Escaping the Echo Chamber

[Alatar]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/trump-s ... cines.html

So, a lifeline for the dying, or a get out of jail free card for Big Pharma?

[River]

So my employer sells equipment to Big Pharma as well as Little Pharma and the product line I'm personally involved with is targeted towards, among other markets, gene therapy. As a result I keep abreast of these goings on. My feelings are extremely mixed. On one hand, safe and effective is a pretty solid standard to hold drugs to. On the other, getting over that line is a brutal affair indeed for everyone, most especially patients. What ultimately worries me is how informed the informed consent is going to be if the drug offered to the desperate and dying hasn't been tested. Also, I have scientific concerns. Since Derek Lowe's a better writer than me I'll link to his take.

[Frelga]

From what I read, it's option 3, unnecessary. The FDA already has a system in place to approve the use of experimental medicine to terminally ill patients. Again, from what I read, it's working just fine.

[Alatar]

This is pretty long but worth a read.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boys ... -rjzz96t96

[Dave_LF]

I'm not curious enough to give them the personal information they're demanding in exchange for being allowed to read the article. Care to summarize (or adequately pique my curiosity )?

[River]

I'm with Dave. It does look interesting, though. The part alcohol plays in sexual shenanigans is an elephant in the room. Consent's an important thing but you can't give or get it while impaired.

[Alatar]

Ok, I'm a subscriber. Hope its ok sharing the full article.

Boys, sex and consent in the MeToo era
Just three years ago British university campuses were known for their hook-up culture. In the wake of the MeToo movement, Ben Machell talks to young men navigating a new dating landscape. Get drunk and make a move? It’s complicated...

The Times, June 23 2018, 12:01am

Monty Alexander is a 22-year-old engineering student from Worcestershire. He is skinny, puckishly handsome, has tousled sandy hair and wears a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He arrives holding his skateboard – “I skate a lot; it’s my favourite thing” – but he also works part-time as a tennis coach and enjoys making mixtapes, which he posts online.

He grew up in the middle of the countryside, attended Rugby School and has an easy, offbeat charm. Monty lost his virginity when he was 17, which was more or less standard for his peer group. “I’d never had a serious relationship until I went to university,” he says. “Because boarding school is kind of weird.”

But then he moved to London to begin his degree. He did what everyone else did and downloaded Tinder. Suddenly, he found that he was meeting quite a few girls and having quite a bit of sex. In fact, he was meeting quite a lot of girls and having quite a lot of sex. “I got a bit carried away,” he says, sheepishly. “All my male hormones were rushing around my body wanting to do this … thing.”

So he kept doing it: swapping messages with girls, meeting them, sleeping with them, then fading away as quickly as he had appeared. It was exciting at first but it wasn’t long before the novelty started to wear off. For one thing, there was a part of him that began to worry he wasn’t good enough in bed. Monty knows he is the product of a highly sexualised culture – “Pornography is everywhere, in every advert, in every music video, in everything online” – and he is self-aware enough to appreciate the expectation-warping effect this can have. But still, he’s only human. “I think guys who watch porn build up this idea that they should be able to last for two hours and do all this crazy shit. It puts a lot of pressure on you. You think, ‘Oh, girls expect you to do all these things.’ ”

But at the same time he admits that “to some extent, I started thinking of girls as objects”, approaching them only with the endgame of his own sexual gratification in mind. He knew this was bad – he still considered himself a romantic – but his hormones kept compelling him to do this … thing. He says that he was scrupulous about making sure that everything he did with his partners was consensual – “I kept saying to them, ‘Do you want to do this?’ ” – but from how he describes it, it’s as if the prospect of sex made him feel a bit agitated when he was around a girl. “When you’re with them it’s like, OK, when are we going to do this thing? It’s all focused on one point.”

Even if he hooked up with somebody who was absolutely gorgeous – “someone who was incredible” – it never felt like the air-punch moment he assumed it would. And afterwards, he was back where he started, scrolling through Tinder, looking for the next girl. “It’s just quite hard being a guy, because everything is about sex,” he says, almost plaintively.

Do you feel sorry for Monty? It is possible that you don’t. It is possible that you think there are worse things to deal with than being a priapic 22-year-old in a world of almost limitless sexual possibility. And perhaps you’d be right. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for a generation of young men, sex has never been less straightforward. On the one hand, there’s the ubiquity of dating apps, hook-up culture and the steady drip effect of online porn on their psyche. On the other, there is the impact of the MeToo movement, popular feminism and the introduction of consent workshops at a growing number of schools and universities. What’s it like trying to navigate all this? And are young men doing a good enough job of it?

This is an important question. Three years ago, I wrote about sex on British university campuses. The conclusion, arrived at by both male and female students, was that there was a huge problem. And the problem was that far too many young men were being sexually aggressive. They made jokes about rape. They tried to force their hands down girls’ skirts on dancefloors. They were reluctant to take no for an answer. It was something that had got out of hand and that universities struggled – and still struggle – to manage.

Three years on, there are signs that more male students are thinking about how they and their friends behave around women. Richard is 19 and studies engineering science at Oxford University, which introduced compulsory consent classes in 2016. “Consent is such a hot topic at Oxford that on a night out we’ll pull a friend off a girl and say, ‘Step back. Don’t take her home. She’s not fit to provide consent,’ if we think that the girl is too drunk or that he’s too drunk to see that,” he says. This might sound a little extreme, yanking your mate away from a girl he’s snogging in case either of them are too tipsy, but Richard is only trying to help. Because while he’s concerned for the wellbeing of girls he is also, like many new students, concerned for himself and his friends.

“There is a culture of fear for boys about consent,” he says. “You don’t want to make the girl uncomfortable, of course. But you want to protect yourself. Everyone is terrified of doing something that could make them look bad. We’ve seen and heard of older boys being accused of rape or sexual assault, and we don’t want to be in that position. Even when allegations are withdrawn, we’ve seen how reputations are ruined. I know three or four boys who have been accused, everybody knows. It’s why I never get too drunk.”

James, who is 20 and studies human, social and political sciences at Cambridge, takes this one step further. He will not allow himself to get drunk at all when on a night out. “I really believe someone can’t give consent once they have had alcohol. And people find non-verbal cues difficult. I know that a lot of my friends worry about having slept with a girl but her ‘yes’ not actually meaning ‘yes’. Consent is a continuous thing. Just because someone wants to have sex doesn’t mean that they can’t change their minds during the act.” As a result of this, James believes there is a lot more “sober sex” going on, aided and abetted by dating apps, which allows you to meet people without having to hit a bar or nightclub. “None of this means that there is any less sex at uni now,” he says. “But no one gloats about it.”

There is a culture of fear for boys about consent. We’re terrified of looking bad
This is a view that recurs, and it’s striking. Young men like James, Richard and Monty genuinely – genuinely – do not think it’s cool to go on about how many people you’ve shagged. It’s not big and it’s not clever. In fact, there has emerged, possibly for the first time ever, a slang term for a guy who sleeps around that is wholly derogatory: “f***boy”.

“Nobody wants to be called a f***boy,” says Richard. “It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot,” explains Oliver, 17 and doing his A levels. “It’s no longer cool to be considered a ‘player’. Girls won’t go near somebody with that reputation.” Monty admits, grimacing, that during his first year in London, he did develop a reputation as a f***boy. “I don’t think there’s a good way to portray it. Because at the end of the day, it’s hooking up with lots of girls without leaving too much emotional attachment.”

There are, I’m sure, young guys who might think that this sounds absolutely ideal. But the fact that there are now plenty who think it’s not something to be proud of is interesting. Dexter is 24 and works in fashion PR. He thinks that, as a whole, he and his peers are more likely to think about how their actions make others feel. “I think with our generation, and the big push there’s been on thinking about mental health, it ties in to how we approach girls or guys. There’s a lot of self-awareness. You start to think, ‘Oh … By me doing this, is it going to have a terrible effect on me or anyone around me?’ ” Perhaps this is just part of being in Generation Snowflake and being constantly anxious about protecting the feelings of others. But then, perhaps that’s fine? Perhaps you’d rather your daughter went out with someone like Dexter than someone who relishes the idea of being a callous f***boy?

Actually, it’s pretty unlikely your daughter is going to end up going out with Dexter, not least because he’s gay. He’s sitting beside Tom, a 22-year-old from Surrey who has a beefcake physique and cropped peroxide hair. Tom is thoughtful and self-possessed. Like everyone else, he thinks that the idea that men should be lauded for shagging around is “antiquated” and he’s been with his girlfriend since they were 14, albeit with a 3-year break during his time at university. “We have a very enjoyable sex life,” he says, without bravado. “And I think I only have that because I know her really well and I know myself really well, so that awkwardness isn’t there. In an ideal world, you want everyone to be able to tell someone, ‘This is what I like. This is what I don’t like.’ ”

Tom says that recently he was watching TV and there was a woman who was talking about how parents should ask for their baby’s consent before changing their nappy. “Obviously, she got a lot of flak,” he says. “But I agreed with the core principle. It’s teaching you that, if you’re a human, you’re in charge of your body. Right now, there might be some pushback to consent workshops. But when they become just a normal thing in society, there’ll be a lot more people who feel empowered.”

A reliance on dating apps and social media as a way of meeting people means that you often have a fairly good idea of whether you’re going to sleep with someone before you’ve even spoken to them. Which Dexter laments. “It’s strange, because as soon as you meet, it’s like, ‘OK, we’ve had a drink. Now let’s go have sex.’ There’s no middle ground. I don’t think our generation knows how to woo people any more. Only once the phone’s out of your hand, you lose that confidence. I know that I can easily talk to ten different guys on Grindr. But put me in the same room as them? I’d just walk out.”

Monty describes how once he actually started talking to a girl who was working in a bakery shop and ended up asking her out on a date. “She was like, ‘No one ever asks me that in person.’ None of her friends had ever been asked on a date in person. It’s weird that what’s so unusual for us is so normal for you,” he says, meaning me, a 36-year-old. But he also suspects that his peers make out that they don’t approach women in real life because they are being respectful, whereas really, they just don’t know what to do.

Everyone is aware of the MeToo movement, and it informs how they behave around the opposite sex. Which is, of course, the point. Tom says that he might compliment a girl about how she looks and then immediately wish he hadn’t. “I’ll think, oh crap, do they think that’s OK? Did I make them feel insecure about something?”

From left: Monty, 22; Tom, 22; Dexter, 24From left: Monty, 22; Tom, 22; Dexter, 24
DAN KENNEDY
Dexter rolls his eyes. “In the heterosexual world, it’s a minefield,” he says. “I don’t know how you do it.” Gay men, he says, don’t really have to worry to the same extent. “I think the MeToo movement is a good thing, and I’m probably going to sound a bit crazy by saying this, but women seem to be taking it a bit too far. You can’t even compliment a woman without her saying, ‘Enough’s enough!’ ”

This, however, isn’t something that seems to bother the rest of the boys. None of them seems to think – or even hint – that it’s stupid or frustrating or ‘PC gone mad’. It’s just another thing they know that they have to think about. Monty is right: when you’re a 19-year-old boy, for better or worse, everything really is about sex. So is Dexter: it can be a minefield. And that can be difficult, not least for the girls who have to live with it. But I think this lot are doing their best. They’re trying harder than a lot of guys I know.

After his year of shagging around, Monty says he stopped and took stock. He deleted Tinder and his social media accounts, stopped watching anything that objectified women. “And since doing that, I’ve seen that my life has progressed,” he says. He no longer sees girls as being potential sexual partners. He has a proper girlfriend now, which may or may not be a coincidence. “I think there’s a change happening and guys are giving up some of their freedom,” he says, meaning they are making themselves more accountable when it comes to sex and relationships. “But at the end of the day, it’s worth it. It’s better to have a guy having to think about what would happen if he crossed a line than to have a girl feel haunted and affected sexually,” he says, before picking his skateboard up to go. “It seems like a no-brainer.”

THE VIEW FROM A MAN ON CAMPUS
‘A part of growing up that’s supposed to be fun and exploratory is now more complicated than ever’

The party’s almost over, or it should be. About ten or eleven people have stayed behind after a surprise gathering for a friend has petered out. One of the hosts – someone I know well – invites a girl up to his room. After a while, he comes downstairs to tell everyone he’s had sex with her. Another friend suggests that maybe he’ll join in. He knocks on the bedroom door, and she says she’s OK with it, and then the two of them have sex with her. The two boys come down again – dope has been smoked; people are laughing. A third boy now goes into the upstairs bedroom. From what my friend later tells me, she had not slept with any of them before. When she comes down she tells the remaining guests she’s left her pants in the upstairs room. “I won’t be awkward about it if you won’t be,” she says, and leaves.

All the participants are from the same social circle at the same university. All three of them had sex with her (and she with them) one after another. The experience was consensual. And yet this was more than just another night of easy sex, freely given. It was something more cold and transactional. They weren’t just in it for the sex. They were in it for the laughs. For the one-upmanship. For the bragging rights.

Stories like this are commonplace in my world – a world of clever, well-to-do undergraduates exploring all the possibilities of sex, drugs and alcohol. Nearly everyone I know is aware of someone who has been involved with, witnessed or heard of incidents like this. Some of these acts are filmed, and videos sent around with emoji-laden jokes via WhatsApp and Snapchat. Even when not, the stories are told over and over. There’s the one about the two women told to “swap over” while sleeping with two best friends, ending up in a foursome neither had planned. Or the one about the boy who turns up to a date with an overnight bag and the girl who lets him stay over for sex, too embarrassed to say no.

Those reports you’ve been reading about racist university WhatsApp groups and drunken misogynistic rugby-club chants are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a sliding scale of people seeing what they can get away with. And when such behaviour is so commonplace, it is increasingly difficult to work out what’s normal for the rest of us.

My own rules of engagement are simple. I find that asking a straightforward question does not ruin the moment or take all the fun out of “the chase”. If the answer is yes, then great. If it’s no, you don’t have sex. How can there be any appeal in trying to have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you?

But in the light of recent events I have questioned my own behaviour. Have I manipulated someone into sex? Did I miss non-verbal cues? Were we both too drunk? How exactly did we end up in bed? Oh, I remember she asked me to come up to her room, and to get up and put some music on, so it must be fine But she said she was really hungover the next day, and then didn’t reply to my text asking her out for a drink.

If that wasn’t complicated enough, my friends and I have grown up watching hours and hours of online porn. For many young people (mostly, though not exclusively, men), porn has taken the place of sex education. Many of the questions we’ve been afraid to ask as teens have been answered in a totally fictional and often extreme online world. No wonder so many young couples regularly film themselves having sex. Sending “nudes” and “sexting” are not just the new normal; they’re old news. But these aren’t just for private consumption. We’ve all seen a video or a picture that was not meant for us.

I’m as comfortable as I can be with how I have navigated the consent issue. I’ve never pressured a woman into sex, but I’m not totally off the hook – I’ve certainly lied about my feelings to get past first base. As a young man, post-MeToo, you have to think a lot about it, and that’s a good thing.

But an essential part of growing up that is meant to be clumsy, fun and exploratory is now more complicated than ever. We’re all too aware how easy it would be to trip up walking down that corridor of uncertainty. We debate the issues. We talk endlessly about Harvey Weinstein, [American actor] Aziz Ansari, Trump and #Time’sUp. These conversations often seem a bit abstract, as if these things are taking place in a world far removed from our own.

But they aren’t. They’re far closer to home than we think.

WHAT YOUNG WOMEN SAY
‘I’ve been kissing a boy and he’s stopped before it gets too heavy. Why? They can’t really win’

Four years ago, when I left university, my girlfriends and I were not having conversations about consent. It was not something you brought up if, for example, you perhaps had sex with someone out of politeness. Or out of not really knowing how to say no. Nor was it part of any explanation that, actually, you’d come round from that last £1.50 jägerbomb, and thanks very much but no thanks. These were just encounters we laughed off. Perhaps we didn’t really know how to define them.

But this was before MeToo and the stories that have flooded our social media pages this year. Even for a 25-year-old (read: “woke” millennial) they have been an education. Would I have felt differently about my university experience if I were there now? Probably, yes.

Or would I? “There’s a fine line for boys; we want them to be gentlemen, but we also want a show of masculinity,” says Polly, who is at Cardiff University. “Sometimes I’ve been with a boy and they’ve been so polite and cautious, when actually I just want them to pin me up against a wall and go for it. Or I’ve been kissing and dancing with someone at an after-party, and they stop before anything gets too heavy, and it’s like, why? They can’t really win.”

These women seem very in control and confident, but at times frustrated with how complex dating has become as a result of the wider cultural conversations happening about consent, and how gentlemanly (or downright nervous) boys now are.

“We’re probably the most emotionally intelligent generation ever, but that also means we are questioning and checking in with ourselves, the other person and our friends at every stage of a relationship – from flirting to dating to having sex,” adds Polly.

Lucy, at Newcastle University, agrees. “People still go out, get drunk and go home with each other, but boys seem more cautious about it now,” she says. “Some of my friends have gone on nights out wanting to hook up, but boys have not taken them home, or told them they are too drunk. Boys have become very aware of their behaviour.”

She also says that there seems to be a lack of trust between the sexes as a result of the fear some boys have over being wrongly accused. “There have been a lot of stories about girls who end up calling out boys for rape that end up not being true, and there are no consequences for that. There’s an imbalance of power – boys seem nervous about girls and it means that many recede back into these packs out of fear. I think too many boys are scared to define what is acceptable, so they avoid it all together.”

Of course, while there have been many positive developments, there are exceptions. Gemma, at Durham University, says that there are still some raised eyebrows about what counts as sexual assault, as when she described a particular situation to her friends and was told by them that it would be unfair to “put the boy in a bad light”.

“He came home with me, very drunk,” she explains. “I didn’t want to have sex, kept saying no and asked him to leave. Another time, a boy grabbed my friend between her legs, but everyone just laughed and said he was a really handsy guy – unbelievable in the current climate.” Hannah Rogers

WILL, 18 At school
“There have been a couple of incidents in my year. One boy woke up after a night out to find out that a girl he had been with at the party had been crying because she’d felt something had been relatively forced and she hadn’t liked it. That boy was absolutely horrified. He had no idea how he had been acting and he did everything he could to make it clear to the girl that he hadn’t known that she didn’t want that ship to sail that way. In the end, she did actually feel better, because he made it so clear to her that he was under the impression that she wanted to, which is what was shocking her and making her feel so upset – because she thought she was making it relatively obvious that she didn’t want something to happen and he just didn’t realise. He felt terrible.”

SAM, 20 At Oxford University
“My friends and I avoid going home with girls if we, or they, are too drunk. We all look out for each other on a night out. I think sometimes that the whole discussion of consent, for boys, can come across as an attack. That’s why there is this fear of accusation for boys. There seems to be a misunderstanding somewhere.

“But you can’t assume that a girl is playing hard to get if she is saying no. Things in popular culture – TV, porn – teach that you if a girl says no, it’s a challenge, but I would never think that. ‘Treat them mean, keep them keen,’ no longer applies.”

OLIVER, 20 At boarding school
“I go to quite a ‘laddy’ boarding school and we’ve had three talks already this year about consent. The most recent one we had was about safeguarding, because some of the boys have younger girlfriends, who aren’t legally able to give consent because they are 15, which usually you just wouldn’t think about. But it’s a very ‘hot’ topic at school right now.

“The things boys would say to girls five years ago just wouldn’t slide now. Girls have quite a lot of power. But that can be scary. There is fear of being wrongly accused – like, for example, a boy and a girl have sex, but it transpires that the girl has cheated on her boyfriend and so then claims she didn’t want to have sex with the boy. It doesn’t happen often, but it makes you think twice about sleeping with someone in certain circumstances.”

[Dave_LF]

I'm not sure what to say, except articles like these make me glad I'm old and off the market .

[Frelga]

What is the problem these men are supposed to be having, exactly? What I'm getting from that article is that some of them have to think before having sex, which can only be good, no?

[River]

So to me the dating scene was always impenetrable and hopeless.

There's a cultural transition happening. It's off-balancing. No one knows where the lines are because everyone's aware that the old ones don't work and the new ones haven't been inked in yet. Eventually people will figure it out. Though there were a couple points made that are a little disturbing. One was how the underclassmen (the 18-20 year-olds) have no idea how to woo in person. The other was how the young men are getting their sexual education from porn. Regarding the first, normal face-to-face interactions need to come back into style. Screens are fun but if you can't interact with people without them that's a problem. Regarding the second, well, in some ways it ties into the first and in some ways it is its own thing. I had a boyfriend in college (back before smart phones and social media as we now know it) who looked at so much porn he had no idea how a normal relationship with normal bodies worked. He ended up with huge hangup about his manhood, which was incredibly tedious for me. I'm not sure how to encourage kids to get a proper education on what to expect and how to behave. Maybe some sort of awareness campaign? A disclaimer on the product that says something like "This is entertainment. This is not reality. It is not meant to be educational. Do not assume your partner has even seen or enjoyed what you're about to consume," and then directions to some actual educational material?

One thing I found extremely heartening was the standards that have been long applied to girls (sleeping around is bad) are now being applied to boys. I suppose the correction could just as easily go in the other direction but at least there's a correction. And that there's a push away from drinking. Getting drunk or drugged only confuses the issues around consent. Now they just need to figure out how to talk to each other...

[Primula Baggins]

God, I am so glad I dodged the dating meat market entirely, having settled on The One correctly in 1975. We were so young and innocent that we had no unrealistic expectations. That worked.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Me too (ten years later).

[Primula Baggins]

It’s the kind of good luck that you appreciate more fully as the years go by.

[yovargas]

Keep rubbing it in, guys.

[Primula Baggins]

I'm sorry, yovvy! I know how lucky I was.

I also know that people in our situation get a lot of side-eye, because there's something suspect about hitting the jackpot your first time out. And TBH the side-eyers have a point, because you can also think you hit the jackpot because you're young and romantic and inexperienced, and actually it turns out to be a nightmare.

In fact that's not uncommon at all.

People don't actually feel sure that they've hit that jackpot until they've lived a lot of years and walked a lot of miles together—even after marriage, as we all know, you can discover it wasn't meant to be, wasn't a good thing—maybe is something you must (to save yourself) walk away from.

So there's still a lot of waiting and worrying involved. You're just with the same person the whole time. It's more convenient, but it's certainly not usual.

[Frelga]

It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, young people have no way of knowing who they will be ten, let alone fifty, years in the future so how can they pick a partner for something that's supposed to last that long. On the other, it's easier to mold to each other when you are young. Also, it's true, the good ones do get taken early, so your chances are better if you lock one down quickly.

[yovargas]

I know how lucky I was.

It makes me quite happy that you hit the big jackpot in the relationship lottery. Our most wonderful Prim most certainly deserves it.

Here's the kind of fun y'all are missing out on. In the past couple months, I've jumped back in the wonderful (read: horrible) world of online dating. In that short time I have had three - three! - exchanges that could be summarized as such:

Guy: Hi, I like your profile, you seem nice
Me: Thanks, I like yours too
Guy: Cool! Would you like to meet sometime?
Me: Sure, that would be nice
Guy: Great! I look forward to meeting you.
Me: Me too.
Guy: *silenceforeeeeveeeeer*

This behavior totally, utterly, completely baffles me. WTF is wrong with people?!?


(I was going to post this in the "online dating" thread but if you'll forgive the slight Osgilliation I'll post it here, though Al's very interesting article still deserves a more specific response too.)

[Inanna]

Have you tried responding with a specific action plan, Yov? That’s what I teach my students - when networking don’t leave with a “let’s stay in touch”. That’s a brush off. Follow up with specific actions - here’s my resume, can we have a call next week on Tue or Thu anytime between 10:00 & 3:00 so that I could get your feedback/understand your firm better.

[River]

**wishes I had an Inanna giving me lessons when I was a student

[yovargas]

It's hard to make specific plans with *silenceforeeeeveeeeer*