accessorize!

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perhaps you've noticed that lately there are only two super cool accessories for the hot hollywood starlet. okay three if you count dogs in a purse. it's one of either a baby or a significantly younger man.

now myself and a couple of ladies were walking along recently and this subject came up... not regarding starlets per se, just that more and more women we know are hooking up with men who aren't actually in their 'age bracket' and then we started to speculate.

the end result of our speculation goes something like this:

we are the lost generation we folks between twenty nine and forty two. we were raised by mothers from the nineteen fifties during the sexual revolution and just when it got to be our turn for the free love and ganja?

yeah hiv showed up. so this free love thing we'd been hearing about? gone just as it got to be time for us to enjoy it.

needless to say this left us a little befuddled. if you throw in that that is also the time period in which women's liberation took some enormous strides you get a generation of people who have no idea how to date.

i think this is especially hard on many of the men my age. if they go by the fifties rulebook then they should court us and woo us with pretty words and trinkets. they should die for a flash of cleavage and hope only for a kiss.

and sex? good gracious me, no sex please! not until we're married and then only with the lights off!

or they go by the seventies rulebook in which case they should basically say "*deep voice* heyyyy... wanna fuck?" and we should effectively want to dive into bed. but take sex seriously? monogamy? caring for your partner?

not important, love is free and should be shared with everyone.

of course then there's the eighties rule book... um. yeah. what rule book? sex is going to kill you, love is for the birds, everyone divorces. basically if you don't meet your mate at school or work you're fucked (or not fucked as the case may be). courtship is nonexistent and people seem to hook up mostly by accident or booze.

i think this time can best be described as dominated by the alpha male and the power shouldered female.

which brings us to now.

who has any idea what rulebook to play in?

what rulebook their potential mate is playing in?

any idea of how to flirt without being desperate or simpering or easy?

NO ONE!

our mothers and our culture raised us to believe that there is a knight in shining armour for everyone and that nice girls learned to cook and sew. at the same time gloria steinem and her cohorts were shouting women's liberation from the rooftops.

we were strong and powerful and we could change the world! we could do anything we wanted EXCEPT stay home and have babies. that was for those other women, the unfortunates, the ones who didn't have this lovely liberation that we had.

we could have careers and power. who needed men??

incidentally this is why i can swing a sledgehammer, change my oil, start a fire when it's thirty below and windy, invent peppercorn sauce off the top of my head AND sew on a button. *grin*

this, of course, led to discussion of the men our age and we concluded that any of the ones left single at this point basically haven't matured with us. that they don't know how to handle a strong and independent woman and that they definetely don't know how to ask them out or court them.

hrm i don't like this term matured. basically they're as fucked as we are just in a different way.

combine this with a generation of women who don't know how to be courted and what do you get?

right... a massive slump in population growth. in other words, we ain't making babies... and that's a fact.

then i got to talking about a woman i know who is eighteen years old. she and i were discussing men one day and i was telling her how proud i was for asking some man out. and she stared at me. no earthly idea what i was talking about. why on earth is this a big deal?

so i explained that in my day the girls who asked out the boys were "those" girls and NO ONE wanted to be one of THOSE girls. i mean ew! and she laughed and said 'i asked my first boyfriend out... and we were together for two years.'

i asked out my first man at THIRTY THREE! (real asked out, not engineered hanging out.)

so her generation has no worries. they don't care who does the asking or the courting. the dance has reverted to mutuality. lovely.

and then my ladies and i realised. these men that are 25 and 28 and 23? they grew up with the notion of strong women. to them the idea of a woman who simpers and doesn't have any power makes no sense. however the women their age seem a little unformed because they're still dealing with the backlash from my generation.

and suddenly all these older woman/younger man combinations that we'd been hearing about made so much more sense.

it isn't anyone's fault, we're just in the middle of a cultural shift and my generation can't handle it. funny that this also explains why so many men MY age are dating women who are twenty five and forty eight. same shift. those women they know how to handle.

ahhh got to love watching evolution.

it's going to be interesting to see where this takes us. possibly into some really stable new relationship models.

possibly... not.

we'll see :)