Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married?

Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state.

This dearth of early adopters is not peculiar to America. Research conducted in 2004 by Gunnar Anderson, a professor of demography at Sweden’s Stockholm University, seems to confirm the trend. ...

Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too.

Labels: culture, domestic partnership, Europe, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, lesbians, Massachusetts, men, Norway, Sweden, women

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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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Mary Eberstadt’s slim new essay collection, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, may at first be more notable for what it doesn’t contain than for what it does. Unlike most books on contemporary sexual culture and its crises, Adam and Eve doesn’t have a plan to save the world. It’s not really a big-picture book, despite a chapter in which contraception is revealed as the major villain. Instead, Adam and Eve reads like a travel guide for an unpleasant safari somewhere east of Eden, hitting a few major areas quickly and even somewhat randomly. ...

The biggest flaws in Eberstadt’s book are a lack of focus and a total absence of economic realities. I’m no Marxist, but economic pressures do affect our culture of unmarriage, and our sexual dysfunctions widen the class divide; neither of these causal arrows gets discussed in Adam and Eve. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” Everybody, apparently.

That said, the book makes a few strong contributions. Eberstadt spends a lot of time discussing the damage done by pornography: body-image problems, greater tolerance for risky sex, earlier sexual initiation, and more sexual partners. The result is an overall jadedness, an inability to be satisfied with a single spouse or potential spouse. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker described the hidden effects of porn on young adults’ sexual culture in their forthright, careful 2010 Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying, and Eberstadt backs them up while providing further citations and avenues for exploration. She overreaches here, as elsewhere—it’s odd to blame Anthony Weiner’s public troubles on porn when powerful men have been making stupid choices about sex since time immemorial—but it’s clear that porn is affecting heterosexual culture more than most of us realize.

Eberstadt also points out what one major study called the “Paradox of Declining Women’s Happiness”: Over the past several decades, while women’s life choices have expanded, their self-reported happiness has decreased.

Labels: class, contraception, culture, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pornography, sex, women

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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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...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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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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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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Trying to make a big decision while you're also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to hold off on that. Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome. ...

The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. "The compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they're less able to resist it," Mather says. So a person who's under stress might think only about the good feelings they'll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.

Stress also increases the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more willing to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative about risk. Mather links this to other research that finds, at difficult times, men are inclined toward fight-or-flight responses, while women try to bond more and improve their relationships.

Labels: gender differences, men, mental health, 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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Men put on their best behaviour when attractive ladies are close by. When the scenario is reversed however, the behaviour of women remains the same. These findings were published February 2, 2012, in the British Psychological Society's British Journal of Psychology via the Wiley Online Library.

The research, which also found that the number of kind and selfless acts by men corresponded to the attractiveness of ladies, was undertaken by Dr Wendy Iredale of Sheffield Hallam University and Mark Van Vugt of the VU University in Amsterdam and the University of Oxford.

Labels: culture, gender, gender differences, men, women

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People from disadvantaged backgrounds gain financial security by attending college but paradoxically lower their odds of ever marrying, a U.S. researcher says.

Cornell University sociologist Kelly Musick says men and women from the least advantaged backgrounds who attend college can end up stranded between social worlds, reluctant to "marry down" to partners with less education and unable to "marry up" to those from more privileged upbringings, a university release reported Tuesday. ...

"College students are becoming more diverse in their social backgrounds, but they nonetheless remain a socio-economically select group," she said. "It may be difficult for students from less privileged backgrounds to navigate social relationships on campus, and these difficulties may affect what students ultimately gain from the college experience."

College attendance negatively affected marriage chances for the least advantaged individuals, lessening men's and women's odds by 38 percent and 22 percent respectively, while among those in the highest social stratum men who attend college increase their marrying chances by 31 percent and women by 8 percent.

Labels: class, culture, gender differences, Marriage, poverty, universities

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...Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Dads and the Changing American Family focuses on the generations that came of age after the 1970s, when power was, in a sense, being transferred from fathers to daughters. Daughters gradually emerged as the, on average, more tractable sex in school and in other settings that mattered to post-industrial skill acquisition. Our Fathers, Ourselves implies — and it should be said here that it is an implication lying at the edges of her book rather than a fleshed-out argument — that a generation and more of enabling fathers may have incited their daughters to this success. The end result has been as dramatic as it has been unexpected: the daughters are now out-professionalizing, out-earning, and academically outperforming their brothers in the competitive races of this century.

Drexler’s book uses a mix of quotations from her interviews with adult daughters who reflect on the roles their fathers have played in their success, scholarly material, and her own often folksy commentary. This mélange makes for a loose, sometimes rambling style, albeit with suggestive nuggets interspersed throughout. Chapters are divvied up according to fatherly patterns — fathers who listened and fathers who encouraged risk-taking, for example. She interviewed 75 women in total, adult daughters in their twenties and thirties, for the most part (some were older), whom she identified, by their sheen of confident savoir faire — in other words, their appearance of having the capacity to make life work out for themselves, to be resourceful, and to have their eye on some sort of ball. Drexler uses the word “sextant” to suggest navigational skills. A fair proportion of the women in her interview set were earning six-figure salaries at young ages.

One could quibble here interminably about Drexler’s selection criteria and methods; about the impossible-to-untangle entanglement of nature (innate disposition) and nurture (in this case, fatherly influence or lack thereof); or indeed about her definition of success, let alone her ability to identify it from the stuff of appearances. But, leaving such quibbles aside, as a human-interest story rather than as science, her study is worth considering for what it does have to say about power, gender, generational transfer, and the races we run. It flirts with tremendously timely issues — like why girls are outperforming boys at this historical moment.

Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, Fathers, fathers and daughters, gender, gender differences, girls, motherhood, parenting

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", class, culture, gender differences, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, men, premarital sex, women

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During his first-period broadcast Monday, the Norwood High athletic director Brian McDonough congratulated Will Higgins for breaking the meet record in the 50-yard freestyle the previous day at the Massachusetts South Division fall swimming and diving championships.

McDonough chose not to mention that it was a girls swimming championship.

“I didn’t want to get into that,” he said.

Anthony Rodriguez, another boy on the Norwood girls team, heard a grace note in McDonough’s omission.

“If people hear that you set a record, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s awesome,’ ” Rodriguez said. “But if they knew you were competing against girls, they wouldn’t have as much respect for you.”

Higgins, a senior, and Rodriguez, a sophomore, are among roughly two dozen boys competing on girls teams in Massachusetts because their schools do not have boys swimming programs. They are able to do so because of the open access amendment to the state constitution, which was voted into law in the 1970s and mandates that boys and girls must be afforded equal access to athletics.

Boys have been members of girls swim teams since the 1980s, but until recently they were mostly a sideshow. It has only been in the last year or two that boys have swum well enough to draw attention — and people’s ire. The epicenter of the debate is the 50-yard freestyle, an event in which strength can trump talent or technique.

At the Division I state championships on Saturday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are eight boys in the 28-swimmer field in the 50 freestyle. Although Norwood’s Higgins was ruled academically ineligible Friday and will not compete at the state meet, two of the top four seeds in the 50 freestyle are boys, giving rise to the possibility that a boy could be the girls state champion. ...

Paul Wetzel, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, said the state’s swimming committee would meet after the season, and among the topics on the table would be Higgins’s record swim.

Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, gender, gender differences, girls, schools

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The Williams Institute, a prestigious gay-legal think tank located at the University of California Los Angeles, has just released some fascinating statistics. In a comprehensive study, researchers Lee Badgett and Jody Herman surveyed the number of same-sex couples that married or state-registered in civil unions or domestic partnerships. They also looked at the gender and age of those who did so. And most interestingly to me, they also looked at the number of couples that are formally ending their relationships, in comparison to the divorce rate for straight couples. The study can be found on Williams Institute website [pdf].

Here is a summary of what these researchers concluded:

1. Nearly 150,000 same-sex couples have either married or registered civil unions or domestic partnerships, which constitutes about one-fifth of same-sex couples in the U.S. (or rather, a fifth of those who acknowledged themselves as such in recent United States Census reports).

2. About 1% of the total number of currently-married or registered same-sex couples get divorced each year, in comparison to about 2% of the total number of married straight couples. Note that the percentage of couples that get divorced eventually is close to 50%, but only 1% or 2% of them get divorced in any particular year.

3. Couples are more likely to legally formalize their relationship when marriage is an option, as opposed to a marriage-equivalent domestic partnership or civil union registration in states where only those options are allowed.

4. Nearly two-thirds of registered or married same-sex couples are lesbians, and only about a third are gay men.

5. A smaller percentage of same-sex couples register or marry in comparison to straight couples, but if current trends continue the marriage/registration rates will be similar in about ten years.

Labels: civil unions, culture, divorce, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, men, relationship dissolution, women

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On an unseasonably cool August Sunday morning in Topanga Canyon, just north of Malibu, a family of four arrives at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, an all-cage-free, everything-local restaurant that's typical of the neighborhood. This brunch is a welcome respite from the errands and worries that increasingly fill their days. Jaiya Ma, the center of the clan, is a 34-year-old with dark, wavy hair and caramel skin. Her life is wide open; she falls in love easily, suffers willingly. Next to her is Ian Ferguson, a thin 44-year-old with a shaved head and a goatee, feeding bits of eggs Benedict to their energetic 2-year-old son, Eamon. Ian and Jaiya have been lovers for four years. Sitting across from Jaiya is Jon Hanauer, an extremely fit 48-year-old wearing wire-rimmed glasses, who serves as Eamon's primary caretaker. He and Jaiya have been in a committed relationship for almost a decade. ...

Matt Bullen is cautious about exposing his 9-year-old to the family's lifestyle. "It gives me nightmares that our family is from some awful seventies adult movie where my son comes down a swirling staircase and sees all kinds of shenanigans going on," he says. He and his wife, Vee, have sought to be "age-appropriately honest" with their son. When the boy saw his father kissing Terisa and asked about it, Matt explained to him, "There are ways of loving that you just can't understand yet." Some of the teachers at his school know about his parents' lifestyle, and he is reportedly happy, well adjusted, and obsessed with soccer. Having more adults in his life, Matt claims, has helped his son's development.

But Jon's demeanor sometimes seems to betray a current of bitterness. When Jaiya caught baby fever soon after turning 30, she begged Jon for a child. He refused, saying he wasn't ready for fatherhood, so she turned to Wyatt (not his real name), her brash young lover at the time. Jaiya miscarried; Wyatt walked out. Later, she and Jon discussed pregnancy again, and again he demurred. "I pushed her into having other relationships," he admits. But seeing Jaiya twice pregnant by other men has stung, and Jon's time with Eamon has made him realize that he desperately wants a child of his own. But after her miscarriage and her difficult pregnancy with Eamon, Jaiya doesn't want any more kids.

Labels: children, culture, gay marriage, gender differences, men, parenting, polyamory, polygamy

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American women face an increasingly tough marriage market, Kate Bolick writes in her recent article in The Atlantic, “All the Single Ladies.” Women continue to outpace men in educational attainment, employment rates, and earnings, with the result that many men are seen as unmarriageable, while the shrinking population of desirable men is increasingly promiscuous. Bolick wants to know what a single lady is to do about it, and her answer is female companionship. ...

In Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, a detailed study of low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas describe how poor, unmarried mothers choose their child’s last name. If the mother’s romantic relationship is intact and satisfying, the child may be given the father’s name; otherwise it will be the mother’s. Thus in a limited but important sense, this segment of society is not only matriarchal, but increasingly matrilineal.

The full implementation of this pattern, so to speak, is seen in the Mosuo community in China, which Bolick also briefly discusses. The Mosuo have a matrilineal and matriarchal social structure and do not practice marriage (though many are monogamous). Women head households, while men lead an apparently carefree and subordinate existence in homes ruled by their mothers or sisters. Sexual contacts between men and women are initiated and terminated at the will of either party, and do not affect family and residential arrangements; the children resulting from these contacts belong to the mother’s household.

Matriarchy and promiscuity sustain one another. For as long as women expect support from the fathers of their children, male promiscuity will lead to distress and declining fertility as women fail to find committed partners. This is the world Bolick inhabits along with other New York singles. But when women give up on men’s playing an important role in the household and turn to one another instead, accepting the financial and emotional costs of raising one another’s children, promiscuity becomes, in a sense, safe. It also becomes inevitable, as men, who become increasingly less likely to meet the standards set by female heads of household, are no longer willing or able to sustain long-term commitment.

Labels: children, culture, Fathers, gender, gender differences, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, women

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...One of the biggest takeaways from your research was that sperm banks and egg agencies present sex cell donation to potential donors in very different ways. What was so different?

Both sperm banks and egg agencies call this a donation, even though the women are being paid and the men are being paid. The difference is that the egg agencies are framing the egg as a gift from one woman to another, and so they look for altruistic women who want to help infertile couple have families. They frame sperm donation as an easy job for men. There are a lot of jokes and cartoon drawings of sperm in advertisements that say "make some cash," but they're not talking about recipients; they're not talking about families.

Did you discover a difference in how men and women feel about donating after they’ve done it? If so, how does the marketing play into that?

One big thing is that the egg agencies encourage recipients to send thank you notes and thank you gifts to the donors. And the result of that is women talk with a lot of pride about being egg donors, and having given this gift. They feel good about their donations and about the creation of a family. That was true of women who were older and younger, women who had kids and didn’t have kids.

With the men, no one is sending their sperm donor thank you notes or giving them gifts. The men used sort of alienated or objectified language. They described themselves as being resources and assets for the sperm bank. In that sense, sperm banks don’t spend a lot of time with donors talking about recipients or thanking them for what they're doing. ...

You also found that sperm donors think of themselves as fathers but egg donors don't think of themselves as mothers. Why is that?

Because there is so much emphasis on the recipients in egg donation, egg donors don’t think of themselves as mothers. They give this egg in the hopes of giving another woman the experience of motherhood, so they point to the recipients as the real mother.

Sperm donors -- because there's not a lot of talk about recipients -- have it in their minds that they are fathers to all these children that are out there. Men and women are each providing half the genetic material for an embryo, but they think of their relationship to the offspring in very different ways. ...

Egg donor after egg donor, in different parts of the country, used this phrase: "Just an egg." They'd say, "What I'm giving is just an egg." They're distancing themselves from the label of mother, because otherwise they would be the worst kind of mothers -- they would be the kind of mother who sold their child for $5,000. They have a pretty vested interest in saying, "I'm not a mother. I'm not a mother. I'm not a mother."

Labels: children, culture, donor conception, economics, Fathers, gender, gender differences, men, motherhood, women

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