IT’S SPRING WHEN I REALIZE that I may never have children, and around that time the thirteen-year cicadas return, burrowing out of neat, round holes in the ground to shed their larval shells, sprout wings, and fly to the treetops, filling the air with the sound of their singular purpose: reproduction. In the woods where I live, an area mostly protected from habitat destruction, the males’ mating song, a vibrating, whooshing, endless hum, a sound at once faraway and up-close, makes me feel like I am living inside a seashell.

Near the river, where the song is louder, their discarded larval shells—translucent amber bodies, weightless and eerie—crunch underfoot on my daily walks. Across the river, in a nest constructed near the top of a tall, spindly pine, bald eagles take turns caring for two new eaglets. Baby turtles, baby snakes, and ducklings appear on the water. Under my parents’ porch, three feral cats give birth in quick succession. And on the news, a miracle pregnancy: Jamani, an eleven-year-old female gorilla at the North Carolina Zoo, is expecting, the first gorilla pregnancy there in twenty-two years. ...

But after three years of trying, it’s hard to give up. I know that it would be better for the planet if I did (if infinitesimally so), better for me, in some ways, as a writer. Certainly giving up makes financial sense. Years ago, when I saw such decisions as black or white, ight or wrong, I would have felt it was selfish and wasteful to spend thousands of dollars on unnecessary medical procedures. Better, the twenty-two-year-old me would have argued, to donate the money to an orphanage or a children’s hospital. Better to adopt.

The thirty-four-year-old me has careful but limited savings, knows how difficult adoption is, and desperately wants her body to work the way it is supposed to.



A LARGE PART OF THE PRESSURE and frustration of infertility is the idea that fertility is normal, natural, and healthy, while infertility is rare, unnatural, and means something is wrong with you. It’s not usually a problem you anticipate; from the time we are very young, we are warned and promised that pregnancy will one day happen. At my support group, someone always says how surprised she is to be there. ...

Nonhuman animals wait without impatience, without a deadline, and I think that is the secret to their composure. Reproductively mature for more than half her life, Acacia waits without knowing she is waiting. The newly hatched cicadas will wait underground for another thirteen years. The submissive marmoset who declines sex, or whose ovaries fail to produce mature follicles, waits and waits—maybe forever.

Though infertile women are aware of the passing of months and years—marked by charts, appointments, prescriptions, and pregnancy tests—we have something animals lack, which is the conscious possibility of a new purpose, a sense of self not tied to reproduction. I think it comes on us eventually, as Woolf suggests, but perhaps knowing that it comes, and understanding infertility as a natural, perhaps even useful phenomenon, can provide us with a measure of peace. Marmoset communities would not survive without their reproductively suppressed, caretaking females. Had Virginia Woolf been a mother, she may not have given us Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, heteronormativity, infertility, women

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The student who has been the center of a controversy involving a mural at Pilgrim High School in Warwick says she is going to go forward and complete her mural as she originally planned.

“I’m going to paint what I originally had,” the 17-year-old student artist told WPRO’s John DePetro Show. “I just figured I would just start what I finished because it was my original plan.”

Bierendy, a junior, painted a mural depicting the life of a man ending with the man being married and standing with his wife and child. School officials had the scene with the husband, wife, and child painted over stating that it may be offensive to students that do not come from the “traditional” family.

Labels: culture, family structure, heteronormativity, Marriage, Rhode Island, schools

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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

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

VOTE

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

VOTE

...A disturbing example of the latter is a recent study regarding attitudes about women changing, or not changing, their names after marriage, undertaken by Pennsylvania State University sociologists Laurie Scheuble and David Johnson. Given that most research into name-changing had focused on well-off liberal types living on the East Coast (New York Times wedding announcements have been one way to track this "rite of passage"), Scheuble and Johnson looked at data from two surveys, one from 1990 and the other from 2006, taken at an unidentified Midwestern university with approximately 1,000 students. The survey responses came from about 250 men and women each time. Additionally, the sociologists asked 369 students at Penn State if they planned to keep their own last names, and whether they thought lack of name-changing showed a lack of commitment.

In the 2006 survey, students were three times more likely to say that if a woman didn't take her husband's last name upon marriage, she was less committed to him and their future together. Predictably, these Midwestern women were also less likely than those at Penn State to say they wanted to keep their own names. What's weird is, this marked a change from how people answered the same question in 1990, when they responded more favorably to the concept....

Labels: class, culture, gender, heteronormativity, Marriage, universities

VOTE

Labels: covenant marriage, culture, divorce, feminism, friendship, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, homosexuality, Marriage, men, women

VOTE

If you met Hanne Blank and her partner on the street, you might have a lot of trouble classifying them. While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.

Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, “Straight,” as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of “straightness” really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.

Salon spoke to Blank over the phone about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the “bromance” is a very good thing.

Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a “history” of heterosexuality?

We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It’s really very similar.

So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?

“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing. ...

In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?

Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.

Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, heteronormativity, homosexuality, Marriage, men, sex, transgender issues

VOTE

When women seem scarce, men may compete for them by being impulsive, saving less and borrowing more, according to a new study.

"What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates," lead author Vladas Griskevicius, an assistant professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, said in a university news release.

"How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products," Griskevicius said.

He and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments with male volunteers and found that they would save 42 percent less and borrow 84 percent more each month if they believed there were more men than women in their local population.

And after looking at photos that included more men than women, men were more likely to take an immediate $20 rather than wait for $30 in a month, according to the study published in the January issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Labels: culture, gender, heteronormativity, men, women

VOTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOTE

As a girl, Andrea Grimes assumed that she would take her husband's last name when she grew up and got married. But at 27 and newly engaged, the Dallas journalist and feminist blogger now has no interest in switching her surname.

But not everyone has caught up: Both Grimes' mother and her fiancé's stepmother have already referred to her with her fiancé's last name. Those assumptions aren't surprising, given that decades after the feminist revolution, most women still take their husband's last name upon marriage. While no national statistics exist, some recent studies suggest that women keeping their own name is actually becoming less popular. And a recent nationally representative survey found that half of Americans support women being legally required to take their husband's name upon marriage. These traditional attitudes persist even as divorce, remarriage, gay marriage and blended families make naming more complex. ...

Regardless of which side you come down on, the push and pull of identity is at the core of the naming debate, according to Powell. He and his colleagues surveyed a nationally representative sample of 815 Americans, asking them not only yes-and-no questions about name-change choices, but also why they felt the way they did.

The researchers found that more than two-thirds of Americans in the study said that it's best if a woman takes her husband's name upon marriage. The researchers expected that a majority of Americans would feel this way, Powell said, but they were more surprised to find that 50 percent supported a law requiring women to take their husband's name.

As for people's reasons for advocating that women change their names, family identity was a reoccurring theme, Powell said.

"One key theme was this idea that marriage is about shifting your identity from an individual identity to a collective or family identity," Powell said. "What they don't explain is why it is that women should change their names as opposed to men, or both the husband and wife shifting [to a new name]."

Some people cited the importance of having the same name for the couple's children, while others said tradition or convenience made women changing their names the best option. Several harkened back to the traditions of coverture, with one person responding, "Women should change their names so there's a connection there, just a connection to let you know that she belongs to him."

Among the 30 percent of people who didn't think that women should change their name, their reasoning was rooted in another type of identity: personal identity. Like Grimes, many people think of their name as core to their identity, Powell said, and associate name changes with a loss of identity. ...

When the researchers asked their participants how they felt about men changing their names, 50 percent said that a man taking his wife's name would be okay. But that response rate didn't seem to reflect much gender liberation based on how the participants answered the question, Powell said.

"They were incredulous," Powell said of the respondents' responses. "They would laugh at it. One quote was, 'Sure, if he wants to be a woman.'"

Labels: children, culture, divorce, gay couples, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, parenting, religion, remarriage, women

VOTE

One of the most common things in the world happened on Oct. 1 in Tappan, NY. "Sunrise, Sunset" was performed at a wedding.

Only this time it was a little different. The song — which has accompanied thousands of nuptials since its debut on Sept. 22, 1964, in Fiddler on the Roof — graced the wedding celebration of two men, entertainer Richard Skipper and landscape architect Daniel Sherman, and the melancholy-happy tune's story of a "little girl I carried" and a "little boy at play," now told of two boys.

"I've been doing same-sex weddings since New York law permitted it in July," said Rev. Joshua Ellis, whose new career as a New York-based Interspiritual minister was preceded by many years as a theatrical press agent in New York City. "And something was missing. Nobody was singing 'Sunrise, Sunset.' It's sung all the time in weddings of mixed couples. I guessed it was because they talk about a little boy and a little girl. So I contacted [lyricist] Sheldon Harnick."

Ellis continued, "Within a few days, he wrote a note back. He'd contacted Richard Ticktin, who was best friend of Jerry Bock and his representative. Attached to that email were revised lyrics of the song." Ellis then gently asked Harnick if he could also write a set of lyrics for a female couple. Those arrived soon after.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Judaism, religion

VOTE

...Now, I don’t know a lot of “best friends” who share bedrooms in an apartment that size, but fine, let’s roll with that part. What I want to note is that the (presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek) observation that puppets “do not have a sexual orientation” is just manifestly false. Lots of the puppets on Sesame Street are portrayed as having a “sexual orientation,” insofar as they’re shown in romantic couples.

Oscar has his girlfriend Grundgetta. The Count has been involved with a series of different Countesses. The Twiddlebugs are your standard nuclear family. And of course, there are no shortage of one-off songs and sketches centered on families or unmarried couples. Muppet squirrel girl groups sing about their boyfriends. The human characters Gordon and Susan were married from the outset (and later adopted a child), while Maria and Luis famously got married on the show.

What all of these have in common is that they’re heterosexual couples. Because it’s regarded as the default, that “sexual orientation” is invisible. But, of course, it’s still there—and nobody imagines that simply depicting all these straight couples and families somehow counts as injecting inappropriate “adult” or sexualized material into a children’s show. ...

That omission is not neutral. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of same-sex relationships on a show that otherwise routinely celebrates family is, in itself, a message and a value judgment. ...

Update: Doug Mataconis articulates what I think is the natural reaction to this kind of argument, which is that “the mission of Sesame Street doesn’t really have much to do teaching children about sexuality at any level.” Whether it’s the “mission” or not, however, that’s what it does. It’s just that when it teaches us about heterosexuality, the teaching is invisible.

Labels: children, culture, gay marriage, heteronormativity, homosexuality

VOTE

The year was 1936, and Jane H. Todd, a state assemblywoman from Westchester County, went to Albany with a warning: the institution of marriage was under siege.

Too many frivolous youngsters were falling in love and eloping on a whim, only to have their marriages end in divorce. These “gin weddings,” as Ms. Todd called them, had to stop.

After two years of lobbying, Ms. Todd, a Republican, persuaded her fellow legislators to enact a law mandating a three-day waiting period between receiving a marriage license and being wed.

The law, and others like it around the country, became so notorious that in 1945 Hollywood made a film, “The Clock,” starring Judy Garland, about a young soldier who falls in love during a two-day leave in New York and tries to find a judge to waive the waiting period so he can marry.

Today, New York’s waiting period, which has been shortened to 24 hours, is back in the limelight because of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Many gay couples want to get married on the first possible day, July 24, and they are now scrambling — in many cases with the help of municipal officials — to find judges who will waive the waiting period.

“We think of Hollywood movies about changes of mind at the altar, but these are couples that have been together for many, many years and have been waiting impatiently to tie the knot,” said Susan Sommer, the director of constitutional litigation for Lambda Legal, an organization that advocates for equal rights for gay people. “They certainly have had a long time to get to know each other.”

Labels: culture, gay marriage, heteronormativity, Marriage, New York

VOTE

Fifteen-year-old Meagan Campbell likes to hug. A lot. “I consider myself a hugger. It’s hi and goodbye. You’d feel like you’d been left hanging if you didn’t get a hug.”

At Citadel, her old high school in Halifax, hugs were administered at the start of the day in the locker room and again at the end. Girls are generally more demonstrative than boys, who passively accept a clinch. Hugs are generally reserved for close female friends. ...

Teenage hugginess is epidemic, and (outside of Canada) schools have taken notice, with some in the United States and Britain banning all public displays of affection between students. Kids protest, especially since administrators offer murky rationales: that extended embraces are a gateway to make-outs and sex in the halls, or that they choke corridors and distract in class.

Only staid handshakes were spared at a small New England high school that outlawed all physical touching between students this month. News of the policy went viral after a 17-year-old student at the school complained anonymously to FreeRangeKids.com, a parenting website.

The girl hoped to protest the rule, which was intended to “thin out the kissing couples who clog up the halls,” as she understood it. “Interpersonal touch is not inherently sexual, and to treat it as such is to make it so,” she wrote in a petition, adding, “… micromanaging merely infantilizes us.” ...

For other administrators, the fear is sexual. “Schools have to draw the line and hugs are probably an easy place to draw the line at because if you don’t draw the line there, where is the line going to be?” Utah’s Chris Williams told the Standard Examiner. The Davis School District spokesman said there were exceptions to the PDA ban, including hugs after a winning basketball shot.

Other schools were more exacting: A Texas school ban stipulated holding hands, while another in Virginia expanded the prohibition to include high-fives.

Labels: adolescence, culture, heteronormativity, schools, sex

VOTE

Half of men would forgive their female partner's infidelity, as long as it was with another woman, according to a new study on cheating.

Women, however, were less likely to forgive and forget if their boyfriend had been with another man, the University of Texas at Austin study showed.

Researchers asked 718 college students to imagine being in a long-term relationship and what their reactions would be to several different cheating scenarios.

They found that overall, 50 percent of men would likely continue a relationship with a woman who had a dalliance with another woman, while 22 percent said they could forgive betrayal with another man.

For women, the results were reversed. If their boyfriend cheated with another woman, 28 percent said they'd keep him around, but only 21 percent said they would if he cheated with another man. ...

So, the researchers asked participants about their real experiences with cheating. There again, men showed less tolerance of cheating than women.

"Men were significantly more likely than women to have ended their actual relationships following a partner's affair," according to the study.

Labels: bisexuality, committed relationships, culture, gender differences, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, men, sex, women

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Research indicates that lesbians tend to make more money than heterosexual women. Over at Big Think, Marina Adshade attempts to demystify the phenomenon:

Sure, lesbian women are better-educated on average, are more likely to be white, live predominantly in cities, have fewer children, and are significantly more likely to be a professional. But even when you control for these differences, the wage premium is still on the order of 6%.

It is fascinating when the data starts looking like the majority is being discriminated against. Is it wage discrimination, though, or is there an economic argument for why lesbians are getting paid more?

Adshade's question has invited a number of responses. How are people accounting for the so-called "lesbian wage premium?"

Labels: culture, economics, heteronormativity, lesbians, parenting, women

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Do opposite-sex couples have a right to civil partnership? Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle of the United Kingdom plan to argue in a future lawsuit that they do. ...

Some have suggested, moreover, that sexual relationships ought not to be considered binary in this way and that individuals ought to be able to marry anyone they wish to marry, regardless of whether either of the parties has any desire to have or to be a "husband," a "wife," or something in between. This argument suggests that what's wrong with insisting on opposite-sex marriage is not simply that people might want to choose a different sort of role (i.e., a woman might want to be another woman's "husband"), but also that people might reject the idea that there must be "husband" and "wife" roles within such relationships at all. On this approach, the rigidity of traditional marriage is stifling and far too scripted, no matter how flexibly the dual roles within it might be allocated. Some might react to this rigidity by wanting something other than marriage, and this is where civil partnerships can come into play.

For a gay couple seeking to marry, a civil partnership might be inadequate, given its "consolation prize" quality -- we won't let you marry, but we'll give you all of the concrete legal benefits of marriage and name the institution something different. But for some gay couples and some straight couples, a civil partnership could be just what the doctor ordered -- an institution through which two committed partners who love each other and want to spend their lives together monogamously can do so, receiving the full legal benefits that come with this commitment, without associating themselves with all of the connotations of marriage.

We can get a sense of what these objectionable connotations might be by asking what someone who is opposed to gay marriage (and gay partnerships) would say is the proper definition of marriage. An opponent of gay unions might say, first, that marriage is about a union between a man and a woman. A straight couple that rejects this script might accordingly prefer an institution that does not contain a traditional sex-role division as part of its historic definition. Though the couple "qualifies" for the man/woman institution, the members of the couple might seek a union that does not emphasize or demand that one member be male and the other female, given the couple's own perception of what unites its members. It could also be that the man and woman in the couple are bisexual and do not like the idea of entering a union that inherently negates this aspect of their identities (by affirming their union as necessarily a heterosexual one).

A second part of the traditional definition of marriage is the couple's openness to the possibility of producing children. A couple that wishes to join together but has no desire to have children might find that this aspect of marriage creates undesirable expectations that they do not plan to meet and may not wish to confront. If marriage is understood to be about children, then this couple might want to opt out of marriage, even as it opts into many of the legal benefits that marriage offers, via a civil partnership.

Labels: childfree, civil unions, discrimination law, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, Marriage, United Kingdom

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Labels: Catholic Church, culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Marriage, religion

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Marriage equality has become a central pillar of the modern gay rights movement. Five states and the District of Columbia offer same sex marriages and a case involving California’s ban on gay marriage is expected to end up in the Supreme Court. But despite recent advances, not all gay people are so eager to ring the wedding bells. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, self-described queer activist and author of “That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation,” says gay people should stop fighting to uphold what she considers to be the failed institution of marriage.

Labels: beyond marriage, culture, gay marriage, heteronormativity

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