Speaking as they do to equal access to a sacrament, last Sunday’s verses from Acts 10 might have seemed, to those fixating on the question of same-sex marriage, like something of a rebuke to the Catholic church and her bishops:

Then Peter proceeded to speak and said, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him. . . Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”

Here we see Peter endorsing inclusivity; following the example of the Christ who interacted with all, the church—through the authority of Christ and the workings of the Holy Spirit—offers Life-in-Christ to all. If all proclaiming Christ are accepted to baptism, one might wonder, then why not all to marriage?

I think it comes down to offices, and the equality to be found therein. We talk about vocations and “one’s state in life,” but I wonder if we would not better serve both clarity and charity by considering that beyond baptism we are called to an Office. Since all Offices are callings, then all servants are equal within them and each office is lived within the fundamental calling of all baptized people, which is to chastity, first and foremost.

This brings home the barely-recognized fact that, except for those called to the Office of Marriage—who are themselves meant to be chaste within that Office—the rest of the world, the majority of humanity walking about, gay or straight, are meant to resist sexual concupiscence, whether within the Office of Singleness or Religious Consecration. ...

Why does this Office get all the fun? Because, while all offices are equal, the Office of Marriage—far from being “for everyone” or a simple expression of a mood subject to change—is one of especial humility and sacrifice. The essentials of procreation residing within us are so powerful that unless one ardently works to prevent it, new life will come (a recent study found that 54% of abortions stem from contraception “failure”). The little bang of sperm and ova are the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic big bang of Creation; co-operating with God in the continuance of that creation means humbly accepting—for the rest of one’s life—involvement and responsibility for specific human beings of varied gifts and challenges. There are no days off; if you don’t like your job, you can’t just move away; you can’t re-staff. Parenthood contains moments of surreal bliss countered by a lifetime of work, self-abnegation, stress, and anxiety. Besides procreation, sexual tenderness in marriage brings a depth of consolation meant to balance out the fullness of that burden or—for a childless couple—the pain of longings unfulfilled.

For the rest of the world—the majority who are called to chastity—what are they meant to do within their Offices? Serve God and others by helping the helpless and companioning the lonely; feeding the hungry; comforting the frightened; really listening to another, even when we’d rather not. In other words, precisely the same things the married folks do, but without the extra gifts, responsibilities, and stresses of children, and without the consolation (and life-creating complications) of sexual intimacy.

Labels: Catholic Church, chastity, Christianity, culture, gay marriage, heterosexual couples, Marriage, religion, sex

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I've wanted to write this column for quite some time, but I was afraid of coming off as some sort of spokesman for angry dudes everywhere. I'm not. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of most men, and I think women have every reason not to trust us, especially when it comes to sex. After all, most guys would cut their own [ahem] off to get laid.

So yes, ladies, you're right. When it comes to sexual interactions, men are mostly awful. But now what? You think you'll avoid all the problems that come from interacting with half the human race just because you know we're not to be trusted? Clearly, that's not enough, because everyone knows that, and yet you keep stepping in it. Here are three of the biggest mistakes women make when it comes to men.

Labels: culture, dating, feminism, heterosexual couples, men, premarital sex, sex, women

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...It’s also interesting to watch “Girls” in parallel with AMC’s 1960s-set “Mad Men,” which reached a crucial cultural hinge moment this week when Peggy Olson’s journalist boyfriend Abe invited her to dinner at a fancy restaurant and proposed that they … move in together. Abe and Peggy have already been sleeping together, but in the substitution of a cohabitation proposal for the marriage proposal she expected – and the way she was first taken aback by, then justified, and then embraced the idea of moving in together – we can see the beginning of the shift from a world where “premarital sex” tended to be actually premarital (i.e., you would sleep with someone only if you thought you might be on the way to marrying them) to the world we inhabit today, in which there’s no clear script for making one’s way from casual encounters through steady relationships to cohabitation and then (at some point, maybe, but not always, especially down the income ladder) marriage. When Peggy’s mother, a sour outer-borough Catholic widow, tells her daughter that her suitor will use her “for practice” and then discard her, she’s probably being unfair to Abe himself, who seems like a decent enough guy. But her words foreshadow a world in which Hannah Horvath’s awful pseudo-boyfriend floats indifferently from one sexual encounter to the next, secure in the knowledge that “practice” is all he’ll ever be expected to provide.

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, premarital sex, Ross Douthat, sex, women

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Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research has found a dramatic shift in how women choose their partners in a study of marriages over the last four decades. Analysing patterns among women born in 1958, 1970 and between 1976 and 1981, the study found a decline in the proportion marrying men from a wealthier background. While there was a small rise in the proportion of women “marrying down” – wedding men from a lower social class, the biggest rise has been in those choosing men of a similar social status. ... However Nick Pearce, the IPPR’s director, voiced concern at the implications of the study. "This shift has implications for inequality, as well-educated, higher earners marry each other and then pass on the fruits of their combined success to their children,” he said.

Labels: class, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, United Kingdom, 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

VOTE

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

VOTE

...On my last date, a friend who knows my fiance came over to change my car headlight. We had some wine, talked about his recent break-up, and ended up in bed. I reported back to my partner, as always – our rule is full disclosure when asked; he usually asks more than I do. That same week, he spent a sunny day roaming the city with a woman he's been seeing. I was at a workshop, and happy he had something to do. It's normal, like going to the cinema or calling a friend. I find it largely unremarkable; my friends have long since lost interest.

We rarely see each other's partners; some people do it differently. Claire, a small business owner and amateur musician, and Bill, a technology consultant from Oxford, frequently socialise together with their lovers. They are in their mid-40s and have been together for 24 years. She has a boyfriend, Chris, of seven years; Bill has a girlfriend, Julie, of eight years, who is in a long-term relationship with her partner George. "From an emotional point of view, it's been pretty straightforward for the last many, many years," Claire says. Bill and Chris sometimes attend Claire's performances: "People probably wonder why I keep turning up to my gigs with two blokes. They've never said anything, naturally."

The relationship works so well that Claire struggles to think of recent friction. "Two years ago, there was a moment when Bill ran up and said, 'Julie's pregnant.' And I said, 'By George, right?' And he said, 'Yes.' That was the right answer." Claire last saw Chris on Tuesday, while Bill was rock climbing. "I cooked him some dinner and we caught up on our weeks. We are in contact during the week but not every day. We had a couple of drinks and ended in bed." She is Chris's only partner. "He mentioned something about snogging at a party a few months ago, but I think that's it. He likes his own space." Bill last saw Julie two weeks ago. "I went to her place after work, and waited for George to get back from work. We handed over custody of the child, went out for dinner, had a nice meal of sushi, came back. I waited while Julie performed her breastfeeding duties, went to bed, managed to stay awake to have a bit of sex, then collapsed into torpor. George was in the house looking after the baby." Both George and Julie have other lovers, and an extra bedroom devoted to the purpose; as far as the child will be concerned, these are just Mum and Dad's good friends.

Labels: children, heterosexual couples, open relationships, parenting, polyamory, United Kingdom

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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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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 startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found.

The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had "no interest" in or even "despised" sex. That's almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

If that's not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

The survey paints a bleak picture for Japan's aging population. The Associated Press reports that the national population of 128 million will have shrunk by one-third by 2060 and seniors will account for 40 percent of people, placing a greater burden on the work force population to support the country's social security and tax systems.

Labels: demographics, gender, heterosexual couples, Japan, men, sex, women

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If you’ve been anywhere near an airport bookstore in the last five years, you’ve probably seen the face of Tucker Max leering out at you from one of his two uber-bestselling books. ...

The books recount Tucker’s endlessly repetitive nights throughout his twenties (he’s 35 now), drinking extreme amounts of alcohol, having utterly drunken, meaningless, uninspired (and uninspiring) sex with a parade of random strangers, acting in a cocky, testosterone-fueled, belligerent way to those who come across his drunken glare, and saying the most insulting, vile, vicious, mean, sexually-degrading things you could possibly imagine to everyone around him, both men and women.

The narrator seems to be doing everything possible to ensure that his photo appears not only in mugshots, but under the dictionary definition of the word “prick.”

But, love Tucker Max or hate him—it is very likely someone you know has paid money for his writing. His books have sold a staggering 2 million copies combined—around 1.6 million for the first one, and around 400,000 for the second. ...

Perhaps more interesting, Tucker is not just retiring from writing about his hard-drinking, hard-partying, and hard-womanizing, whose recounting made him famous and earned him millions. He is also retiring entirely from that lifestyle of his twenties.

Or, I should say, he already has. Unbeknownst to his legions of fans, his legions of critics, or the legions of publishing professionals who want a piece of him, this most public of “I-don’t-wanna-grow-up” males is in fact now in the midst of a serious, intentional and devoted period of cleaning up and growing up.

He is changing his ways of the past, and—gasp!—becoming a mature adult male, one is who seeking a committed, long-term relationship, leading to marriage, with an intelligent, substantive, accomplished woman.

What you are about to read is the most in-depth and personal profile of this bestselling and infamous author ever written, based on the most access he has ever given a fellow writer.

It should be abundantly clear from what follows that I’m not a fan of Tucker Max’s writing, nor of his behavior in his twenties.

So why am I writing this? I felt Tucker had an interesting story to tell here, and I wanted to help tell it (no, it’s not another drinking story.) I also have my own personal interest in this story, having to do with how I spent my own twenties. I’ll reveal that towards the end.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", childhood, culture, divorce, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Marriage, men, mental health, parenting, premarital sex, sex, women

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It works for some people. There has never been a scientific study of the success rate of open marriages, because different couples work out their arrangements in different ways. ...

According to psychologist Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, gay men are more likely than any other group to practice polyamory. For a forthcoming study, she asked 120 cohabiting couples in the Salt Lake City area whether they had explicitly agreed to have sex outside of their relationships. Almost one-quarter of the gay male couples said they had a polyamorous arrangement. That’s compared with about 7 percent of the heterosexual couples and 3 percent of the lesbians. Previous studies have suggested similar proportions, although none is large enough to state the prevalence of open marriage with any certainty. The character of the arrangement also differs between the groups. Among gay men, polyamory most often involves discrete sexual trysts. (Some of these arrangements are very specific, for example, allowing sexual infidelity only when one of the partners has crossed an ocean.) Lesbians are more likely to have a long-term second partner. The polyamorous couples in Diamond’s study reported the same level of relationship satisfaction as those who were monogamous.

Labels: culture, gay couples, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, lesbians, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, women

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While it’s true that marriage is in serious trouble in the United States, it’s not because of the gay and lesbian couples seeking to achieve it. If my own research telegraphs future marriage trends, the real peril may come from an increasing number of straight folks who have had their fill of traditional marriage. Instead of fretting about how gay couples are redefining marriage, maybe we should start talking about why straight couples are rejecting it.

At least that’s the conclusion I’m reaching in considering the fallout from Illinois’ first-in-the-nation experiment with civil unions for opposite-sex couples, which went into effect June 1 of last year. When asked during a long Skype interview why she and her partner, Justin Gates, chose to enter a civil union rather than marry, Leah Whitesel, who identifies as queer despite her current relationship, framed the question this way: “Gay marriage doesn’t seem like the right discussion to me. Because it should be: ‘What is this institution of marriage and does it still need to be defined the way it has been?’ ” For Whitesel and Gates, the answer is no. ...

To be sure, the numbers of people entering opposite-sex civil unions in Illinois still represents a very small share of the total. As of Dec. 29, 2011, only 148 of the 1,993 civil union licenses had gone to opposite-sex couples. That’s not surprising, because—as is the case in the other states that have recognized civil unions—the Illinois measure was primarily intended to grant same-sex couples the benefits of marriage without the name. The law can’t achieve equality for them, so there’s very little about these clever creatures of compromise to attract opposite-sex couples. Civil unions aren’t recognized on the federal level, and hardly anyone understands what they are in the first place. For many same-sex couples, a civil-union law is much better than nothing. The expectation was that for opposite-sex couples, it would still be worse than the alternative. That’s why most states haven’t bothered extending the option to straight couples. And why it’s striking that some straight couples in Illinois have nevertheless opted in.

Those 148 couples might portend something big. The clerk’s office was able to survey one partner from more than half (46 of 87) of the opposite-sex couples who had civilly united as of Sept. 19. And their reasons for entering into civil unions rather than marriage should worry marriage traditionalists. For instance, by more than three-to-one, respondents cited “personal or religious convictions against marriage” as a reason for choosing the civil union. And when asked an open-ended question—“Why did you decide to obtain a civil union instead of getting married?” the most frequently proffered response fell into the political/ideological category. The report provides a few specifics behind that political objection to marriage, including statements of “solidarity with the gay community and/or support of equality, fairness, and inclusiveness.” Some respondents cited commitment/label issues, which included those who did not want a “husband” or a “wife,” or even the “marriage” label itself. And 9 percent of respondents cited religious issues. (Even though religion need not be a part of a marriage ceremony, for many the two are inextricably linked).

Labels: civil unions, culture, heterosexual couples, Marriage

VOTE

As the year ends, much of the talk around women — at least in the United States — has moved from empowerment and global gender gaps to the trend of young single women out-earning men and the rise of female breadwinners.

There are so many views and theories out there, some of them driven by independent research and others by personal experience and still others by a chatty blend of both, that we are getting a sometimes confounding, always provocative and occasionally contradictory picture.

For starters, young women today — and not just in the United States — are moving quickly to close the pay gap, or in some cases have closed it already.

They are marrying later and later, or not marrying at all. They no longer need husbands to have children, or want no children (40 percent of births in the United States each year are now to single women).

Women are ahead of men in education (last year, 55 percent of U.S. college graduates were female). And a study shows that in most U.S. cities, single, childless women under 30 are making an average of 8 percent more money than their male counterparts, with Atlanta and Miami in the lead at 20 percent.

Although that study of 2,000 communities was done only in the United States, it points to a global trend.

The emergence of this cohort of high-earning young women and the increasing number of female breadwinners are transforming gender relationships, upending patterns of matchmaking, marriage and motherhood, creating a new conflict between the sexes, redefining the word “breadwinner” and inspiring tracts on the leveling of men’s roles.

It is being called the reverse gender gap.

Labels: culture, economics, gender, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

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With growing evidence that the American dad has stepped up his game when it comes to housework and child care, U.S. households would seem to have been swept clean of gender inequity. But a new study finds that women outpace men in doing more than one task at a time — and they are paying an emotional cost for doing so.

The findings, published Thursday in the American Sociological Review, come from a two-year study of 500 middle-class, dual-earner families from eight urban and suburban communities across the country. They show that while fathers and mothers log nearly equal time performing paid and unpaid work combined, mothers spend nine more hours per week multitasking at home and work than do their husbands.

It also finds that men and women respond differently to the challenges of multitasking — not so much at work, where both sexes find it stressful, but at home and in public places. While multitasking men tend to get that heady "superdad" feeling while juggling kids at the playground and a client on the BlackBerry, multitasking women are more likely to report feeling stressed, pressed for time and guilty about not spending more time — or more quality time — with their families. ...

Participants in the 500 Family Study may not be representative of American families economically, educationally or by ethnicity, Schneider acknowledged. But by focusing on some of the busiest parents, she said, the study underscores the disproportionate emotional toll that multitasking may be taking on women as they shoulder a wider range of responsibilities in the family. ...

Making matters worse, mothers spent more of their hours multitasking than did fathers. The women in the study did at least two things at once for 48 hours over the course of a week, compared with 39 hours for men.

Multitasking by fathers was far less likely to involve child care, the study found, and unlike moms, dads tended to report they were more focused when in charge of their kids. Researchers said this jibes with much research showing that fathers are more likely than mothers to engage with their children in "interactive activities" that are "more pleasurable than routine child care tasks." When mothers had child care duties, they were more likely to take the kids along on errands, drive them to activities or supervise their homework, the study found.

The effect of mothers' multiple roles as earners, child care providers and managers of ever-more complex households emerged clearly from the interviews and surveys conducted as part of the study: When men get home from their paid work, they uniformly report reduced stress and improved mood as their cares lighten. Upon arriving home from her job to start her "second shift," the typical mother in a dual-earner household reports no such emotional boost, Schneider said.

Schneider said the new data help explain a "paradox" — that while men's contributions to household work have increased substantially, they have not resulted in happier mothers.

Labels: children, culture, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, parenting, women, work/family policy

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If ever there was a sign that times are a-changing, it may be the rising popularity of men's engagement rings.

'Mangagement' rings are said to gaining popularity among heterosexual couples who have a forward-thinking outlook on relationships, with equality-minded men happy to make the same public 'pre-commitment' as women.

From online jewellers to local boutiques, U.S. retailers are more often providing engagement options for men as well as women. ...

Others are more positive towards the niche trend. Speaking in 2009, Brad Gross of H.L. Gross & Bro Jewelers in Garden City, NY told ABC's nightline that rather than being a marketing ploy, mangagement rings are good value for what they represent.

'If you think about it, a woman is engaged and wears an engagement ring on her finger, oftentimes [for] north of a year.

'And a guy's engaged during that same time and walks into a bar as a free man ... so I think for $350, $400 for a woman to claim her territory, it's catching on pretty quickly.'

Labels: culture, economics, gender, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

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Labels: abortion, culture, Eve Tushnet, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, women

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Kate Bolick has set the chattering class — not to mention the bar scene — abuzz with her cover story for The Atlantic, “All the Single Ladies.” Because she passed up marriage in her late 20s and has now concluded that at 39 the possibility has passed her by completely, she declares the end of marriage as her generation’s contribution to history. Have all single 30-somethings come to a similar conclusion? Not quite, as you might expect. For further insight, National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez discusses the issue with Jennifer A. Marshall, director of domestic-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and author of the book Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of Single Life in the 21st Century.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is this month’s Atlantic story one woman trying to justify why she broke up with a boyfriend of three years for no good reason (as she tells it)?

JENNIFER A. MARSHALL: Not trying “to justify” but perhaps trying to figure out, in retrospect, why she did it. She confesses to having been bewildered by her decision at the time. There were some pretty strong winds at our backs for those of us growing up in the you-go-girl generation (i.e., those born after 1970), propelling us along a seemingly endless path of opportunity. So if “something was missing,” as she says, why not keep looking for it? As in any generation, cultural dynamics shaped our motivations in ways we couldn’t readily articulate, and this article strikes me as an effort to sort those out. ...

MARSHALL: The problem here is taking a fundamentally relational dimension of life — romance — and approaching it individualistically. The more we focus solely on our own goals, our own timelines, the less likely we are to have the other-focused outlook that makes relationships succeed. And as the Atlantic story points out, it’s that relational piece that is so elusive for women of the you-go-girl generation, the satisfaction we struggle to find. These romantic and relational decisions have consequences beyond ourselves, often particularly for children. Part of empowering women today ought to be instilling a greater sense of stewardship for those consequences beyond ourselves.

LOPEZ: Is Kate Bolick a case for arranged marriage? Of course, her feminist mother wouldn’t have been the best candidate for the arranger.

MARSHALL: There’s a lot of room between the situation today — an almost entirely autonomous search for a marriage partner — and arranged marriage. We live in a highly individualistic culture with confused notions of privacy. Sure, there’s a lot of disclosure on Facebook, Twitter, etc., but when it comes to some of the most intimate issues, where mentoring and wise counsel are most needed, they’re often walled off in a zone of individual privacy. It would do us good to take a few steps away from this atomized scenario and restore more family, congregational, and social support for helping young people discern the path to marriage. That takes a willingness to be in a community where we know others and are willing to be known — really known — by them.

Labels: culture, dating, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

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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

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In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. (A friend who suffered my company a lot that summer sent me a birthday text this past July: “A decade ago you and I were reuniting, and you were crying a lot.”) I missed Allan desperately—his calm, sure voice; the sweetly fastidious way he folded his shirts. On good days, I felt secure that I’d done the right thing. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?

Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

Well, there was a lot I didn’t know 10 years ago. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons (“something was missing”), I see now, is in keeping with a post-Boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else. And the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother, who had embraced it, in part, I suspect, to correct for her own choices.

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle, or: A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be … You and Me (released the same year Title IX was passed, also the year of my birth). Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda’s retelling of “Atalanta,” the ancient Greek myth about a fleet-footed princess who longs to travel the world before finding her prince, became the theme song of my life. Once, in high school, driving home from a family vacation, my mother turned to my boyfriend and me cuddling in the backseat and said, “Isn’t it time you two started seeing other people?” She adored Brian—he was invited on family vacations! But my future was to be one of limitless possibilities, where getting married was something I’d do when I was ready, to a man who was in every way my equal, and she didn’t want me to get tied down just yet.

This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place. I spent many a golden afternoon at my small New England liberal-arts college debating with friends the merits of leg-shaving and whether or not we’d take our husband’s surname. (Even then, our concerns struck me as retro; hadn’t the women’s libbers tackled all this stuff already?) We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates—an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing. ...

Of course, between the diminishing external pressure to have children and the common misperception that our biology is ours to control, some of us don’t deal with the matter in a timely fashion. Like me, for instance. Do I want children? My answer is: I don’t know. But somewhere along the way, I decided to not let my biology dictate my romantic life. If I find someone I really like being with, and if he and I decide we want a child together, and it’s too late for me to conceive naturally, I’ll consider whatever technological aid is currently available, or adopt (and if he’s not open to adoption, he’s not the kind of man I want to be with).

Do I realize that this further narrows my pool of prospects? Yes. Just as I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from. But what can I possibly do about that? Sure, my stance here could be read as a feint, or even self-deception. By blithely deeming biology a nonissue, I’m conveniently removing myself from arguably the most significant decision a woman has to make. But that’s only if you regard motherhood as the defining feature of womanhood—and I happen not to. ...

In their 1983 book, Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question, two psychologists developed what has become known as the Guttentag-Secord theory, which holds that members of the gender in shorter supply are less dependent on their partners, because they have a greater number of alternative relationships available to them; that is, they have greater “dyadic power” than members of the sex in oversupply. How this plays out, however, varies drastically between genders.

In societies where men heavily outnumber women—in what’s known as a “high-sex-ratio society”—women are valued and treated with deference and respect and use their high dyadic power to create loving, committed bonds with their partners and raise families. Rates of illegitimacy and divorce are low. Women’s traditional roles as mothers and homemakers are held in high esteem. In such situations, however, men also use the power of their greater numbers to limit women’s economic and political strength, and female literacy and labor-force participation drop.

One might hope that in low-sex-ratio societies—where women outnumber men—women would have the social and sexual advantage. (After all, didn’t the mythical all-female nation of Amazons capture men and keep them as their sex slaves?) But that’s not what happens: instead, when confronted with a surplus of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship.

Labels: age at first marriage, children, culture, dating, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Marriage, men, motherhood, premarital sex, race, women

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