Heather Havrilesky has an article up at Salon examining the question—-and lamenting the fact of—-why we tend to absorb the details of other people’s troubled marriages with an eye towards Judgey McJudgeniks. She suggests that it’s about wanting a world that’s black and white.
Most married people prefer black and white stories about marriage. We either want a marriage to be blessed by the gods above, fated to endure through whatever crazy obstacles life may bring, or we want a marriage to be doomed to fail, preferably because one party in the marriage is a rat bastard. In either case, it’s obvious what the parties involved should do: stay together forever or end it immediately.
And all the truisms about marriage are trotted out:
And really, who the hell are we to judge? You can never know how another person’s marriage works, even if that person is a very close friend. A dynamic that appears toxic might function perfectly well behind closed doors. Sure, we think we know who’s the angel and who’s the rat bastard, but chances are we really don’t have a clue. In the end, it’s always best to keep our fat mouths shut.
Unfortunately, she hangs these theories on a story she admits is far from the best example, which is that of Laura Munson, who wrote about enduring her miserable marriage into survival many months ago to mostly piles of praise, and who now has a book out about how she saved her marriage through martyrdom. Munson’s story struck me at the time—-and reading this book review, still strikes me—-as the reason that judging other people has its value, even as we are expected, in tones of highest self-righteousness, to judge the judgers.
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re LGBT, the vast majority of people in Fulton, Mississippi think you’re lower than dirt. For young Itawamba Agricultural High School student Constance McMillen, who merely wanted to take her same-sex date to the school prom, it has been a lesson in just how damn evil some of her neighbors are.
McMillen tells The Advocate that a parent-organized prom happened behind her back — she and her date were sent to a Friday night event at a country club in Fulton, Miss., that attracted only five other students. Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn’t much to keep an eye on.
“They had two proms and I was only invited to one of them,” McMillen says. “The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn’t invited to.”
Last week McMillen asked one of the students organizing the prom for details about the event, and was directed to the country club. “It hurts my feelings,” McMillen says.
Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. “They had the time of their lives,” McMillen says. “That’s the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn’t have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom].”
In a community that invoked the bible and Christian beliefs in condemning Constance, these homophobes clearly chucked the sacred tome when it comes to loving thy neighbor, hospitality, and general decency without a second thought. To think that Fulton not only displayed rank homophobia, it raised the bar of evil by sending learning-disabled students to the fake prom, clearly labeling them “others.” I challenge any of these “Christians” in Fulton to cite where in the bible Jesus teaches that the physically or mentally challenged deserve to be outcasts.
This social hellhole isn’t even worthy of a boycott, since no gay person or ally would want to drive through this evil place to begin with. For Constance, one can only hope for a scholarship to get the hell out of there to attend college in an environment where she can thrive. Leave the evil behind, gain strength, knowledge and, should you want to challenge the hate, return to reclaim your space with others ready to fight homophobia in the darkest of places.
Fulton, Mississippi has earned its stripes as the cruelest town in America, by treating one of its young residents as a pariah for no good reason that the God they claim to worship can imagine. I do hope there is no adultery or fornication going on in Fulton. The bible had a lot to say about that.
UPDATE: More evil in Fulton, from Firedoglake’s Lisa Derrick @ LaFiga; the proud homophobic students grin at how they pulled off their straights-only prom with photos posted on public FB and Flickr pages.
I can see some of the same dresses in these pictures posted by different students.
Actually, there might be a slight reason to find this news surprising. I think a lot of us live in liberal parts of the country where these attitudes are muted, so it might actually be surprising to find out that single women ages 25-35 are often painfully stigmatized, no doubt especially in more conservative areas. The researchers at Texas Tech University interviewed 32 never-married women, and found that around age 25, their subjects began to face pretty ugly social stigma for not having snagged a husband yet. The idea that women’s main and often sole source of validation comes from being picked by a man hasn’t gone away by a long shot in our culture.
What I thought was most interesting about the study was that a lot of the pressure on single women to be ashamed of themselves and to feel desperate for validation comes in forms disguised as cute and harmless, so the women also feel unable to push back. Family “jokes” making fun of them for being unpicked by some random guy, for instance. Or the horrible tradition of the bouquet toss at weddings, a tradition that exists solely to make unmarried women feel bad about themselves. There’s no way to win the bouquet toss situation. If you don’t participate in the ritualistic shaming of the unmarried, you’re a spoilsport. If you throw yourself into it, you’re a screeching, desperate harpy confirming every negative stereotype about women—-the big one being that they’re nothing without male validation, and will debase themselves to get it. Women who choose to stand there and let the bouquet drop at their feet while others scramble for it are finding the closest thing to a way out, but they’re still going to be treated like they’re acting superior. You can’t win. Except by getting married and exempted from the ritual humiliation.*
This stuff is far from harmless. When women are stigmatized far beyond what men can expect for not being married, that creates pressure for women to settle. Sometimes, that pressure is pretty explicit. This means men can make higher demands on women in exchange for their validation of women. Sometimes a woman’s devalued position in a relationship merely means she does most of the housework and emotional work, and her sexual satisfaction is a secondary concern. But in the worst case scenarios, culturally created female desperation can be used as leverage by domestic abusers to keep their victims in place. Abusers are often fond of telling their victims that no one else will have them—-and in culture where a woman who has no man is a pariah, that threat can carry a lot of weight.
I know it seems like a lot to suggest that things like the bouquet toss subtly embolden wife beaters. And it’s true that any one “joke” or tradition that implies that there’s nothing worse for a woman to be than single would not in itself be harmful. But when women get that message from all corners, many start to think they really should lower their standards. And domestic abusers are willing to use every tool in the box. Take, for instance, this judge who suggested to an abuser that he marry the victim so that she wouldn’t be required to testify against him. He was able to convince both the abuser and his victim to marry. Most of us have to ask why a woman would marry someone who beat her like that, and I think the above explains the reason why in part. When you hear over and over that it’s horrible to be a single woman and you need a man to rescue/validate you with an offer of marriage—-and when your self-esteem is already torn up by an abuser—-then the offer of marriage and all the social status with it can be very tempting indeed.
*Though I will point out that you won’t escape without a blowout of humiliation. The bachelor and bachelorette parties always seemed to me to be an opportunity for the soon-to-be-marrieds to be punished by their friends, who are either jealous or sick of all the wedding crap.
Courtney praised this new book out called A Little Bit Married: How to Know When It’s Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door by Hannah Seligson, and I put my skeptical assumption that this just more backlash stuff on hold because of it. Even thought the cover is offensive, painting the essentialist, misogynist picture of women eager to marry while men are eager to ignore to avoid it. But then Seligson went on Sex, Really, and now I’m going to have to protest for real. Seligson doesn’t fall into the trap that Laura Sessions Stepp lays out for her—-no way is she going to get into that “don’t let him have the milk for free, ladies!” narrative that Sessions Stepp promotes—-but the interview still paints this misleading picture of marriage as something women want and men have to be pushed towards.
There you have the marital readiness gap, where women are ready to get married before men. It used to be that men had to get married because it was too dangerous to have sex outside of marriage and women needed a base of economic support, and those factors are no longer there. I heard from a lot of women that they were ready to get married before the men were.
This is the same narrative as the hand-wringing about the “hook-up culture”, just moved a few years into the future. But the image is always, always of women chasing and desperate and men running away. And it’s always, always contrasted with this past where men supposedly didn’t run away, because marriage was the only access to sex they had. (At least without paying for it, though the enormous decline in prostitution that occurred as women became more sexually liberated is rarely noticed or remarked upon in these pieces.) However, it’s way more complicated than that. I had trouble finding the statistics online, but if I recall correctly, marriage rates in the 19th century were incredibly low. Right now, the marriage rate in England and Wales is getting as low as it was in 1862, but that’s only because (as is noted in this interview) that Western Europeans in general are rejecting marriage in ever-higher numbers. The U.S. isn’t even close to touching how low the rate of marriage was 100+ years ago for us.
But I digress. The image of women chasing and men running away makes intuitive sense, because men enjoy a higher social ranking than women. Which means that marriage means that she gets validated as a worthy person chosen by her social superior when she marries (or for the younger set, obtains a boyfriend), but all he gets at best is having to reduce his sexual options and at worst, he feels the emasculating pain of having people think he cares about girly stuff like commitment. That’s not what I think is actually happening, but it’s the underlying narrative of this assumption that women are eager for commitment and men aren’t. And I do think in some circles, there’s probably truth to that, especially if young men are getting a lot of “bros before hos” social pressure. But as I’ve noted before, that fades as you age, so suggesting that couples that are living together are generally stuck in the she’s chasing/he’s running mode doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Indeed, I pick up a whiff of fudging in the suggestion that because men marry an average of two years later in life than women, that means women are “ready” sooner—-that women are chasing and men are running until they apparently collapse from exhaustion. Likelier to me is that these numbers simply reflect the fact that men are more likely to marry someone younger than women. Again, the stats are hard to find on Google, but if I recall correctly, Susan Faludi talked in Backlash about how there were all these horror stories about eager women and disinterested men, but the actual statistics showed that men were more, not less, likely to express a desire to get married. Which makes sense—-marriage is correlated strongly for men with better mental and physical health and higher salaries, whereas women don’t get these benefits and sometimes even see a decline after marriage. And even when it comes to housework, married women do more of it than those of us who live in sin.
“No person shall be admitted as a student in any Catholic school unless that person and his/her parent(s) subscribe to the school’s philosophy and agree to abide by the educational policies and regulations of the school and Archdiocese. Homosexual couples living together as a couple are in disaccord with Catholic teaching… “Parents living in open discord with Catholic teaching in areas of faith and morals unfortunately choose by their actions to disqualify their children from enrollment.” —statements made by the Archdiocese of Denver. Archdiocese spokeswoman Jeanette R. De Melo didn’t return calls or e-mails inquiring whether students whose parents are divorced, non-Catholic or used fertility medication also are not allowed to attend the preschool.
And the church and school, Sacred Heart of Jesus preschool in Boulder, have the constitutional right to do this—they have the religious freedom to discriminate against an innocent child. Parents are outraged and starting a petition against this decision.
“I grew up Catholic in a strong Catholic family with six kids, and I’m just deeply, deeply disappointed by the decision of Sacred Heart,” she said.
Another protestor said she believes barring the student goes against the teachings of the Bible.
“I have a daughter that goes to school at Sacred Heart,” Colleen Scanlan Lyons said. “I’ve had 16 years of Catholic education, and this just reached the core of my being as completely wrong and against the teachings of Jesus.”
Some parents are considering taking a full-page ad out in a local paper to blast the Archdiocese’s decision. Others say they might pull their kids from Sacred Heart school.
Inside the church, Father Bill Breslin explained his decision to his congregation. While he didn’t want to speak to reporters, he encouraged people to visit his blog to learn about why he decided bar the student.
On his blog, Breslin said, “This past week we implemented a policy that has been the most difficult decision of my life.” Breslin also said he “chose to protect the faith over doing what would have looked like the loving thing to do.”
“These actions by the Denver Archdiocese harm the student by taking the child away from friends, teachers and community,” said Jarrett Barrios, President of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). “It’s deeply troubling to see any school remove a child from their educational program simply as the means of rejecting that child’s parents.”
GLAAD is in close contact with local advocates who are on the ground in Boulder working to help community members organize around this situation. GLAAD will also continue to conduct outreach to local and national media to spotlight this story and raise awareness of the harms faced by LGBT families.
“[Friday] night, in conjunction with Wesley Chapel, Boulder Pride held a community forum about the situation, to provide people a space to talk about their feelings and plan action going forward. We have heard loud and clear from the LGBTQ community, as well as from allies, that this situation has stirred feelings of anger, pain and frustration,” wrote Boulder Pride’s Board President, Dave Ensign and Executive Director, AicilaLewis. “While this situation has been incredibly difficult and reminded us all of vital work that remains to be done, it also has highlighted our strengths as a community. We are grateful to live in Boulder County with engaged, passionate community members like you.”
As Boulder community leaders continue to help constituents deal with the hurt caused by this decision, GLAAD calls on the nation’s media to elevate the story to larger platforms and show the American public the concrete harms facing the children of gay and lesbian parents across the country. “The media has a responsibility to spotlight how this type of exclusion damages families and creates roadblocks to children’s future achievements,” said Barrios.
“I am gay. Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long. It is something that is personal, and I don’t believe I felt with my heart that being gay would affect how I do my job.”
—California State Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield)
This is the funniest and most pathetic story of the day. I think Roy forgot that the news broke last week, and a whole lot of people already knew.
That said, his official coming out on a Bakersfield radio show reveals that he’s still unapologetically politically homophobic, reassuring his Bakersfield constituents he’s not like those radical nasty gays who want civil rights, I presume. (GayPolitics):
Radio talk show host Inga Barks wanted assurances that Ashburn would continue to vote in a conservative manner on LGBT rights issues. Ashburn responded, “I believe firmly that my responsibility is to my constituents. I will take a careful look at each measure and apply that standard. How would they vote on this? How would they want me to vote on this,” adding that most people understood what that means.
“I don’t know how else to ask this, but are you going to live this lifestyle now in the district?” Barks asked. Ashburn, who announced he is not running for public office again, said, “I pray to God I can find peace. I want to go back to the senate and work hard for the people of my district…Now you know everything about me.”
This, my friends, is the definition of a self-loathing man. I suppose if his constituents wanted to round up TEH HOMOSEXUALS, he’d vote for that too. Sick.
I don’t know about the calling her “John” thing—-according Andi, all the info they have appears to be that the little girl is dressing like a tomboy—-but even if they are letting her call herself by another name, I have to point out that a lot of little kids go through that phase. My sister insisted for something like two months that we call her “Michelle” when she was around this age. But apparently, the entire story is hyperventilating gender panic. Andi discovers that Life & Style is using Focus on the Family as expert testimony now:
Says FotF’s Glenn Stanton, “Little girls have never been women before. They need help, they need guidance of what that looks like.”
I had always thought of the baby bump-watching, wedding-slobbering tabloids as patriarchy propaganda, so I suppose moving into hyperventilating hyper-reactionary crap is the next step.
But what’s really interesting to me is that social conservatives want to have it both ways—-they argue both that gender is innate and unchangeable, and that it’s learned. When feminists criticize domestic sexism, conservatives are all about how gender roles are natural and fixed—-and in complete opposition to each other. That men are naturally boorish pigs and women are naturally nurturing, so women who resent being told to nurture people who can’t even be expected to show gratitude are bucking nature and need to learn to live with our debased roles. But then they turn around and say things like Stanton did, which is basically to admit that femininity (they also believe this about masculinity) is a learned behavior, and not only that, but it’s a long, hard process learning your gender. You’ll hear from conservatives that boys are naturally drawn to trains and girls to dolls, and then they’ll flip around and tell each other that it’s extremely important to steer your children towards the “right” gender roles.
Their homophobia is clashing with their sexism, and showing how intellectually bankrupt both positions are. Social conservatives portray homosexuality as a “choice”—-which makes sense. They want gays to get in the closet, and they’re just portraying that as authentic heterosexuality. But in order to argue that it’s a choice, you have to position homosexuality as a serious temptation and gays as simply very weak people who give in. If you buy into that argument, then you start to see homosexuality as a temptation that preys on all people, and your job as a parent becomes about shoring your child up to resist that temptation. Focus on the Family has long taught its followers that homosexuality can be warded off with strict teaching of gender roles. In other words, they’ve been forced to make explicit what they’ve always pretended wasn’t true, which is that gender roles are learned and performed. The irony is that the one avenue where they’ll admit gender roles are learned is the one avenue where they’re not actually going to have as much influence as they think. Forcing a little girl who wants to be a tomboy into dresses is not going to make her not be a lesbian, and also that many lesbians prefer to present a feminine manner to the world. And a lot of little girls allowed to be tomboys grow up straight.
It’s fascinating, because this contradiction social conservatives carry around—-where they claim gender roles are natural while expending tons of effort into teaching them—-usually goes completely unacknowledged. Despite the fact that publishing especially makes unbelievable amounts of money teaching gender, from women’s magazines to dating manuals, people love to front like men and women’s roles are inborn (and heterosexual). I suppose open acceptance of homosexuality has thrown a wrench into the works, because it suggests perfectly healthy people can reject assigned gender roles, even when it comes to something as fundamental to mandatory gender roles as who you sleep with.
I know I’ve been writing a lot about reproductive rights and sexual health issues, but the stories I want to comment on seem to be increasing lately. As someone who writes a lot about these issues, I’ve noticed something interesting over the years about the feedback I get on the “moral” question of abortion, specifically from self-identified pro-choicers. Occasionally I’ll get an email, comment, or tweet from someone who is worried about the moral gravity of abortion, and suggests that somehow pro-choice arguments would be more compelling if we gave up more ground on the stigma of the procedure, if we spent more time in public worrying about how terrible abortion is (as if women who get abortions aren’t already shamed enough), that I personally haven’t thought enough about how serious a decision abortion must be for women and how tragic it always, always is.
95-99% of this feedback is from men.
I have a few theories—-some of them work together, due to the both/and nature of this blog—-as to why this might be. I considered the possibility that it’s biological, that these men are so unaware of a woman’s bodily functions that they really don’t stop to think about how early stage pregnancy isn’t like some lightening bolt for women, but more a gradually introduction to bloaty crankiness that has to be confirmed by a pregnancy test, it’s so not lightening bolt-ish. And so these men don’t have a relationship to the idea of abortion as prevention, which is closer to how women who have abortion—-and those of us who feel empathy for them—-think of it. I also considered strongly that for men, it’s really an ego thing. The sentimental patriarchal arguments forwarded by anti-choice men who clearly get off on the idea of being able to control women with their super-sperm unfortunately have an emotional effect on some men who are intellectually pro-choice. But what I realized is that a man’s unease with abortion was often, in his own words, related to his desire to be a father—-usually recently realized or something he wants very soon.
It makes no sense, though! Or at least that’s what I thought at first. Wanting to be a father, in my mind, was about wanting to make the decision jointly with a woman and moving forward with a plan. But in real life, there are often situations where decisions are made passively, because of an unintended pregnancy. And I realized how that might actually be something men who want marriage and fatherhood hope for. Why not? In our sexist society, the decision to marry is basically on the man. Women are the ones who are supposed to be eager to get married, but they’re also the ones who are supposed to sit back and wait to be asked. But asking is showing eagerness, but eagerness is supposed to be girly stuff, so I imagine that’s intimidating for a lot of dudes. Ways to manage the slight emasculation inherent in picking out jewelry and showing interest in this wedding stuff include having a huge public proposal where people will side with you and her only role is to say “yes”, asking her father first and making it seem transactional, or getting over your hang-ups about masculinity and just asking. Or….you could get her pregnant and be the conquering hero by making an honest woman of her. As soon as I realized this, I realized what a powerful fantasy that must be to some men. It’s the perfect way to get what you want (marriage, babies) without having to say you want that girly stuff. It certainly explained a handful of men’s erratic behavior and opinions that I’ve known in my time. It was a pet theory of mine, but nothing I thought too much about beyond bullshitting over beers.
It was clear that the Commonwealth of Virginia was going to take a turn for the worse politically when openly wingnut and ant-gay Bob McDonnell pulled the wool over enough voter eyes to slide into the governor’s chair. It gave fringe wingnuts and Dominionists like lawmaker Bob Marshall free rein to spew scripture-laden insanity as public policy.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday assailed a series of recent moves in Virginia under new Gov. Bob McDonnell, citing the rising influence of the Christian right in exacerbating “discrimination” against gays and women.
Maddow was dumbstruck by state legislator Bob Marshall (R-Manassas), who declared Monday that children born with disabilities are God’s “vengeance” for abortion, quoting scripture to make his case.
“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” Marshall said, according to the Capital News Service
A speechless Maddow noted that Marshall stood by his remarks when contacted by her producers. “This is the argument he’s using as an elected official to…cut off any state support for Planned Parenthood,” she said.
McDonnell, by the way, apparently tried to rein in the bad PR that he brought upon himself by assuming everyone is a demented “Christian” as himself. So out came the “clarification.”
A story by Capital News Service regarding my remarks at a recent press conference opposing taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood conveyed the impression that I believe disabled children are a punishment for prior abortions. No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion[.] I regret any misimpression my poorly chosen words may have created[.]
As Right Wing Watch points out, this man has a history of attempts to roll back beyond-offensive statements he’s made, but there’s no misimpression when you go to the videotape…
Marshall is entitled to his offensive views, but he should not run from them.
He said this about abortion in the case of rape: “[T]he woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman.”
And he said this about contraception: “[W]e have no business passing this garbage out and making these co-eds chemical Love Canals for these frat house playboys in Virginia.”
Lynn Harris has a bone-chilling article up at Salon about yet another incident of fundamentalist Christians taking their beliefs to an extreme and getting someone hurt or killed, usually and inevitably someone in a vulnerable position. In this case, the story is that of 7-year-old Lydia Schatz, whose parents beat her to death using a tool—-a quarter inch plumbing supply line—-recommended by the wildly popular authors Michael and Debi Pearl, who have an entire series about “child training” for evangelical Christians. Like James Dobson of Focus on Family, the Pearls are big on spanking kids, and not just small pats on the butt. In both cases, the idea is to beat the kid into submission. Dobson wrote about his preferred technique like so:
[T]he spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms.
Light, swatting spankings, done in anger without courtroom dignity will make children mad because they sense that they have been bullied by an antagonists. A proper spanking leaves children without breath to complain.
Naturally, some children will complain until they’re beaten to death, a situation the Pearls apparently didn’t account for. Now they’re scrambling to avoid any moral responsibility for the death of this little girl, the severe beating of two other children. (The ones who got it the hardest were adopted children from Liberia.)
Lynn describes the debate going on inside the evangelical community about the Pearls, and what is considered “too far”. It’s all very interesting, and I suggest you read her article. But I’m going to argue that the continued debating over the line between forcing someone to submit and overt abuse that goes on in this world completely misses the point. When you define entire classes of people, whether children or women, as existing to submit and suggest that willfulness is an evil brought upon your family by the devil, then abuse is inevitable. The idea itself is abusive and dehumanizing. Everything else that follows from it is simply logical.
I’m struck, when reading right wing Christian child-rearing advice, on how much the advice resembles the tactics that wife beaters use against their victims.
There’s been a lot of feminist responseto the fact that Lori Gottlieb expanded her article imploring women to settle down for Mr. Good Enough into a book titled Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough. It’s based on the false assumption that educated, middle class women are too picky and have trouble getting married. I’m not going to tear up the logic—-the links provided do a handy job—-but I have a serious question to ask in the face of this argument about “settling”: What about love?
The underlying assumption in this book and anything of the “you’d better settle or you’ll die alone with your cats!” genre is that women marry (or at least partner up) for children, companionship, and above all, so to prove that someone liked it enough to put a ring on it. And that men marry so that they have a nice house, children, and a regular source of sexual release that isn’t their hand. Anna at Jezebel summarizes Gottlieb’s point of view on this:
It’s not just that Lori Gottlieb takes an incredibly narrow view of what marriage is for (she keeps mentioning the desire “to be part of a traditional family”), or that she views life without a man as necessarily lonely and shitty (she’s especially harsh on the topic of girlfriends) — she also does all this with a vitriol that’s frankly bizarre.
This narrative about why people want to marry and do marry has a lot of traction in media, because it’s basically sexist and a lot of people fucking love that. But it also has no relationship to why most people actually want to marry, and what most people want their marriage (or partnership) to look like, which is love, baby, love. That’s what’s never directly discussed, and it’s frankly bizarre. The reason that women balk at the term “settle” isn’t because they’ve been poisoned by feminism to have too high of standards. It’s because the term implies marrying someone you don’t love, and agreeing to a terse exchange of your body and housework for the social approval and companionship of being a wife.
“But,” you might say, “She’s just saying that women are too picky and need to consider guys who aren’t maybe as tall or rich or handsome as they’ve been told they should want!” Well, I have to agree with the link to Matt above that at best you’re talking about a few women who refuse to listen to sensible advice like that. But more importantly, that argument is a red herring. The book isn’t titled Hey, Go Out With The Guy And Enjoy New Experiences, You Never Know Who’ll Knock You Off Your Feet. It’s titled Marry Him. To which I say to Ms Gottlieb: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make her drink.
Hey, maybe I’m all wrong here, and Gottlieb addresses the giant flaw I’m seeing. But I honestly doubt it. From Anna’s review, it seems Gottlieb thinks there’s a nationwide problem of women who are madly in love with excellent men, but throw them over for something relatively inconsequential. Or maybe Gottlieb is skeptical of love and romance, and sees dating as a game like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, where you see how high you can go without failing out, and she’s suggesting you cut your losses at the quarter million question. Either way, “settling” is something people don’t do as much as Gottlieb would like, mostly because it falls out of the realm of how dating actually works.
I have to agree with Atrios that it’s really surprising to see such a dramatic decline in the number of 16-year-olds who are getting their driver’s licenses. Of course, he’s remembering a suburban upbringing, where being carless was a trap. I was living in a small town in high school, which means you could get everywhere in town on a bike if you wanted to, but everyone had licenses as soon as they could anyway, because that’s just what was done. Getting me into the driver’s seat was as much about setting my parents free as myself, especially since we had to make a lot of weekend trips to El Paso to visit my dad. As soon as they could, my parents let me make that drive by myself so they could avoid the method we had prior, which was meeting halfway in Van Horn for the trade-off. My mother treated my driver’s license like it was her ticket to freedom—-the end of having to drive me to El Paso, to my after school activities, and even the end of having to get up with me at 3 or 4 in the morning to drive me to school so I could catch the bus to our speech tournaments in other small towns. (The definition of a town close enough to drive to for competitive events in Texas is way different than elsewhere, I’d imagine—-we thought a mere 2 hour drive was a relief compared to some of the trips we took.) When my mom realized she could make me drive to the grocery store and run her errands for her, she took advantage of that, too.
According to this article, that situation has reversed in a lot of families, and kids aren’t driving because their parents are only too willing to do all the driving for them. I have no reason to think that must be the answer, but it seems as good an explanation as anything, because the drop in teenaged drivers is astounding.
Federal data released Friday underscore a striking national shift: 30.7 percent of 16-year-olds got their licenses in 2008, compared with 44.7 percent in 1988.
Of course, the Washington Post reporter mostly asks people from the D.C. area about this, and that’s not going to tell us much about what this does for both child and parent freedom, because in D.C. you can get around with public transportation. Thus, you don’t get a really clear picture of what’s driving this trend. I fear that the WaPo is right, and a lot of parents are simply electing to drive their children around until they leave home. If so, that’s really too bad, and a startling indicator that the trend is towards restricting children’s freedom at later and later ages, even at great expense to the parents’ well-being. The safety thing puzzles me—-until I started watching Buffy battle her mother over a license, the idea that a parent thought they could really keep a kid safe by delaying the license until 18 (where in many states you can get it with a simple test and no training) didn’t even occur to me. On the contrary, my parents and a lot of parents that I knew started teaching their kids to drive months, sometimes years before they were eligible for a permit, on the grounds that more training was safer. That makes sense to me.
You can’t really get around the learning curve on learning to drive by starting later, so arguments about the car itself being dangerous ring false to me, especially since a minor driver who is learning gets more training and supervision. Therefore, I’m inclined to wonder if the issue isn’t the car itself, but the freedom it grants kids that live in areas that don’t have adequate public transportation. Like Atrios, my experience growing up was that getting your license was as close to a rite of passage as adolescents get in our culture—-with it came later curfews, less checking in, and more general freedom to make your own choices. An adulthood light, to prepare you for living on your own. A car (borrowed from parents or owned outright) was sort of the lead-up to having your own place, since it bought you a measure of freedom and privacy. Most of my friends and myself didn’t really start to date in earnest until after we got the license and the freedom to participate in the great American tradition of sexual experimentation in parked cars. In El Paso, having a car meant going bowling or to the movies or to a friend’s house without having to get a parent to drive you; in Alpine, it meant being able to explore the countryside, driving out far beyond the eyesight of any other people and goof off, party, or of course, screw around.
Therefore, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that these exact effects are why kids aren’t getting licenses, because parents aren’t letting them, because they fear this freedom. Suspicions that the trend is leaning towards parents being more controlling of their children are difficult to prove, but there are indicators beyond stereotypes of soccer moms. For instance, there was a 40 year decline in kids walking to school, down from 42% of kids to 16%. Which is crazy, since there are fewer housewives on hand to do all that scuttling around. Everyone who’s lived next to an elementary or junior high school that wasn’t built for that amount of traffic can tell you what a nightmare it creates. And I’d say that most people nowadays take it as a given that raising kids in the suburbs is “safer” precisely because it limits personal freedom. I usually roll my eyes when people declaim the overscheduling of extracurricular activities—-those were the impetus for my growing freedom as a teenager—-but if they’re being so tightly supervised when they do these activities, a lot of the value of them is lost.
I really don’t know what to make of this trend. I’m not a psychologist, so I have no opinions on whether or not this intense mollycoddling of children is really going to harm them and their confidence in their own decision-making abilities. It seems like it must—-the people I knew in college most unsure of themselves were the ones kept on a tight leash in high school—-but who knows if there’s long term damage? But I worry that this trend demonstrates a larger trend towards Americans accepting and even promoting a general loss of freedom and a greater submission to control.
Kind of sad, though. Having my mom take me to the city offices to get my license on my 16th birthday, and then the party we had to celebrate, was a satisfying rite of passage. Of course, if you live in a part of the country that doesn’t require a car to travel very far, the issue is moot. But of course, bringing up kids in an urban environment is being looked upon with suspicion when it’s universally acknowledged (though hardly proven) that suburbs are “safer”.
Round two on the NY Times struggling with the shocking! information that some men will actually allow themselves to be married to a woman with more education or income. Round one featured blatant denial—-even though the research indicated that the number of marriages where women make more is rising, the Times ran a story that featured a bunch of single women swearing that they can’t get a date because they’re too smart or rich. I don’t know if round two was run in reaction to a bunch of bloggers pointing out that stories about these marriages might actually be a better illustration of a story about these marriages, but that’s what they did this time out. Subsequently, the story is much better. It’s interesting to read about how people who buck the gender roles they were brought up with struggle sometimes not to lapse into roles they’ve decided don’t work for them. It makes sense that many women unintentionally sabotage the situation by trying to exert control over their husbands’ domestic choices, and how you really have to not do that if you want the situation to work. And that even well-meaning men have trouble shaking off thousands of cultural messages about how you’re emasculated if your wife makes more money than you.
But even though writer Tara Parker-Pope seems to have her head screwed on straight, she does drop a doozy of a statistic that will probably be the thing that people looking to bash working women will latch on to:
Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.
This is listed in the section on men’s struggles with changing gender roles. The implication is clear—-that the income difference probably has some sort of causal relationship to the health problems. But there are so many other possibilities! The first thing that came to mind for me is that men with poor health might face more difficulties at work that make it hard for them to climb up the income ladder. The mere fact of having protections for disabled people, for instance, doesn’t mean that people with disabilities in our society don’t face a lot of obstacles in their careers that negatively impact their income. “Poor health” folds in a lot of disabilities, and that alone could account for the difference. Especially when you’re looking at such dramatic differences like that.
I’m just hypothesizing, of course. I looked around for more on the study she cited, but couldn’t find it. Springer has done a lot of research on marriage, gender, and health, and it was hard to comb through it for this specific study. Whatever the actual relationship between women earning more and men being in poorer health is might not established, or they might have a very good explanation that’s not alluded to in this story. But the larger point is that when you drop a statistic like that, you imply a causation chain that may not be there. Most people, when reading that sentence, will think that women earning more money causes men to be in poorer health, and that men should avoid marriage to higher-earning women out of self-preservation. When in fact, what we might be seeing is the opposite—-men with poor health whose burdens are lightened because they are married to women who bring more money into the household, and may even cover their health insurance.
I don’t want to give a bad impression of the overall article, which I found sound and nuanced. I think it’s useful to understand that it’s not like most people set out to have marriages where women earn more or men earn more, but that who earns more in a marriage is usually just a matter of outside forces, personal choices, and happenstance. And that what feminism has created is the chance for women to have more opportunities, and marriages are changing as a result. The takeaway message for feminism is sound, which is that if we want more egalitarian marriages, the most important step is creating the social circumstances that make that possible—-equal pay being one of the most important factors.
Sorry to torture you with this video—-the sound of Glenn Beck’s smug, hateful voice makes me a little ill, too——but I found it a fascinating example of how all the focus on this new Senator is creating some misery on the right. It’s a good thing, since this will help usher Scott Brown out in 6 years, but it’s also fascinating to me how much so many of the people celebrating this election have come to really dislike Scott Brown now that they’re paying attention. He’s all over the map on reproductive rights, for instance, which sets off alarm bells with right wingers who prefer politicians who are never hijacked by sympathy for non-virginal women. He’s smarmy like a right winger should be, but not in precisely the way they prefer, with a solid dose of disingenuous piety to work as a shield. He makes dirty jokes about his daughters, for instance, when the proper target for that kind of thing is your wife—-unmarried daughters are virgins, right? And smarmy disrespect is meant for obvious non-virgins.
1. It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
2. It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.
This initially seems like a stretch, but the more you think about it, the more it’s obvious how these beliefs are wound throughout our social narratives about sex, from arguing that teen girls have sex for attention (not desire) to the way that homophobes obsess over gay men having anal sex, which puts a man in the inconceivable/intolerable position (in their view) of being penetrated, which is what women are for.
Scott Brown violated the rules in this case, and demonstrated that a man can both be an object of sexual desire and that a woman can look with lust. To Beck’s mind, this is an unspeakable perversion of nature, and apparently that once you commit the unspeakable perversion of assuming women want and men can be wanted, then the doors of society are blown off and everyone’s murdering interns. I guess I don’t have much to add to this at this point, except to point out that this was a disturbing glimpse into how much rigid gender roles define conservatism’s worldview—-and how rigid they really are.
I’ll confess to mixed feelings about Ted Olson joining the fight for gay marriage. On one hand, I’m glad to have him on the team, with the esteem he has with colleagues and his admittedly prodigious legal skills. But I fear that the more conservatives who get mixed up in this, the more likely it is that gay marriage is going to end up becoming a tool that’s used to justify continued de-privileging of people who can’t or won’t get married for various reasons, including asexuality, non-monogamous inclinations expressed honestly, loner-ism, or political objections to the existence of marital privilege/enforced monogamy. But I’m setting all this aside to say that the fact that there are few Ted Olsons in the world is evidence of how full of shit most social conservatives are when they talk about marriage.
To explain why, I’ll start with what I see are the three main reasons that the institution of marriage exists (which are separate from the individual reasons people choose to marry):
1) The subjugation of women.
2) Social stability.
3) Pleasure (this is a recent innovation, but so widespread that it has to be included).
Now that women are legally equal and even the biggest misogynists out there feel they have to pay lip service to women’s equality, speaking about #1 is a big, fat no-no. Pragmatically speaking, #1 is still a major part of modern American marriage—-women still mostly change their names when they marry, women take on more housework but make less money (while men see the inverse) after marriage, and women start giving free labor over to the care and feeding of men that results in better health outcomes for men than when they’re left to their own devices.
Obviously, individuals in the flush of love still marry mainly for reason #3—-both the wedding offer pleasure, and the fantasies of happy family life do as well. But the justifications for marital privilege are all about #2, the idea being that marital privilege is payment for creating social stability. I’m skeptical, for reasons I’ve hit upon endlessly, if for no other reason than the idea that you have to compensate people for marriage undermines the idea that marriage is worth undertaking strictly for love and commitment. In fact, this contradiction is all over our pop culture. We both suck up endless amounts of wedding porn, and then turn around and crack jokes about what a miserable trap marriage is.
Liberals generally put more emphasis on #3 and conservatives on #2, but I’d argue that most of us view marriage in relatively the same way—-most people buy in for love, but also accept duty. The love arguments for marriage make same-sex marriage rights a shoo-in. But what’s interesting about Ted Olson’s argument is that, if you take at face value the claim that marriage is mainly about social stability seriously, then you also have to support gay marriage. Conservative attempts to get around this problem are laughable—-they bring up images of promiscuous sex to horrify people, but of course if you’re interested in promiscuous sex—-regardless of your sexual orientation—-you’re not usually one to clamor for marriage rights.
But there is a way to be for #2 and not feel a contradiction when opposing gay marriage, and that’s if you prioritize #1 over #2—-that is, see social stability as a good, but the subjugation of women and policing of gender as the number one priority. It’s possible for marriage to survive being remade into an egalitarian institution (though y’all know my doubts on this), but I’d argue that conservatives who are absolutely bonkers on this issue really don’t want marriage if it doesn’t exist precisely to police gender. But of course, they can’t say that out loud—-neither that they want marriage to continue to be defined by women’s second class status, nor that they just hate gay people and want to lash out at them. So we get incoherent arguments, and I suppose that means we’re going to see more people like Ted Olson decamp to the egalitarian side.
I do wonder if Olson moved over because he was a true believer in the arguments made by mostly disingenuous conservatives, or if he has gay people in his life that have made the discomfort with these disingenuous arguments more pronounced, because they’re such obvious cover stories for bigotry. His article indicates that the latter is the likelier story. His arguments are shockingly egalitarian and kind-hearted in tone; it really made me wonder. Any way you slice it, though: Good for him.
Heather Havrilesky has an article up at Salon examining the question—-and lamenting the fact of—-why we tend to absorb the details of other people’s troubled marriages with an eye towards Judgey McJudgeniks. She suggests that it’s about wanting a world that’s black and white. 
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re LGBT, the vast majority of people in 
these pics from two different FB pages. Hmmmm….guess there was a prom after all. Constance and seven others were not invited.
Actually, there might be a slight reason to find this news surprising. I think a lot of us live in liberal parts of the country where these attitudes are muted, so it might actually be surprising to find out that 
I know I’ve been writing a lot about reproductive rights and sexual health issues, but the stories I want to comment on seem to be increasing lately. As someone who writes a lot about these issues, I’ve noticed something interesting over the years about the feedback I get on the “moral” question of abortion, specifically from self-identified pro-choicers. Occasionally I’ll get an email, comment, or tweet from someone who is worried about the moral gravity of abortion, and suggests that somehow pro-choice arguments would be more compelling if we gave up more ground on the stigma of the procedure, if we spent more time in public worrying about how terrible abortion is (as if women who get abortions aren’t already shamed enough), that I personally haven’t thought enough about how serious a decision abortion must be for women and how tragic it always, always is. 
There’s been
