So many singles appear to be enjoying their unencumbered and unmarried state that two-thirds aren't even sure they want to marry, suggests a broad national survey of the dating habits, sexual behaviors and lifestyles of 5,541 single adults across the USA.

Almost 40% of singles 21 and older surveyed were uncertain about wanting to marry; overall, 34.5% say they do want to marry, but 27% don't.

This second annual Singles in America study, conducted online and completed in December by market research firm MarketTools for the Dallas-based dating website Match.com, was developed by the Institute for Evolutionary Studies at Binghamton University, along with biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and sex therapist Laura Berman.

Attitudes about relationships also show decidely mixed views: 21.3% report they don't have time or prefer to stay unattached. Only 12.7% are actively seeking a relationship. Just under half (46.8%) are not actively looking for a relationship but say that if they met the right person they would consider it, and 16.9% are dating someone. Another 2.2% like to play the field.

The nationally representative sample of single adults not in a committed relationship is largely heterosexual (90.5%) and includes 56.5% who have never married, 30.9% divorced, 10.2% widowed and 2.4% separated. ...

Almost a quarter said they typically have sex after one, two or three dates; 25% said “when the other person is ready,” and 19% said “when we agree to an exclusive relationship.” About 13% said “when we are married.”

Among other sex-related findings:

-- 58% of singles have had a one-night stand (65% of men and 51% of women).
-- 44% had not experienced infidelity; of those who had, 36% said a partner had been unfaithful, 8% had personally been unfaithful, and 13% said both were.
-- 60% said a partner having a series of one-night stands was “more unacceptable” than a three-month affair with one person; 40% said a three-month affair was worse.

Labels: committed relationships, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

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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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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

VOTE

A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could pregnant. ...

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex. ...

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to. That suggests that sex education must include not only information about anatomy and birth control, but also about how to deal with situations in which a girl feels pressured to do something she doesn't want to, Gavin said.

The findings are sobering, Albert said. But it's important to remember that the overall teen birth rate has been falling for some time, and recently hit its lowest mark in about 70 years.

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, teenage pregnancy

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

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Why don’t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get married someday. And yet we delay, we divorce, and we churn through relationships so quickly that in 2004 only 61 percent of American children were living with both of their biological parents. Why can’t we get and keep what we say we want?

Maybe we lack role models. As we wander around aimlessly, the pejorative term “extended adolescence” has become the euphemism “emerging adulthood.” Kate Bolick’s much discussed Atlantic article, “All the Single Ladies,” seems to offer this explanation for its author’s eventual surrender to singleness.

And yet two recent books argue that a big part of our problem is that we do have role models, conventions, cultural mores, and rules to follow. It’s just that the rules don’t work. Paul Hollander’s Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker’s Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying take very different approaches to the question of how Americans mate and marry. Extravagant Expectations is a work of pop-philosophy that muses about how modernity and the Romantic movement have influenced personals ads and internet dating. Premarital Sex is a research-based look at the sexual practices and beliefs of young Americans from a broad range of class, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Yet both end up arguing that Americans today are working from fairly well-defined “scripts” about love, dating, marriage—and selfhood. Perhaps, they conclude, our marriage problems ultimately spring from a flawed understanding of what it means to become an adult.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", cohabitation, culture, dating, Eve Tushnet, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

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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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Evangelical abstinence campaigns have shifted their emphasis from "just say no" to sex before marriage to "just say yes"—within marriage, that is, says Christine Gardner. In Making Chastity Sexy (University of California Press), the Wheaton College communications professor examines the rhetoric of three evangelical abstinence organizations, comparing them with an abstinence campaign in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS is a common threat. Christianity Today online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey spoke with Gardner about the larger ideas communicated to young people in the campaign.

What did you find upon examining the language of the U.S. abstinence movement?

This is a study of rhetoric in the classical sense—the study of the art of persuasion, focusing on three very specific church-related evangelical campaigns. These groups are using a savvy rhetorical strategy: They are using sex to sell abstinence. They are using the very thing they are prohibiting to admonish young people to wait. They are saying, "If you are abstinent now, you will have amazing sex when you are married." The argument then becomes a promise of marriage.

What are the limitations of this approach?

Such campaigns don't address the challenges of singleness. Also, what if you are gay? What if you do get married, but sex isn't all it's cracked up to be? There are many challenges with this kind of strategy, as savvy and persuasive as it is.

Evangelicals are quite good at interacting with secular culture. We have a long history of adapting secular forms for religious ends. The language of self-gratification in "sexy abstinence" is showing the ability of evangelicals to speak the language of the culture. But in doing so, are we actually transforming it?

You looked at how Africans view abstinence, saying they "saw their bodies as temples of the Lord and themselves as caretakers … a more deeply theological response."

I assumed that HIV/AIDS would be the big motivator for [African] young people to commit to abstinence. It is big, but I found this other undercurrent that was deeply theological. A leader of one of the programs told me that yes, they do talk about AIDS as a motivator for young people to commit to abstinence, but they noted that "you can get malaria and die, too." AIDS is not as much of a motivator as a Western researcher coming in would have assumed.

How do the American and African messages compare?

Americans have turned a prohibition into a more positive admonition. In this case, pleasing God is an end in itself. Pleasing God will have tangible benefits. In Kenya and Rwanda, it was more of a combination: "Avoid death. Avoid HIV/AIDS, and do it out of fear of God, because he wants you to do this."

Also, in the places I visited in Africa, the condom is viewed as a medical device, a tool for saving lives. It is not viewed as a tool for promiscuity, as evangelicals in this country largely view it. The same little piece of latex is described so radically differently by evangelicals in two different cultural contexts.

How does Western rhetoric translate to the African context?

It offers an understanding of self and empowers young people, especially women, to respect their bodies. This is, of course, fabulous and indeed, very biblical. But the language of individualism and self-gratification can seep in and pose a problem.

Labels: abstinence, Africa, Christianity, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex education, STDs

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"Confessions of a 29-year old virgin."

That’s the title of the emotionally revealing blog of four Fraser Valley virgins who are looking for some good men for marriage and “holy” sex.

The Abbotsford women’s online “virgin diaries” have suddenly made them media stars. Their quest for guys led to a video about them appearing Wednesday on the popular show of Ellen DeGeneres, who proceeded to get in some virgin jokes.

The virginal British Columbians, all of whom are 29 or 30 and evangelical Christians, were also to be videotaped Wednesday night for an upcoming appearance on HLN’s Dr. Drew Show.

And this Sunday evening three of the four young B.C. women will be starring on a pilot program called The Virgin Diaries on the TLC network. The program includes video of the young women dating eligible men, all of whom also happen to be virgins.

The extroverted B.C. females, all members of a small church in Abbotsford called The River, began their blog four months ago because they were tired of being stereotyped as defective for being virgins (actually, one confesses to being a “born-again” virgin who wants to start over). They are fighting back against a sex-saturated culture, and looking for guys, in the name of spiritual “purity.” ...

The four young women’s crusade for virginity before marriage goes against the grain of North American culture, where a poll released this week by online polling system Soda-Head suggested 70 per cent of North Americans think cohabitation before marriage is a good thing.

Labels: Canada, Christianity, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, virginity

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Yesterday, Yale's president announced that the university's "Sex Week," an exploration of sexual issues featuring panels discussions, guest speakers, and other events, will no longer be allowed to use Yale's name or facilities. Conservative students have been campaigning against Sex Week for some time, calling it pro-porn and anti-relationship. But the president's explanation for the ban includes some more serious allegations.

Earlier this year, Yale asked a special committee to examine and report on "how sexual harassment, violence or misconduct may be more effectively combated at Yale, and what additional steps the University might take to create a culture and community in which all of our students are safe and feel well supported." The committee was chaired by former Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Margaret Marshall, famous for her 2003 decision authorizing gay marriage in the state, and it issued its report in September. The report made a number of recommendations, including that the university "improve the mechanisms for addressing claims of sexual misconduct so that every Yale student understands clearly where to make a claim."

Labels: culture, pornography, premarital sex, sex, sex education, universities

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Popular discourse portrays marriage as a source of innumerable public and private benefits, happiness, companionship, financial security, and even good health. Complementing this view, our legal discourse frames the right to marry as a right of access, the exercise of which is an act of autonomy and free will. However, a closer look at marriage’s past reveals a more complicated portrait. Marriage has been used -- and importantly, continues to be used -- as state-imposed sexual discipline.

Until the mid-twentieth century, marriage played an important role in the crime of seduction. Enacted in a majority of U.S. jurisdictions in the nineteenth century, seduction statutes punished those who 'seduced and had sexual intercourse with an unmarried female of previously chaste character' under a 'promise of marriage.' Seduction statutes routinely prescribed a bar to prosecution for the offense: marriage. The defendant could simply marry the victim and avoid liability for the crime. However, marriage did more than serve as a bar to prosecution. It also was understood as a punishment for the crime. Just as incarceration promoted the internalization of discipline and reform of the inmate, marriage’s attendant legal and social obligations imposed upon defendant and victim a new disciplined identity, transforming them from sexual outlaws into in-laws. ...

With this in mind, the recent struggle for marriage equality seems unduly narrow. While achieving marriage equality is important, this history underscores an equally important interest in defining and preserving spaces for sexual liberty that exist beyond the disciplining domains of the state.

Labels: law, Marriage, premarital sex, sex

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

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

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

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

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

VOTE

More people are getting married later and later. Last I read, the average age at marriage for men in the US was 28 and for women it was 27. (Clearly, women in their 20s dig older men.) There is an obvious and interesting implication of this that I first a sociologist talk about around 12 years ago. He noted that there exists this increasingly long period of time in human development between when people are sexually maturing (I only mean capable of having sex and making babies) and when people are settling down into marriage. It’s really pretty amazing to think about this. It has huge implications, since the average person is not settling into marriage until 15 years after when they become interested in, and capable of, having sex. ...

I’m not actually much interested in Vegas but I am interested in the Vegas mindset. The core idea, of course, is that what happens in Vegas does not touch the rest of your life. It’s a no-harm, no-foul, place with a firewall around it. You can do whatever you like in Vegas and it won’t affect the rest of your life. I have a theory about this. It has two parts.

Part 1. What happens romantically between the ages of 18 and 34 (or whenever a person settles down in marriage and family life) affects the rest of life.

Part 2. People are now more likely to believe than in the past that what happens before they settle down will not affect their prospects for life-long love and happiness.

Part 1 is really pretty easy to document. Part 2, then, is the hypothesis that matters here.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, single parenting

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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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Last spring, the editors of the News wrote that “the project of reforming Yale’s sexual culture is a formidable one.” This challenge followed upon an academic year punctuated by a number of events that drew attention to Yale’s sexual culture and the problems that mar it: rape, harassment, objectification of women and the ways in which the expectation of sexual gratification easily boils over into ugly disrespect and denigration. The formidable project has yet to find an adequate vision. ...

It was several months later that a group of students filed a complaint against the University under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, citing a “sexually hostile environment” for women. If Yale had hit the snooze button following the first alarm, here was the second one to wake us up. By the end of the year, attentive observers could not deny that Yale had a failed culture; nevertheless, the basis of the University’s reaction was not much different. Once again, it was assumed that the response should be more of the same: bureaucratic bodies to dissect the “campus climate,” recruiting students to act as “communication and consent educators,” and tasking freshman counselors with imparting a legalistic and unwieldy definition of “consent.”

We, as members of Undergraduates for a Better Yale College, would like to propose an alternative approach. Loving our University and recognizing that her culture is in need of renewal, we seek to look behind the surface and strike at the root causes of our sexual maladies. We believe that these maladies are at once simpler and yet more profound than has been hitherto acknowledged. Simply put, we believe that the heart of the problem is the very attitude toward sexuality that prevails on campus, a paradoxical attitude that both trivializes sex and is obsessed with it. It is trivializing to treat sex as nothing more than a casual weekend pastime. It is obsessive — and pathetic — to be as consumed with sexual curiosity as our campus so frequently is.

We believe that the hook-up culture is fertile ground for acts of sexual selfishness, insensitivity, cruelty and malice, for the simple reason that selfishness provides the whole premise of that culture.

As a co-founder of the Undergraduates for a Better Yale College (UBYC), I am delighted at the overwhelmingly positive response we have received so far. Students, alumni, faculty and parents have signed our petition, sent us emails and called us to encourage our efforts and ask how they could help. Freshmen and sophomores have shown particular enthusiasm; I am glad that those who will be here after I am gone are taking action about the future Yale they will inherit.

Amidst so many positive developments, we are not much fazed by the relatively scant criticism we have received. With the exception of one or two kind, patient e-mails seeking to explain a point of view and then understand where we are coming from, most criticism has taken the form of straw man arguments, mischaracterization and exaggeration. Keeping this in mind, then, and understanding that I, too, am capable of misunderstanding people’s words, I want to clarify UBYC’s aims by responding to the pair of op-eds that have been leveled against us.

In a column harshly titled “Exacerbating Yale’s rape culture” (Sept. 21), four Title IX complainants made the case that by “seeking silence” on sexual issues, “the Undergraduates for a Better Yale College (UBYC) create a culture of violence.” We are accused of “suppressing dialogue around intimacy.” But it is abundantly clear on our website, and in all of our materials, how eager we actually are to talk about intimacy — it is the key element, along with respect, responsibility and, above all, interpersonal love, in any healthy relationship, and it is what we find so conspicuously lacking in Yale’s romantic culture, especially in Sex Week. If the column’s authors have misunderstood our point, we apologize and rephrase: We are not seeking to stop discussion on sex and intimacy. Rather, we are seeking to improve that discussion.

It was heartening to see Ted Lee’s ’12 column grace the op-ed page of Friday’s paper (“Love, sex and intimacy,” Sept. 22). Lee offered a sincere reflection on the intricate relationship between sex and love, the physical and the emotional. He encouraged us to consider the fundamental question that must underlie any proposed reform of our sexual culture, something that the back-and-forth about “rape culture,” in my opinion, has only obliquely touched upon. We cannot envision a better sexual culture until we have settled the meaning of sex.

Nevertheless, Lee’s conclusions rest on a number of crucial confusions, some of them dramatic. I was particularly taken aback by these sentences: “To follow UBYC’s logic … requires some sort of separation between the mind and body. My experience suggests emotional and physical intimacy are inextricably linked.”

As an active member of Undergraduates for a Better Yale College, I am somewhat distressed that there has arisen so fundamental a misunderstanding of our advocacy. I can only conclude that we have not been clear enough in articulating exactly what we stand for.

We do not advocate a separation of mind and body. On the contrary, we oppose hook-up culture precisely because it seeks to divorce the physical pleasure of sex from the mental, spiritual, and interpersonal dimensions of sexuality. In so doing, it reduces sex from an experience of total intimacy with another human being to the mere relief of a simple bodily appetite. We are against Sex Week because it reinforces this mindset and the culture that exists around it.

Labels: culture, hooking up, premarital sex, sex, universities

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When Catholic University President John Garvey announced in June that the university would be reverting to same-sex dorms for on-campus students, he probably didn't expect much of a legal challenge.

Well, he got one.

Yesterday the university was forced to explain to the D.C. Office of Human Rights how the new policy doesn't violate the city's Human Rights Act, a claim made by public interest law professor John Banzhaf in a lawsuit. According to Banzhaf, who teaches at The George Washington University Law School, the District's statute prohibits discrimination unless it is a "business necessity" without which an institution could not function. He adds:

Unfortunately for [Garvey], he cannot rely upon religion, because the D.C. Court of Appeals has held -- in a case in which Georgetown University tried to justify discrimination based upon sexual orientation because of fundamental and strongly held Catholic teachings about homosexuality -- that religious motivations were irrelevant, and no defense, under the statute.

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, DC, discrimination law, gender, hooking up, men, premarital sex, religion, religious liberty, sex, universities, women

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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.”

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

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"Stayover relationships" are a growing trend among U.S. college-age couples who are committed, but not interested in cohabiting, researchers say.

Tyler Jamison, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri, found people in their 20s engage in "stayover relationships," spending three or more nights together each week while maintaining the option of going to their own homes.

"There is a gap between the teen years and adulthood during which we don't know much about the dating behaviors of young adults," Jaminson said in a statement.

Jamison conducted interviews among college-educated adults who were in committed, exclusive relationships and found though living together before marriage has become less taboo, many want to avoid the potential negative social consequences of cohabitation.

Labels: cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, premarital sex

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There might be a new argument to try when convincing your teen to wait to have sex. According to the a study conducted by the University of Iowa, women who lost their virginity in their young teens are more likely to divorce.

The study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, surveyed the responses of 3,793 women and found that 31 percent who lost their virginity as teens divorced within five years, and 47 percent divorced within 10 years. On the flip side, the divorce rate for women who had waited to have sex was only 15 percent at the five year mark, and 27 percent by the time 10 years rolled around.

But the study also found that a first sexual experience before the age of 16 -- wanted or not -- was still strongly associated with divorce.

Of course early sexual experiences can have lasting effects on relationships later in life. So it's not surprising that with 42 percent of participants claiming their first sexual experience before the age of 18 wasn't completely wanted, that it could affect them in their adult life.

Labels: abstinence, adolescence, culture, divorce, girls, Marriage, premarital sex, sex, sexual assault, virginity, women

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...And while the pressures on the leader of the Labour party will be slightly different to those of the average person, there is no mistaking that attitudes to marriage and family have changed. Getting married used to be about sex, living together and having children, but research shows this is no longer the case.

According to the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey, which was conducted in 2008, almost two-thirds of people now see little difference between marriage and living together. Fewer than a fifth of people took issue with it.

Just under half thought cohabitation showed just as much commitment as getting married. When it comes to children, where opinion can often be a bit more traditional, only 28% said they believe married couples make better parents.

So why do it? Psychologist Donna Dawson, who has specialised in sex and relationships, says it is often about making a public statement.

"Having the children take part is like a ceremonial creation of a family and a public statement that they are all in it together. It's very much a 21st Century ritual, which more and more people will be doing." ...

In the end it could all be about having a big party for Ed and Justine. According to BSA survey, 53% of people now think a wedding is more about a celebration than a life-long commitment.

Labels: children, cohabitation, committed relationships, common-law, Marriage, premarital sex, United Kingdom, unmarried parents

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