Congrats, Amanda! You really managed to get them riled up this time. Those wingnuts are really hilarious when they lash out in anger.

That essay you qouted brought to mind the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. That’s how that woman wants her dating. It really shows the hatred for ambiguity many conservatives have, something that goes beyond dating. I almost pity towards them for not being able to handle ambiguity, but only almost. It’s hard to feel sorry for people filled with so much bile.

This makes me think of the Louis C.K. skit where he talks about how his oldest daughter broke her toy and asked her father to break the younger daughter’s toy “to be fair”.  In essence, these loonies are a bunch of petulant children who are mad that other children are having fun that, because their “parents” (here this would be religion or a crushing sense of guilt established by having religious parents) won’t allow them to do the same things.  I know because I was this way for a long time before I realized that all of the reasons why my family was telling me I couldn’t do these things were bullshit.  I’m hardly a joyful person (years of conservative indoctrination has a tendency to crush those kinds of impulses), but at least I recognize that the correct alternative isn’t to make everyone else as miserable as I am.

For a single person, how is having four people interested in dating you a problem? That never happened to me when I was single, but I would have reveled in figuring out that particular problem.

I read her whole essay (and now my stomach hurts) and in the end she begs for some guidance on how to stop dating and get married. The answer is to marry the next guy who asks you for a second date. That isn’t hard to figure out.

What’s hard is doing the work of going on dates, getting to know people and slowly figuring out who you are in relationships and what you hope to find in a mate. This process can be quite lengthy so it won’t work for wingnuts who think they have an expiration date stamped to their foreheads that will start to flash the words “old maid” the moment they turn 22 and aren’t married.

I think the lottery system already exists, you just have to join the unification church (moonies) and an elderly korean man will assign you to someone.

Heh, prog, but they would suggest that a material good like a toy is sacrosanct, though.

Well, one thing I have to give credit to this batch of Republicans—at least they’re consistent.  They hate everyone who isn’t them and are sadistic to all.

Who the hell votes for them?

And so he wishes to “fix” this situation by dramatically lowering the happiness rates of married people by shoving all the single people into dysfunctional relationships as soon as possible.  I forget why we’re supposed to think this is an argument against the hypothesis that conservatives are sadistic.

While I don’t disagree with your hypothesis at all, I think we should also remember that these people really don’t understand selection or intervention effects either, and are extremely resistant to having them explained.

In sum, the problem with freedom is that it’s confusing!

Erich Fromm wrote a whole book on the subject: Escape From Freedom. (Although the Freudian framework hasn’t exactly stood the test of time, many of the underlying ideas stand.)

Hint to James @7: the numbers of people who aren’t them is increasing all the time, and that makes them sad.

The ugly thinking that marriage is the only safe place for women. and that all it takes to make it work is a little more self-denial and less personhood on the woman’s part, kept me in a bad marriage way longer than I needed to be.  The world I’ve found since I finally got out of that cage totally belies the rightwing horror stories.  I’m happier single with no prospects than I ever was in my marriage.  So I take this asshattery a little personally.  The women who are scared into staying on the compound can be just as vicious with it as the men, if not worse.

serious bette -

I read her whole essay (and now my stomach hurts) and in the end she begs for some guidance on how to stop dating and get married.

I read it too, and frankly I think her problem is that she thinks that a marriage is an end rather than a means.  A marriage isn’t an end in and of itself - and folks who treat it that way are setting themselves up for nastiness.  Marriages don’t solve problems by their mere existence - hell in many ways a marriage can create a whole lot of new problems, like any partnership does.  But a good partnership can also help overcome problems.  And marriages that are built on good partnerships and compatibility can be a great tool for the end goal of happiness.  (So can any monogamous life-partner relationship, but marriages come with all kinds of built-in perks that can make things even easier for those folks who decide to register their relationship with the government.)

Wingnuts have something in their ear that distorts what they’re hearing from liberals. A liberal says, “Don’t be ashamed of your sexuality - have as little or as much sex as you want, just be safe and considerate.” A wingnuts hears, “Fuck everyone you meet! Fuck men! Fuck women! Get abortions! Force every woman you know to get an abortion!”

I don’t think they’re opposed to freedom. I think they don’t understand freedom. They’re so used to trying to tell other people how to live their lives, they can’t grasp that that’s not what we’re doing.

The real problem is that these people don’t want to admit they’ve been lied to—they gobbled-up the rules for a happy life they were given as kids, and now that they’ve discovered it isn’t nearly that simple, they hate seeing people who didn’t follow the same program being happy because it reminds them of all the choices they didn’t make but wanted to.  If they can get everyone else to sign on to the idea that their way is the One True Path, then it’s easier for them to pretend that they made the right choices.

Is freedom confusing?  Sometimes, anyways.  But it makes you be honest by making you ask the question, “Which way is better?”  Everything important deserves to be questioned, whether it’s what you believe, who you date, or why you would get married.

This is a little more on the earlier topic of Hymnowitz and her marketing ploy of ‘Battle of the Sexes!’ It occurred to me that what her book seems to lament the end of the ‘The Manly Man,’ but what she is really missing is not responsible men but, lets face it, her DADDY. This obsession with snow tires and lawn care - that;s just nostalgia for dear old dad.

Female complaints about men are as old as time, but I find accounts of man taming in the 19th Century west amusing. Their were complaints that men turned Christmas and Thanksgiving into excuses to tramp around the woods with a rifle in pursuit of a turkey. The ne’er do well cowboy or trapper man was more the rule than the exception in that milieu. Men who traveled west were often in the process of running away from families. The copious consumption of whiskey by men was always viewed with alarm by the fairer sex.

In fact, a big part of the feminist movement dovetailed with the prohibitionist movement. Heavy drinking was seen as pretty much a male problem - hence prohibition and female suffrage came through at the same time 1920.

Basically, men have not been living up to female standards forever - it’s just that feminism allowed women to break out of the script and have more control over their own lives. 

And in Hymnowitz’s case - hey, her heart belongs to Daddy, so no one could ever live up to Him.

If you think being married at 20 to the first person you fuck is a great plan

Haha, ouch. In my defense, I was 24 when I got married to the first guy I fucked, and it was pretty much an accident of fate. I wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone else.

I think you’re being unfair to John Hawkins. He doesn’t sound like he’s anti-sex, only against sex that women choose freely and enjoy.

Meanwhile,  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a significant portion of the difficulty people have in figuring out relationship stuff is the result of the fact that patriarchal rules haven’t withered away as fast as they might have. Just look at that quoted section, where it’s all about what the guy does or doesn’t think is going on as a result of a date.

So, I propose an all-volunteer marriage lottery system for people who think dating is stupid because why can’t they just be married and get it over already.

Given that right-wingers view marriage as a cold economic transaction, the guy who built this site (for mopes who want to be sugar daddies) and this site (for even more pathetic mopes who don’t want the commitment/expense of being sugar daddies) is probably already working on the on-line version of this idea. Hang in there, Hawkins and Hymowitz!

Slightly off-topic, I was recently told that a single business acquaintance who’s notorious for burning business and personal bridges tried one of those sugar-daddy sites, and couldn’t even succeed there. Do I need to ask anyone to guess what his politics are?

“It probably depends on the person and on the situation” is an “easy pass”? Do they go out of their way to get things backwards?

Gracchus: the thing is, they don’t really believe that marriage is a cold economic transaction. They have this wierd thing where it’s purely economic when it suits them, but not when it suits anyone else. So they really believe the barista likes them, and they think the woman who divorces an unemployed husband is a heartless moneygrubbing bitch (and not in a good way).  They want to buy being loved for who they are.

MMM, the latest studies find that happiness in a marriage depends on—

wait for it

the happiness of the partner!

Happiness waxes and wanes

“What we saw over a long period of time is that if one spouse changed in terms of increasing happiness, the other spouse’s happiness would go up,” says Christiane Hoppmann, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study. “And if there was a dip in happiness, this dip would also affect the respective spouse.

Data for the happiness study was gleaned from the Seattle Longitudinal Study which, since 1956, has followed more than 6,000 individuals, tapping them for insights into their life satisfaction, personality, and health issues. Researchers at UBC, the University of Washington and Penn State sifted through the data to find responses from 178 married couples — some together as long as 35 years — and compared their happiness ratings.

Link

What is true is that men benefit healthwise from being married, especially as we get older, a similar effect isn’t observed for women.

Also:

LONDON — Young, married couples who had not started a family had the happiest relationships, according to a study of British attitudes published Monday.

The initial findings of Understanding Society, a 48.9 million pound study commissioned by the government-backed Economic and Social Research Council, showed older couples were less content than their younger counterparts, with women experiencing a greater decline in happiness than men.

Researchers discovered couples who had been together for less than five years were more likely to see their happiness blossom than those in a longer-term relationship.

The taxpayer-funded study, which is tracking 40,000 households over the next 20 years in a bid to improve understanding of people’s lives and experiences, found married couples were happier than their cohabiting peers.

Relationships in which both partners had a university education were also more likely to see their happiness prosper, according to the study which says it will “map the social landscape as the country recovers from the deepest recession for 60 years.”

Link

The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past
35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of
subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined
both absolutely and relative to men. This decline in relative wellbeing
is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing,
demographic groups, and industrialized countries. Relative
declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness
in which women in the 1970s reported higher subjective well-being
than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap
is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men.

Link

FWIW, when I was searching on Google, the autocomplete offered “married couples Bible
Studies” as a suggested search, I guess you need help to find in the Bible where it tells you how to have a perfect marriage like Jehovah and Jesus intended for you.

Well my inner softy can sort of feel for the writer of that Family Scholars article.  The truth is that dating can be hard at times and difficult to negotiate, but so are many of the interactions we happen to have with others with whom we deal throughout our lives.  I remember lamenting how hard it was to handle the dating scene and how difficult it often was to know what might be going on in a the mind of whatever guy I happened to be interested in at the time. 

But hopefully a big part of the point of getting older (and waiting until one gets a bit older to get hitched, if you’re into that sort of thing) is that life and its accompanying experiences will bring increasing maturity and a better understanding of our fellow humans as a result.  Getting married at the age of 20 does absolutely nothing to suddenly mature someone (man or woman) into a full on responsible adult, and that is the point so often lost on people like Hymowitz.  I just don’t understand how it can be so outrageous in the minds of Hymowitz et al for young 20 somethings to still be relatively immature and undesirous of taking on “adult” trappings like a mortgage, marriage and parenting of a young child.  But I think there is a fundamental disagreement underlying that point as to what makes someone a valuable member of our society, and playing by the old social rules is seen by many of these people as the magic bullet to social acceptance and the rest of us realize just how absurd that sort of argument truly is.

And that all feeds back into the point on made on the previous discussion on this issue a few days ago.  It is a good thing for all of society that young people hold off on marriage and procreation until the get older, and it’s a good thing for men and women (and especially for women, I would argue) to use those younger years to get an education, get their career going, and experience the world around them.  Of course I don’t think marriage has to be a the ultimate goal for anyone (especially since gay marriage is as yet unrecognized in most of our states) and that’s really the ultimate fallacy of their argument against young people these days.  But I suppose that’s too nuanced of a argument for people who insist on being so black and white in the way that the view the world.

And last:

This is from WebMD:

Yes, those old, mopey stereotypes are still alive and kicking.

“The stereotypes that single women are either promiscuous or don’t get any are a scam,” she says. “It’s like if you’re married, all you have to do is roll over and have perfect sex. Anyone who reads the divorce columns knows that’s not true! Single women can now get sex outside of marriage. It’s probably quaint not to. Single women can even have kids without a husband, and without having sex!”

DePaulo’s favorite line: “Single women can pick up the check at work and sperm at the bank.”

The Happiness Bullet?

Marriage isn’t a magic bullet for a wonderful life, says DePaulo. “But it has that appeal that you will meet this person and everything falls into place. Yet if you look to one person to be everything, it’s not fair to that person, not fair to you, and it’s not healthy. And if the marriage doesn’t last, it’s devastating.”

One study tracking 1,000 couples for 15 years found that marriage brought only a “tiny blip” of happiness during the brief time closest to the wedding ceremony. “But on average, afterwards, people go back to way they were before. The researcher’s perspective is that we each have a baseline of happiness, and marriage on average isn’t going to change that—except for that little blip,” DePaulo says.

In fact, most married vs. single “happiness studies” are seriously flawed, she adds. “They lump all single people together - divorced, widowed, always-single - without factoring in the transition period, the really unnerving period in your life after divorce or becoming widowed,” she tells WebMD. “Over time, you go back to the person you were before. But studies don’t take that transition period into account.”

Here’s an eye-opener: In one survey, moms were asked what they most wanted as a Mother’s Day gift. “The overwhelming answer was ‘time to myself.’ Women who have the dream—marriage and kids—just want time to themselves,” says DePaulo.

Link

Poor Amanda, forever forced to swat flies.

Johnny boy, it ain’t legitimate research if you take a conclusion and then look for just the stuff that supports it, ignoring anything that contradicts your conclusion.

Here ya go, buddy.  It took me a second to consider what might be relevant and less than ten seconds to find the statistics.

http://www.divorcerate.org/

Swish the stats on that page around in your homunculus-sized brainpan and see if they drag you over the threshhold to reasonable conclusions.

Now try this on for size (it’s small, so it should fit you):  the younger you marry, the more likely it is that your marriage will end in divorce.

or until you can’t take it anymore and get divorced (the likelier outcome, but shush).

Ah, but is it?  Consider the type of person who would sign on for an arranged marriage—are they likely to even consider divorce?  Or even be able to think about things?

My thought-experiment-bet is that there would be a lower divorce rate simply because they’d be conditioned to accept whatever they get.

In Silicon Valley, I’ve worked with a number of Indians on H1B visas, and some of them have had arranged marriages.  I don’t know what their home lives are like, but they’ve remained married.  It is not something I’d like.

I love this. Good job.

@Amanda: Drat, yet another analogy ruined by the conservatives inverted moral compass.  Also, sorry if that post was a bit of a grammatical train wreck, as I tried to revise the wording but didn’t re-read the whole thing.  My English teacher would be ashamed.

@Jayn:  That’s pretty much what I was trying to say expressed more concisely (and without analogies that conservatives don’t understand).  It does suck to realize that everything you were taught about how people should relate to each other is completely wrong.  I think many conservative, mostly the older ones, truly believe their own dreck about how everyone needs to be forced into marriage so they can be happy, but for the rest, particularly hypocrites like Newt Gingrich, their tendencies towards Schadenfreude push them to advocate for other people to be miserable so that those people can then be “happy”.  They have truly mastered both Doublespeak and Doublethink.

I don’t think they’re opposed to freedom. I think they don’t understand freedom. They’re so used to trying to tell other people how to live their lives, they can’t grasp that that’s not what we’re doing.

All the arguments revolving around marriage, sex, abortion, and “happiness” tend to focus on strawmen, it’s easier to beat up a slut then to discuss the reality of somebody who has conscientious, conse

I always find it really creepy the way that righties insist on referring to romantic partners as “mates”. And they accuse the left of being obsessed with sex!

@Olivia: Interesting thing about the Amish—they actually do expect their young people to make an informed choice about whether to opt-in to the restrictions of Amish life.  The process includes a period of sampling the pleasures of the outside world—outsiders usually hear about this when it gets really out of hand, like with drugs and things, but questioning the Amish lifestyle and exploring the alternative is considered a normal life stage in Amish culture (I’m not sure how much religious questioning is involved—what I’ve read about it tends to focus on the behavioral aspects—but the whole thing is based on their belief in adult baptism).  Of course, this isn’t a completely free choice—obviously there’s a lot of pressure to conclude that yes, Amish life is better—but I’ve always found it interesting that there’s an official point between childhood and adulthood where everyone is expected to stop and make a conscious decision to continue as an Amish adult (or not), while it seems like evangelical Christians want to prevent their kids from ever noticing that there might be an alternative to the religion and culture they were raised in.

Additionally, Marcotte’s tired jabs about conservatives hating sex aren’t surprising coming from someone whose philosophy could be fairly summed up as screw everything that moves, follow that with an abortion, and accuse anyone who raises an eyebrow about it of “slut shaming.”

Yet another wingnut male hypnotised by the almighty Marcotte Cooze!

We need to, I dunno, photoshop pictures of it onto coconuts and see if we can get wingnuts to run after them when thrown.  Imagine the havoc you could inflict on a TeaBagger gathering.

I have proof that lifelong partnerships can be absolutely miserable: A pair of ducks have taken up residency around my driveway.  The male is constantly waddling around in the middle of the road, usually right as I happen to be leaving for work.  He is clearly suicidal.

But in all seriousness:

someone whose philosophy could be fairly summed up as screw everything that moves

That is one phenomenal bit of MRA projection.

I come as a witness of 1950s marriage: my babysitter pregnant and married at 16—by 30 missing teeth in the front.  My stepmother, married at 16 (maybe pregnant), her first husband abused both her and their kids.

And on into the ‘60s before legal abortion and availability of the birth control pill—two high school friends married off at 14 and 16, cause: pregnancy. Two college friends, 19 and 20, shotgun weddings.

Didn’t look too happy to me.

Okay, that’s anecdoatal evidence: but if it’s so much darn fun to marry obscenely early, when pregnant, or for other reasons—why is it that the Red States, where teen pregnancy and early marriage abound, also specialize in more divorce than the Blue States where marriage, on average, is later, and there are fewer teen mothers?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/13/national/13census.html

(Red States also tend to be more screwed financially than Blue States, and I’ve read that the education level of mothers is tied to the finances of a state, or country, or family.)

It’s really difficult to buy the argument that you’re not anti-sex when the first reaction you have to a woman who doesn’t hate herself for being sexual is to call her a slut.

It’s almost like he doesn’t know he’s a cliche.

So, I propose an all-volunteer marriage lottery system for people who think dating is stupid because why can’t they just be married and get it over already.

Actually, that Nice Guy who I complained about a few weeks ago?  He advocates for something like this, except administered by the government and presumably not voluntary.  I haven’t had the chance to ask him, but I do wonder what his recourse would be if the government set him up with a woman and she wanted nothing to do with him.  Would she be sent to jail?

So, just last night, after lamenting a second 1st date dud, I said “arrange marry me already”—that lamentation is shear laziness and assholery and to all present @ my chapter of Drinking Liberally, I apologize. Laziness, cowardess & a fundamental lack of desire to take responsibility for one’s own happiness/choices are all hallmarks of the modern conservative movement…the kind of pre-19th Century courtship vista the Family Scholars chick envisions would be nothing short of a slave market. Yeah, its hard to date—its hard to find that balance of self and “best self” to share with a prospect. Its hard not to get a call three days after a seemingly “nice” date…All these hard things? They aren’t really all that hard, honestly, they just are part of the process of putting yourself out there (if out there is where you want to be)...and thankfully, I can freely chose to date, to embrace ironic spinsterhood or to even screw around (consensually and safely)...thank you Feminism.

Slave market in the sense that if other conservative policies were enacted, women would have serious difficulty getting a divorce and would be expected to “provide services” to their arranged married husbands for life, for free.

Even the arranged marriages in certain current cultures still rely on consent of both parties.

I know an Indian-American couple and basically, they’ll be hiring a matchmaker to find marriageable girls of “good” families (by their definition, similar culture seems to be the largest factor) and compatible temperments to introduce to their college graduate son.

And that’s as far as the arrangement goes. It’s up to the couples to take it from there. He’s the shy kid, and they think he might need help meeting a girl, and they’re hoping that might connect him to someone within their culture.

I would consider that way too intrusive in my life, but even so, the couples themselves have to do the heavy lifting of getting to know each other and making decisions about each other as partners.

@ Amanda: “having grown up in Bible-thumping land, I can assure you that many people who are stone cold miserable would tell a pollster they’re full of joy, because otherwise, everything they’ve lived for is a lie,” and Antigone@8: “I thought the research said that most women were actually less happy while married.  Can anybody find the studies?”

I’ve read some of this stuff and can confirm that Amanda’s suspicion is correct.  Ask people on survey forms “Are you happy?,” and married people of both genders are more likely than unmarried persons to say yes.  But ask them to keep track of their moods during the day, and divorced women report more cheerfulness than married women.  That conclusion came from a study of 1,000 working women in ... yep, Texas.

@keshmeshi: Better yet, ask him what happens if the mandatory matching system sets him up with a woman he wants nothing to do with. One of the more amusing beliefs MRAs appear to have is that they assume their birthright is a rich supermodel who is submissive to their every whim. The only reason they haven’t gotten it yet is because those damned feminists are preventing it by insisting women are human beings and should have a choice.

I can almost guarantee he’ll automatically reverse course and insist he should be get to veto partners while the woman isn’t allowed to.

Okay, I keep hearing about this legendary article where Amanda suggests we schtupp anything that moves and the get mad abortions or suchlike (Well we being not me, unless there’s something my body isn’t telling me). And yet despite my weeks of searching I haven’t found hide nor hair of it. I feel cheated, cheated I tell you that you haven’t once reposted this legendary article for our reading pleasure. I believe you are remiss in your duties not to let this posting back into the light where you advocate double-gay rottweiler sex with triple abortions for everyone involved.

Is there something keeping them from arranging marriages within their own little clans? They already follow biblical patriarchy and have virginity pledges from father to daughter and some of them home school and a lot of them end up going to bible universities so what’s stopping them from going the full hog? It seems like it would save them a lot of time and us a lot of grief of having to listen to their bitching.

Sure, a few wayward teens would say “fuck that” and bounce, or try to at least, but really, shouldn’t that young woman be mad at her parents for not having someone set up for her by the time she graduated high school? How is her dating life everyone’s else’s fault?

my babysitter pregnant and married at 16—by 30 missing teeth in the front

Is “missing teeth in the front” some kind of euphemism that I’m not familiar with?  Because I’ve been sitting here thinking about this, and I can’t see what that has to with the early marriage/be miserable and pregnant thing.  The only things I can think of are her husband beat her, hillbilly stereotypes, or the family is poor and doesn’t have adequate dental insurance/can’t afford dental care.  Possibly even that she has no means to take care of herself and she lost her teeth as a result.  I mean, the 16 and pregnant alone gets the point across, but I have no idea how missing teeth really fits in there.

On topic -

If the young woman complaining about dating would read the profiles of the men that she was dating, she might figure out something about them, thereby saving her some time and rejection.  Unless she’s desperate for any warm penis.  At that point, I would not suggest dating so much as working on herself as a person.  Does she not understand that purpose of dating is getting to know people to decide if you want a relationship with them?  If Rob, Richard and James annoy you, stop dating them.

This is the point at which I wish people had a tad more confidence to say “no”.  I presume that this young lady knows - or knows someone who knows - about the internet, so the question of “dating etiquette” shouldn’t be that mysterious.  It’s out there.

I never dated when I was young. I fell head over heels in love with someone I met when I was 17, by the time I was 19, I was married and a mother. Well, our marriage ended in 2009 (divorce was final early in 2010), and I’ve never been happier. I feel like I didn’t even know what happy felt like until after I was divorced!

For the Family Scholar who wonders what’s going on in the minds of her dates: I suggest asking.

This crap about screwing everything that moves and then having an abortion stirkes me as actionably libelous, speaking as someone who has litigated defamation cases.  The only real issue would be whether the weasel words about “philosophy” were enough to prevent the statement from carrying the implication that Amanada engages in such behavior herself.

What I loved (and by “loved,” I mean thbththththppppth) about “screw everything that moves, follow that with an abortion” is that it doesn’t even allow for either party’s use of (shhhh!) birth control.

Thank God conservatives (of any gender) are not attracted to me (nor I to them), because I’d have to use so much bug spray…

Via Stuff Christian Culture Likes, I recently found this article called “Biblical Dating: From ‘Hi’ to ‘I Do’ in a Year.” The premise: that you have to get married before you develop too much of an emotional connection, because then you’d be acting “emotionally married” without being actually married. You shouldn’t date for long, because it might lead to premarital emotional intimacy.

So the solution is to marry someone quick before you get too attached to them. Really.

And I guess God will send you a sign that you will emotionally connect with this person, so you know it’s a good idea to commit yourself to being with them forever, even though you’ve only known each other for a few months, and have been maintaining “emotional distance” so as not to act married.

This is such an uneasy compromise with dating that I wish they would just go ahead and say your parents should choose your spouse, and you shouldn’t meet them until the day you marry them. That would reduce the risk of premarital love.

The premise: that you have to get married before you develop too much of an emotional connection, because then you’d be acting “emotionally married” without being actually married. You shouldn’t date for long, because it might lead to premarital emotional intimacy.

The hell? What is it about human connection that fundies are so afraid of?

I think many conservatives have genuine difficulty reading other people’s intentions.  If you are trained to view another person as a representative of a particular category of being, rather than as somebody who has a more organic make up, understanding becomes generic rather than specific.  The ability to sort the good apples from the bad becomes lost.

I really enjoyed the article, except for the last part where you go at the woman who finds dating confusing and wishes it were easier.  I didn’t read the whole essay and I’ll take your word for it that the rest of it is reactionary nonsense, but as far as that excerpt goes I really strongly relate, as someone with social anxiety disorder who finds the casual-dating-and-getting-to-know-someone-as-precursor-to-relationship process really uncomfortable.  Which doesn’t mean that I want to return to the days when I had no choice in the matter.  It doesn’t mean that I want to get married at age 20.  I don’t appreciate the implication that all people like me have those desires.

People like me are not accepted with open arms into the purity movement, I might add.  Because what matters is the spirit of the thing.  That’s why people who’ve had loads of sex can become “virgins” again if they suddenly get religion and renounce any future premarital sex.  It works in reverse, too - if you’re a virgin who is open about her desire to engage in non-Jerry-Falwell-approved sex in the future, and who makes no attempt to suppress “lustful” thoughts, you are basically a slut-in-training.

Mezosub - Thanks for the info, I had no idea.  That is pretty horrible that that would happen.

Amanda: the only problem with your suggestion is that it seems like it would lead to a textbook case of adverse selection.

I’m going to disagree with apocryphal Ben Franklin quote, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.”  Why should we be so cruel?  People who sacrifice freedom at least deserve the illusion of security.

Not only do I agree with Franklin, I find that security will not be the result and even the illusion of such is fleeting.  YMMV, I suppose.

They want to buy being loved for who they are.

I vote Paul @19 FTW.

Mezosub and SporkeyO: the calcium leetching is pretty much gone in the USA except in fringe populations due to the push to consume large amounts of liquid milk and other calcium rich items, though that’s usually described as something to protect from later osteo issues in older women.  The greater consumption during childhood via the school lunch program guidelines has helped decrease occurance along with the lower numbers of births per woman, greater spacing between births and later initial occurance of first birth.