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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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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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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Medieval Christians were obsessed with the Song of Songs. No book of the Bible received such intensely devoted attention in commentary and preaching. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six homilies on the Song and died just as he was getting started on chapter 3. The Song has a much-diminished place in the modern Christian imagination. The time is far past to reverse that trend, but it is worth reversing only if the Song is recovered as allegory.

Christians today often read the Song as lusty celebration of sex. Some try to wipe away the prudish poetry to peep at the sex acts of Solomon and his Shulammite. Such an approach simply projects contemporary obsessions into an ancient text. It assumes that we already know what real sex is. We have outgrown romance and now know that sex is no more than a clash of bodies and an exchange of fluids. There is no magic, no mystery, only friction, only technique. Reading the Song as disguised pornography reinforces and sacralizes the sexual confusions of our age.

Even as an erotic poem, the Song has much to teach. Robert Alter observes that in much of the world’s erotic literature, “the body in the act of love often seems to displace the rest of the world.” By contrast in the Song, “the world is constantly embraced in the very process of imagining the body. The natural landscape, the cycle of the seasons, the beauty of the animal and floral realm, the profusion of goods afforded through trade, the inventive skill of the artisan, the grandeur of cities, are all joyfully affirmed as love is affirmed.” Solomon is no courtly lover who abandons the world and all to chase after his bride. When he turns from the world, he rediscovers his world in her. That insight alone is enough to justify the Song’s inclusion in the wisdom literature.

But the poem itself invites us deeper. The verse that everyone recognizes as the Song’s theme (8:6) gives the poem a cosmic scope. Love’s strength is comparable to relentless forces of decay and destruction—death (Hebrew, mot) and Sheol. Love is no ordinary fire, but a flash from the very “flame of Yah.” “Mot” is the name of a Canaanite deity, so the conflict of Love and Death is a war of gods. The placement of this verse is a rhetorical tour de force. Near the end of a poem that might be read as nothing more than a love poem, the poet drops in the short form of the name of Israel’s God. It is not even a separate word, but a suffix to the word “flame.” With a subtle gesture, the poet encourages us to re-read the entire poem, now aware that love burns as divine fire.

When we do, we find Yah everywhere.

Labels: Christianity, Marriage, religion, sex

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...Now, let’s approach this from a different direction than usual with regard to stories describing the health consequences of sexual behavior. (Yes, I know HIV can also be spread with non sexually.) If our job as a society is to prevent risk and stop disease–both for humane and health care cost control reasons–why shouldn’t promiscuity be treated with the same cultural disdain and public health preventative campaigns as smoking? (Remember the old ad, warning that when you sleep with someone, you are also sleeping with everyone they have ever slept with? You don’t see that anymore.)

Clearly, promiscuity falls into the same dengerous personal behavior category as smoking. So, why do we not see concerted and unequivocal anti-promiscuity campaigns, like we do anti-smoking campaigns? Why do we not tax products, such as pornography, that promote promiscuity? Why not have warning labels on articles in Playboy and Cosmopolitan warning that promiscuous behavior can cause genital warts or gonorrhea? I mean, if Herman Cain got in trouble because an Internet campaign ad showed a man smoking, why not exhibit the same opprobrium when popular culture extols the fun of sleeping with someone they just met?

I would like to see a study computing how much promiscuity adds to the cost of health care in the USA. It has to be huge, what with unwanted pregnancies, abortion, STDs, herpes, HIV, depression, uterine cancer, etc., beyond etc.

Labels: culture, sex

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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

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...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.

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

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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

VOTE

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.

In the fall, frat pledges marched around Old Campus shouting chants that openly glorified rape and graphically joked about necrophilia. In response, this op-ed page was flooded with commentary on the incident, which, for the most part, condemned the pledges’ mentality but shied away from asking what underlying cultural deficiencies made it possible.

A few days before Halloween, Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry emailed the student body to emphasize the wonders of “glorious consensual sex,” subtly but unmistakably assuming that the hook-up enriches students’ lives provided only that the right verbal signs are given. The comfortable consensus opinion was that the fundamentals of Yale’s sexual culture were sound. All that was lacking was their proper implementation in a few specific cases, and that chasm could be bridged in a few relatively simple steps. As then-YCC President Jeff Gordon ’12 advised: “Ask someone to dance before grabbing her hips.” ...

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.

Labels: culture, hooking up, sex, sexual assault, 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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...And blogger Alyssa Rosenberg summed up the biggest objection. “I think it’s actively unhelpful,” she wrote, “to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple . . . Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way.”

Strange indeed. It teaches the ridiculous and deeply destructive idea that same-sex friendships are necessarily sexual. And that’s the last thing we want to teach our children, because it will spell the end of friendship, particularly friendships between young men.

Yet that is precisely the message that’s communicated over and over. It’s the reason gay apologists want to eroticize Bert and Ernie, David and Jonathan, Jesus and the apostle John, and Achilles and Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad.

Some in our culture are apparently incapable of understanding close friendship without sex. And that flies right in the face of a Christian understanding of friendship.

Labels: culture, friendship, gender, homosexuality, men, sex

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I was on a very long flight the other day and, to get me through it, I had two books: the new bestseller “Of Thee I Zing,” by Laura Ingraham, and a book I last read 20 years ago, “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth. The former is the latest hit from one of America’s most popular talk radio hosts; the latter is an Austrian novel from 1932 by a fellow who drank himself to death just before the Second World War, which, if you’re planning on drinking yourself to death, is a better pretext than most. Don’t worry, I’ll save the Germanic alcoholic guy for a couple of paragraphs, although the two books are oddly related. ...

... She opens with a lurid account of a recent visit to a north Virginia mall – zombie teens texting, a thirtysomething metrosexual having his eyebrows threaded, a fiftysomething cougar spilling out of her tube top, grade-schoolers in the latest “prostitot” fashions – and then embarks on a lively tour of American cultural levers, from schools to social media to churches to Hollywood. If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all. So we have skanky ’tweens “dry humping” at middle-school dances, and an ever greater proportion of “men” in their thirties living at home with their parents.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents? ...

Laura Ingraham’s book is a rollicking read. But, as I said, I picked it up after a re-immersion in “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth, a melancholy portrait of the decline of the Habsburg Empire seen through the eyes of three generations of minor nobility and imperial civil servants in the years before the Great War swept away an entire world order and its assumptions of permanence. Roth was a man of the post-war era, yet he could not write his story without an instinctive respect for the lost rituals of a doomed world: The novel takes its title from the great Strauss march that the town band plays in front of the District Commissioner’s home every Sunday. As much as the Habsburgs, we, too, are invested in the illusions of permanence, and perhaps one day it will fall to someone to write a bittersweet novel about the final years of the Republic. But we will not even enjoy the consolations of a Strauss march. It doesn’t have quite the same ring if you call the book “Carry Out” or “F**king You.”

Labels: "emerging adulthood", culture, dating, sex

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Seven years ago, when Sabrina Morgan, 33, was single and desperate for a child, she found herself chatting to Kam Wong, 41, a gay man who was longing to be a father, in an online fertility forum. 'I instantly thought he was genuine, down-to-earth, laidback and flexible,’ says Sabrina.

'We exchanged pictures. It wasn’t about sexual attraction, obviously, but it was important what he looked like. I asked him if he had any history of baldness and loose teeth. It was part humour but it was also my way to steer towards more serious questions, like does he have any genetic health conditions.’

For Kam, who is in a long-term relationship, contacting Sabrina was about more than being a sperm donor: 'I adore children. The desire to have my own has always been with me. Because of my sexuality I thought it might never happen. The urge grew stronger in my thirties until one day I researched options. When I met Sabrina I was very nervous. This was my chance to fulfil my dreams.’ ...

Tomorrow sees the launch of pollentree.com, started by Patrick and Rita D’Alton-Harrison, ex-lawyers from north London. Rita had the idea after a number of single female friends asked for legal advice on sperm donation. 'One had looked into IVF but found the prices extortionate so turned to the internet to seek a donor. I was horrified. That’s when we had the idea to create a safe environment for women like her to explore all parenting routes.

'We can’t believe the number of young, straight women joining our site who say they are simply not prepared to wait for Mr Right. The attitude seems to be, “I’m not going to compromise with a relationship just to have children.”’

Catherine started her online search after a break-up from a three-year relationship with a man who didn’t want children. 'I’d just turned 39 and thought, “I don’t have time for this to happen again.” In a worst-case scenario I would seek an anonymous donor, but I’ve always thought a child needs a father. At the very least I wanted a donor who would visit regularly.’ ...

Leila’s first 'date’ in her co-parent search, was Paul, a 43-year-old pilot. 'We met at a Café Rouge for drinks. It felt more intense than a date. You are choosing someone who will pass on traits to the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with – your child.

'He was clean-cut with dark hair and green eyes. He told me he was a strict Catholic and had had only one serious relationship, with a girl from his church, who didn’t want children. He ached to be a parent and this was the quickest way he could make that happen.’

After three meetings they set a date to do the deed. 'You’d think that would be less weird than having sex. It was more weird. Picture it: there’s a stranger in your bathroom masturbating while you go for a walk around the block. When you get back he hands you a pot and leaves. You’re left to do the female bit, which is messy and uncomfortable.’

A pregnancy test 10 days later came out negative. After finding the encounter with Paul so awkward, Leila decided to try natural insemination (NI) – a euphemism in fertility forums for full sex – with her next potential suitor, Carl. 'I can see that could be unthinkable for a woman who is gay, in a relationship or has been assaulted ,’ she says. 'But I’m single. I don’t have barriers about sex.’

Labels: culture, donor conception, family structure, Fathers, more than two parents, parenting, sex, United Kingdom

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A study by University at Buffalo sociologists has found that the portrayal of women in the popular media over the last several decades has become increasingly sexualized, even "pornified." The same is not true of the portrayal of men. ...

Erin Hatton, PhD, and Mary Nell Trautner, PhD, assistant professors in the UB Department of Sociology, are the authors of "Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone," which examines the covers of Rolling Stone magazine from 1967 to 2009 to measure changes in the sexualization of men and women in popular media over time.

The study will be published in the September issue of the journal Sexuality & Culture and is available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k722255851qh46u8.

"We chose Rolling Stone," explains Hatton, "because it is a well-established, pop-culture media outlet. It is not explicitly about sex or relationships; foremost it is about music. But it also covers politics, film, television and current events, and so offers a useful window into how women and men are portrayed generally in popular culture."

After analyzing more than 1,000 images of men and women on Rolling Stone covers over the course of 43 years, the authors came to several conclusions. First, representations of both women and men have indeed become more sexualized over time; and, second, women continue to be more frequently sexualized than men. Their most striking finding, however, was the change in how intensely sexualized images of women -- but not men -- have become.

Labels: culture, men, sex, women

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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.

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

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