A casual shift

Plus: auntie joy, dad friends, Usher's ice cream dimples, ProMommes, and more in the weekend roundup.

Photo: Steve Johnson

Back in my day, circa 2008, the debate was whether women could have casual sex without ruining themselves for love and marriage. That was the big topic of cultural concern. This put many young women like myself in the defensive posture of saying: casual sex is sooo great I love it.

It felt to me like the choice was either: save yourself for marriage, buy into a bunch of retro ideas about women as sexual gatekeepers, or put the full weight of your conviction behind this experience that, ideals and potentialities aside, was filled with inequity.

This week, Emily Leibert reported on women’s bad experiences with casual sex with men. It is very upsetting to read about these encounters, which, as she puts it, range “from awkward and annoying to harrowing and traumatic.” Sadly, plenty of what’s discussed has been true over the years, while much of it feels newly and distinctly awful. But it’s remarkable to see the current flood of young women saying: this sucks, no thank you.

To the links!

Aunties are everything.

How do women hit a breaking point “in a way that's accommodated by our world?” asks Chelsea Bieker in a conversation with

Sara Petersen

. Highly relevant to my piece this week on the current canininomenon! As is this forthcoming book (hat tip to

Cindy DiTiberio

).

Jazmine Hughes on Usher’s falsetto, dimples (“so deep I could eat ice cream out of them”), and brand of sexy. “I feel myself start to slide down the Kinsey scale,” she writes.