goldstein because I'm a white male (granted, a white male who tends to read Brooks with a skeptical eye but a white male nonetheless).

I'll throw a bit or two of that unoffended white male perspective - which I think is valuable to have since it's probably the majority of Brooks' readers - on the table here. Dana, kaygee and others see Brooks as attacking feminism, sexual liberation and getting married at a later age than is typical. (Just so you know where I'm coming from, my mom was the executive director of Women Organized Against Rape, didn't get married until she was 36, and gave me her last name instead of my dad's.) I agree that some of the phrases Brooks uses (e.g. “formless premarital life and the anxieties it produces,” "nobody knows the rules," etc.) seem nostalgic for the good ol' days before the Sexual Revolution led to a "cold-eye age of divorce and hookups." I am not particularly nostalgic for those days, but I think Brooks can be read in a more charitable manner which doesn't make him out as an unabashed sexist.

His op-ed seems more of a straight-up social commentary than an attack on female independence and reproductive rights as kaygee suggests in an argument I still can't quite follow. Indeed, much of what Brooks writes could hardly be interpreted as sexist rhetoric as much as a critique of “hookup culture.” For example, Brooks claims that “cellphones, Facebook and text messages” create “fluidity, drama and anxiety.” True or not, Brooks’ aim here seems to be noting a social phenomenon, not suggesting women shouldn’t be using online social networks and talking on the phone late at night. Speaking of which, it is very late at night. (Check out the post date on this comment.) I’ll check back in the morning and hopefully add the rest of what was floating around in my white male noggin.

I see what you're saying zach, but you also have to ask yourself what David Brooks, with his history of writing on such subjects, is really driving at and why he specifically chose to write this particular column. He has a creepy history on such issues. Also, anyone who decides to generalize on the state of American female sex from Pink and Carrie Underwood is simply borderline retarded.

"What I find interesting about the Brooks piece is how the Underwood song gets a pass for it's violent imagery. Smashing and trashing your ex's car."

MRF, great point. I think the main reason for that is that it's a really bad example of Brooks's point, to the point of almost being a counterexample! That song breaks absolutely no ground in the plight of modern women in their 20s. Women who catch their men cheating always "hit him where it hurts" by trashing his property, and they have centuries of history behind them in doing so. How exactly is keying a car and smashing in the headlights different from tossing his clothes out the 3rd-story window? I imagine, in Brooks's head, it's simply because women didn't used to handle the bat like Barry Bonds.

Funny...my parents are still happily married after 40+ years. I'm over 30 and never married. All those empty hook-ups that Brooks bangs on about? Fuggedaboudit. That kind of thing never interested me. Boyfriends? Been there, done that, lousy t-shirt got given away long ago, and good riddance. I prefer MANfriends nowadays. Or just friends, period. The nicest thing about being child-free and never-married is that you don't become so wrapped up in keeping up with the other married Joneses that you forget how to be a friend. So much for David Brooks's "cold-eyed age" of blah blah blabbity blah blah!

I guess what really bugs Mr. Brooks is that women might actually--gasp!--get a taste for independence, to the point where they're not willing to settle for some pseudo-intellectual dumb nerd like himself. That they might actually want to hold out for real love, not some socially acceptable simulacrum thereof. That they might actually learn to ENJOY hanging out with a diverse circle of friends and colleagues, just for its own sake, not with the goal of snagging a husband. Or that, heaven forfend, we might actually like having sex with a guy but not doing all sorts of inane contortions to get a diamond ring out of him first, or be bovinely content to come away with a bellyful of "his" offspring afterward. Life without rules! Life on one's own terms! Shudder. No, we CAN'T have that!

"I guess what really bugs Mr. Brooks is that women might actually--gasp!--get a taste for independence"

I don't know what Brooks thinks (never could figure out the Times logic about what to put behind the firewall)-- but from everyone's comments it seems like he isn't talking about independence but an angry lack of independence.

They're fixated on men and relationships, but it's not fulfilling (as he apparently assumes the married state is) rather, it's enraging.

Seems like the point is not whether or not they're married but that they're single but not independent and not happy.

You could say he has no idea what's going on out there, but this female angst does seem to sell.