Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married?

Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state.

This dearth of early adopters is not peculiar to America. Research conducted in 2004 by Gunnar Anderson, a professor of demography at Sweden’s Stockholm University, seems to confirm the trend. ...

Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too.

Labels: culture, domestic partnership, Europe, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, lesbians, Massachusetts, men, Norway, Sweden, women

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Labels: class, culture, economics, Marriage, motherhood, race, single parenting, women

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As we prepare to honor mothers on Sunday, we should keep in mind that the practice of mothering is not limited to women. There are many men in America today, married and single, gay and straight, who mother their children every day. I am one of them. My male partner and I nurture and care for our two sons in ways that are indistinguishable from what society has traditionally expected of mothers.

We comfort our children when they get hurt, either physically or emotionally. We cook their meals and clean their room. We bake cupcakes for their birthdays and take them to their school so they can celebrate with their friends. We hug and kiss them as often as they allow us. We encourage them to explore their passions, not only for baseball and soccer, but for knitting and piano too.

It may be tempting to think that my partner and I mother our children because there is no female parent in our home. But we know heterosexual married men who do the same things for their children that we do for ours. They, too, are mothers.

The seemingly obvious requirement that one must be a woman to be a mother is actually a powerful example of the ways in which our society has traditionally allowed apparently natural truths about gender differences to color our thinking about what individuals are capable of achieving. Interestingly, however, while our culture continues to view motherhood and fatherhood as mutually exclusive categories, the law no longer distinguishes between the two.

Labels: culture, Fathers, gay parenting, gender, gender differences, men, motherhood, women

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Ever since “90210’s” Donna Martin held on to hers for seven seasons, adult virginity — the state of having it and the act of losing it — has been a recurring plot point on TV dramas, and not just ones set in high school. The rules that apply to virginity in characters of a certain age are more or less the same ones that apply to Chekhov’s famous gun: If it appears in the first season, it will probably go off by the third, or the fourth, or the seventh, just as it did for Donna Martin. There are currently three fictional adults — or two adults and a self-identified “Girl” — grappling with their virginities with varying amounts of shame in big-name TV shows. (Shame-free virginity: not currently a fictional TV offering.)

“Grey’s Anatomy’s” April Kepner (Sarah Drew) just lost her virginity last week, and will be dealing with the fallout in this one, on tonight’s episode. April’s deflowering would have been a happy event — if the show hadn’t used the mind-bending powers of retroactive continuity to suddenly assert that she had been saving herself because of her religious beliefs. At the beginning of last season, the high-strung, cheery Kepner (a common characteristic of TV virgins is a type-A, neurotic personality) yelled at her colleagues, in an effort to quell their merciless teasing, “I am a 28-year-old virgin, namely because I wanted my first time to be special and then I waited too long, and partially because I’m pretty sure guys find me annoying.” She then spent the next year and a half flirting, making out with and never quite sleeping with a series of guys who weren’t right for her, without once mentioning chastity or a higher power.

Then last Thursday, she threw herself on fellow resident Jackson, assuring him — after he kept repeating to her, out loud, “You’re a virgin” — that having sex with him was really what she wanted to do. The next day, she seemed shell-shocked. When Jackson tried to apologize, she explained, “It’s not you. It’s Jesus. I was a virgin because I loved Jesus. And now Jesus hates me.” Ta-dah! April Kepner had been magically transformed from an accidental, circumstantial virgin into a religious one. In the process she’s gotten stuck in a fun house mirror of TV sex-shaming: Having felt ashamed for two seasons about not having had sex, she now gets to feel ashamed for a few more seasons about having had it.

Labels: culture, gender, men, premarital sex, religion, sex, virginity, women

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

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

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

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

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

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...Alas, biology still holds a trump card: my closing fertility window. By the time I’m 38, my bank account may be pregnant, but my eggs will be fossils. In last week’s issue of New Scientist, I wrote about a far-out experimental solution: freezing pieces of my ovary. The premise of the story was that if this technology ever gets off the ground, it could fulfill the original promise of the birth control pill, allowing women to make career decisions without the pressure of a ticking clock. And it’s such a satisfying premise, isn’t it, especially for science-loving feminists like me. But after five months of airing it, triumphantly, to everyone I know, and thinking about their responses, my enthusiasm has waned. The cultural limits on the age of motherhood, I’m afraid, are far stronger than the biological ones.

Labels: aging, Artificial Reproductive Technology, children, culture, motherhood, parenting, women

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I completely agree that motherhood is hard. There aren’t many jobs where the employee worries that she may have scarred someone for life by having a bad day. Except for surgeons but at least they don’t have to see the person everyday for the first 18 years. Parenting is also 24-7 for most people. Even when we aren’t with our kids, we are on-call for them. No job beyond the presidency seems that constant, and we don’t let presidents stay on for more than 8 years. But we’re moms forever.

But is motherhood really the hardEST job? Most jobs don’t let employees put the customers to bed early because they’re cranky. And when my day is heading in that direction, I have many other tricks that aren’t exactly employer-friendly. I can put my sweatpants on, turn on the TV, order pizza and chase my kids around the house with a broom. All of these are frowned upon in most job settings except for the pizza part, but I’d have to buy for 30-3000 people rather than 4 so it’s just not practical for every bad day.

I believe that by calling motherhood the hardest job, we are creating a competition of sorts between women with children and women without children and between women and men. ...

Motherhood is hard in all the best ways any vocation or avocation (depending on one’s point of view) can be, but calling it the hardest job in the world is making me more than I am and in reality, making my parenting worse. Motherhood is about facing my fears, humiliations and character flaws and demanding better. Motherhood is also about letting go, giving in, and accepting that I am just another human being doing the best I can do.

Labels: culture, Fathers, motherhood, parenting, women

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IT’S SPRING WHEN I REALIZE that I may never have children, and around that time the thirteen-year cicadas return, burrowing out of neat, round holes in the ground to shed their larval shells, sprout wings, and fly to the treetops, filling the air with the sound of their singular purpose: reproduction. In the woods where I live, an area mostly protected from habitat destruction, the males’ mating song, a vibrating, whooshing, endless hum, a sound at once faraway and up-close, makes me feel like I am living inside a seashell.

Near the river, where the song is louder, their discarded larval shells—translucent amber bodies, weightless and eerie—crunch underfoot on my daily walks. Across the river, in a nest constructed near the top of a tall, spindly pine, bald eagles take turns caring for two new eaglets. Baby turtles, baby snakes, and ducklings appear on the water. Under my parents’ porch, three feral cats give birth in quick succession. And on the news, a miracle pregnancy: Jamani, an eleven-year-old female gorilla at the North Carolina Zoo, is expecting, the first gorilla pregnancy there in twenty-two years. ...

But after three years of trying, it’s hard to give up. I know that it would be better for the planet if I did (if infinitesimally so), better for me, in some ways, as a writer. Certainly giving up makes financial sense. Years ago, when I saw such decisions as black or white, ight or wrong, I would have felt it was selfish and wasteful to spend thousands of dollars on unnecessary medical procedures. Better, the twenty-two-year-old me would have argued, to donate the money to an orphanage or a children’s hospital. Better to adopt.

The thirty-four-year-old me has careful but limited savings, knows how difficult adoption is, and desperately wants her body to work the way it is supposed to.



A LARGE PART OF THE PRESSURE and frustration of infertility is the idea that fertility is normal, natural, and healthy, while infertility is rare, unnatural, and means something is wrong with you. It’s not usually a problem you anticipate; from the time we are very young, we are warned and promised that pregnancy will one day happen. At my support group, someone always says how surprised she is to be there. ...

Nonhuman animals wait without impatience, without a deadline, and I think that is the secret to their composure. Reproductively mature for more than half her life, Acacia waits without knowing she is waiting. The newly hatched cicadas will wait underground for another thirteen years. The submissive marmoset who declines sex, or whose ovaries fail to produce mature follicles, waits and waits—maybe forever.

Though infertile women are aware of the passing of months and years—marked by charts, appointments, prescriptions, and pregnancy tests—we have something animals lack, which is the conscious possibility of a new purpose, a sense of self not tied to reproduction. I think it comes on us eventually, as Woolf suggests, but perhaps knowing that it comes, and understanding infertility as a natural, perhaps even useful phenomenon, can provide us with a measure of peace. Marmoset communities would not survive without their reproductively suppressed, caretaking females. Had Virginia Woolf been a mother, she may not have given us Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, heteronormativity, infertility, women

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

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

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It's one thing to tell an adult to do something to keep a child safe. It's entirely another to ask an uneducated, over-her-head mother to read, reflect and make a judgment call.

Therein lies the greatest challenge of the valley's latest child welfare campaign, a deeply personal drive to address a persistent problem that makes front-page news a few times a year, but can't be easily distilled and can't be solved simply by handing out products or passing laws.

The maddening, tragic trend of children being murdered by the abusive boyfriends of their single mothers has the full attention of valley law enforcement, social workers and researchers. On Wednesday, as part of National Child Abuse Prevention Month, a coalition led by UNLV's Nevada Institute for Children's Research and Policy launched the "Choose Your Partner Carefully" campaign. The drive, which already is under way in other communities across the country, attempts to educate parents about qualities in a partner/caregiver that officials say can put a child at risk for abuse.

The state-funded campaign will place posters at bus stop shelters and fliers and brochures at community centers, medical offices, schools, child care providers, domestic violence shelters and government offices. (You can download the posters and literature at the Internet links listed with this column.)

I first wrote about this issue in January 2011, in a column headlined "Single moms, boyfriends and dead kids." Las Vegas police reviewed child abuse and neglect homicides between 2005 and 2010 for me and found they were most often carried out by the mother's boyfriend, with 11 such cases in those six years in Metro's jurisdiction. I also learned that the FBI's national homicide data list 17 categories for a homicide victim's relationship to the killer, and "mother's boyfriend" isn't one of them. It's a crime in need of deeper examination.

The Nevada Institute for Children's Research and Policy reported Wednesday that in almost half of abuse and neglect homicides reported by all Clark County jurisdictions over the past two years, the perpetrator or suspect charged in the crime was the mother's boyfriend.

Labels: child abuse, children, Choose Your Partner Carefully, culture, domestic violence, motherhood, Nevada, women

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Mary Eberstadt’s slim new essay collection, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, may at first be more notable for what it doesn’t contain than for what it does. Unlike most books on contemporary sexual culture and its crises, Adam and Eve doesn’t have a plan to save the world. It’s not really a big-picture book, despite a chapter in which contraception is revealed as the major villain. Instead, Adam and Eve reads like a travel guide for an unpleasant safari somewhere east of Eden, hitting a few major areas quickly and even somewhat randomly. ...

The biggest flaws in Eberstadt’s book are a lack of focus and a total absence of economic realities. I’m no Marxist, but economic pressures do affect our culture of unmarriage, and our sexual dysfunctions widen the class divide; neither of these causal arrows gets discussed in Adam and Eve. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” Everybody, apparently.

That said, the book makes a few strong contributions. Eberstadt spends a lot of time discussing the damage done by pornography: body-image problems, greater tolerance for risky sex, earlier sexual initiation, and more sexual partners. The result is an overall jadedness, an inability to be satisfied with a single spouse or potential spouse. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker described the hidden effects of porn on young adults’ sexual culture in their forthright, careful 2010 Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying, and Eberstadt backs them up while providing further citations and avenues for exploration. She overreaches here, as elsewhere—it’s odd to blame Anthony Weiner’s public troubles on porn when powerful men have been making stupid choices about sex since time immemorial—but it’s clear that porn is affecting heterosexual culture more than most of us realize.

Eberstadt also points out what one major study called the “Paradox of Declining Women’s Happiness”: Over the past several decades, while women’s life choices have expanded, their self-reported happiness has decreased.

Labels: class, contraception, culture, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pornography, sex, women

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AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

But that belief is contradicted by experience. ...

As Jennifer and I worked to answer her question, “How did this happen?” we talked about how she and her boyfriend went from dating to cohabiting. Her response was consistent with studies reporting that most couples say it “just happened.”

“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”

She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

WHEN researchers ask cohabitors these questions, partners often have different, unspoken — even unconscious — agendas. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

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...The show is drawing inevitable — and apt — comparisons to “Sex and the City,” in whose long shadow it blooms. “Girls,” too, is a half-hour comedy (of sorts) about four women finding themselves and fortifying one another in the daunting, libidinous wilds of New York City.

But it’s a recession-era adjustment. The gloss of Manhattan is traded for the mild grit of Brooklyn’s more affordable neighborhoods. The anxieties are as much economic as erotic. The colors are duller, the mood is dourer and the clothes aren’t much. It’s “Sex and the City” in a charcoal gray Salvation Army overcoat.

It comes along at a moment of fresh examination of women’s progress. A just-published book, “The Richer Sex,” by Liza Mundy, asserts that women are well on their way to becoming the primary breadwinners in a majority of American families; it rated the cover of Time magazine two weeks ago. It will be joined later this year by “The End of Men,” by Hanna Rosin, which answers the question posed by the title of Maureen Dowd’s prescient 2005 best seller, “Are Men Necessary?” As Rosin sees it, not so much, because women have achieved unprecedented autonomy.

But “Girls” also amplifies a growing chorus of laments over what’s happening on the sexual frontier, a state of befuddlement reflective in part of post-feminist power dynamics and in part of our digital culture and virtual fixations.

Are young women who think that they should be more like men willing themselves into a casual attitude toward sex that’s an awkward emotional fit? Two movies released last year, “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits,” held that position, and Dunham subscribes to it as well.

In a recent interview, presented in more detail on my Times blog, she told me that various cultural cues exhort her and her female peers to approach sex in an ostensibly “empowered” way that she couldn’t quite manage. “I heard so many of my friends saying, ‘Why can’t I have sex and feel nothing?’ It was amazing: that this was the new goal.”

Labels: gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pornography, sex, women

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CAN men and women be friends? We have been asking ourselves that question for a long time, and the answer is usually no. The movie “When Harry Met Sally...” provides the locus classicus. The problem, Harry famously explains, is that “the sex part always gets in the way.” Heterosexual people of the opposite sex may claim to be just friends, the message goes, but count on it — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — something more’s going on. Popular culture enforces the notion relentlessly. In movie after movie, show after show, the narrative arc is the same. What starts as friendship (Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler) ends up in bed.

There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

Then came feminism — specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, in the late 18th century. Wollstonecraft was actually wary of platonic relationships, which could lead too easily, she thought, to mischief. (She had a child out of wedlock herself.) But she did believe that friendship, “the most sublime of all affections,” should be the mainspring of marriage. ...

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand.

We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind. When we imagine those relationships, we seem to have to sexualize them.

Labels: culture, feminism, friendship, gender, heteronormativity, men, women

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Many women do not fully appreciate the consequences of delaying motherhood, and expect that assisted reproductive technologies can reverse their aged ovarian function, Yale researchers reported in a study published in a recent issue of Fertility and Sterility.

“There is an alarming misconception about fertility among women,” said Dr. Pasquale Patrizio, professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Yale School of Medicine and director of the Yale Fertility Center. “We also found a lack of knowledge about steps women can take early in their reproductive years to preserve the possibility of conception later in life.”

The report stemmed from the observations Patrizio and colleagues made that more women are coming to the fertility clinic at age 43 or older expecting that pregnancy can be instantly achieved, and they’re disappointed to learn that it can’t be done easily. “We are really seeing more and more patients ‘upset’ after failing in having their own biological child after age 43 so we had to report on this,” said Patrizio. “Their typical reaction is, ‘what do you mean you cannot help me? I am healthy, I exercise, and I cannot have my own baby?’”

These women delay pregnancies in their most fertile years for a variety of reasons, such as focusing on careers, lack of financial stability, or not having a partner. They are vaguely aware that fertility decreases with age, but it is only when they experience age-related infertility firsthand that they begin to understand the reality of their situation, note the researchers.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, culture, infertility, motherhood, women

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In the future, U.S. growth will be slower. Recessions will be deeper. Recoveries will be weaker. And there's exactly one thing to blame.

That's the stark conclusion from James Stock and Mark Watson in this fascinating, and occasionally depressing, new paper. In fact, they say, the future is now. For the last few years, we've weathered the beginning of what demographers have called the grey tsunami. "Most of the slow recovery [in today's job market] is attributable to a long-term slowdown in trend employment growth," Stock and Watson write.

The authors blame two demographic demons for our uncertain future: (1) the plateau in the female labor force participation rate, and (2) the aging of the U.S. workforce. Their underlying logic is that without continued growth in female workers or a significant boost in population, employment and GDP growth will slow, leaving us vulnerable to recessions with "steeper declines and slower recoveries." In such a future, jobless recoveries will be the only recoveries we know. ...

The ascendance of women in the workforce was perhaps the singular cultural/economic triumph of the second half of the 20th century. In 1960, just four in ten working-age women were active in the labor force. By 1990, it was more like six in ten (see graph below of female participation rates). By 2010, women made up a majority of the workforce. But that growth appears to have hit a ceiling. The female participation rate in early 2011 was the same as in 1994. In that time, the male participation has fallen. That's not good news for a country that will require more workers to both grow the national pot of money and provide for an aging population transitioning out of the workplace.

Labels: aging, culture, demographics, economics, health care, men, women

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The number of people living on their own has doubled, over the last three decades, to one in three in the UK and US. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Public Health shows that the risk of depression, measured by people taking antidepressants, is almost 80% higher for those living alone compared to people living in any kind of social or family group.

For women a third of this risk was attributable to sociodemographic factors, such as lack of education and low income. For men the biggest contributing factors included poor job climate, lack of support at the work place or in their private lives, and heavy drinking.

It is known that living alone can increase the risk of mental health problems for the elderly, and for single parents, but little is known about the effects of isolation on working-age people. Researchers in Finland followed 3500 working-aged men and women for seven years and compared their living arrangements with psychosocial, sociodemographic, and health risk factors, including smoking, heavy drinking and low physical activity, to antidepressant use. Information on antidepressant medication was taken from the National Prescription Register.

Labels: Finland, gender, gender differences, men, mental health, women

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Recently I wrote about the many problems polygamy tends to cause across the world, including high crime rates resulting from young men confined to singledom because older men are hoarding wives, and the subjugation of teenage girls forced to marry because there simply aren’t enough women to go around. ...

Historically, though, there’s been an exception to the rule about plural marriage being bad for women. Polyamory, in which people openly take on multiple relationships, sometimes in the context of group marriage, has a radically different history. Nearly as marginal on the left wing of our culture as polygamy is on the right, modern-day polyamory is intertwined with the rise of feminism, and its roots go back to the ’40s— the 1840s. It’s hard to believe, but during the heart of the Victorian era, during a time when chastity was the rule, divorce was unheard of and petticoats were unmentionables, the most radical American women renounced monogamy as an instrument of their servility. A progressive attitude toward gender roles continues in the modern-day polyamory movement, which has been shepherded by women writers, historians, and organizers.

From the late 1840s to the late 1870s, under the leadership of a charismatic Christian minister named John Noyes, the Oneida commune in upstate New York conducted an experiment in promiscuity known as complex marriage. Noyes believed that sex was a kind of worship, and that in order to live without sin, men and women had to be free to worship all over the place with whoever they wanted. About 300 people lived at Oneida, and they were all considered married to one another. Noyes had radical and sometimes abhorrent ideas about sex; he tried to breed a better class of humans through eugenics, and he thought incest was just fine. (At various points he had sex with his niece, and possibly his sister.)

Despite its many faults, though, the system of complex marriage at Oneida amounted to remarkable progress for the women who lived there.

Labels: culture, feminism, gender, polyamory, polygamy, women

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Caught cocooning in public: Here’s what the NYT‘s story on its latest poll told readers:

In recent weeks, there has been much debate over the government’s role in guaranteeing insurance coverage for contraception, including for those who work for religious organizations. The poll found that women were split as to whether health insurance plans should cover the costs of birth control and whether employers with religious objections should be able to opt out. [E.A.]

If the Times says women were “split,” you know that must mean they were actually narrowly against the NYT‘s preferred position. Sure enough, when asked, “Should health insurance plans for all employees have to cover the full cost of birth control for female employees or should employers be able to opt out for moral or religious reasons?” women favored opting out by a 46-44 margin. The margin increased to a decisive 53-38 for “religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university.”

That’s among women. Unbeknownst to those who read only the Times‘ main story, the poll asked the same question to men. They were not split. Men favored opting out by a 20 point margin (57 vs. 37), except when a “religiously affiliated employer” was involved, in which case the margin increased to 25 points. Combining men and women, a substantial majority (51-40) favors allowing an opt-out–increasing to 57-36 where religiously-affiliated institutions are involved.

Labels: Barack Obama, contraception, culture, religious liberty, women

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