Jezebel
Hell's Bells
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Hell's Bells
users are losers
Dudes Today: The Emotional Conquistador Is The New Sexual Conquistador
I think one of the biggest threats facing sexually-liberated women today is the Emotional Conquistador. It's become blatantly obvious to me in recent months that the power struggle between the sexes is still at play, but because the interactions in heterosexual relationships have shifted—with women taking a more aggressive approach to their sexual satisfaction, and becoming more adroit at compartmentalizing the physical from the emotional—we're now dealing with certain (insecure?) men who still have this innate need to take the upper hand. With the age-old option of sexual conquering removed from the equation, this male faction has been reduced to finding new ways to subjugate women, in order to feel better about themselves. So lately, guys have been trying to talk their way into receiving "feelings" instead of fellatio. Because, at the end of the day, they really want their egos stroked more than their dicks. After the jump, a cautionary tale. More »
hell's bells
So It's Not A Jinx To Dedicate Your Book To Your Fictional Future Husband?
Nicola Kraus, one of the authors of the Nanny Diaries just put an end to 33 years of the misery of singledom by getting married to a man. Oh my god how did she do it??? I knew you'd ask! According to Vows:
Last year Ms. Kraus decided to dedicate their latest novel, "Dedication" to her husband. No, she wasn’t married. But she was hopeful. 'I was creating a place holder,” Ms. Kraus, 33, said. “He was out there. I just hadn’t crossed paths with him yet.' She began behaving as if she was already in love. 'You carry yourself differently when you’re not alone,' she explained. 'I would carry myself at a party or a supermarket or a gym as if I was loved.' Then a month later David Wheir kissed her, and she no longer needed to pretend."
Okay, so clearly something about this is bothersome, but what?
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crap email from a dude
"I Could Be Writing To Tell You Your Feature Is Tasteless, Promotes Sexism, And Secures Its Readership By Offering Slanderous And Sensationalized Accounts…"
People often wonder what the fallout of a Crap Email is like. We don't often know! This guy contacted us once, thinking his ex-girlfriend had changed her name to Anna Holmes, even though her name was not Anna; when he finally figured out the deal he good-naturedly defended his doghouse-building skills and retreated back into his proverbial own. Truthfully, he seemed really nice, and I felt a little bad. The same cannot be said for "Christopher Davis," the Ayn Rand prostrating author of last week's "I Am, Right Now, Involved In Something More Important," which many of you felt to be the Douchiest Email Of All Time. Here is definitive proof it was not! A tale told in two parts: one note sent to his ex girlfriend after discovering his Crap Email on our site, one sent to us. (And yes, I bought Ayn Rand's journals last weekend and have been crafting a primer on why she is to be avoided. Although that will seem rather unnecessary in a moment.)
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save your life, cheap!
How The He's Just Not That Into You Guy Actually Helped Me Get Over My (Married) (Strip Club DJ) Ex-Boyfriend
Tormented? Driven witless? 99 problems but therapy bills ain't one? Welcome to "Save Your Life, Cheap!" in which we write about the dumb things that get America's uninsured through hard times. AA meetings, James Joyce, Ani di Franco, suicide hotlines…anything nonalcoholic can apply, the more embarrassing the better. Which brings me to: self-help. In our first installment, Sephora Spy's Loren Hunt reviews the $1 book that got her through the worst breakup ever.
So, it's probably safe to make the baseline assumption that self-help books are not the kind of thing that anyone reads because they think it's cool. For some reason, self-loathing became more inherently cool than trying to fix problems, which would explain the aura of lameness surrounding self-help books: the corny covers, the corny catchphrases, the corny jacket photos, and the corny titles, which are invariably presented in a corny (and really large, readable) font. There are no cool self-help books. Cool people do not write self-help books. Happy people write them. And they could give a fuck who thinks they're cool. And you know who else doesn't give a fuck who thinks they're cool? A 23-year-old stripper who just used up every last shred of self-regard finally "breaking up" with the three-timing strip club DJ she had been fucking for the past year. And that, friends, is how I came to appreciate It's Called A Breakup Because It's Broken, the second offering from Greg Berendt of He's Just Not That Into You fame.
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douche du jour
Meet Chris, Scruffy British Everydouche. He Interviewed All His Ex-Girlfriends For A Documentary. Turns Out They're Still Scarred!
I am fairly certain Chris Waitt is an incorrigible douchebag but I will pay to see his movie anyway because he has done something horrendously cynical and at once infuriatingly smart/totally obvious, which is to say: he went back and interviewed all his ex-girlfriends to ask why they kept dumping him and made it into a movie called A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures— trailer after the jump — which is out next week in… London. (But you can, um, upload a Facebook widget at the website!) Anyway, the point is, it seems all Chris's girlfriends dumped him for the same reason, because at some point everyone wearies of waiting around for the satisfaction of being dumped, and when you get to that point you're generally too busy trying to decide whether to target your contempt at yourself/him to even think to articulate any specific grievances for the sake of hearing yourself talk. So Chris goes back to hear what they would have said. (And also get spanked by a dominatrix.) Most of them blocked it out obviously! "All I remember is…you were a jerk," says this one, adding semi-poignantly: More »
Um, so "Vows" this weekend…between the word "excruciating" and the surveying everyone on "how they knew"… and the fact that this guy couldn't even figure out how he felt about this woman after 17 months in Africa I think it is safe to say it was the most depressing thing ever. (Fine, "ever" in that section.) Is Jonathon (spelling: what's with?) just gay? Or is it common for dudes to act like this? Discuss. [NYT]
Ready? Set? No.
What If Love & Marriage Do Not Go Together Like A Horse & Carriage?
Me and my old man have been together for over three years now; we've been living together since March, 2007. Which is why this article by my buddy and coconspirator Doree Shafrir in this week's Observer hit sometimes uncomfortably close to home. It's a musing of sorts on longterm relationships and cohabitation and why people get married or why they don't. Doree describes a cocktail party where she runs into an old friend. "When we started talking, the topic of my boyfriend came up, and then it came up that we were living together, and then Max looked at my left hand and said, 'Oh, I was just checking to see if you had a ring. But you guys aren’t engaged?' This was a question-statement." She managed to capture perfectly the profound ambivalence of relationship status; even when you're happily ensconced in something serious, there's often internal and external pressures that make you question your choices. More »
web of lies
Online Dating Expert Reveals Not-So-Secret "Secrets"
Jane Coloccia, now 45, spent eight years online dating. That's about 200 dates. Now she is an "expert" at online dating, which means she has a book, of course: Confessions of an Online Dating Addict: A True Account of Dating and Relating in the Internet Age. Coloccia says, "I would go on three or four dates a week. One Sunday I had three dates — brunch, lunch and dinner." It would be safe to say that she loved the attention. "It does get very seductive as it is nice to open up an email and someone to say you are beautiful and they want to meet you," she explains. Anyway, Coloccia says: "My impression before I did this was that the people online were weirdos, but that is just not the case." Wow, really? People online are like, normal? What a revelation! Plus — you're not going to believe this — sometimes married men will post profiles online! More »
failure to launch
Living At Home In Your 20s Is Not Really Ideal For Anyone Involved
Every year when a new crop of grads emerges from that beer-sticky collegiate womb, this article gets written — you know the one, about how more and more 20-somethings are living with their parents instead of living on their own. All of these articles, including the most recent ones from the Wall Street Journal and the AP, claim a demographic shift since the 60s, when only 10.9% of men aged 25-24 lived with their parents, compared with 14.3% today. The reasons given for the preponderance of "incomplete launches" are usually the rising costs of housing, wage stagnation, and the extended adolescence that is currently in societal vogue. More »
zen attachment
Sexless Monk Marriage Appears To Verge On Giving World The Next "Virgin Birth"
Michael Roach and Christie McNally have sort of the opposite of an "open marriage": Never separated by more than fifteen feet...they do not fuck. They breathe in unison, thanks to all the yoga — "We are always inhaling at the same moment and we are always exhaling at the same moment," she says — but have apparently never tried to apply this skill to the simultaneous orgasm-thing the Cosmos are always talking about. They fell in love during a three-year silent meditation...but falling in love wasn't allowed, because they are Buddhist monks. So they plumbed the depths of their souls for a way to reconcile monastic emptiness and austerity with romance and...came up with an ingenious partnership whereby they do everything completely together, including reading books (one waits till the other is finished to flip the page!) and determining their "look" of the moment. ("He let his hair grow long like hers and became taut and lean in a way he was not before.") The story sort of leaves you wondering how he managed to Zen-ify his $100 million jewelry fortune, as do lines like this: More »
arabian nights
Strict Rules In Saudi Arabia Render Romance Elusive, But Not Dead
The New York Times has a series of articles on Love in Saudi Arabia. That's capital L "Love," the romantic kind of love as seen in movies and sung about in pop songs. The articles focus on Riyadh, which has strict Islamic laws. Women and men are severely segregated. Women are not allowed to be in a public place alone, without a man. Men are not allowed in malls because they may see women shopping. Women have only recently been able to drive; they are usually driven around the city in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and universities, and eat in "family" sections of restaurants, which are partitioned from the sections used by single males. But in a country where half of the population is under 25 years old, hormones and dreams are flourishing. So how do you fall in Love? More »
a matter of perspective
What Constitutes a Dry Spell?
I like sex a lot. There, I've said it. I have had my moments in life when I thought that I ought not to like it that much, when I was embarrassed by how much I like it, when I've blushed when a dude has said something along the lines of "Wow, you seem to have a lot more fun than most women." I've been a serial monogamist; the girl that doesn't want to do it on the first date; the girl who wants to do it on the first date but won't; and at some point I thankfully graduated to being a woman who has sex when I want to have sex with a given person who is equally willing. Also, I got off the Pill, got my heart broken a bunch, realized I might not actually "find" someone permanent, stopped judging myself and turned 30, and between all of that my libido kind of went through the roof. Last night, I complained to Anna that, having recently ended a thing with a guy, I was already feeling the weight of the dry spell. Yeah, it's been a whole ten days since I had sex and I'm complaining that this is a dry spell. Let's all join me after the jump to wonder what's wrong with me. More »
some say the world will end in fire
Making Out In Public: Do You Care That It's Gross?
A Memphis high school principal publicly outed a bunch of gay kids when she posted a list of couples teachers had told her were "known couples" in hopes of shaming them out of making out in the hallways. And yes, that is mindbogglingly outrageous — as opposed to merely "sad," which is how I characterized it before I realized many of the couples had no public makeout history — but the ACLU is on it and I feel there is a more important matter at hand, because it is Friday, and a bunch of you are invariably going to be engaging in Public Displays of Affection tonight. And I'm okay with that. This morning I revealed that I had once been kicked out of a bar for making out. I like making out in bars and on street corners sometimes, because making out at home on your couch gets old and inevitably leads to fucking, and you can't run errands or get drunk while you're fucking. But sometimes I forget how it makes others feel. More »
clips
30 Rock's Jenna: "Love Is Going Downstairs To The Burger King To Poop"
On last night's 30 Rock Liz Lemon's smarmy ex-boyfriend, Dennis, comes back into the picture. Dennis, a beeper salesman/loser/pork-pie-hat-enthusiast, becomes a New York City hero and minor celebrity by saving a stranger from being run over by an oncoming subway car. In the clip above, Liz tries to explain to her coworker, Jenna, why she keeps getting back together with Dennis: because, although she works so hard at everything else in her life, being with Dennis is easy. Jenna responds that love isn't "easy", "It's hiding who you are at all times. It's wearing make up to bed and going downstairs to the Burger King to poop." Swoon!
catch me a catch
Is Matchmaking The New Online Dating?
Patti Stanger, aka Bravo's Millionaire Matchmaker, just got a six-figure book deal to dispense her dating advice to the literate public. That deal was reported yesterday by GalleyCat, and today, the Christian Science Monitor has a profile of another California-based yenta, Julie Ferman. In eight years, Ferman, who runs a business called "Cupid's Coach," "has paired 100 couples who married or are still together," reports the Monitor. Apparently there are 1,500 independent matchmakers in the US, and part of their current resurgence is due to the fact that online dating freaks some people out: according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project , 66% of internet users believe online dating is dangerous. More »
Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend
Remember the 3 Reasons Why Smart Women Love Baseball? Here's number 1.1: couples who watch baseball together may be more likely to stay together. At some point in the 1990s, Howard Markman of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, did a survey — "for fun" — when Denver was considering bringing the Rockies to the city. And based on his "results", he concluded that "you're 28 percent more likely to get a divorce if you live in a town that wants a professional baseball team." Yeah it's probably bullshit, (you can read more here), but as a soon-to-be-married major baseball fan, I can use all the excuses to go to the ballpark I can get. [Divorce360]
scary sadshaws
