I Always Forget I'm Just a Vagina on Legs, Like All the Other Vaginas on Legs

This latest from Salon's "We're liberal, but not in that way ladies" department infuriated me. I was left sputtering with a rage so profound, I couldn't even figure out exactly what was setting me off.

Not a day goes by when we don't hear about the incredible accomplishments of today's kick-butt young women. They outnumber men in college and they are out-earning their male peers when they first enter the work world -- to such a degree that many consider it evidence of a "boy crisis." But the authors of a new book, "Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying," say all this success has come at a great cost to women's sexual bargaining power. When it comes to relationships, they say men are calling all the shots -- which means less commitment and more sex.

Because women want wedding rings and men want a place to stick their dicks, hurhur! And it's all your fault, girls, for insisting upon educations and job opportunity. If you'd just stay in the kitchen where you belong, you'd . . . actually, even this article admits that college-educated women are the most likely to get married and stay married, but why let facts get in the way of slut shaming?

I measure the price of sex in a couple of different ways. I didn't write this theory personally, but social psychologists claim that men's sex has no value per se. In the world of prostitution you never see women paying men for sex. Men pay women for sex, men will pay men for sex, but women don't pay men for sex. You get a sense that she has something of value that he wants.

Any discussion of this sort of thing without acknowledging the patriarchy we live, as well as gender roles and the perceived duality of female desire (the whole Madonna/whore thing), as well as the inherent fear of female desire in our society is just missing the point. Or misogyny.

Beyond that, it's absurd to state that men pay prostitutes for sex because they can't get sex any other way. Seriously, Charlie Sheen hired a hooker because Charlie Sheen can't get laid? Really? I'm just not buying that. Some men might pay for sex because they can't get it for free, but the real appeal of bought sex is that you get exactly what you want, when you want it, and then you leave.

Anyway, I can't possibly review everything that is wrong with this article, because there's just so much and I'm only one vagina with legs, so let's cut to the money shot:

That's a terrible environment to try to get men to commit. The women wind up competing with each other -- not necessarily to marry because they're not interested in marriage at that point -- but they compete with each other to attract men. How do you compete with other women to attract men? Well, sex is the way to get his attention. It's the opposite of a cartel effect where women would say, "All right, we need to band together and artificially restrict the price of sex and get it high, even if we don't want to, in order to extract things from men." It used to be women would shame each other for selling low.

. . .

I think it's a bad idea for women collectively to compete with each other for men and to just sort of say I'll do whatever it takes to be in a relationship with men. Women need to somehow reacquire control over the direction of relationships. They feel like they don't have control. They feel like he calls the shots. That is most unfortunate. Part of that, I think, involves -- and this is what some women don't want to hear -- the artificial restriction of sex until later in the relationship. You might not feel like doing that but it's for a greater future goal. Men who have sex early in a relationship feel little impulse to make strong commitments. Women desperately want that to not be true, but it is. Men and women make relationship commitments very differently. It doesn't sound modern and it doesn't sound natural, but I don't care what it sounds like, I'm telling you how things work. Giving it away early gives a great deal of power to him.

Because men don't care about women, just about the vaginas we're attached to. And if he can't get access to my vagina as quickly as he can get access to another vagina, he'll go find that other vagina. The fact that he might like me as a person, might find me interesting, nice, funny, smart and great to hang out with is irrelevant as long as that other vagina is easy to access.

Never forget, ladies, that we're interchangeable. Men have no interest in anything going on above our waists, other than the boobies!- so you're just like any other vagina out there. And if you allow access to your vagina easily, you're ruining it for every other vagina-carrier out there. Which is so rude! We need to form vagina cartels! (He actually says this, btw.)