Photo by Flickr user P.J.S. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[Note: So since maybe 1955 or so Seattle has been lucky enough to host a local burger chain called Dick’s. Soon after my arrival someone mention the burgers there and I said I’d never had one. Almost in chorus my mixed group of friends and roommates said “35 years old and never had a Dick in him?” Not sure it’s a Seattle tradition or if it was just an isolated fluke (it’s definitely never been a sanctioned slogan of the chain) but it obviously stuck with me. Anyway any time I hear about the whole “dinner and a movie” or “flowers and dinner” I think about their signature burger, the Dick’s Deluxe. —fl]
In comments to this post on the “dating tradition” of men providing dinner and flowers with an expectation of sex in return, Ivastar of Astronomy (Extra)Ordinaire asked a compelling question (that I would have addressed a lot sooner but for my template/comment-spam hassles.)
Why am I expected to pay back a dinner to a guy with sexual favors if I could have just paid with money? Go figure.
I’d been thinking about it in terms of Holly who’s a bit of a starving student at the moment but no more so than her male partners and, given her med-school prospects, not likely to starve for long. But it’s the same for pretty much anybody!
And really, even if we maintained the status quo isn’t there always going to be some point (say the median income point for any given demographic) where the marginal worth of one roses-n-dinner more or less can’t possibly be worth holding out for if one is horny, or “putting out” for if one is not?
And what are the alternatives anyway? Crafting “family friendly” legislation designed to keep women out of the workforce altogether? No. Turns out even the wingnut who proposed “strengthening the family” that way claims everybody just couldn’t read his handwriting.”
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 10:20.
(Actually, one of my partners is rich as hell -- [zzz] is fairly high up at, er, a large Eastside [jjj] company. He always pays for stuff, not in exchange for sex I hope, but just because, good God, he makes in a week what I do in a month. [yyy]'s broke like me and we split expenses evenly.)
But I agree completely--look at the price range on actual prostitutes. A middle or upper-class call girl offering a "girlfriend experience" is going to run you what? Maybe $200 an hour or more. That's a Metropolitan Grill dinner and a forest of roses. Why should the price on "respectable" women be lower?
Which gets back to the real question, which is, why should women have a price at all? Do guys really think sex with them is so unpleasant their partners have to be compensated? That's sad.
[Just for good luck I've sort of redacted names and other identifying features. Because it's always a smaller world than we think. :-) As for the price of dinner-n-a-show vs. calling an escort, in a way I don't even want to go there because *either* way men think about it is sort of bogus because neither accounts for the possibility of authentic, independent desire. And that actually is cool about you and your partners. Thanks, Holly! --fl]
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 13:49.
"[zzz]" isn't really [zzz]'s name anyway, but thanks for the, uh, double security.
[Sorry if I got paranoid, Holly. Ok, ok, so I started *out* paranoid. :-) --fl]
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 14:33.
While it is absurd for men to think of flowers and dinner as payment for sex (do men really think that?) I hope you don't mean that men should stop buying flowers. I for one really really like it when my man buys me flowers and I hope he will never stop.
I am thinking about men I know or have known in the past, and I don't think they think that giving a woman flowers and buying her dinner entitles him to sex. I guess "the men I know" is a pretty small sample of the general population of men and so maybe they are not representative of all men. Maybe they are the orchids :-) or maybe I am naive.
[Actually if you chase the links all the way back, the initial proposal was that men, especially young men, won't buy flowers and dinner if a) they think they'll "get" sex for free, or b) if they think they won't "get" it at all. Now I happen to think that providing and sex are as tightly bound. Anyway, like you I think that since we all like to do things for each other and we all like sex why are people trying to tell us gifts and sex have to be cross-linked like that? Thanks, Mag. --fl]
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 20:33.
I think that the "dinner and flowers buys sex" narrative works better when you look at what the woman is presumed to be saying.
The presumed "sales pitch" by the woman runs something like this: "If I have an emotionally satisfying evening, and am made to feel like you really care about me, then I will give you what I know you really only care about."
Or, more succinctly, "show me a good time this evening, and I'll show you a good time tonight."
This stems right from the "sex-class"/"no-sex class" paradigm, where it is assumed that the woman is only interested in an emotional pay-off from the evening (and doesn't have any interest in sex except as a means of obtaining that), whereas the man is presumed to be only interested in a physical pay-off from the evening (and doesn't have any interest in romance except as a means of obtaining sex).
Incidentally, there is an escalating price set by "respectable" women, which starts from the "I don't have sex on a first date" (in other words, "one dinner and bunch of flowers buys you a peck on the cheek goodnight, you need to buy me more dinners and more flowers before you'll get something as valuable as my pussy").
Obviously, the best thing is to know that if you both want sex, you're both going to get it, and the rest of the time, you're both going to have (hopefully) an emotionally satisfying and pleasurable evening in each other's company. After that, who picks up the tab is kind of irrelevant. But we won't get there while ever women and men both believe in the "women are the no-sex class" myth, and the twin myth that sex is all men want, all the time.
[My one quibble would be that the "presumed" sales pitch is exactly that, presumed. Unless, perhaps, the woman's so indoctrinated, or worse, so burnt out, that she's given up any possibility of anything else. Which really *is* possible, but also an incredible indictment of men-as-a-class if so. Thanks, SDE. --fl]
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 20:38.
oh, yeah, and just to add: I love the anecdote about Dick's!
(and I am loving this reCAPTCHA thing, every so often the word combination makes some kind of sense, for this comment it's "baseball community")
[Thank you, SDE. --fl]
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-12-18 21:54.
Hi Snowdrop! I hear you. That is really sad, isn't it? What you are saying is pretty much what Figleaf is saying, and I guess that my thought that maybe men don't think that shows just how out of touch I am with the whole dating scene. I have been married for a long time and actually, I don't think I have ever had a date like that with someone who is practically a stranger. When my husband and I were dating, we were teenagers and we didn't have any money (or a car) and our dates pretty much consisted of hanging out and doing drugs like teenagers do. Or at least we did. But now that we have money my husband does the romantic things that men are "supposed to do" for women and it's nice. Actually, he did romantic things then, too. We both lived with our parents then, and on weekend mornings I would go over to his parents' house and he would make me breakfast. That was very romantic!
I agree that the whole sex class/no class thing is not doing anyone any favors, but is there a way that we can move past that and still keep the romance? Do we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? I'm not talking about who pays, I'm talking about all the other stuff that men do that women like, like buying roses on Valentine's Day. Maybe other people don't care about that, but I do.
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-12-19 01:15.
sugar mag - there's absolutely no reason why men shouldn't make the woman (women, whoever) in their life feel special. The trouble lies in the worthiness myth and sex/no-sex myth, which means that men feel that it is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, that is the problem. It means also that men can feel "entitled" to sex, because they've met the presumed asking price.
After all, if you can have sex whenever, without having to buy her flowers (as long as she wants it too, of course) then you can buy her flowers just whenever you feel like seeing her smile. In fact, the sex/no-sex thing is what kills a real sense of romance and caring. If doing nice things are just about meeting the asking price, then there's no romance in it at all!
Incidentally, I've never had this problem with dates because most of the time, I'm going out with someone whom I know is also interested in kinkiness like me, and we've discussed things by email and IM - so we're much better-equipped for either partner to be open about wanting sex on a date, and we've also established in advance that being nice to her is not an attempt to buy her.
My suspicion is that a lot of this stuff is media-generated anyway, and that there is less of it than people suppose to be the case. However, there does seem to be some element of it involved or assumed in a lot of dating situations.
One other thing, though: I am fairly sure that it is less a "tradition" than something that developed out of the social movements of the late 1970s and the 1980s, at least, in an explicit sense. I am fairly sure that examples of it can be found at least as far back as WWII, and probably further back than that, but the prevalence of it I suspect may have increased as social attitudes began more and more to see everything as a trade-off of some kind.
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-12-19 04:15.
That makes sense, especially "In fact, the sex/no-sex thing is what kills a real sense of romance and caring. If doing nice things are just about meeting the asking price, then there's no romance in it at all!" I had not thought about it that way before. Thanks! It's a scary scary world out there. Be careful and have fun.
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-12-19 04:50.
Oh, and I agree with what you said about your suspicion that much of this is media related, and that these assumptions can be the cause of much misunderstanding. It is just plain hard for many people to talk honestly about sex, feelings, and what their expectations are, especially on a first date, and sometimes even after a long time. I also think that most people are not jerks.
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-12-19 07:30.
[Hey Sugar Mag. A couple of things. First, I think what more likely goes through the average man's head isn't so much "sheesh, I'm buying her flowers so of course she's going to put out" or (as in the little chart in my original post) "if I don't bring flowers she won't put out." It's more like "If I take her to dinner and... better get some flowers too, and... that extra bit is what it'll take for me to "get lucky" with her." But I need to be careful that I'm not really stereotyping things -- I don't think it's so much a matter of total scheming as being a matter of pre- or post-breakup fuming... which is sometimes a little harsh but also sometimes where revelations about individual relationship dynamics come out.
And second, there's nothing at all wrong with romance in relationships, not at all, at all! (Heck no!) I would say, though, that by moving away from the idea of him-buy-she-lie or whatever that we actually *double* the possiblities for romance, right? Because, for instance, tokens of appreciation go both ways, and then there's... :-)
Thanks, Sugar Mag.
figleaf
Submitted by 1766 (not verified) on Wed, 2007-12-19 09:31.
Thanks for saying that Figleaf, made me feel better. I just reread your original post, and it depressed me as much this time as the last time I read it. All the talk of "pussy price" is enough for me to scan briefly and move on, with out really thinking about it. I liked Holly's comment about dick price being zero, though ;-). I know, it is just as unkind. Someone else said that her mom always told her to not let her dates pay for anything, smart mom! I will tell my daughter that. It was different for my husband and me because we both worked until we had children and we always shared everything we had. When my daughter was born, I did not want to leave her in someone else's care and so my dear husband found a way to make enough money for me to stay at home with her. It was an incredibly loving thing to do! I know that many families find other solutions, like husband as primary caregiver, but I wanted to breastfeed my baby and I think he would have been unhappy staying at home. He is an ambitious, competitive person.
I think what is important is having choices. Before I had children, I never thought that my lifestyle would be so traditional, I never thought I would be a stay at home mom. But here I am, and it's nice, so it can work well. I think there are a lot of forces that put pressure on moms to leave their babies when they do not want to, and that is really sad for the babies as well as the moms. In my ideal world, every mother would have the choice to be the primary caregiver for her baby if she wanted to. Obviously, many mothers would not be happy without their careers, and I do believe that many women are better moms because they are happy because they are working. I would not be nearly as content with my role as I am if I had not chosen it and if I had not had a chance to do other things before I had children. Sorry for the long digression. Let us now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
[No problem, Mag. Funny thing is that I had some of the same considerations when I chose to stay home when our first child was born, while my partner returned to work. In between children we moved and I wound up with a pretty nice job that let me work very flexible hours from home. So I've been able to be here with my children for more than eleven years. It's played hob on my long-term career track but, maybe like you, I wouldn't trade a minute of it. Thanks! --fl]