Lately, I’ve had different girls talk to me about the same topic, sex. While some of my friends are happily married, some of them are still single playing the field, and the rest are just playing everyone in the field! As women in our late 20’s – early 30’s, the idea of dating, hooking up and looking for the one can be so blurry that it just doesn’t seem to work even when we give any of them an honest effort.
More recently than ever, the tone of social media for women have been about empowering themselves, taking charge, being bold etc etc… and that’s what we do: we work hard in our jobs with aims to break the glass ceiling, we work out and get fit because #tonedisthenewsexy, we play hard by travelling and exposing ourselves to all kinds of experiences. But with the emergence of these dating apps, Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Match.com – do we empower ourselves sexually too?
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We know what we want, how we want it and how to get it.
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Keep in mind, we are no longer high school/college girls who are still discovering our lady parts but now embarking on sexual identity and sexual confidence (I just made that up but it sounds about right). So for the phase of one-night-stands and reasons which all more-or-less sound like “because I was drunk” or “because I felt like it”, we find ourselves in the midst of confronting our choices in the worst possible way. As women, there’s always a stigma and double standard and when coupled with Asian-centric values, that standard gets compounded. Welcome to slut-shaming.
So, in my bouts of singledom, I decided to change things up a bit, I would just hold out. I met really great guys who were really awesome and I got to know them better with dinners ending with no more than a Disney-no-tongue-no-touch kiss. For those that I was on the fence with, I would just wait it out until communication got sparse. For the ones I didn’t like, I would take myself out of the equation. One guy went the platonic route when told me he wanted to brainstorm with me, another wanted to fly me out and continue our romance but abruptly ended it. Even though I was still miserable and unlucky in love, I found that my PG-13 rated situations meant that I kept my reputation intact and didn’t feel like I lost anything either.
I’m not trying to preach that empowered women should be saints, but for the girls who have accelerated their “count”, try the other option and get to know someone before jumping into it because I felt more empty with my mistakes than the mismatches I had to go through to find the right guy. Or perhaps ask yourself why you need physical love, are you compensating for something else? We all go through our own journeys to the right path but respecting yourself and having others earn your respect also helps.
But here’s my question, at this day and age, is it worth holding out when it comes to sex? Is it still a thing?
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