JAPAN POPULATION DECLINE: THIRD OF NATION'S YOUTH HAVE "NO INTEREST" IN SEX: Huffington Post

reports:

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.

more

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

posted by Eve at 1:13 AM VOTE

TUCKER MAX GIVES UP THE GAME: Michael Ellsberg

in Forbes [rough language, obviously]:

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.

more

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

posted by Eve at 8:39 PM VOTE

DO OPEN MARRIAGES EVER WORK?: Brian Palmer

in Slate:

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.

more

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

posted by Eve at 10:23 PM VOTE

NO TO NUPTIALS: John Culhane

in Slate:

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).

more

Labels: civil unions, culture, heterosexual couples, Marriage

posted by Eve at 1:18 AM VOTE

THEY CALL IT THE REVERSE GENDER GAP: NYTimes

feature:

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.

more

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

posted by Eve at 6:03 PM VOTE

DADS ARE DOING MORE, BUT MOMS ARE MORE STRESSED, STUDY FINDS: LA Times

reports:

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.

more

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

posted by Eve at 8:19 PM VOTE

IF YOU LIKE HIM, PUT A RING ON IT: The Daily Mail

does its thing:

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.'

more

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

posted by Eve at 11:44 PM VOTE

ABORTION AND GAY MARRIAGE: Eve

I wrote about the pro-life/pro-gay-marriage stance, including its origins and a possible tension within it, about a year ago here.

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

posted by Eve at 10:26 PM VOTE

Single Hope: Interview

with Jennifer A. Marshall:

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.

more

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

posted by Imapp Staff at 9:43 PM VOTE

MODERN WIVES STILL TAKING HUSBANDS' NAMES: MSNBC

Today Health:

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.'"

more

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

posted by Eve at 11:50 AM VOTE

ALL THE SINGLE LADIES: Kate Bolick

in The Atlantic:

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.

more

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

posted by Eve at 8:25 PM VOTE

THE INVENTION OF HOMOSEXUALITY... AND HETEROSEXUALITY: Jenell Paris

interview at Patheos:

...Jenell Paris, a cultural anthropologist teaching at Messiah College, has posed these questions and provided her own answer in her recent book, The End of Sexual Identity. Her book makes the historical argument that the very concept of a homosexual versus heterosexual identity is a relatively modern invention. ...


Was it also the 19th century when these labels gained currency in the broader culture?

Those didn't really influence the general public until the 1930s, when those words became a more common part of American discourse. So in thinking about even my own family, just to take an example, we could say that my grandfather who came of age in the 1910s probably didn't have a sexual identity. He was a fundamentalist minister, but he was a man, he was a Christian, and his sexuality got wrapped around those concepts, not his identity understood in terms of his sexuality.

My parents remember getting a sexual identity in the 1960s. So these ideas came a little late for them but they both can talk about realizing, "Oh, I am heterosexual; there is such a thing and I am going to claim one of those labels for myself." I, growing up in the ‘80s, always had a sexual identity. So we can see across the 20th century there has been a deeper and deeper entrenchment of that concept in American self-understandings.

And these changes correspond to how different generations have understood the role and meaning of sex in human life?

Right. If anything, sex was considered a more communal element of life. It had to do with reproduction, with family, with extended family, and with church and community. Sexual identity categories radically individualized the meaning of sex in the human experience. So the meaning of sex is now located primarily within the individual and her private, innermost feelings.

As an anthropologist, why do you think these changes occurred?

I think there are many different social factors around increasing individualism, even urbanization and other factors that don't seem directly related to sex. Urbanization made it possible for people to move far away from their families and have relationships or sexual experiences that their kin would never even know about. So people were gaining more freedom to cultivate sexual experiences that were more individualized, and I think this influenced the scientific community to categorize sexuality in ways that were more individual and less religious and less communal.

more

Labels: Christianity, culture, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, homosexuality, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 7:05 PM VOTE

AFTER CLASS, SKIMPY EQUALITY: Lisa Belkin

in the NYTimes:

AT Duke University last fall, members of the Sigma Nu fraternity e-mailed 300 of their female classmates about an off-campus Halloween party. “Hey Ladies,” the invitation leered, complete with a misspelling, “Whether your dressing up as a slutty nurse, a slutty doctor, a slutty schoolgirl or just a total slut, we invite you...”

Yes, there was outrage: in the form of fliers plastered around the Duke campus reprinting the offending e-mail and asking, “Is this why you came to Duke?” And there was official indignation: The recently formed Greek Women’s Initiative will be tackling the subject of gender relations.

But a less-noted fact remains: hundreds of Duke women went to that Halloween party and many dressed as they had been asked.

As parents around the country send their children to campuses for the start of another academic year, what are we to make of the fact that lessons of equality, respect and self-worth have been heard when it comes to the classroom, but lost somewhere on the way to the clubs? Why has the pendulum swung back to a feeling that sexualization of women is fun and funny rather than insulting and uncomfortable? Why are so many women O.K. with that? Odds are that the women dancing at that Duke party had mothers who attended more than one Take Back the Night march in their college days. What has changed? ...

I wasn’t surprised by the progress, though. The male-female ratio is essentially equal now, and the message of female achievement comes from the top: the university’s president is just one of many powerful women on campus.

What stunned me was what was happening outside class, where women seemed not to have budged in decades. In social settings and in relationships, men set the pace, made the rules and acted as they had in the days when women were still “less than.” It might as well have been the 1950s, but with skimpier clothing, fewer inhibitions and better birth control. ...

Whichever way they thought the balance tipped, the students interviewed essentially believed the “he chases, she submits” paradigm was no big deal. Boys will be boys, said Nora Taranto, 20, a history of science major at Princeton, who is particularly interested in neuroscience. “It’s just the way that drunk frat guys act,” she said of the antics of pledges on her campus and others. “Well, besides the naked runs through lectures, which I guess could be offensive to some people but weren’t offensive to me, not really.”

They all get to the generational card eventually, believing that parents are too uptight; being free to flaunt your assets as you do your intellect is a new kind of empowerment, they say. “When I talked about it with my mom, she didn’t understand that there were in-betweens between friends and relationships,” said a female junior at the University of Virginia. “That you could be unofficial. So I think it’s just a generational difference. It really just depends on the girl. Some girls just really like to have sex.”

more

Labels: culture, dating, heterosexual couples, hooking up, men, premarital sex, sex, universities, women

posted by Eve at 5:15 PM VOTE

MONOGAMISH: Ari Karpel

in the Advocate:

When birth control pills were making Megan’s sex drive almost nonexistent, she told her boyfriend, Colin, what many gay men in a similar position might say to theirs: “If you want to have sex, feel free to sleep with someone else; just don’t tell me about it.”

Last year, after six years together and a year and a half of marriage, Colin’s chronic back pain was making sex less than fun. So he returned the favor: “Sleep around all you want,” he said. “Just don’t do anything stupid, and don’t tell me about it.”

That’s how Megan, now 25, and Colin, 26, college sweethearts who live in Minneapolis, came to fashion a committed, nonmonogamous marriage. They don’t flaunt their unconventional lifestyle (they requested that their last name not be used), but they are hardly alone. By designing a relationship that doesn’t fit a typical married couple, Megan and Colin have joined a small but growing number of straight couples who are looking to gay male relationships as the model for long-term, nonmonogamous unions.

Anti-equality right-wingers have long insisted that allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of “traditional marriage,” and, of course, the logical, liberal party-line response has long been “No, it won’t.” But what if—for once—the sanctimonious crazies are right? Could the gay male tradition of open relationships actually alter marriage as we know it? And would that be such a bad thing? With divorce rates at an all-time high and news reports full of famous marriages crumbling at the hand of flagrant infidelities (see: Schwarzenegger, Arnold), perhaps now is the perfect time for the gays to conduct a little marriage makeover.

Welcome to Queer (Roving) Eye for the Monogamous Straight Couple Lie, brought to you in part by writer Dan Savage, who coined the term monogamish to signify committed relationships in which the partners are, he explains, “mostly monogamous, but there’s a little allowance for the reality of desire for others and a variety of experiences and adventure and possibility.” ...

Even many gay male couples, who Savage describes as having “perfected nonmonogamy,” fear disclosing that their relationship is anything but one-on-one. Gary (not his real name) is out in every area of his life, and his family is completely supportive. “But I don’t tell my family, even my brother—who I’m incredibly close with—that I have sex outside of the relationship with Ben,” his partner of 14 years, he says. “I have never said that to him.”

more

Labels: culture, gay couples, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships

posted by Eve at 9:33 PM VOTE

SUPPLY, DEMAND, AND THE RISE OF THE MAN-CHILD: Bryan Caplan

at Econlog:

Consider a traditional society where all the men sell their labor and all the women keep house. You might think there's only one market, but there are actually two: The labor market and the mating market. Men use their wages to supplement their masculine charms (if any) when they woo. In the labor market, the compensation that employers offer workers adjusts to balance the supply and demand for labor. In the mating market, the quality of life that men offer women adjusts to balance the supply and demand for women.* ...

Question: What happens in this model when the demand for (exclusively male) labor goes up? Wages rise, of course. But so does demand for women - and women's quality of life. This might simply mean that women enjoy higher material consumption. But it could just as easily mean that women get more leisure, better birthday presents, or a big church wedding. When demand for women goes up, men who refuse to somehow match the new market price end up alone. ...

Next question: What happens if we move this model into the modern world? Specifically, what happens in the mating market when women start earning money of their own? The obvious answer is just to flip the initial model around. If higher wages for men lead to higher quality of life for women, we'd expect higher wages for women to lead to higher quality of life for men. And what do most men see as a "higher quality of life"? Among other things: Less commitment, lower maturity, and lower expectations of financial support. In short, the chance to be a man-child.

Funny thing: If Kay Hymowitz's description of modern malehood in Manning Up is even vaguely accurate, this is exactly what we're seeing. Women are more economically successful, but increasingly dissatisfied with male behavior. Men are less economically successful, but pay a surprisingly small price in the mating market. There's no big puzzle here. A simple supply-and-demand story, with no mention of "feminism" or "family values," fits the facts rather well.

A sophisticated supply-and-demand story can do even better.

more

Labels: "emerging adulthood", culture, economics, gender, heterosexual couples, men, women

posted by Eve at 12:56 AM VOTE

COUPLES REPORT GENDER DIFFERENCES IN RELATIONSHIP, SEXUAL SATISFACTION OVER TIME: Indiana University

press release--why don't they separate married and cohabiting couples? bizarre:

Cuddling and caressing are important ingredients for long-term relationship satisfaction, according to an international study that looks at relationship and sexual satisfaction throughout committed relationships, but contrary to stereotypes, tenderness was more important to the men than to the women.

The Kinsey Institute study involved more than 1,000 couples from five countries -- the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Spain and Japan.

Also contrary to expectations of the researchers, men were more likely to report being happy in their relationship, while women were more likely to report being satisfied with their sexual relationship. The couples, more than 1,000 from the United States, Brazil, Germany, Japan and Spain, where together an average 25 years. ...

Participants in the study were 40- to 70-year-old men and their female partners, either married or living together for a minimum of one year. The study included around 200 couples from each country. The men and women answered gender-specific questionnaires and were assured that their responses would not be shared with their partner. ...

For men, relationship happiness was more likely if the man reported being in good health and if it was important to him that his partner experienced orgasm. Surprisingly, frequent kissing or cuddling also predicted happiness in the relationship for men, but not for women. Both men and women reported more happiness the longer they had been together, and if they themselves scored higher on several sexual functioning questionnaires.

more (download the study as pdf here)

Labels: Brazil, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, gender, gender differences, Germany, heterosexual couples, Japan, Marriage, men, sex, Spain, women

posted by Eve at 7:21 PM VOTE

A FEW COMMENTS ON THAT NYT MAGAZINE COVER STORY: Eve

These are criticisms, not because I think everything in the piece was wrong but just because these are the only things I think I have to contribute to the discussion of Mark Oppenheimer's cover story.

1. There's gonna be a few things--maybe several things--you're gonna find really difficult to forgive. I was struck by the conflation of forgiving adultery and understanding nonmonogamy such that there is nothing to forgive in the first place. These actually seem to me like opposite moral positions, but both Savage and Oppenheimer (in his role as sympathetic conveyer of someone else's position) consistently conflate them.

2. Stay Together for Which Kids? On a related note, I'm struck by how the only players in this story are a) the adults (in the magazine story as printed it's really only the adults in the marriage, but even in Oppenheimer's comments here he only looks at e.g. the mistress, her boyfriend, or other adult parties who might be affected emotionally) and b) the children within the marriage. Have we really forgotten that sex still makes babies? There will be children of affairs, too, and so framing (heterosexual) adultery as a stay-together-for-the-kids plan strikes me as a great way to enhance the inherent inequality between children of the marriage and those outside it. Out-of-wedlock children, in this worldview, become unfortunate side effects of the sexual license designed to protect the marital children.

3. O reason not the need! But couldn't we all just be rational actors, contracepting demi-perfectly and backing it up with abortion? Then no worries!

But of course the whole weird premise of Savage's claim is that eros is so powerful and irrational, sexual fulfillment such an obvious non-negotiable, that... we should talk things out like rational adults before we get married and then stick to our rational rules and goals. Eros is simultaneously overwhelming--breaking down the strong norm of marital fidelity--and easily-tamed, contained within little well-contracepted well-communicated honest and generous mini-affairs.

Ultimately I think this piece, although it takes a really long time to hit its stride, offers a deeper analysis of Savage's ethic--both the good points and the bad.

Labels: adultery, children, culture, Dan Savage, divorce, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, sex, women

posted by Eve at 12:20 AM VOTE

REVIEW: "IS MARRIAGE FOR WHITE PEOPLE?": Jenee Desmond-Harris

at The Root:

When titles for this book were being considered, perhaps Why Middle Class Black Women Can't Find a Man and How the Whole Problem Could Be Solved if They Would Just Marry White Guys didn't have quite the ring the publisher was after. ...

But we can tire of the way the issue is framed without boycotting attempts to get it right. And there are chapters nestled in the middle of the book that should be applauded for accomplishing Banks' stated goal: to tell the stories of single black women and "capture their lives as they experience it." He explains that he supplemented personal stories with insights gained from literature, fusing insights from social science research and personal interviews.

In chapters 3 through 6: mission accomplished. Banks promises the reader to attempt to understand why so many black women are single by considering the challenges they face when looking for a mate. And he does that. These barriers are outlined in the chapters that follow: "The Marriage Decline," "The Man Shortage," "The Market," "Power Wives" (income disparities within marriages) and "What About the Children?" (pregnancy out of wedlock).

more

Labels: culture, economics, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, race, women

posted by Eve at 10:09 AM VOTE

"THE LESSER SEX": Andrew Sullivan

at the Daily Beast:

...As a gay man, I have lived in a world created, propelled and dominated by testosterone. I have loved it, been entranced by it, obsessed by it, crushed by it, exposed by it, humiliated by it and also exhausted by it. The gay male world is in some respects women's revenge on men - because everything women deal with on the testosterone front is doubled and then inflicted on other men.

In the long run, it makes sense to settle down and see this raging, deranging horniness/temper decline in one's life, whether you're gay or straight. Marriage has had this effect on me in ways I never fully expected. Yes, men can domesticate men, even if not as effectively as women can. ...

But back to the gay angle. Because there is so much more physical and psychological equality in a male-only sexual culture, the traps and tragedies of straight men's testosteroned lives in interaction with calmer, saner women, may not be so common. Yes, hearts are broken, diseases caught (by far the biggest drawback), cruelties unleashed. But there is also more civility than you might expect. Very few fights break out in gay bars over emotional rivalries. Aggressive, unwanted pursuits of beloveds are less likely, because guys can tell guys to fuck off and mean it much more successfully than less physically imposing and more decorous women. When you're rejected, you are more likely, as a man, to know it's only superficial, because you too are superficial, and perhaps recover more quickly from the blow to the ego.

more

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, homosexuality, men, sex

posted by Eve at 5:32 PM VOTE

30 AND PREGNANT: Rachel Friedman's

brilliant tomorrow's-news-today at McSweeney's:

"What are you going to do?" my friend Kate whispered across the square table at Le Pain Quotidian. She squeezed my hand.

"I have no idea," I said. I could feel tears collecting in the corner of my eyes. I would not cry in public. I would not. This is all a bad dream, I tried to tell myself.

There were several people to break the news to, first and foremost my husband. We've only been married for four years, practically newlyweds! This wasn't part of the plan. ...

Next on the list was my father, the professor. There was a long silence after I confessed to him.

"But you haven't even made tenure yet!" he wailed once he was finally able to speak. "A baby is going to derail your entire career!"

"It's going to be okay, Dad," I said, trying to calm him. "I'll only have to take a few weeks off."

"I thought you were waiting until 35," he said. "That's what good girls do."

"Sometimes accidents happen," I said.

more

Labels: children, class, culture, heterosexual couples, pregnancy, satire, sex

posted by Eve at 2:05 PM VOTE