Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life

Front Cover
Basic Books, Sep 27, 2011 - Family & Relationships - 280 pages

Romance and love are in a state of crisis: Statistically speaking, young women today are living romantic lives of all kinds—but they’re still feeling bogged down by social, cultural, economic, and familial pressures to love in a certain way. 

Young women in the modern world have greater flexibility than ever when it comes to who we choose to love and how we choose to love them; but while social circumstances may have changed since our parents’ generation, certain life expectations remain. 

In Outdated, Samhita Mukhopadhyay addresses the difficulty of negotiating loving relationships within the borderlands of race, culture, class, and sexuality-and of holding true to our convictions and maintaining our independence while we do it. Outdated analyzes how different forms of media, cultural norms, family pressure, and even laws, are produced to scare women into believing that if they don’t devote themselves to finding a man, they’ll be doomed to a life of loneliness and shame. 

Using interviews with young women that are living around, between, within, and outside of the romantic industrial complex, Mukhopadhyay weaves a narrative of the alternative ways that women today have elected to live their lives, and in doing so offers a fresh, feminist look at an old topic: How do diverse, independent young women date happily and successfully—and outside of the box?

From inside the book

Contents

The New Problem That Has NO NAME
6
Feminism Didnt Ruin Dating Dating Ruined Dating
19
Searching For Citizenship In The State Of Love
41
Cinderella 20
62
Top Five Sexist Myths
84
Single And Lovin It Sorta
110
Nice Guys Pickup Artists And The Masculinity Crisis
133
Dating While Feminist DWF
154
Naughty Girls Need Love Too
176
The Art of Feminist Romantic Maintenance
203
Notes
225
Acknowledgments
232
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

Samhita Mukhopadhyay is a writer, speaker and technologist residing in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Executive Editor of the popular website Feministing.com and is the author of Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life. Mukhopadhyay is also co-host of the podcast Opinionated on Citizen Radio. She has written for multiple outlets including GOOD Magazine, The Nation, The American Prospect, Alternet and the Guardian UK. She has been profiled in The Globe and Mail, The Rumpus, Salon, India Currents Magazine, Nirali Magazine, Brown Girl Magazine, Rabble.ca and on Alternet.

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