one thing that I know is that journalists need a "beat". You write about education or the courts or religion or whatever. I'm all into Benoit Denizet-Lewis from the NYTimes...he has the Sex Beat.

I first read him last year when he talked about the DL (Down Low) culture of black men who have sex with other men but do not consider themselves gay. Now he is writing about teenagers and the culture of hookups and friends with benefits.

it's a great article (you can read it here if you're registered with the NYTimes, and hey, you should be) and what interests me is the idea of a Market Economy at work in the realm of sex.

Conventional wisdom holds that since male-to-male sex involves two individuals who are socialized to say "yes" then you get elements like bathhouses, backrooms, etc. Because there is an advantage to providing a place where men can dispense with formalities (like, you know, finding out the other person's name) and getting down to business.

One argument that is commonly made on behalf of this behavior is that this is not gay male culture, this is simply MALE culture and that if straight men could make a similar arrangement, they would.

What this Denizet-Lewis article suggests is that just such a heterosexual experiment is underway, right now, facilitated by cell phones and the internet. Dating and relationships are messy, difficult, frustrating, unnecessary. Hookups are better, "friends with benefits" is better. In other words, contemporary teenagers are acting like gay men. Interestingly the hot issue with gay men these days is not the right to sleep with whomever they please, without the burdens of social conventions, but rather the right to marry (which follows hot on the heels of the right for gays to engage in parenting) and, as the article points out, gay teens who go online are quick to point out that they are NOT interested in hookups but only in relationships.

The information about hooking up is about what you might expect (the boys mostly dig it, the girls mostly feel a little used, everyone is quick to claim that they have no emotional feelings about it at all) but Denizet-Lewis does a nice historical survey of dating mores.

In the 1930's, teenagers were supposed to be (socially) promiscuous meaning that they did NOT go steady with one another and that a loser was a girl at a dance who danced with the same boy all night. You were supposed to get around, have a broad spectrum. Then all of the sudden it's WWII and they start scaring girls, telling them, essentially, "look to your left, look to your right ONE OF YOU WILL NEVER BE MARRIED" and the pendulum swung THAT way.

The difference, of course, is that in the 1930's mixed-gender groups could hang out but if one lad wanted to get a blow job from one of the girls, well, first of all he might have to give a tutorial on the topic but secondly he didn't have this entire back channel of communications to facilitate the endeavor. A 1930's teen did not post pics of himself to solicit feedback on whether or not he was hot or not.

I can't imagine how much worse my teenage years would have been if, on top of everything else, I felt a pressure to post pics of myself online and allow complete strangers to assess my naked torso. Ugh.