...The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse tracks pertinent statistics. "When fathers are involved in the lives of their children," it notes, "especially their education, their children learn more, perform better in school and exhibit healthier behavior. Even when fathers do not share a home with their children, their active involvement can have a lasting and positive impact. There are countless ways to be involved in your child's education at all ages."

The organization says children with highly involved fathers have increased mental dexterity, more empathy, less stereotypical views of their gender roles and better self control. They are more curious and better able to solve problems. A father's active involvement with his young children helps language and literacy development. When non-custodial dads are very involved with their kids' learning, those kids are more likely to excel at all grade levels. And when dad doesn't live with his kids but sees them often and plays a big role in their education and lives, three things are more likely: "Fathers paying child support, custodial mothers being more educated and custodial homes not experiencing financial difficulties," says the U.S. Department of Education.

But what if the number of families without fathers keeps growing and if there are, as Slayton suggests, entire communities that lack male role models? ...

The A stands for "all-in marriage," he says. "You hear people say ridiculous things like 'we had some struggles, some fights, and thought it better to get a divorce.' Statistics are very clear that is not the case" except with physical abuse, he says. "All marriages go through difficult times. But for the kids and the mom and dad, when (they) stick together and get through the difficult times, kids' futures and success are dramatically strengthened.

"Being a good husband to your wife is the biggest gift you can give to the children themselves," Slayton says. ...

[Tom Watson] believes men need to do better in their friendships. They hang out and talk about sports, he says, but they often don't dig deeper, and they should. Lots of men before him faced challenges he went through, he says, and there are opportunities to share the wisdom gained. Too often, it doesn't happen. They should be able to ask for support, and to do it on a regular basis, "not just when they're having a meltdown. They will tell you what they think about the New England Patriots in great detail, he says, but most avoid communicating on a level where they'd have to "almost unzipper our hearts."

Labels: childhood, children, culture, Fathers, friendship, gender, Marriage, parenting, unmarried parents

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...Unilever accompanied roughly 100 males (identical studies were later carried out across other European countries, North America, and Latin America) ages 15 to 50 to the pubs until three or four in the morning and (soberly, while secretly taking copious notes) watched them in action. After poring over their pages and pages of notes, via a process known in the industry as "segmentation," the Unilever team isolated six psychological profiles of the male animal -- and the potential Axe user: the Predator, the Natural Talent, the Marriage-Material Guy, Always the Friend, the Insecure Novice, and the Enthusiastic Novice.

Ultimately, they decided the most obvious choice would be the Insecure Novice, followed by the Enthusiastic Novice, followed by the Natural Talent.

Labels: consumerism, culture, gender, men, sex

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As we prepare to honor mothers on Sunday, we should keep in mind that the practice of mothering is not limited to women. There are many men in America today, married and single, gay and straight, who mother their children every day. I am one of them. My male partner and I nurture and care for our two sons in ways that are indistinguishable from what society has traditionally expected of mothers.

We comfort our children when they get hurt, either physically or emotionally. We cook their meals and clean their room. We bake cupcakes for their birthdays and take them to their school so they can celebrate with their friends. We hug and kiss them as often as they allow us. We encourage them to explore their passions, not only for baseball and soccer, but for knitting and piano too.

It may be tempting to think that my partner and I mother our children because there is no female parent in our home. But we know heterosexual married men who do the same things for their children that we do for ours. They, too, are mothers.

The seemingly obvious requirement that one must be a woman to be a mother is actually a powerful example of the ways in which our society has traditionally allowed apparently natural truths about gender differences to color our thinking about what individuals are capable of achieving. Interestingly, however, while our culture continues to view motherhood and fatherhood as mutually exclusive categories, the law no longer distinguishes between the two.

Labels: culture, Fathers, gay parenting, gender, gender differences, men, motherhood, women

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Ever since “90210’s” Donna Martin held on to hers for seven seasons, adult virginity — the state of having it and the act of losing it — has been a recurring plot point on TV dramas, and not just ones set in high school. The rules that apply to virginity in characters of a certain age are more or less the same ones that apply to Chekhov’s famous gun: If it appears in the first season, it will probably go off by the third, or the fourth, or the seventh, just as it did for Donna Martin. There are currently three fictional adults — or two adults and a self-identified “Girl” — grappling with their virginities with varying amounts of shame in big-name TV shows. (Shame-free virginity: not currently a fictional TV offering.)

“Grey’s Anatomy’s” April Kepner (Sarah Drew) just lost her virginity last week, and will be dealing with the fallout in this one, on tonight’s episode. April’s deflowering would have been a happy event — if the show hadn’t used the mind-bending powers of retroactive continuity to suddenly assert that she had been saving herself because of her religious beliefs. At the beginning of last season, the high-strung, cheery Kepner (a common characteristic of TV virgins is a type-A, neurotic personality) yelled at her colleagues, in an effort to quell their merciless teasing, “I am a 28-year-old virgin, namely because I wanted my first time to be special and then I waited too long, and partially because I’m pretty sure guys find me annoying.” She then spent the next year and a half flirting, making out with and never quite sleeping with a series of guys who weren’t right for her, without once mentioning chastity or a higher power.

Then last Thursday, she threw herself on fellow resident Jackson, assuring him — after he kept repeating to her, out loud, “You’re a virgin” — that having sex with him was really what she wanted to do. The next day, she seemed shell-shocked. When Jackson tried to apologize, she explained, “It’s not you. It’s Jesus. I was a virgin because I loved Jesus. And now Jesus hates me.” Ta-dah! April Kepner had been magically transformed from an accidental, circumstantial virgin into a religious one. In the process she’s gotten stuck in a fun house mirror of TV sex-shaming: Having felt ashamed for two seasons about not having had sex, she now gets to feel ashamed for a few more seasons about having had it.

Labels: culture, gender, men, premarital sex, religion, sex, virginity, women

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My friend Oliver is 12 years old. I give his single mom a break every now and then, and he comes over to hang out. He's a whiz on a skateboard, has some killer dance moves, and radiates angelic sweetness. "You're a good person," he said to me once, apropos of nothing, getting me all choked up. He sees the best in everyone, though his own life has included years in a homeless shelter and an abusive dad. Recently, I saw Oliver on a sunny California day. We were outside at the pool, eating watermelon and relaxing. He loves to talk about his Xbox or Weird Al YouTube videos. Instead of going there, I asked Oliver, "Read any good books lately?" In response, he mumbled, "I guess." Books aren't Oliver's thing. I know he'd rather talk about basketball, or sneakers, but I wouldn't, and I was on a mission.

"What's your favorite book?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, staring off into the distance.

Oliver reads only when absolutely required to. You'd never find Oliver sneaking a book under the blankets with a flashlight, as I did growing up. (The midnight glow from his bed would be an iPhone app.)

When I had this moment with him, I was in the midst of writing, "Swagger: 10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness and Thug Culture." I had been researching all the cultural forces that are dumbing down our boys. So I needed to drill down to the root of the issue.

Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, girls

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Among the contradictions of my childhood experiences in churches was the fact that, on one hand, there was the famous portrait of Jesus by Warner Sallman—meek and mild verging on the effeminate—and, on the other hand, the appearance of various sports figures to remind us that Jesus was not just male but a man's man who ran the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip.

It is hardly a newsflash that we've been living through an era of upheaval in gender roles. Churches have been divided over the role of women in ministry. In "Young, Restless, Reformed" circles, a new generation is discovering Jonathan Edwards and "masculine Christianity" in one fell swoop. Weaned on romantic—even sentimental—images of a deity who seems to exist to ensure our emotional and psychic equilibrium, many younger Christians (especially men) are drawn to a robust vision of a loving and sovereign, holy and gracious, merciful and just, powerful and tender King. As David Murrow pointed out in Why Men Hate Going to Church (2004), men are tired of singing love songs to Jesus and don't feel comfortable in a "safe environment" that caters to women, children, and older people. His critique is familiar to many: men don't like "conformity, control, and ceremony," so churches need to "adjust the thermostat" and orient their ministry toward giving men tasks (since they're "doers"). Men don't like to learn by instruction; they need object lessons and, most of all, to find ways to discover truth for themselves. ...

In the drive to make churches more guy-friendly, we risk confusing cultural (especially American) customs with biblical discipleship. One noted pastor has said that God gave Christianity a "masculine feel." Another contrasted "latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers" with "real men." Jesus and his buddies were "dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes." Real Christian men like Jesus and Paul "are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal." Seriously?

The back story on all of this is the rise of the "masculine Christianity movement" in Victorian England, especially with Charles Kingsley's fictional stories in Two Years Ago (1857). D. L. Moody popularized the movement in the United States and baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday preached it as he pretended to hit a home run against the devil. For those of us raised on testimonies from recently converted football players in youth group, Tim Tebow is hardly a new phenomenon. Reacting against the safe deity, John Eldredge's Wild at Heart (2001) offered a God who is wild and unpredictable. Neither image is grounded adequately in Scripture. With good intentions, the Promise Keepers movement apparently did not have a significant lasting impact. Nor, I predict, will the call of New Calvinists to a Jesus with "callused hands and big biceps," "the Ultimate Fighting Jesus."

Are these really the images we have of men in the Scriptures? Furthermore, are these the characteristics that the New Testament highlights as "the fruit of the Spirit"—which, apparently, is not gender-specific? "Gentleness, meekness, self-control," "growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ," "submitting to your leaders," and the like? Officers are to be "apt to teach," "preaching the truth in love," not quenching a bruised reed or putting out a smoldering candle, and the like. There is nothing about beating people up or belonging to a biker club.

Labels: Christianity, culture, gender, men, religion

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By most people’s standards, Sweden is a paradise for liberated women. It has the highest proportion of working women in the world, and women earn about two-thirds of all degrees. Standard parental leave runs at 480 days, and 60 of those days are reserved exclusively for dads, causing some to credit the country with forging the way for a new kind of nurturing masculinity. In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world.

But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don't identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels. ...

The Swedish Bowling Association has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments in order to make the sport gender-neutral. Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils' genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as "buddies." So, a teacher would say "good morning, buddies" or "good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack" rather than, "good morning, boys and girls." They believe this fulfills the national curriculum's guideline that preschools should "counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles" and give girls and boys "the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles." ...

Claeson might have a point. The Swedish school system has wholeheartedly, and probably too quickly and eagerly, embraced this new agenda. Last fall, 200 teachers attended a major government-sponsored conference discussing how to avoid "traditional gender patterns" in schools. At Egalia, one model Stockholm preschool, everything from the decoration to the books and toys are carefully selected to promote a gender-equal perspective and to avoid traditional presentations of gender and parenting roles. The teachers try to expose the pupils to as few "gendered expressions" as possible. At Christmastime, the Egalia staff rewrote a traditional song as "hen bakes cakes all day long." When pupils play house, they are encouraged to include "mommy, daddy, child" in their imaginary families, as well as "daddy, daddy, child"; "mommy, mommy, child"; "daddy, daddy, sister, aunty, child"; or any other modern combination.

Labels: childhood, children, gender, gender differences, Sweden, work/family policy

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AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

But that belief is contradicted by experience. ...

As Jennifer and I worked to answer her question, “How did this happen?” we talked about how she and her boyfriend went from dating to cohabiting. Her response was consistent with studies reporting that most couples say it “just happened.”

“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”

She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

WHEN researchers ask cohabitors these questions, partners often have different, unspoken — even unconscious — agendas. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

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Boys will be boys — but can they be raised to be men by single mothers?

That was the topic on everyone’s minds last Saturday afternoon at the Black Spectrum Theatre, where a debate, hosted by Councilman James Sanders Jr. (D-Laurelton) as part of a salute to Women’s History Month, at times worked the audience of more than 100 vested individuals into a near frenzy of emotions.

The time restrictions were not always observed, the panelists didn’t necessarily speak in turn, and the audience was talking back long before the public participation segment began, but the debate did what Sanders said it set out to accomplish: it educated, motivated and sent the spectators home with plenty of food for thought.

“We might as well start wrestling with this in a respectful, disciplined manner,” Sanders said prior to the discussion.

“Our job is to look at the whole thing, to explore it all. We’re going to bring thinking back,” he said.

According to Sanders, the debate was designed to “make us think about our children, our families and the structure of our society. What has happened to the positive male influence, and what happens to our sons if they don’t have one?”

Sanders asked the audience, “When was the last time our community thought? We used to play chess, a thinking game. For every move, 20 possibilities open up. Now we have strong thumbs and weak minds.

“There’s a lot going on in our community. Women are left with the burden of raising children,” he said.

The six panelists, representing a wide range of backgrounds, were divided into two even groups, based on their response to the debate’s premise, “Single mothers can’t raise boys to be men.” One side agreed, the other did not.

Cathleen Williams, whose book, “Single Mother The New Father,” raised considerable controversy because of its provocative title, opened the discussion by saying, “As a single woman, I was able to successfully raise my son,” currently a student at St. John’s University.

“As a people, we tell women you can’t do it, that you’re doomed to failure. Not only can you, but you must do it for the salvation of our race,” she said.

She indicated that there are “over 10 million single women in the United States raising their children successfully,” admitting that she “didn’t do it alone.”

Opening the discussion for the opposition, clinical social worker Rodney Pride, who serves as vice president of youth development at United Black Men of Queens, said, “Eight out of 10 boys are without a positive male role model in their families and that ain’t good. So many boys are walking around with a level of anger.” He suggested that their pent-up rage often leads to cases of teenage pregnancy, dropping out of high school, and black on black violence.

Labels: boys, children, culture, Fathers, gender, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting

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...The show is drawing inevitable — and apt — comparisons to “Sex and the City,” in whose long shadow it blooms. “Girls,” too, is a half-hour comedy (of sorts) about four women finding themselves and fortifying one another in the daunting, libidinous wilds of New York City.

But it’s a recession-era adjustment. The gloss of Manhattan is traded for the mild grit of Brooklyn’s more affordable neighborhoods. The anxieties are as much economic as erotic. The colors are duller, the mood is dourer and the clothes aren’t much. It’s “Sex and the City” in a charcoal gray Salvation Army overcoat.

It comes along at a moment of fresh examination of women’s progress. A just-published book, “The Richer Sex,” by Liza Mundy, asserts that women are well on their way to becoming the primary breadwinners in a majority of American families; it rated the cover of Time magazine two weeks ago. It will be joined later this year by “The End of Men,” by Hanna Rosin, which answers the question posed by the title of Maureen Dowd’s prescient 2005 best seller, “Are Men Necessary?” As Rosin sees it, not so much, because women have achieved unprecedented autonomy.

But “Girls” also amplifies a growing chorus of laments over what’s happening on the sexual frontier, a state of befuddlement reflective in part of post-feminist power dynamics and in part of our digital culture and virtual fixations.

Are young women who think that they should be more like men willing themselves into a casual attitude toward sex that’s an awkward emotional fit? Two movies released last year, “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits,” held that position, and Dunham subscribes to it as well.

In a recent interview, presented in more detail on my Times blog, she told me that various cultural cues exhort her and her female peers to approach sex in an ostensibly “empowered” way that she couldn’t quite manage. “I heard so many of my friends saying, ‘Why can’t I have sex and feel nothing?’ It was amazing: that this was the new goal.”

Labels: gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pornography, sex, women

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CAN men and women be friends? We have been asking ourselves that question for a long time, and the answer is usually no. The movie “When Harry Met Sally...” provides the locus classicus. The problem, Harry famously explains, is that “the sex part always gets in the way.” Heterosexual people of the opposite sex may claim to be just friends, the message goes, but count on it — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — something more’s going on. Popular culture enforces the notion relentlessly. In movie after movie, show after show, the narrative arc is the same. What starts as friendship (Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler) ends up in bed.

There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

Then came feminism — specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, in the late 18th century. Wollstonecraft was actually wary of platonic relationships, which could lead too easily, she thought, to mischief. (She had a child out of wedlock herself.) But she did believe that friendship, “the most sublime of all affections,” should be the mainspring of marriage. ...

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand.

We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind. When we imagine those relationships, we seem to have to sexualize them.

Labels: culture, feminism, friendship, gender, heteronormativity, men, women

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What’s a “mama’s boy”? A wimp, of course, a child tied too tightly to his mother’s apron strings, overly sensitive, incapable of detaching, ready to “run to mama” at the slightest hint of adversity. Norman Bates. Oedipus. Robert, the awkward brother on “Everybody Loves Raymond.” The men are ineffectual, the “mamas” domineering — and if you’re looking for an analogous stereotype in the world of fathers and daughters (think father-daughter dances and “Daddy’s Girl”), you won’t find one.

It sounds like a myth of yesteryear, but Kate Stone Lombardi, frequent New York Times contributor and author of “The Mama’s Boy Myth,” says the hangover from generations of gender preconceptions affects us all, and that in many families and communities, mothers still find themselves urged to push their sons away at exactly the moments (like starting school and becoming a teenager) when our boys need us most — and that even when we don’t, we find it hard to talk about how close we are to our sons. ...

That soundtrack, she says, is part of why mothers are so often told to go against their instincts with their boys, to tell a crying child to “man up” or “shake it off,” or to let a hurting teenager suffer in silence and “work it out on his own.” Even the most attached of mothers can find herself wondering if she’s doing the right thing when she babies her little boy, or pushes her teen to talk. “But both science and research tell us it really is a good thing to offer boys our emotional support, and maintain that connection.”

As the mother of two boys (and two girls), I was surprised by how often I recognized issues I’d run up against, even in our modern, feminist, equal-parenting household: the son who needs to talk after his team lost a game (it wasn’t the loss that was upsetting him); the need to staunchly squash the commentary people seem to feel the need to make about one son’s long hair, and the other’s pink hockey skate lace; and my own surprise (and extreme pleasure) that my 10-year-old son still seeks to hold my hand, even in public.

Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, motherhood, parenting

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The number of people living on their own has doubled, over the last three decades, to one in three in the UK and US. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Public Health shows that the risk of depression, measured by people taking antidepressants, is almost 80% higher for those living alone compared to people living in any kind of social or family group.

For women a third of this risk was attributable to sociodemographic factors, such as lack of education and low income. For men the biggest contributing factors included poor job climate, lack of support at the work place or in their private lives, and heavy drinking.

It is known that living alone can increase the risk of mental health problems for the elderly, and for single parents, but little is known about the effects of isolation on working-age people. Researchers in Finland followed 3500 working-aged men and women for seven years and compared their living arrangements with psychosocial, sociodemographic, and health risk factors, including smoking, heavy drinking and low physical activity, to antidepressant use. Information on antidepressant medication was taken from the National Prescription Register.

Labels: Finland, gender, gender differences, men, mental health, women

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...When it comes to religion and daily life then, few things are more applicable than the simple day-to-day routines of being a parent. How do moms and dads live out their faith when it comes to bringing up baby? Believe it or not, there’s not a lot of research out there on this point given that these two social institutions of family and religion are so fundamental to society. So it surprised me when one of the only religion studies to show up last year in the top sociology journals tackled this very topic. Alfred DeMaris, Annette Mahoney, and Kenneth Pargament examined data derived from 169 English-speaking married couples in a Midwestern US city that were in their third trimester and attending childbirth classes as they awaited the birth of their first child. Unlike other studies, the couples were not interviewed once, but 4 different times at the 4th, 7th and 13th month. They accomplished this for every couple between 2005 and 2008.

Daily tasks in infant care included the following: changing “poopy” diapers, changing wet diapers, putting the baby to sleep, getting the baby dressed, bathing, getting up at night to care for the baby, feeding, soothing when in distress, and play. It’s exhausting just reading that list isn’t it? So they used this as a way to determine whether religion helps dads become more involved and thus reduce the “gender gap” in infant care.

The researchers asked each parent how much he or she did of the aforementioned tasks, and then asked them to rate their spouse on his or her task accomplishments. Further they introduced questions that one doesn’t normally see in surveys. They asked a series of questions that tap into what they call “theistic sanctification” which refers to their view of whether God played a large or no role in the pregnancy, delivery and care of their baby. Their second unique measure refers to “spiritual investment” which picks up on each spouse’s view of their religious behavior regarding their child (e.g. “I have prayed for my unborn child”).

They also included other important characteristics such as “spouse’s knowledge of infants,” infant temperament, marital satisfaction, and a key scale, “sex-role traditionalism,” an established set of questions that identifies whether each spouse has a fairly traditional view of the roles & responsibilities in the relationship (e.g. wives are nurturing, more involved in the private sphere and subordinate in the relationship). God bless these couples for answering all these questions.

The upshot: no effect for theistic sanctification on infant care. Sigh. As they conclude: “In sum, all these efforts revealed only one consistent effect: The more religious the couple, the greater the gender gap ‘in favor’ of moms” (363). For those not familiar with this kind of language the quotations mean this: more religious couples usually exhibit greater infant care from the mom rather than a leveling out between mom and dad. Further they state, “To the extent that religiousness promotes a traditional gendered division of labor with respect to child care, then, our evidence suggests that it hinders rather than furthers the goal of gender equality in parenting.” (365) ...

What do you think about their implications? If father involvement is a priority for Christians, what sort of ways could Christian communities get more faith-informed dads to be more involved in baby duty? (doodie?)

Labels: babies, Christianity, culture, Fathers, gender, gender differences, motherhood, parenting, religion

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Recently I wrote about the many problems polygamy tends to cause across the world, including high crime rates resulting from young men confined to singledom because older men are hoarding wives, and the subjugation of teenage girls forced to marry because there simply aren’t enough women to go around. ...

Historically, though, there’s been an exception to the rule about plural marriage being bad for women. Polyamory, in which people openly take on multiple relationships, sometimes in the context of group marriage, has a radically different history. Nearly as marginal on the left wing of our culture as polygamy is on the right, modern-day polyamory is intertwined with the rise of feminism, and its roots go back to the ’40s— the 1840s. It’s hard to believe, but during the heart of the Victorian era, during a time when chastity was the rule, divorce was unheard of and petticoats were unmentionables, the most radical American women renounced monogamy as an instrument of their servility. A progressive attitude toward gender roles continues in the modern-day polyamory movement, which has been shepherded by women writers, historians, and organizers.

From the late 1840s to the late 1870s, under the leadership of a charismatic Christian minister named John Noyes, the Oneida commune in upstate New York conducted an experiment in promiscuity known as complex marriage. Noyes believed that sex was a kind of worship, and that in order to live without sin, men and women had to be free to worship all over the place with whoever they wanted. About 300 people lived at Oneida, and they were all considered married to one another. Noyes had radical and sometimes abhorrent ideas about sex; he tried to breed a better class of humans through eugenics, and he thought incest was just fine. (At various points he had sex with his niece, and possibly his sister.)

Despite its many faults, though, the system of complex marriage at Oneida amounted to remarkable progress for the women who lived there.

Labels: culture, feminism, gender, polyamory, polygamy, women

VOTE

The controversy surrounding gay marriage has now reached a fever pitch in countries like Australia and the UK, as governments have begun to move past debate and towards legislative change. While such intensity can have the benefit of clarifying just what is at stake - on both sides of the argument - it can also obscure some of the deeper, intrinsically related issues. ...

Homosexuality has always existed in human societies and sometimes has been tolerated or even made into an essential phase of cultural development - as with the Baruya or in ancient Athens. But it has never previously been linked to marriage - apart from parodic instances (as in ancient Rome) or marginal situations where for various reasons (including those of transgender) a male or female marital role is "performed" by someone not of that gender.

So there is no reason to suppose that those opposing gay marriage are necessarily opposed to homosexual practice as such. The issue is rather: Why should it now be thought that an inherently heterosexual institution should be extended to gay relations also?

Injustice and individual rights

Overwhelmingly the answer is that modern political discourse tends only to recognise as public goods things that can be equally appropriated by any given individual. It has great difficulties in acknowledging public goods that can only be exercised by certain groups or by individuals fulfilling certain social roles. This includes a refusal to entertain notions of public rights and obligations that might pertain to one sex rather than to the other, or to one sexual orientation rather than another.

The risk of this exclusive focus on individual rights is that the needs and capacities of people in their specific differences, which may be either naturally given or the result of cultural association, tend to be overridden. And so it is that injustice can arise in the name of justice.

One example of this is the way that economic pressures combined with liberal feminism have conspired to remove the notion of the "family wage" thereby effectively prohibiting some women - or, indeed, some men - from choosing to remain at home to bring up children and engage in non-waged social activities for some years of their lives. ...

The loss of sexual difference

There are two other reasons for the current unprecedented advocacy of gay marriage. The first is the decline of any public recognition of sexual difference and so the significance of sexually asymmetric unions, which I've already alluded to. The second, and arguably most important factor, is the technologisation of childbirth, allied to the increased acceptance of the adoption of children by gay couples.

Since the link between sex and childbirth is becoming increasingly tenuous, heterosexual marriage is increasingly connected with child-rearing rather than with procreation. In which case, indeed, why should not gay couples sustain the same connection with an equal capacity?

Are these reasons good reasons? It is notable that even the churches do not seem to dare to address the first issue of sexual difference, despite the fact that they recognise the validity of childless heterosexual marriage, that they have in modern times increasingly stressed mutual affection as one of the goods of the married state, and that both Augustine and Aquinas regarded marriage between man and woman as the most intimate mode of specifically natural human friendship.

In the realm of public discourse, assertion of sexual difference has become practically unspeakable, despite the fact that it is implicitly assumed and indeed spoken of by most ordinary non-intellectual people in the course of everyday life.

Moreover, there are crucial negative testimonies to its persistence. It would seem that when it is denied that a woman's body or biology has any psychic correlate, that then her purely physical difference gets vastly over-accentuated and exploited. Thus children are increasingly differentiated by gender to a ludicrous degree in terms, for example, of every item intended for little girls being coloured pink and the ever-younger adoption of sexualised clothes and make-up by adolescent and pre-pubescent girls.

Indeed, it has been plausibly argued that the "young girl" is now at once the prime commodity and the prime consumer of late capitalism. Is it an accident that the according of only "human" rights to women coincides with a new phase in their degradation?

Equally, the increased crisis of the masculine psyche suggests that we cannot just remove by fiat the greater propensity of men towards danger, risk, physicality, objectivity, transcendence and the need to be in charge. Faced with the prospect of being out-competed by women possessed of more personal skills, plus a stronger draw of physical focus (something both natural and today artificially enhanced) in the ever-expanding service sector, working and lower-middle class men are tending to retreat to the margins. This suggests that we need to learn how to channel male aptitudes to social advantage, rather than dogmatically to deny their instance, in the face of all the evidence.

Labels: Anglican Church, Church of England, donor conception, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, heteronormativity, Marriage, religion, United Kingdom

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The trend toward unwed parenthood has reached a new milestone: More than half of births to American women younger than 30 now occur outside of marriage.

Predictably, some lament this as another sign of the fall of civilization. Others see it as something to celebrate. On the feminist blog Jezebel.com, a headline unabashedly proclaimed: "The Increase in Single Moms Is Actually a Good Thing." The article argued that women are now empowered enough to be choosy about the men they marry. On Slate.com, writer Katie Roiphe urges us to recognize that "the facts of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies" and that marriage is only one way of raising children.

The doomsayers may exaggerate, but the cheerleaders are misguided. It's great news that more women are economically self-sufficient. But there are at least two major reasons the rise of single motherhood should not be hailed as a victory for female autonomy. One is children. The other is men. ...

Many feminists have lamented the fact that, while women have moved into traditionally male roles in the workforce and made great strides in career achievement, they continue to do most of the traditionally female work of housekeeping and child care. Gloria Steinem is fond of saying that we have learned that women can do everything men can do, but not the other way around. This, many agree, is the unfinished business of the last half-century's revolution in gender roles.

In fact, married fathers, especially in households where both parents work, have become involved in hands-on child-rearing to an extent that would have seemed unthinkable 50 years ago. It is no longer unusual to see fathers changing diapers, bottle-feeding infants, or shopping with toddlers. Stay-at-home dads are a small but growing population.

Yet the trend toward more engaged fatherhood is being canceled out by the growing number of children with no father in the home. This redefinition of families as women and their children is a modern-day version of the old-fashioned, very non-feminist notion of family and child-rearing as a female domain in which men are only visitors. Sending men the signal that they are disposable is hardly a way to encourage them to be better fathers.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Fathers, feminism, gender, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting, women

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...But many folks presume that divorce after a traumatic, spouse altering event is common. A recent, highly cited study [pdf] from the Traumatic Brain Injury Model System at Virginia Commonwealth University conducted in 2007 found that divorce is not as common after brain injury as was once presumed.

“The study included 120 people with mild, moderate and severe brain injuries who were married at the time of their injury. Their average age was 41 and it had been 3 to 8 years since their injury. The study found that 3 out of 4 or 90 out of 120 survivors were still married. This starkly contrasts with the common belief that divorce is widespread among couples after brain injury. Additional findings from the researchers are:

The overall rate of breakdown among couples was 25% (17% of survivors were divorced; 8% separated).
There was no difference in marital breakdown rates between male and female survivors.
The more serious the injury, the greater the likelihood of divorce.
Age mattered; survivors who were older when injured were much more likely to stay married.
Length of marriage mattered; those who had been married for more years before the injury were more likely to stay married after the injury.”

Labels: culture, divorce, gender, gender differences, Marriage

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My wife and I have two children, and we love them dearly, dearly, the sleep-stealing, bank-account-depleting little trolls. But some days—when the living room is knee-deep in toys, when my daughter has flushed an apple down the toilet and my son has stripped off his clothes and run into the yard—we halfjokingly say that we can't wait until they become teenagers and ignore us. We can handle the two of them, barely. But a third? Outnumbered, we would have to switch from man-on-man to zone defense, and I can't help but shudder when I imagine a red-faced baby wailing through the night, the bank statements withering further, the walls crayoned, and the laundry hampers reeking of spit-up and poo. An unexpected pregnancy, in other words, would be a nightmare.

That's what happened to our friends. They had an Oops. We all know an Oops. The husband rips through his condom or the wife forgets to take her pill.

Oops. The parents of the Oops always say it was meant to be. They say they can't imagine life without their dear third or fourth or (mercy!) fifth child. But they say these things years later, after the kids are grown, when the memory of sexless and sleepless nights, the financial and emotional panic, have long since faded. When our friends first broke the news about their accidental pregnancy, we told them, "Congratulations," but our smiles trembled at the edges. That same week my wife got on the phone and scheduled my vasectomy. We'd been discussing the idea for months, and I'd finally assented. Think of all the sex we would have! Wild sex! No pregnancy anxiety. No frantic rummaging through the bathroom cabinet for the last nerve-deadening condom. No doublechecking the expiration date stamped on the foil and struggling to unroll the rubber one way, then the other, hoping all the while that the mood won't pass. We'd be able to do it anytime, anywhere. I could step into the shower or push up against her in the produce section at Whole Foods, jog my eyebrows, and say, "You wanna?"

Now that I have a date with a surgeon, an appointment with a knife, shadows have begun to steal across my fantasies of rolling around in the organic lemongrass. I find myself thinking of Cocoa. Cocoa was my childhood dog, a standard poodle with floppy hair. He humped everything in sight—sofas, legs, our cat, Mr. Meow. My parents finally took him to the vet. He returned sad-eyed and tamed, with a scab between his legs that took a long time to heal. A vasectomy isn't a castration, I know. Still, I cannot help but feel that, on some level, I, too, am being disciplined. That I, too, am a bad, bad dog.

Labels: children, contraception, culture, Fathers, gender, men, parenting

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Predator drones. The tur-duc-ken. Lady Gaga. What will America think of next?

Drumroll… Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the man-gagement ring.

Worn by a growing number of straight and gay hubbies-to-be, from the acceptance of a marriage proposal until the wedding, the man-gagement ring (MR) is the very latest in nuptial fashion. It embodies seismic changes going on in American courtship patterns and gender relations.

The history of the engagement ring stretches back to 1477 when the Archduke Maximilian of Austria presented the first of its kind to Mary of Burgundy. But no one knows which lass gave which lad the first MR.

The roots of the MR lie in the history of the wedding band itself. According to Dr Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, American men started wearing wedding rings in the 1920s: “Jewellers went on a campaign to make them popular, but it initially made very little headway. The practice began to spread during the Second World War, as a way of signifying, that despite the separation of war, the married man was going to broadcast his commitment by wearing a ring. It became especially widespread in the 1960s and 1970s as new ideas of mutuality emerged, along with growing disapproval of men's traditionally greater freedom to commit adultery with impunity.”

Coontz admits “I don't know of any historical precedent for a man-gagement ring.” ...

Rising female demand is the principal engine of this change. Feminist women view the traditional engagement ring as inherently unfair. In an article at Slate.com, writer Meghan O’Rourke summed up this grievance: “An engagement ring clearly makes a claim about the status of a woman's sexual currency. It's a big, shiny NO TRESPASSING sign, stating that the woman wearing it has been bought and paid for, while her beau is out there sign-free and all too easily trespassable, until the wedding.”

The MR redresses this gender imbalance. It’s a bugle call that the gentleman is heading down the aisle. That’s exactly what the ladies want, says Adourian: “They want confirmation. They want to possess the man. They want everyone to know he is off the market.” ...

The exact nature of the new man-gagement rituals varies according to each couple. Occasionally, the man chooses and buys the ring; sometimes, the couple does it together; but the majority of the time (60 per cent, according to Adourian), the woman arranges it all. ...

Since my gamophobia disqualifies me as an objective observer of the MR, I conducted a survey of opinions from friends and colleagues – men and women; married and unmarried; gay, bisexual and straight.

The biggest advocates of the MR were gay or bisexual men. John Ferguson, who formalised the marriage to his boyfriend last year after New York legalised same-sex unions, enthused: “It’s a great idea, a wonderful opportunity for couples to bond in traditional ways, do design work together, or at least go shopping. Sounds like fun!”

Women who defined themselves as both pro-gender-equality and pro-marriage also came over strongly in favour. They all mentioned the importance of burying the age when matrimony involved men treating women as chattel.

Frankel did warn, however, that the MR can have the opposite effect to ensuring a man’s fidelity. “Somewhere around the height of the Sex and The City craze, men figured out that a wedding band was second only to a cute puppy in attracting women. What should have been a signal that the man was off the market became the equivalent of the matador's red cape.”

Maddy Miller, one of New York’s leading portrait photographers, fretted: “What if the woman pays more for the man’s ring? Will she feel slighted when her diamond is smaller? What if she buys his at Cartier and he buys hers at Macy's? And how will dead grandma feel about soon-to be son-in-law wearing her jewels? If the couple breaks up can he keep it and give it to his next girl friend? There needs to be a pre-man-gagement contract!”

Karmen Ross, a married mother-of-two, and human rights activist, offered a pan-sexual view: "For gay men who can finally get married in this country, I say – show it off, honey! For het couples, an un-even playing field keeps things hot. It's far sexier for the girl to wear the betrothal ring.”

Unmarried, straight men – the demographic that should have been most in favour, since they’re the ones with the bling coming to them – were actually the MR’s most savage opponents.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, United Kingdom, women

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