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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A study found that in polygamous cultures, levels of rape, kidnap, murder and robbery increase as the dissatsified men left on the shelf go on the rampage.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia say that monogamous marriage has replaced polygamy because it has lower levels of inherent social problems.

Prof Joseph Henrich said: "Our goal was to understand why monogamous marriage has become standard in most developed nations in recent centuries, when most recorded cultures have practiced polygaymy.

"The emergence of monogamous marriage is also puzzling for some as the very people who most benefit from polygymy - wealthy, powerful men - were best positioned to reject it.

"Our findings suggest that that institutionalised monogamous marriage provides greater net benefits for society at large by reducing social problems that are inherent in polygymous societies."

Published in journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society the study represents the most comprehensive study of polygamy and the institution of marriage.

Labels: children, Marriage, men, monogamy, parenting, polygamy, women

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We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition. ...

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.

A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust.

Labels: adultery, class, culture, Europe, gender, homosexuality, men, premarital sex, race, religion, sex, women

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

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

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

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

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

So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?

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

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

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

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

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Wife and Number Two daughter should not be left unattended in used book stores. That’s how we ended up with the latest additions to our growing array of used (and all but used up) books: What a Young Wife Ought to Know (1901) and a companion volume, What a Young Husband Ought to Know (1897). Both were part of a “Sex and Self” series on how to live a successful Victorian middle class life. ...

Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake, M.D., the book’s author, was, according to the cover, a professor of obstetrics at Denver Homeopathic Medical School and Hospital. The book carries an endorsement by no less than Elizabeth Stanton, prominent in the abolitionist effort and later prominent in women’s suffrage. I was expecting a casual hoot, looking for antiquated if not dangerous medical advice for women. It was in 1901, after all, that the best of medical attention more or less killed President McKinley after he was shot. I found some of that, but I also found a burgeoning feminist sensibility. Throughout this book the young wife is the equal of the husband, never a mere counterpart.

Dr. Drake has advice on everything, from how to assemble a trousseau before marriage to making wise choices in furniture once a woman is wed. She warns against “ruinous displays at weddings.” Keep it tasteful, and above all affordable. That won’t get into today’s pages of People but, then again, that’s probably a good thing. Some of her advice frankly grates. Drake has ungenerous notions on heredity and how to avoid the faults and transmit the virtues connected to it. It’s pretty clear with which classes she thinks most of those faults lie. Equally grating to some will be her assertion that the locus for what the young wife should know and where she should put her knowledge to use is the home. There she finds her true greatness.

...Dr. Drake sought to produce successful women. And successful women do not derive their happiness by being petted and placated. To do that, she asserts a sexual equality between men and women that surprised me, upsetting my assumptions about the period, and she insists that enforcement of that equality falls upon the woman as she takes responsibility for herself and, among other things, coolly examines a prospective husband.

For the record, I would not have liked filling out the questionnaire Drake envisioned for prospective suitors, but when it comes to my own two daughters yet at home, I may hand it to their future intendeds.

• Do you bring to your bride the same purity that you expect from her?

• What companions have you, whom you would not care to bring to your home or introduce to your wife?

• What in your life and habits have you hidden, and would you still hide from her?

• How many hours of thought have you given to the wise, earnest fitting for fatherhood?

Labels: culture, Fathers, feminism, gender, Marriage, men, motherhood, women

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: culture, gender, heteronormativity, men, women

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Women, more than men, are staying out of the work force to pursue higher education. When the economy improves, will this education gap break the glass ceiling? Or will men still be better off because they were gaining work experience while women were taking on student loan debt?

Labels: culture, economics, education, gender, gender gap, men, women

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After a couple years of sending my girlfriend a clear message of, "We're never getting married," I proposed. There are reasons it took me so long to come around, but none of them fell into those magazine/sitcom stereotypes (which can be summed up as, "He's having too much fun screwing around and doesn't want to commit").

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the people who write sitcoms and jewelry commercials and movies about bachelor parties don't have any goddamned idea how actual human relationships work. So for the women who have been conditioned to believe that we men are afraid of commitment because we don't want to give up our seat on the Saturday Night [expletive] Train, allow me to give you the real reasons marriage scares guys.

#5. We're Flooded with Anti-Marriage Messages

Labels: child support, children, cohabitation, culture, custody, divorce, Marriage, men, weddings, weddings vs. marriage

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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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Gay men who live in states where same-sex marriage is legal are healthier, have less stress, make fewer doctor visits and have lower health-care costs, a new study finds.

It included more than 1,200 patients at a large Massachusetts health clinic that provides services for gay men and other sexual minorities.

During the 12 months after the 2003 legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, there was a significant decrease in medical care visits, mental health visits and mental health-care costs among gay and bisexual men, compared to the 12 months before the law changed.

This led to a 13 percent reduction in health-care visits and a 14 percent reduction in health-care costs. The health benefits were similar for single gay men and those with partners.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Massachusetts, men, mental health

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Lucie Elmer's life follows the familiar trajectory of her generation: marriage at a young age, divorce and remarriage. The second marriage lasted 28 years, and when it ended a couple of years ago, Elmer joined the legions of other baby boomers who are raising the divorce rate among those in their 50s and 60s.

"Even though I was a very independent person, when it came to being divorced at this age, now it's just you," said Elmer, 54, of Orlando. "It's frightening and exciting."

While the overall divorce rate in the United States has declined, divorce among those aged 50 to 64 has spiked. What once was considered unusual — older people getting divorced — is now becoming commonplace.

"Historically we thought, 'Older people, they don't get divorced,' " said Susan L. Brown, co-director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green University in Ohio. "Now one in four people getting divorced is over the age of 50. In 1990, it was less than one in 10." ...

And though many older men may be looking for wives to take care of them in their old age, some women don't want — or need — that responsibility. Elmer sees herself in a committed relationship in her future, but not as a wife.

"I see myself as single, but with a significant other, someone you can do things with," she said. "It could be dinner; it could be travel; it could be the arts festival."

That scenario — lots of old people, single or living together but not married — raises serious issues as to who will take care of them when they do become ill and infirm. Traditionally, care for the elderly has been the duty of the spouse.

Labels: aging, culture, divorce, Marriage, men, remarriage, women

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

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Abstract

This paper studies how rising male incarceration has affected women through its effect on the marriage market. Variation in marriage-market shocks arising from incarceration is isolated using two facts: the tendency of people to marry within marriage markets defined by the interaction of race, location, and age and the fact that increases in incarceration have been very different across these three characteristics. Using a variety of estimation strategies, including difference and fixed effects models and TSLS models in which we use policy parameters to instrument for within-marriage market changes in incarceration, we find evidence that is, on the whole, consistent with the implications of the standard marriage-market model. In particular, higher male imprisonment appears to have lowered the likelihood that women marry, modestly reduced the quality of their spouses when they do marry, and shifted the gains from marriage away from women and toward men. The evidence suggests that women in affected markets have increased their schooling and labor supply in response to these changes.

Labels: class, culture, Marriage, men, race, women

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Three-fifths of young U.S. adults who cohabit eventually get married, researchers say.

Dr. Susan Brown, co-director of Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research, said 63 percent of women cohabited versus 57 percent of men.

"Today, most marriages are preceded by cohabitation," Brown said in a statement. "It's really become a stage in the courtship process. It's unusual for couples to marry without first cohabiting."

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the study found 61 percent of U.S. adults have formed a family by age 25. ...

More than one-third of men followed a "traditional" pathway into marriage, meaning they did not cohabit or have a child before getting married, and it was more prevalent among Hispanics and less so among African-Americans. Twenty-six percent of African-Americans who married by age 25 did not live with their partner or have a child before getting married.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race

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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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Labels: adultery, childhood, children, culture, custody, divorce, economics, Marriage, men, poverty, women

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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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