Wife and Number Two daughter should not be left unattended in used book stores. That’s how we ended up with the latest additions to our growing array of used (and all but used up) books: What a Young Wife Ought to Know (1901) and a companion volume, What a Young Husband Ought to Know (1897). Both were part of a “Sex and Self” series on how to live a successful Victorian middle class life. ...

Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake, M.D., the book’s author, was, according to the cover, a professor of obstetrics at Denver Homeopathic Medical School and Hospital. The book carries an endorsement by no less than Elizabeth Stanton, prominent in the abolitionist effort and later prominent in women’s suffrage. I was expecting a casual hoot, looking for antiquated if not dangerous medical advice for women. It was in 1901, after all, that the best of medical attention more or less killed President McKinley after he was shot. I found some of that, but I also found a burgeoning feminist sensibility. Throughout this book the young wife is the equal of the husband, never a mere counterpart.

Dr. Drake has advice on everything, from how to assemble a trousseau before marriage to making wise choices in furniture once a woman is wed. She warns against “ruinous displays at weddings.” Keep it tasteful, and above all affordable. That won’t get into today’s pages of People but, then again, that’s probably a good thing. Some of her advice frankly grates. Drake has ungenerous notions on heredity and how to avoid the faults and transmit the virtues connected to it. It’s pretty clear with which classes she thinks most of those faults lie. Equally grating to some will be her assertion that the locus for what the young wife should know and where she should put her knowledge to use is the home. There she finds her true greatness.

...Dr. Drake sought to produce successful women. And successful women do not derive their happiness by being petted and placated. To do that, she asserts a sexual equality between men and women that surprised me, upsetting my assumptions about the period, and she insists that enforcement of that equality falls upon the woman as she takes responsibility for herself and, among other things, coolly examines a prospective husband.

For the record, I would not have liked filling out the questionnaire Drake envisioned for prospective suitors, but when it comes to my own two daughters yet at home, I may hand it to their future intendeds.

• Do you bring to your bride the same purity that you expect from her?

• What companions have you, whom you would not care to bring to your home or introduce to your wife?

• What in your life and habits have you hidden, and would you still hide from her?

• How many hours of thought have you given to the wise, earnest fitting for fatherhood?

Labels: culture, Fathers, feminism, gender, Marriage, men, motherhood, women

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Polygamy and gay marriage are importantly different, the B.C. Supreme Court has said.

“The alarmist view expressed by some that the recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage will lead to the legitimization of polygamy misses the whole point,” B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman wrote in upholding the polygamy ban last week. Plural marriage is full of “harm,” he says, but gay marriage is not.

The judge is very right. Polygamy has many victims. It often imprisons people in marriages based on sexist rules. It reinforces religious fundamentalism in many cases. Same-sex marriage, by contrast, gives freedom to gays, and arguably to straights as well. It is fundamentalists’ worst nightmare.

But the judge’s ruling does not go far enough in countering the homophobic myth, still prevalent, that a road to tolerance for polygamy has been paved by good gay intentions. When Canada debated same-sex marriage, we heard regularly that gay unions would lead to legalized plural marriage. ...

From a moral and historical perspective, gay marriage is the opposite of polygamy. Straight marriage is somewhere in between. Whereas gay marriage has redefined love and family in a positive way, for gays and straights alike, polygamy buries its head in smothering sand. ...

But the judge also leaves something else a bit unclear: exactly why free choice is inviolable (and constitutionally protected) for gay and straight monogamists, but not for polygamists, too. This is where my own claim – as a gay man who thinks polygamy is retrograde – runs into trouble.

Labels: Canada, feminism, gay marriage, Marriage, polygamy, religion, religious liberty

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...I don’t have children yet, but plenty of others in my cohort — the first in which nontrivial numbers were born hyphenated — do. And reproducing while hyphenated brings inevitable quandaries. I was curious to see how my peers have handled them. So I asked around. What I found was a whole gamut of solutions. The name-blending pioneers now have grandchildren whose names embody an intriguing mix of the traditional and the maverick.

I encountered several women who kept their own hyphenated names when they married, but gave their children the father’s surname. This scenario seems to deviate the least from the mainstream: after all, many other women with single surnames do the same. ...

Same-sex couples face their own quandaries, since there is no tradition to follow. Cora Jeyadame (née Stubbs-Dame), 37, a first-grade teacher in Newton, Mass., was determined to share a name with her child, and to think ahead more than her own parents had.

“It’s a one-generation solution,” she said of hyphenation. She and her wife, whose surname was Jeyapalan, spliced their names together into an entirely new, hyphenless amalgam.

How did they decide on the name? “I actually put it out on Facebook,” she said: “ ‘I challenge you to come up with good combinations.’ ” The winning entry, Jeyadame, is the legal surname of Cora and her 4-month-old; her wife uses it socially.

Naming decisions raise novel questions for hyphenated men. There is little precedent of husbands changing their names at marriage or giving up the prerogative to pass their names on. Traditional practices grew out of a male-dominated culture and a need for simple rules. But there is another, less obvious motive: to hold men accountable for their offspring.

“How do you attach men to children?” said Laurie K. Scheuble, a senior lecturer at Pennsylvania State University who has done several studies on naming practices. Names are “a very functional and practical way” to do so.

But perhaps, in an age when men wear BabyBjorns, it is no longer always necessary. When Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, 32, an English professor who lives in Portland, Ore., married Laura Rosenbaum, he toyed with the idea of a creative synthesis.

Labels: children, culture, Fathers, feminism, gay couples, heteronormativity, men, parenting, women

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...Yet if Swedish executive suites boast 17 percent women and the United States and Britain 14 percent, in Germany it is 2 percent — as in India, according to McKinsey’s 2010 Women Matter report.

One of the countries in most need of female talent — at 1.39 the German birthrate is among the lowest in Europe and labor shortages in skilled technical professions are already 150,000 — Germany is a place where gender stereotypes remain engrained in the mind, and in key institutions across society. ...

Married couples pay a joint tax rate closer to the lower rate the two would pay individually. This effectively subsidizes income inequality between husband and wife, noted Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank. And most schools still end at lunchtime, which has sustained the stay-at-home-mother image of German lore.

To that, add a women’s movement that from 19th-century Social Democrats focused more on protecting women and mothers from harsh capitalism than on the fierce egalitarianism of American, British — or Soviet — counterparts.

“We are still very far from a situation where it’s as normal for women as for men to want both a career and family — even among young women,” said Angelika Dammann, the first and only female board member at software giant SAP. “When you have children, you’re expected to stay home for a significant period; otherwise you are considered a bad mother.” ...

As family minister in Ms. Merkel’s first term, Ms. von der Leyen introduced a 14-month, generously paid shared parental leave in 2007. Two months are reserved for the father; if he does not take them, the government pays for only 12.

She also sponsored a law promising every 1-year-old the right to a nursery place from 2013, and favors all-day schooling — although actually enacting this is up to each of Germany’s 16 Länder, or states.

“Laws help change mentalities,” Ms. von der Leyen has argued.

But Germany lags far behind countries like the United States — where government aid for child care is scant compared with Europe — in getting women into full-time work and senior positions.

Labels: child care, feminism, gender, gender differences, Germany, men, women, work/family policy

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While so many of my friends were enjoying the congenial company of like-minded scholars last weeks at the Law and Religion Roundtable, I spent two days last week with mostly other-minded scholars at the AALS's Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality, presenting some thoughts on the gender theory of complementarity on a panel entitled "Theorizing Gender." (A glance at the program [pdf] for this workshop will give you some sense of how well-receive was my suggestion that many women's religious faith will be an important influence on their views on gender theory.)

That experience caused me to appreciate even more getting the announcement yesterday of the posting of a truly extraordinary article on SSRN: Erika Bachiochi's just-published Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights, 34 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 889 (2011). It's a tour de force of pro-life feminism -- a creative and powerful piece of scholarship. This article is truly an invaluable resource for anyone teaching Con Law or feminist legal theory who wants to do justice to all sides of these arguments. ...

[from the article abstract:] I thus challenge the assumptions underlying the idea that pregnancy and motherhood necessarily undermine equality for women. I argue instead that abortion rights actually hinder the equality of women by taking the wombless male body as normative, thereby promoting cultural hostility toward pregnancy and motherhood. In a legitimate attempt to get beyond the essentialist idea that women’s reproductive capacities should be determinative of women’s lives, pro-choice feminist legal scholars have jettisoned the significance of the body. In rightfully arguing that pregnancy is more than just a biological reality, they discount the fact that pregnancy is a fundamental biological reality. I will show that acknowledging this biological reality—that the human species gestates in the wombs of women—need not necessitate the current social reality that women are the primary (and, too often, sole) caretakers of their children or the social arrangements in which professional and public occupations are so hostile to parenting duties.

Labels: abortion, feminism, gender, law, men, pregnancy, women

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...Yep, Naomi and Stacie and Stephanie and Liz are Mormons. They're members of a large, close-knit network of Mormon lifestyle bloggers -- young stay-at-home-moms who blog about home and hearth, Latter-day Saint-style. From Rockstar Diaries (Naomi) to Underaged and Engaged (Stacie) to Nie Nie Dialogues (Stephanie) to Say Yes to Hoboken (Liz), Mormon lifestyle bloggers occupy their very own corner of the blogosphere.

Their lives are nothing like mine -- I'm your standard-issue late-20-something childless overeducated atheist feminist -- yet I'm completely obsessed with their blogs. On an average day, I'll skim through a half-dozen Mormon blogs, looking at Polaroids of dogs in raincoats or kids in bow ties, reading gratitude lists, admiring sewing projects.

I'm not alone, either. Two of my closest friends -- both chronically overworked Ph.D. candidates -- procrastinate for hours poring over Nat the Fat Rat or C. Jane Enjoy It. A recent discussion of Mormonism on the blog Jezebel unleashed a waterfall of confessions in the comments section from other young non-religious women similarly riveted by the shiny, happy domestic lives of their Latter-day Saint sisters. ...

So why, exactly, are these blogs so fascinating to women like us -- secular, childless women who may have never so much as baked a cupcake, let alone reupholstered our own ottomans with thrifted fabric and vintage grosgrain ribbon? It's not as though we're sniffing around the dark side of the faith, à la "Big Love." And it's not about religion. As someone married to a former Saint (my husband left the church as a teenager), I certainly have no illusions about what life as a Mormon would be like, and I'm sure it's not for me, which makes my obsession with these blogs all the more startling.

Well, to use a word that makes me cringe, these blogs are weirdly "uplifting." To read Mormon lifestyle blogs is to peer into a strange and fascinating world where the most fraught issues of modern living -- marriage and child rearing -- appear completely unproblematic. This seems practically subversive to someone like me, weaned on an endless media parade of fretful stories about "work-life balance" and soaring divorce rates and the perils of marrying too young/too old/too whatever. And don't even get me started on the Mommy Blogs, which make parenthood seem like a vale of judgment and anxiety, full of words like "guilt" and "chaos" and "BPA-free" and "episiotomy." Read enough of these, and you'll be ready to remove your own ovaries with a butter knife.

Labels: childfree, children, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, culture, feminism, Marriage, motherhood, parenting, religion

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Like so many Jewish women, Anne Suissa pursued her education and career with gusto, earning degrees from Cornell and MIT and going on to manage 27 people at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Suissa always knew she wanted marriage and family, but by the time she had found her husband and began trying to have a child, she was in her late 30s. Doctors told her the fertility treatments she had begun would not likely succeed.

Today, the Suissas are parents of two children from Guatemala, both of whom they converted to Judaism. Though their lives are full and rewarding, Suissa still wishes someone had encouraged her to start a family earlier.

In Jewish families, it’s “education, education, education,” she said. “But nobody told me that college might be a good time to meet a nice Jewish boy.”

The general track of Suissa’s life is not unusual among Jewish American women. As a group, they’re highly educated—a fact demographers say contributes to their relatively low fertility rates.

Still longing to be mothers, they often adopt, and frequently, their children are of Latino, Asian or African descent. And that, in turn, is slowly changing the face of American Judaism. ...

The number of childless Jewish women in their early 30s is 54 percent, compared to 28 percent for American women in general, according to the most recent National Jewish Population Survey.

The survey also shows about 5 percent of American Jewish households with children include adopted children, compared to the national rate of 3.7 percent. But unlike Americans in general, the survey notes, Jewish Americans are not having enough children to replace themselves.

Labels: adoption, culture, demographics, feminism, Judaism, religion

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“Girls can’t be guys in matters of the heart, even though they think they can,” says Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, published in 2007.

In her view, “hooking up”—casual sexual activity ranging from kissing to intercourse—places women at risk of “low self-esteem, depression, alcoholism, and eating disorders.” Stepp is only one of half a dozen journalists currently engaged in the business of detailing the dangers of casual sex.

On the other side, pop culture feminists such as Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (2010), argue that the problem isn’t casual sex, but a “moral panic” over casual sex. And still a third set of writers like Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005), questions whether it’s empowering for young women to show up at parties dressed to imitate porn stars or to strip in “Girls Gone Wild” fashion. Levy’s concern isn’t necessarily moral, but rather that these young women seem less focused on their own sexual pleasure and more worried about being seen as “hot” by men.

Following on the heels of the mass media obsession, sociologists and psychologists have begun to investigate adolescent and young adult hookups more systematically. In this essay, we draw on systematic data and studies of youth sexual practices over time to counter claims that hooking up represents a sudden and alarming change in youth sexual culture. The research shows that there is some truth to popular claims that hookups are bad for women. However, it also demonstrates that women’s hookup experiences are quite varied and far from uniformly negative and that monogamous, long-term relationships are not an ideal alternative. Scholarship suggests that pop culture feminists have correctly zeroed in on sexual double standards as a key source of gender inequality in sexuality. ...

The pervasiveness of casual sexual activity among today’s youth may be at the heart of Boomers’ concerns. England surveyed more than 14,000 students from 19 universities and colleges about their hookup, dating, and relationship experiences. Seventy-two percent of both men and women participating in the survey reported at least one hookup by their senior year in college. What the Boomer panic may gloss over, however, is the fact that college students don’t, on average, hook up that much. By senior year, roughly 40 percent of those who ever hooked up had engaged in three or fewer hookups, 40 percent between four and nine hookups, and only 20 percent in ten or more hookups. About 80 percent of students hook up, on average, less than once per semester over the course of college.

In addition, the sexual activity in hookups is often relatively light. Only about one third engaged in intercourse in their most recent hookup. Another third had engaged in oral sex or manual stimulation of the genitals. The other third of hookups only involved kissing and non-genital touching. A full 20 percent of survey respondents in their fourth year of college had never had vaginal intercourse. In addition, hookups between total strangers are relatively uncommon, while hooking up with the same person multiple times is common. Ongoing sexual relationships without commitment are labeled as “repeat,” “regular,” or “continuing” hookups, and sometimes as “friends with benefits.” Often there is friendship or socializing both before and after the hookup. ...

Contemporary hookup culture among adolescents and young adults may rework aspects of the Sexual Revolution to get some of its pleasures while reducing its physical and emotional risks. Young people today—particularly young whites from affluent families—are expected to delay the commitments of adulthood while they invest in careers. They get the message that sex is okay, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize their futures; STDs and early pregnancies are to be avoided. This generates a sort of limited liability hedonism. For instance, friendship is prioritized a bit more than romance, and oral sex appeals because of its relative safety. Hookups may be the most explicit example of a calculating approach to sexual exploration. They make it possible to be sexually active while avoiding behaviors with the highest physical and emotional risks (e.g., intercourse, intense relationships). Media panic over hooking up may be at least in part a result of adult confusion about youth sexual culture—that is, not understanding that oral sex and sexual experimentation with friends are actually some young people’s ways of balancing fun and risk.

Labels: culture, feminism, gender, hooking up, premarital sex, sex, universities, women

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Critics of contract pregnancy contend that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is not simply a biochemical relationship or a matter of contingent physical connection. They also point out that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is different from that between a worker and her material product. The long months of pregnancy and the experience of childbirth are part of forming a relationship with the child-to-be. Elizabeth Anderson makes an argument along these lines. She suggests that the commodification of reproductive labor makes pregnancy an alienated form of labor for the women who perform it; selling her reproductive labor alienates a woman from her “normal” and justified emotions. Rather than viewing pregnancy as an evolving relationship with a child-to-be, contract pregnancy reinforces a vision of the pregnant woman as a mere “home” or an “environment.” The sale of reproductive labor thus distorts the nature of the bond between mother and the developing fetus by misrepresenting the nature of a woman’s reproductive labor as a commodity. What should we make of this argument? ...

Indeed there is a dilemma for those who wish to use the mother-fetus bond to condemn pregnancy contracts while endorsing a woman’s right to choose an abortion. They must hold it acceptable to abort a fetus but not to sell it. Although the Warnock Report takes no stand on the issue of abortion, it uses present abortion law as a term of reference in considering contract pregnancy. Because abortion is currently legal in England, the Report’s position has this paradoxical consequence: one can kill a fetus, but one cannot contract to sell it. One possible response to this objection would be to claim that women do not bond with their fetuses in the first trimester. But the fact remains that some women never bond with their fetuses; some women even fail to bond with their babies after they deliver them.

Are we really sure that we know which emotions pregnancy “normally” involves? Whereas married women are portrayed as nurturing and altruistic, society has historically stigmatized the unwed mother as selfish, neurotic, and unconcerned with the welfare of her child. Until quite recently social pressure was directed at unwed mothers to surrender their children after birth. Thus married women who gave up their children were seen as “abnormal” and unfeeling, and unwed mothers who failed to surrender their children were seen as selfish. Assumptions of “normal” maternal bonding may reinforce traditional views of the family and a women’s proper role within it.

Labels: abortion, feminism, motherhood, pregnancy, surrogate motherhood, women

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In 1969, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law. He later called it the worst mistake of his life. But other states eventually followed California’s lead, and no-fault — under which one spouse can end a marriage, with no proof required of wrongdoing by either party — more or less became law of the land. New York State was the longtime holdout, since South Dakota passed its law in 1985.

That may be about to change. On Tuesday evening, the State Senate approved legislation that would permit no-fault divorce after a marriage has “irretrievably” broken down for six months or more, without the need to identify a fault, like adultery or abandonment. The package must still pass the State Assembly, which is considering two bills that would adopt some version of no-fault divorce.

New York’s failure to permit more accessible divorce has long been denounced as archaic, but longtime opponents of “liberalization” have included the Catholic Church and the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women.

What should the New York Legislature consider as it works out the details of its no-fault measures? What do we know about the effects of no-fault laws in the rest of the country?

* Betsey Stevenson, economist, University of Pennsylvania
* Robin Fretwell Wilson, law professor, Washington and Lee University
* Andrew J. Cherlin, professor of sociology, Johns Hopkins
* Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Institute for American Values
* Marcia Pappas, New York president, National Organization for Women

Labels: divorce, divorce reform, domestic violence, feminism, New York, no-fault divorce

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...Before we get into specifics, a caveat: check with us again in five years. We’re in our late 20s and early 30s, right around the time when biological clocks start ticking and whispers of “Why don’t you just settle down?” get louder. (We’re looking at you, Lori Gottlieb.) So just as NEWSWEEK will never live down its (false) prediction that 40-year-old single women were more likely to be “killed by a terrorist” than to marry, we permit you, friends and readers, to mock us at our own weddings (should they happen). Current data may not yet identify our feelings as a so-called trend, but they certainly show we’re on to something: the percentage of married Americans has dropped each decade since the 1950s, and the number of unmarried-but-cohabiting partners has risen 1,000 percent over the last 40 years. At 28 for men and 26 for women, the median age at which Americans are marrying is at its highest point ever—and even higher among our cohort of urban and educated. Turns out that waiting is a good idea: for every year we put off marriage, our chances of divorce go down.

Which brings us to this question: if you’re going to wait, why do it at all? Like a fifth of young Americans, we identify as secular. We know that having children out of wedlock lost its stigma a long time ago: in 2008, 41 percent of births were to unmarried mothers, more than ever before, according to a Pew study. (Older, educated mothers make up the fastest-growing percentage of those births.) And the idea that we’d “save ourselves” for marriage? Please. As one 28-year-old man told the author of a new book on marriage: “If I had to be married to have sex, I would probably be married, as would every guy I know.” Even the legal argument for tying the knot is easily debunked. Thanks largely to the efforts of same-sex-marriage advocates, heterosexual couples have more unmarried rights to partnership now than ever. And for the rights we don’t have—well, “if you have enough money,” says Jennifer Pizer, a senior attorney at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, “you can pay lawyers to litigate just about anything.” To put the icing on the cake, it often pays to stay single: federal law favors unmarried taxpayers in almost every case—only those whose incomes are wildly unequal get a real tax break—and under President Obama’s new health plan, low-earning single people get better subsidies to buy insurance. As Diana Furchtgott-Roth, writing for the Hudson Institute, put it, “Goodbye, marriage.” As of 2013, “unwed Americans may find it even more advantageous—financially, anyway—to stay single.” ...

Which means that when we do tie the knot, we do it for love. Young people today don’t want their parents’ marriage, says Tara Parker-Pope, the author of For Better—they want all-encompassing, head-over-heels fulfillment: a best friend, a business partner, somebody to share sex, love, and chores. In other words, a “soulmate”—which is what 94 percent of singles in their 20s describe what they look for in a partner. Yet the idea of a “soulmate” is still a pretty new concept in our romantic history—and one that’s hard to maintain. Measurements of brain activity have shown that 20 years into marriage, 90 percent of couples have lost the passion they originally felt. And while couples who marry for love are less “in love” with each passing year, one study found that those in arranged marriages grow steadily more in love as the years progress—because their expectations, say researchers, are a whole lot lower.

So while little girls may still dream of Prince Charming, they’ll be more likely to keep him if they don’t expect too much. Research shows that the more education and financial independence a woman has—in other words, the more success she has outside the home—the more likely she is to stay married. (In states where fewer wives have paid jobs, for example, divorce rates tend to be higher.) But when these egalitarian, independent couples decide not to marry at all, they lose none of that stability. Just take a look at couples in Europe: they’re happier, less religious, and more likely to believe that marriage is an outdated institution, and their divorce rate is a fraction of our own. Not being married may make it slightly easier to walk away—at least legally—but if you’ve gone to the lengths to establish a life together, is it really all that different? Studies show that never-married couples with the intention of forever are just as likely to stay together as married ones. And for all the talk of marriage being good for families, a study of the Scandinavian countries—where a majority of children are born out of wedlock—found that kids actually spend more time with their parents than American children do. Work and living habits surely factor into that reality, but the point is this: what’s good for children is stability. The decline of marriage “doesn’t have to spell catastrophe,” says Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage, a History. “We can make marriages better and make nonmarriages work as well.”

Labels: arranged marriage, cohabitation, culture, divorce, feminism, gender differences, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, women

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Many people regard marriage rights for same-sex couples as the civil rights issue of this generation. Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't have strong feelings one way or the other on this issue: Should courts recognize the marriage rights of lesbian and gay couples as a matter of dignity and equality, or should we respect opposition to same-sex matrimony based in religion and traditional morality?

This issue has taken a new turn in recent weeks as Seton Hall University political science professor King Mott was notified that the class he was planning to teach in the fall, titled "Gay Marriage," might be canceled by the university's governing board when it meets on June 4. Newark Archbishop John J. Myers said the course conflicts with the teachings of the Catholic Church (Seton Hall is a Catholic university). "This proposed course seeks to promote as legitimate a train of thought that is contrary to what the Church teaches," Archbishop Myers said in a statement. "As a result, the course is not in synch with Catholic teaching."

We have taken a special interest in professor Mott's class because we too are scheduled to teach a new class titled "Gay Marriage" this fall at Columbia University, through the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. The flier we put together to advertise the class poses two views of the marriage issue: One image captures gay rights demonstrators protesting laws that preclude them from marrying, while the other image, from the group Dyke Action Machine, asks: "Why Be Boring for a Blender? You Might as Well Be Straight."

Unlike professor Mott, we have little worry that officials from our university will step in and cancel our class for ideological or moral reasons. But that doesn't mean that we are immune from ideological criticism of the material we will cover in our course. Oddly enough, that criticism may come from the LGBT community itself.

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, feminism, gay marriage, heteronormativity, religion, universities

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...Chen doesn't apologize for her old blog, but she acknowledges that the early posts "reflected a painful desire to be liked" and that she's lost a lot because of it. Her experience echoes that of other female bloggers who have written about their intimate lives. Emily Gould also does not apologize for her former antics in her new book, And the Heart Says Whatever. In a New York Times Magazine article, she wrote about the panic attacks she experienced as a result of the public vitriol she received after an unfortunate appearance on Larry King Live. Chen admits that she didn't understand the potential repercussions when she started blogging.

Now, Chen seems dedicated to making sure no one else goes through what she had to endure. In theory, the Rethinking Virginity conference was supposed to create a utopian space in which no one is judged for any kind of sexual behavior—whether it be Jesse James' mistress Michelle "Bombshell" McGee or someone who chooses to be abstinent. But the conference-goers didn't exhibit much tolerance for unusual or hedonistic behavior. I asked the panel called "The Feminist Response to Slut-Shaming & Sexual Scare Tactics" what they thought of adults having nonmonogamous unprotected sex, and the response was uniformly, well, shaming. "They're doing something damaging, and careless, and it's not a choice I personally approve of," said one panelist.

The final panel of the day, moderated by Chen, was called "Toward a Sex Positive Vision of Abstinence." The panelists all concurred that abstinence should be taught to high schoolers as part of an arsenal of ways to prevent pregnancy and STDs. The only real debate seemed to be about whether the government should continue to push the abstinence message past high school and make sure that adults knew it was an option as well, by, for example, mandating that abstinence be discussed as part of comprehensive sex education programs in colleges across the country.

While the one middle-aged sex educator on the panel seemed horrified by that idea ("I wouldn't presume to teach abstinence to adults," she said), Chen was intrigued. "What if an 18-year-old virgin needs to learn how to talk to his partner about how he's never had sex before?" Chen inquired. It was striking to hear young adults call for a government-mandated safe area to save a hypothetical virgin from the risks—and the joys—of youthful trial and error. That abstinence was even being considered as a solution to the young adult sexual minefield is a surprisingly conservative shift.

Labels: abstinence, culture, feminism, hooking up, premarital sex, sex, sex education, virginity

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One Thursday last month, during the lunch hour at H.D. Woodson Senior High School, half a dozen teenage boys have gathered to eat pizza and talk about hollering at women. “From where I come from, you holler at a girl,” one student tells the group. “A girl can’t be too upset when a guy is paying attention to her.” “It depends on the type of girl and whether she has respect for herself,” another says. “Some girls will say, stop. But they like it, for real.” “If she’s wearing short shorts, booty shorts, short skirt, with the thong showing, she wants it,” another guy says. “Can’t blame it on the boy. She knows what she’s doing.”

“But what if it’s hot out?” This is Kedrick Griffin. He’s here to play the 37-year-old devil’s advocate on a subject that’s generally considered normal behavior for a teenage boy in the District of Columbia.

“What if all her other shorts are dirty? What if it’s 2 a.m. in a dark alley? What if it’s your girlfriend who’s wearing the short shorts?” Along with the targeted line of questioning, Griffin has also brought three boxes of Pizza Boli’s and an 18-pack of Sierra Mist. These Woodson students have been eating Griffin’s pizza since September. By now, they know full well that it’s wrong to blame a woman for rape based on what she’s wearing—now, they’re just struggling through the street harassment piece. This exercise has come almost at the end of a year-long District program called the “Men of Strength” club—MOST Club, for short. The same pattern is repeated with groups of boys in public middle and high schools across the District: Come for the pizza, stay for the deconstructions of masculinity. ...

Griffin doesn’t just stroll into D.C. public schools with a pizza and start engaging boys on topics like rape. Each MOST meeting begins with a slow wind-up: a weekly “check-in” in which each student updates the group on his recent life developments. Stuff like how he can’t find a ride to football practice, or how he only slept in one class today, or how he’s starting to look at colleges, or how he put his rap video on YouTube but then he took it down. These personal conversations are meant to transition into headier discussion topics like understanding rape culture and questioning the patriarchy. As a short-cut, MOST has chosen a phrase that Griffin employs more than once in each meeting: “The Dominant Story of Masculinity.”

In order to illustrate what that means, Griffin performs an exercise he calls “The Real Man.” Griffin shows students photographs of male celebrities—from Lebron James to Barack Obama to 50 Cent to Johnny Depp—and asks students to comment on “who they think society says is a real man and why.” The exercise is meant to reveal how society’s idea of ‘manhood’ is threaded with negative attributes. While it’s reasonable to want to be president and dunk a basketball, do you really want to get shot nine times in order to prove you’re a man? “When we talk about what a ‘real man’ is, we think of stuff like: Strong. Lifts weights. Spike TV. Prison. Explosions,” explains Eugene. “When we start talking about men in our lives and what we want from them, we think: Nice. Fun. Cares about us. Respects his family.”

Labels: culture, feminism, gender, homosexuality, men, sexual assault

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On most measures of the strength of a community’s social fabric, the town of Oakdale would score poorly. There’s the high divorce rate and appallingly low incidence of marital fidelity, the off-the-charts frequency of assault, murder, rape, and arson; the overlapping epidemics of kidnapping, identity theft, fraud, and wedding-day bridal abandonment. And there is a local justice system seemingly bent on imprisoning the innocent, leaving it up to intrepid family members and lovers to bring the truth to light.

Thankfully, no one lives in Oakdale, no one real. It is the fictional town where ”As the World Turns,” America’s longest-running current soap opera, has tumultuously unfolded for over half a century (this season will be its last). And while the Gomorrhic dysfunction of places like the fictionalized Oakdale, Ill., or Port Charles, N.Y. (”General Hospital”) or Pine Valley, Pa. (”All My Children”) is what makes them so entertaining to their loyal fans, few would describe these as places where people live exemplary lives. Soap operas, after all, are entertainment at its least believable and least nutritious.

The possibility, therefore, that people might be modeling themselves after characters on soaps might seem both farfetched and frightening. A spate of recent research, however, suggests that, all over the world, that’s exactly what’s happening. What’s more, we should be happy about it.

Soaps, it turns out, are shaping behavior in ways that are subtle, profound and, from the standpoint of global development experts, positive. A team of economists credits Brazilian TV ”novelas” for helping to dramatically lower a fertility rate that in 1960 was above six births per woman. Others have found that in India — where soaps dominate the airwaves — villages where people watch more TV give more responsibilities and rights to women and girls. Researchers in Rwanda have found that radio soap operas there can help defuse the country’s dangerous ethnic tensions. Turkish soap operas have set off a public debate about women’s roles in the Middle East. And research in the United States has found that health tips tucked into soaps have greater sticking power than with just about any other mode of transmission. In a surprising number of ways, soap operas are improving lives around the world.

”The evidence we have from these academic studies is that quite often [viewers] take away different attitudes toward things like how many children they want, what is acceptable behavior for a husband toward his wife, what is the breakdown in a household of responsibilities over things like finances, should we be sending girls to school,” says Charles Kenny, an economist at the World Bank who has written about global television habits, and the author of a forthcoming book on development. ”All of these seem to be generated by watching some soap operas.”

Labels: Africa, Brazil, culture, feminism, gender, India, Marriage, Turkey, women

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It might not be everybody's idea of sexual foreplay, but for an Ottawa man and his live-in partner, being bound and choked into unconsciousness was a favoured way of life.

The couple have an eight-year relationship, and are parents of a two-and-a-half-year-old son.

However, things went too far during one of the couple's asphyxial trysts in early 2007. ...

The boyfriend was charged and convicted of sexual assault.

In late March, however, his conviction was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal in a 2-1 ruling, which may set up one of the more bizarre hearings the Supreme Court of Canada has hosted in recent years.

Assuming that the Ontario Crown appeals – and most observers believe that this will happen – the nine-judge bench will depart from its usual dry fare to decide whether an unconscious person can consent in advance to supplying sexual gratification for others. ...

But Prof. Sheehy said sexual activity is the product of an ongoing, consensual relationship. “The question is, are we really prepared to say that people can consent to having their bodies used in those ways?” she said. “I think it degrades our humanity.”

Labels: autonomy, Canada, feminism, sex, sexual assault

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First came women’s studies, then came men’s studies, and now, a new field in reaction to both: male studies.

Scholars of boys and men converged Wednesday at Wagner College, in Staten Island, N.Y., to announce the creation of the Foundation for Male Studies, which will support a conference and a journal targeted at exploring the triumphs and struggles of the XY-chromosomed of the human race -- without needing to contextualize their ideas as being one half of a male-female binary or an offshoot of feminist theory. Organizers positioned themselves in contrast to men's studies, which is seen as based on the same theories as women's studies and is grouped together with it as gender studies.

More than anything else, the event was a chance for supporters to frame men and boys as an underrepresented minority, and to justify the need for a male studies discipline in a society that many perceive to be male-dominated.

Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, said the field takes its cues “from the notion that male and female organisms really are different” and the “enormous relation between ... a person’s biology and their behavior” that’s not being addressed in most contemporary scholarship on men and boys.

Labels: feminism, gender, gender differences, men

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...That, at least, is the view of Elisabeth Badinter, a French philosopher who has shaken her fellow feminists with a frontal assault on the breastfeeding, pumpkin-peeling, earth motherhood ideologists who she believes are a threat to women’s liberation.

Her latest book, Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother), which is topping the bestseller lists in France amid intense debate, maintains that women have thrown off the shackles of male domination only to impose a far more pernicious tyranny on themselves — that of their own children.

She advocates a return to the old French model, which involved whatever necessary — powdered milk, baby minders, nurseries, you name it — to prevent les enfants from taking over their mothers’ lives. ...

But Badinter backs her arguments up by contrasting the fertility rate in France (2.0 children per woman) with that of Germany (1.3 children). The explanation she gives is that France is more resistant to earth motherhood, with only just over half of mothers breastfeeding, for example, compared with almost 100 per cent in Germany.

“We’ve always been mediocre mothers here,” Badinter said (pointing out that in the 18th century French women farmed their children out to nurses “so that they could continue to have social lives and sex with their husbands”). “But we’ve tended to have happier lives.” In other words, you can still be une mère and une femme as well — even if the tension between the two is rising in France as it is elsewhere.

For die mutter, on the other hand, “once you become a mother, you are only a mother” — an unacceptable choice for the quarter of young German women (more than double the French proportion) who are opting not to have children at all.

Britain is somewhere in between, she says — pulled by tradition towards the French model and by fashion towards a touchy-feely, child-centred future. We should stop before it is too late. “The English tradition of sending children to boarding school from a young age is like the 18th-century French tradition of sending them to nurses — a way of getting rid of them.”

And that, to Badinter, is no bad thing.

Labels: breastfeeding, demographics, feminism, France, gender differences, Germany, motherhood, United Kingdom

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Julie Klausner has slept with a lot of losers and perverts, she tells us in her funny, trenchant new collection of essays I Don't Care About Your Band. She is not permanently wounded by these encounters and yet she feels bad. And then she feels bad about feeling bad. "When you cry about things not working out, you're crying not only because a guy you slept with now doesn't seem to care you're alive," Klausner writes, "but also because you're ashamed of yourself for crying."

Why would she be ashamed? After all, Klausner is a feminist who doesn't believe there is anything wrong with casual sex. But she's not the only recent memoirist with regrets. Hephzibah Anderson had such deep ones that she decided to abstain from what she calls "penetrative sex" for a whole 12 months. "A tiny bit of me can't help judging myself, nor, presumably, can those women who consistently shave their own tallies in sex surveys," she writes in her memoir Chastened (out in the United States in June), which chronicles this self-imposed dry spell. "Liberated women that we are, we'll blame Victorian morality and its outmoded, repressive mores—we'll blame ourselves for succumbing and we'll deny our feelings."

From whence this confusing, shame-feedback loop? Compelling research shows that hooking up is not psychologically damaging, and only purity-ring-clutching evangelicals believe that it's wrong to have sex before marriage. Feminist Web sites advise that is it our "feminist duty to 1) seek pleasure and feel entitled to it and 2) to make the world a more orgasmic place for other women." And yet there seems to be something else at play in the culture that's making Klausner and Anderson regretful, some new wave of anti-orgasmic sexual conservatism that makes you hate yourself for what you did last night. ...

At the start of this decade, we have thoroughly internalized these recent conservative cultural messages about the importance of marriage: "73 percent of women born between 1977 and 1989 place a high priority on marriage," writes Hannah Seligson in the Wall Street Journal. If what Gen Y wants is marriage, then it follows that feelings about sex would be more complicated—and in some cases, deeply judgmental. A Princeton freshman wrote an op-ed last week about why her friend should not be allowed to claim rape after a night of highly inebriated sex, the implicit message being that she should not have been having inebriated sex in the first place. A poll taken last month in London showed that women were less likely to forgive a rape victim than men were.

Labels: culture, feminism, Marriage, sex, women

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Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.

Traditional society choked this down—some more progressive parts of it did, anyway—by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity that must be rigid and ineluctable. It hypothesized three millennia of men and women who must have been closeted, before they had such wonderfully enlightened friends and neighbors as we are. Only in this restricted way could society understand homosexuality without gayness threatening to reveal more new choices.

The utopians among us held our peace. It seemed impossible to stay in view of the rest of traditional society, the reactionary and hostile parts, and make our argument to fellow progressives that gay reorganization might be better than the old heterosexuality, and not just a neutral object for tolerance—that liberation from the heterosexual family was something we all could wish for, and that it needn't stop where it has. Then, because such a large part of the gay community publicly seemed to prefer the necessitarian, "eternal" framework, finding it the best way to make sense of individuals' own experiences, and to justify them to family and friends, we utopian straights—bystanders, well-wishers, but dilettantes—had another good reason to keep quiet. ...

Social utopianism has long focused on the reorganization of households, but has rarely accomplished much. Straight utopians argued for free love, free divorce, unorthodox childrearing and communal parenthood, and got divorce, followed by more imprisoning marriages, followed by more divorce. Because the home has seemed to be at the origin of economics (the word comes from the Greek oikos, household, and household management, oikonomia), a revision of the home, say one based on non-reproductivity and made by equals of the same sex, could ground a wider egalitarianism. Because the family, as the crucible of personality for children, seems to be the origin of violence, hierarchy, and tyranny—in the old descending triad of dominance: man-woman-child—a revision of the family, such that children could look forward to forming their own future households on different models, could gain new principles of power for society.

Labels: abortion, beyond marriage, culture, fam, feminism, gay marriage, gay/straight differences

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