I'm less sure why "grind" dancing is considered a bad thing. Sure, there's lots of sexual connotations. But...

Except for sweat there doesn't seem to be a lot of sharing of bodily fluids.

Also, this is going to sound old-fogie and out of touch maybe but...

Over time I've noticed that whereas there was a sort of mythology about men's "thrusting" behavior, as contrasted to women's passive receptivity, it's been seeming to me lately that women have their own version of "thrusting" that...

Pretty similar in both motivation and intent.

It's just that attitudes have changed since the 1970s that it's ok to, I dunno, thrust back.

Pamela Haag begins a post with the following tidbit:

Like other local and state governments, Topeka, Kansas is in the grips of a dismal budget crisis. So this week, Topeka’s City Council did something desperate. They debated decriminalizing domestic violence--because the cost of prosecuting these cases, and other misdemeanors, is just too high. The county has already turned back 30 domestic violence cases since they stopped prosecuting them on September 8.

One of the problems with these stories is that it’s hard to believe that we’re actually hearing what we’re hearing. Sometimes I think the 20th century was all a dream, and we’ve awakened back in the 19th. Could civilization unravel so much that we rip up paved roads to save money—or revive wife-beating to save a buck? It sounds like a satirical Onion headline.

Source: Big Think Proxy

My first inclination post this with the title "Oh for heaven's sakes, part 3,776" or something like that. But the rest of Haag's post is too important to miss. It's an essay on the extremely narrow definitions of marriage extreme right-wing "traditionalists" like, naturally, Kansas governor Sam Brownback emphasize is their "marriage encouragement" policies.

It’s not heterosexual marriage generically that’s promoted in Kansas and elsewhere. It’s marriage of a particular (patriarchal) brand and a particular (gender-typed) sort.

...

Ironically, in the classes and states today that have the very lowest divorces rates—the educated, affluent middle class, that is, and uber-liberal Massachusetts—it’s precisely this sort of gender role flexibility that you’re likely to see. The community welcomes stay-at-home dads as well as stay-at-home moms. Dads and moms are likely to perform a variety of roles in marriage, from breadwinning to breadbaking and childrearing and nurturing. These precisely aren’t marriages of interdependence, but of overlapping, multi-tasking competencies. Still, the defense of marriage tends to trash career moms for ruining the family, and privilege distinct husband and wife roles

...

If a view doesn’t punch our own life in the face, then we think it can’t hurt us.

But marriage politics today aren’t just about opposition to same-sex marriage and homosexuality. No, they’re interested in your big, fat, straight wedding, too. Campaigns for traditional marriage support particular versions of heterosexual marriage. To paraphrase from Animal Farm, some marriages are more equal than others.

Yes, the initial snippet about effectively legalized wife (and husband) battering is shocking but Haag reminds us that it's just one tiny foray in a very long, quiet, and persistent campaign to and to re-enact Biblical, capital-P Patriarchy.

Having rather enjoyed I can't imagine why anyone would want to effectively repeal the second half of the 20th Century as well as the first tenth of the 21st, let alone why they'd want to force everyone else to go back. But they do.

Photo by Flickr user Jon Bragg. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here's Lynn Gazis-Sax on the recent dealbreaker meme. Pointing out, correctly, that there's probably no controversy about what she calls "red flag" dealbreakers, and there shouldn't be much of an issue with "we don't share the same values" dealbreakers (say, a collector and a declutterer) there are also "shallow" dealbreakers. About which she has some great points (emphasis hers):

Finally, there are the “shallow” dealbreakers, the ones that involve looks, hobbies, tastes, etc. Now, the thing about shallow dealbreakers is that several things are true:

• You have the right to have any dealbreaker you darn well please.
• That “right” doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers (and it especially doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers if you announce them in a particularly rude way). It does mean that, once the deal is broken, the person you’re not going to date needs to accept no for an answer, and it does mean that at a certain point you get to tell people to butt out of your business.
• You should, in fact, not date anyone you don’t want. That applies even if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to other people’s values. It also applies if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to your own values. If, for instance, you really, really wish you could be sexually attracted to men (because your faith won’t allow you to sleep with other women), but you’re actually only attracted to women, it’s not fair to pick a guy you’re not attracted to and date him anyway. For as long as your attractions and your faith are in conflict, suck up and be abstinent; at least that way, you don’t wind up imposing on some unhappy man who would have liked a woman who actually found him attractive.
• At the same time, some “dealbreakers” may turn out to be more malleable than you thought they were. Sometimes people’s attractions even change (though the one about which sex you’re actually attracted to seems to be, if at least partly mutable for some people, pretty darn resistant to deliberate change). If you’re not happy with the men you’re actually choosing, you may want to rethink your choices. That might mean caring less about how a man dresses, or deciding that values are dealbreakers but tastes are fungible. The point here, though, isn’t to “settle” (and it isn’t that no one gets to have any “shallow” dealbreaker – see above about how you’re doing no one any favors if you date people you can’t find attractive); it’s to pick useful standards, ones that actually bring you a happy relationship, rather than being more exacting about things that matter less than about things that matter more.

Source: Noli Irritare Leones

I think the second point nicely handles, say, Jill Filipovic's defense of "shallow" dealbreakers while making sense out of Rebecca Watson's reservations about mocking those you've declined to date for "shallow" dealbreaker reasons.  While also nicely handling the case where when it's a woman who balks over a "shallow" dealbreaker it instantly stops being about the shallowness and turns into zomg there'sfeminernazifemalebichesusingwordsonmyinternetsmakeitstopppsss!!!!

But I digress.  One peculiarity in the discourse is an assumption that it's generally women who wield the dealbreakers.  Actually that's not all that peculiar in and of itself.  Inside the dominant paradigm where men are supposed to initiate and women are only supposed to accept or decline it makes sense that women's dealbreakers are visible (it's easy and almost inevitable to wonder "why did you say no") whereas men's are invisible (it's almost impossible to imagine anyone saying "why did you just not ask me out just then?")  And therefore inside the dominant paradigm it follows that there would be talk of shallow "gatekeeping" but none about the often equally shallow... I dunno... call it "gate passing."

What I don't get so much is how much of the conversation hasn't mentioned, or mocked, shallow gate passing.  (Note: if I was feeling more strident I'd mention how this is yet further another still instance where we men have the wind at our backs.)

Because it seems like the Lynn's points about dealbreaking apply equally to both responding to and initiating relationship overtures.

Rachel Hills catches of some author pushing the line that men and women are so different they need to have seminars to figure them out in a little bit of double-standarding.

In What Men Want, for instance, she argues that men have an insatiable need for variety. But she also says that women are more likely to go off sex in long term relationships – not because they don’t want it at all, but because they don’t want it from their husbands.

Source: Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

When you think about it you realize how difficult it is to maintain the facade of women being from Mars and men from Venus or however that story about interplanetary differences goes. Because, seriously, can it really be that difficult to say that both men and women, being human beings, like novelty? And call me a rebel here but has no one really ever noticed that, again like all human beings, men no less than women simultaneously crave stability?