4 April 06 in Found
Let’s face it: the saga of the single white female looking for love (or lust) in the big city has been done. To fucking death. While there are still occasional standouts in the genre, when I read yet another why-can’t-I-find-a-decent-man blog, watch yet another Sex and the City-esque program, or wipe my ass with pages torn from yet another cynically-marketed chick-lit novel, I feel like I’m stuck in a recursive loop. Everything there is to say about white bourgeois pairings has been said a million times already.
This is why Flint had me at “hello.” Not only does he offer an all-too-rare male perspective on sex and dating in the big city, but his blog reflects the true diversity of New York relationships—a far cry from the whitewashed fantasyland we usually read about. Flint sounds neither boastful nor apologetic; he reveals his inner life rather than simply rattling off a litany of conquests.
There’s a poem I read in some lurid Marilyn Monroe bio when I was about 13 that I’ve never been able to put out of my head. It’s something about, “This is the wisdom, to make prayers and wish nothing of the the gods, to kiss the lips and stroke the hair, to have, to hold and in time, let go.” I’ve never been able to find the book again to get it right, but that pretty much sums up my approach to relationships.
He must be doing something right—you didn’t hear it from me, but the blogger chicks at the NYC Perverts’ Saloon were making goo-goo eyes at him all night.
[Props to Chelsea Girl]
More: Sexblogs,
Blogging,
New York,
Black,
Relationships
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27 March 06 in Commentary
I’ve been puzzling over this article published in the Washington Post on Sunday.
The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States. In 2001, according to the U.S. Census, 43.3 percent of black men and 41.9 percent of black women in America had never been married, in contrast to 27.4 percent and 20.7 percent respectively for whites. African American women are the least likely in our society to marry. In the period between 1970 and 2001, the overall marriage rate in the United States declined by 17 percent; but for blacks, it fell by 34 percent. Such statistics have caused Howard University relationship therapist Audrey Chapman to point out that African Americans are the most uncoupled people in the country.
The author goes on to cite several factors she sees as primarily responsible for the decline in the black marriage rate:
Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a package deal that comes with marriage. Moreover, in an era of brothers on the “down low,” the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the decline of the stable blue-collar jobs that black men used to hold, linking one’s fate to a man makes marriage a risky business for a black woman.
I think the phenomenon is less attributable to race per se than to class. My analysis here is admittedly unscientific, but those in my peer group who went on to college, stuck it out and committed themselves to careers were more likely to end up in stable relationships, regardless of race. And they’ve done so in roughly equal percentages. In fact, the only out-of-wedlock births among my diverse high school peer group involved white couples.
Not to gloss over the issue of race—the cycle of disenfranchisement, poverty and lowered expectations is certainly a huge factor here—but considering either race or class in a vacuum doesn’t yield much insight.
More: Relationships,
Black,
Racial Bias
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