Thu, 2008-10-30 22:39

Photo “Little Spectator” by Flickr user Proggie. Used under a Creative Commons license.

[Note: Big update below — I originally, and possibly shamefully, looked at only one side of the question. —fl]

Matisse of Mistress Matisse’s Journal answers a question from a reader. Her answer’s spot on.

“...my best friend is actually a very beautiful lesbian with whom I have a lot of chemistry, but who obviously would never have sex with me. She is a very materialistic girl, and I’ve found that nothing makes me happier than to make her happy and to talk to her. I actually don’t even like pursuing straight girls anymore because I’m intrigued by how she makes me feel. And of course, the fact that she’s unavailable makes her more tantalizing, but that’s one of the things I want to understand.”

if you’re just asking for my opinion in general, I’d say that just based on the situation you’re describing… you’re an emotional masochist. And that’s not a good thing.

That’s not a real psychological term, of course, and it’s not a BDSM term, either. But you’re engaging in an unrequited love/lust thing with a bitchy-but-beautiful lesbian who doesn’t return your feelings. You imply that you’re giving her money or gifts or something? And you’re not even trying to find a woman who might love you back? I call that emotional masochism, my friend. I will bet you any amount of money that the situation you’re describing is not going to end in you being happy and getting what you want.

She said it here.

Given my fondness for my theory that men indoctrinate ourselves to perceive women as the“no-sex” class, the dominant paradigm wherein women are perceived as disinterested in sex… and therefore fair game for any and all attempts to leverage it out of them, either in exchange for something else or, sometimes, by brute force. I ought to nominate Matisse’s correspondent as a classic case since he’s constructed an attraction wherein pretty much anything he does isn’t going to work. Or, if for some reason she every says yes, that he can consider the ultimate “score” of his efforts to be “worthy” enough for her. And if he had a really bad case of it then it would also make sense that a woman who was interested in him (for instance, um, isn’t a lesbian for crying out loud?) might seem too “easy” and therefore not “worthy” of his attention.

The real clue for me? He says “I actually don’t even like pursuing straight girls anymore because I’m intrigued by how she makes me feel.” Because, you know, if it was personal — just her — then you’d expect him to say something like “I don’t feel like pursuing any other girls because of how she makes me feel.” Instead the schematic qualification of “straight girls” i.e. “women actually likely to be interested in him.”

But I dunno… if I knew more than what she wrote I might be more sure. It’s also the case that a lot of people — men and women — get “imprinted“ duckling-style on one particular characteristic of their first major crush or first serious partner and then keep cycling deeper and deeper trying to recapture that feeling. Or possibly he, like more men than I think people recognize, finds obsession with an unachievable potential partner is a convenient way to avoid sexual relationships altogether. Who knows?

I do have to say Matisse is right, though, that since his dynamic with this woman really isn’t satisfiable, and since if he pursues it or something like it really does subject himself not so much to domination but abuse, he really should consider a little talk therapy to clarify for himself what’s going on.

Update: Doh! I need to get out of the house a little more often I guess. After getting the children off to school this morning I took a long walk home. Thinking about the situation I outlined last night I realized I’d been thinking way too much in terms of the letter writer and how his affectation… well… affects him. Upon reflection it occurs to me that what he really needs to get off his affection/obsession is the effect it has on the women or women he’s decided to impossibly dream about.

My only excuse is one I mentioned last night: I only know what he wrote... in other words we only know his side of the story. And inside his framing then yeah, he’s parked himself in.

We don’t know her side, however. He sees her as his best friend. Is this how she sees him? He sees her as “materialist” and any acts he performs or gifts he brings as making himself happy by making her happy. Does she see herself as materialist? Is she happy when he thinks she’s happy? He talks about wanting to be the controlled submissive in a full-time D/s withholding relationship with her. Does she see him as wanting to be controlled or as already controlling?

Again, I dunno. Since we only have his side of his story we can’t know, eh?

In the extreme case she may see him as a stalker, in which case, considering how miserable unsuccessful things like restraining orders are (“wow, now she’s really playing hard to get”) talk therapy would really, really be good idea! (And if not talk therapy then more drastic interventions would be entirely called for — my experience of the aftermaths of “successful” stalkers and their survivors is that it’s the epitome of senseless tragedy.)

But a deeper lesson might be learned if he isn’t a stalker and is instead just really sunk in the worthiness trap. Because what the ordinary supplicant sees only as striving for worthiness often appears to others as entitlement. And the suitor’s expressions of frustration? More entitlement? And why not — after all who’s usually setting the terms? “If I only do this she’ll realize…” or “Maybe if I help her move…” or even “if she only knew how I felt about her she’d…” are all setting the terms, and reward that one believes “should” slay the dragon of indifference and “earn” the longed-for kiss.

Getting back to the “no-sex” class paradigm one can see how actual women’s agency or genuine desire beyond “yes or no” would only interfere with or even frustrate the internal cycles of the male worthiness trap.

One hopes talk therapy helps with that too.

Thu, 2008-10-30 15:37

[This post crystallizes for me an age-related structural gender issue that seems pretty critical but I haven’t seen it discussed much. :-) —fl]

Last week Ezra Klein raised one of those hidden-in-plain-sight issues that I think are barkingly critical to understanding contemporary gender dynamics.

Folks might remember this rather startling map that criss-crossed the internet a few months ago. Using Census Survey data, it purported to show the imbalance in singles of both genders across the country. The East Coast, it turned out, was full of lonesome ladies. The West Coast was packed with unhappy bachelors. Folks had some methodological questions, but most read the map and moved on, or read the map and moved to a city with more hot, hot, singles action.

But Great American Jonathan Soma decided to dig into the numbers and make a more manipulable map. And the main variable he let you manipulate was age. The original map counted all singles between the ages of 20 and 64. The new map lets you screw with some sliders for a data range. And the results are fascinating. On the young end of the spectrum, single men outnumber single women just about everywhere. If you hold the ages to 20-34, DC, for instance, has 27 extra single men for every 1,000 people. Shift the slider so it tracks folks from age 45 to 60, and DC has 48 more single women for every 1,000 folks.

The reason for this, basically, is that women marry younger. About 1/3rd of women are married by age 24. Only 1/5th of men are. That creates some imbalance.

Read the quote in context here.

Click to see the full comic. The syndicated cartoonist Vic Lee addresses the same issue in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

If you can’t make it out the comic is set in a restaurant. In center frame two women are sharing a toast. Behind them an angry older man exclaims to the similarly shocked woman at his table “No! It’s wrong! We’ve got to fight for traditional marriage.” At the next table a hip young man is whispering to his partner “Same-sex Issues?” She whispers back “No, same age!”

Ouch! Now there’s an unspoken taboo!

I’m pretty sure, by the way, that to the probably-substantial extent traditional gender values are involved this one is not unilaterally imposed by men. For instance if I hear one more single woman refer to their younger partner as “my 25-year-old” or, for that matter, a younger man refer to a prospective date as a “cougar” I may use intemperate language. (And duh, it already bugged me when similarly gendered language goes the other way.)

And yes, I’m aware that differential maturity rates among early-adolescent girls and boys establishes something of a gradient very early on. But here’s the deal: that gradient tends to disappear around, oh, say, age 18 — the age, coincidentally, when a blog called “real adult sex” would consider an appropriate age for folks to start having, well, real adult sex! But I digress…

If I hadn’t been thinking a lot about this I might have just left it at something like “gee, it’s just so inefficient this way — single 40-year-old women and unattached 20-year-old men should just start hooking up more often.” I’d have even had both statistical justification (marriages where the male partner is younger tend to be far more durable than other age-related pairings) or personal/anecdotal (if my dad’s parents had stuck with older-man/younger-woman then he wouldn’t be here and neither would I.) And there’s the business about how (at least for now) men tend to die before their partners and so it’s inefficient, dumb, and even self-defeatingly tragic for women to prefer older partners. I could even have dragged out examples of “other cultures” and, of course, the old saw about “sexual peaks.” A bit more recently I might have dragged out bits about patriarchy naturally favoring economically-advantaged older men and younger women with a system pitched against economical autonomy just seeing which side the bread is buttered on. And if (flying-spaghetti monster forfend) I was an ev-psych fan I’d blather about men’s preference for firm boobs and women’s preference for “proven providers…” as if most pre-modern economic and agricultural production world-wide

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that. Whatever.

Instead I’ll just say we gotta start talking about this gendered age gradient. I’m obviously not saying we should start carding couples for their birth years — not only would that be counterproductive at any point it would also be premature. But! If we don’t start looking at it we’re going to continue looking at more than a lot of lonely people of different ages sitting on different coasts.

Look at relative pay differences between men and women, to name just one. We’re so used to looking at comparable pay — how as in the Ledbetter case female manager X was systematically paid less than male managers performing the same work. Chances are looking pretty good right now that the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act will be passed by the next Congress and signed by the next President. Cool, right? Well, sure! But that’s comparative pay.

But what about relative, internal-to-relationship income and experience when by tradition and, evidently, statistical preference of both parties consistently gives the male partner a three to five year jump on the female partner?

In the outside world they can both be earning amounts comparable to peers of both genders, but when it comes to decisions at home about who brings home more money, which career moves… or even geographic ones… should take precedent, and who the family can most afford to stay home with pre-school children a bias towards… whoever has the more established career and income is going to carry a lot of weight. No matter who does most of the dishes on a daily basis. And don’t forget that whoever stays home with new children (usually the lower-earning-power member) is set back all the further.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that aggregate personal choices of partner grossly exaggerate perceptions of differences in height, strength, horniness, or whatever compared to actual averages. For instance there’s far, far, far more overlap in average men’s and women’s heights than in relative heights between hetero partners. Well, in the same way a persistent bias for younger, and therefore on-average lower-earning women partnering with older, and therefore longer-in-the-workplace men will tend to perpetuate gendered economic differences no matter how egalitarian society becomes at large.

Since one of the precepts of radical feminism is that imbalances in domestic heterosexual relationship is the template for all other forms of oppression (one reason why the old-timers kept saying “the personal is the political”) averaging the economic playing field may not create as much egalitarianism as projections of aggregate equality might lead us to expect.

So.

I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to overturn both the one-way Hugh Hefner/Maureen Dowd gender/age template. Which is ok — there are lots of ways to get there. But I will say, rather bluntly, that gender relations are going to plateau below parity until we start seeing more truly random age mixing between gendered couples.

[While all this is a new idea to me it must have been discussed by others earlier. Therefore I’ll welcome pointers to references in comments. Thanks in advance. —fl]

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Random Note: Despite the charts Ezra Klein linked to it’s not necessary to just hookup surpluses of 20-something west-coast men with 40-something east-coast women. Almost all couples are just a few years apart and I’m guessing under any optimal solution that would still be true after the gendered age gradient collapsed. (Unlike, say, Hugo Schwyzer, I don’t think larger age gaps are necessarily a problem… again, as long as they trend gender-random as well.)

Random Note: Makes me wonder about the trend where “red-state” people both begin sex and get married much younger than “blue states”... and consequently blue-state people have more stable marriages and way lower divorce rates. [Update: Doh! Corrected typo in the previous sentence implying that red-state people were better off. —fl]

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See also

- “Cougers,” Entitlement, and Unexamined Bias – Sexism? Ask me (out)

Wed, 2008-10-29 19:00

Ok, first of all for a heck of a lot of people one of the spookier things you can say to them is “Put on this gown after you undress. It goes on with the ties towards the back.” Talk about chills up your spine! Nuff said.

But more to the point I think an exam gown nicely illustrates the difference between sexy and “sexy” costumes. Now just to be clear there’s nothing wrong with the sort of “sexy” doctor/nurse costumes you see advertised (if not necessarily worn) all over. But while costumes centered around lucite heels for women, or Chippendale collars for men tend more to signify sexiness than embody it. They’re safe because the exaggerations make clear you’re just pretending sexiness.

Again that’s fine (if a bit dismissive of people who have to wear those clothes at work) but it seems like if you’re just going to pretend to be something why not avoid pretending you’re something else entirely. As the former blogger Olympia Monet put it why not just wear a nice black dress with a pointy hat and maybe a broom? Or a suit with a big red sash, pitchfork, and a little forked goatee? And then just be yourself, as sexy, or not sexy as you want to be.

And if you do want to be a little more erotic, maybe just for a private party for two? I think one could do worse than a hospital gown, lab coat, biker jeans and vest, a kilt and sash, or tutu… with underneath as much or as little else as you wish to wear underneath of course… could be sexy and stylin’

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here, though you may need a Flickr™ account.

Wed, 2008-10-29 12:40

Via YesOnPropK.org the text of the ballot measure that seems most relevant to me would be

THE PROPOSAL:
Proposition K would prohibit the Police Department from providing resources to investigate and prosecute prostitution. It would also prohibit the Police Department from applying for federal or state funds that involve racial profiling to target alleged trafficking victims and would require any existing funds to implement the Task Force’s recommendations.

Proposition K would require the Police Department and the District Attorney to enforce existing criminal laws that prohibit coercion, extortion, battery, rape, sexual assault and other violent crimes, regardless of the victim’s status as a sex worker. It also requires these agencies to fully disclose the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against sex workers.

Read text of the entire ballot measure here.

So the first part says no investigation or prosecution of prostitution. The second part requires police to enforce laws protecting people from crimes typically associated with prostitution including violence and coercion.

Beyond its sheer duh-no obvious appropriateness there seems to be an interesting story behind that second part. In particular the clause “regardless of the victim’s status as a sex worker.”

Consider the “findings” section of the formal proposition, again via YesOnPropK.org (emphasis mine.)

The police department targets massage parlor workers and management in numerous sting operations, which result in the loss of economic independence for those workers.

The police department utilizes those same targeted businesses as a means of entertainment for its ranks, as demonstrated in the Bayview Station police videos, made public in December, 2005. This demonstrates a lack of respect for their human dignity, freedom of choice, and labor rights.

The San Francisco police department and the San Francisco District Attorneys office has completely ignored dancers in dance clubs who have made written and tape recorded statements on prostitution, sexual assault, rape, and extortion in the form of the ‘pay everyday to work’ program.

The San Francisco District Attorneys Office has demonstrated unequal prosecution of the laws regarding prostitution related activity, in that street-based, home-based, massage parlor and out call escort workers are prosecuted to the full extent of the law leading to either the issuance of citations or arrest, yet dance clubs workers and managers are not prosecuted within the full extent of the law when issued citations or arrested. This policy reflects the long standing “Cronyism” between dance club owner/operators and key decision makers.

Read the quote in context here.

Mmm..kay, so one problem would be that officers are formally cops one day and customers then next. Which, in a completely compartmentalized world could somehow make sense. But the world not being particularly compartmentalized the law as carried out under criminalization led to prosecution of prostitution by prostitutes on the one hand, and indifference to what’s often considerable pressure on non-prostitutes, including coercion, intimidation, threats (of withholding hours and/or income) to be prostitutes.

Oh, did I say there’s no compartmentalization? My mistake: Like the sort of compartmentalization that allows the the likes of Senator Craig to say he’s not gay, he just likes sex with men, or that allows church and military to discriminate against non-heterosexual but also non-sexually-active subordinates there really does seem to be some kind of compartmentalization that distinguishes between prostitutes who have sex for money and… non-prostitutes who can be coaxed or coerced into having sex for money. Charming.

Yeah, if I lived in San Francisco I’d vote for Prop-8 too. Just for that.

Wed, 2008-10-29 09:45

Las Vegas Courtesan, answering repeated calls for her opinion on Proposition K, San Francisco’s ballot measure to decriminalize prostitution.

I understand the concern that the District Attorney has who spoke on the video about how it would make the city run rampant with street walkers and allow pimps to take over. That’s the part that I don’t understand as much.

If they are decriminalizing prostitution then how does that have to do with pimps getting away with anything they want? Isn’t that part of the point so that girls can get help when they get into tough situations with clients or their pimp?

Of course they shouldn’t decriminalize pimping laws and trafficking but that has no relation to the Proposition that is up for vote. I think this will only encourage girls to not be afraid of reporting their pimps or unethical businesses they work for.

She said it here.

Yeah, I’m curious about that too. If prostitution is legal then prostitutes can go straight a) straight to the police for protection and b) straight to a booking agency or even just an answering machine for appointment management, and c) straight to San Francisco Bay to throw away up to 100% of the money they earn.

So where’s the room for a pimp in the first place?

Heck, they can iPhone a timestamped and GPS-tagged photo of their location to a backup buddy or, for that matter, to Flickr™ before ringing the doorbell on an outcall. If they’re soliciting from a sidewalk they can iPhone a photo of a car license plate before getting in — and since they’ll no longer have to skulk in dimly-lit areas there can be plenty of light for the camera. If they’re working from home they can iPhone a photo of their customers and… sorry… since what they’re doing is perfectly legal I just don’t what grounds the customer would have for objecting!

So where’s the room for a pimp there either?

And, not to put too fine a point on it, if prostitution is legal then what, exactly, are the grounds for dirty cops shaking prostitutes down for “free” sex in exchange for looking the other way? Managing such shakedowns in equitable fashion, by the way, is allegedly one of the “benefits” of prostitutes who work with pimps. And just as an aside it appears Prop-K emerged in part to curb complaints of… um… inconsistent enforcement of existing laws.) If prostitution is legal then what leverage do corrupt police have?

And where, exactly, is there room for a pimp after that?

Oh yeah, pimps evidently serve two other purposes: conscripting people into involuntary sex-traffick and, because they and not their conscripts set prices, keeping prices lower than they would otherwise be. If sex work is legal then what possible motives would prostitutes have for letting conscripted sex workers compete with them instead of doing the right thing: report pimped, or trafficked, or (for that matter) minor prostitutes in competition with them?

Where’s the room for pimps there either?

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And I’m not really asking these questions rhetorically. I don’t know. Maybe pimps will continue to thrive because I’m overlooking some critical feature they’re able to provide inside a legal framework. Or perhaps they’ll be replaced by the kind of brothel owners, escort-booking agencies, and hoteliers the Las Vegas Courtesan and other Nevada sex-workers must perpetually circumvent. (Though the text of Proposition K appears to direct law enforcement officials to monitor strip clubs and other venues more closely.) Anyway, if I’ve missed a critical point that, in your opinion, makes the status-quo preferable this would be a great time to leave a comment.

Because otherwise if you live in San Francisco, and are able to vote, and haven’t voted yet, please consider voting in favor of Proposition K.

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I’ve mentioned, first in this 2005 post and repeatedly since, that I care about this issue because while I’m not personally enthusiastic about sex work itself the conditions criminalization impose make it one of the most dangerous… and unnecessarily dangerous jobs in the country. (In my region just a handful of serial killers managed to murder more than 200 street/subsistance prostitutes. No one even bothers to keep track of how many have been robbed, raped, roughed up, or shaken down by pimps, customers, passers by, and dirty cops.)

It seems to me that even if you’re opposed to sex work on moral, ethical, or social grounds it seems easier to perform social, non-law-enforcement-oriented interventions than under the current status quo where, as I’ve argued in this post, coercive elements have much greater latitude because they can depend on sex-workers not coming forward and, indeed, avoiding social-service and law-enforcement agencies.

See also: – Full text of Proposition K – Full text as it appears on the ballot – Yes on Proposition K – Eeek, social causes — prostitution and workplace safety – A window into contemporary prostitution – The “no-sex” class: the (oldest) profession nobody wanted

Wed, 2008-10-29 07:56

Blue Gal says

If I as a straight woman can be in a “relationship” and decide to get married or not to get married, why can’t everybody decide one way or the other, without government interference?

She said it here.

I say: Marriage isn’t for everybody but marriage is for everybody!

If you live in California, and are able to vote, and haven’t voted yet, please consider that voting “no” on Proposition 8 is voting yes for marriage for everyone.

Tue, 2008-10-28 15:25

Scott Swenson of RHRealityCheck.org says

Mavee Reston, the LA Times reporter who stumped John McCain on the issue of insurance coverage for Viagra versus birth control, writes today that it was that question that pushed the campaign to cut off press access. (Bold emphasis mine.)

In the driveway of the airport motel on the evening of the Viagra question, McCain’s aides made an argument that would shape their attitude over the next four months: If reporters were going to ask about issues that they deemed irrelevant to voters, why should the campaign give them access to the candidate at all?

Actually, the question wasn’t about if McCain used Viagra, but about underlying issues releated to the costs of birth control and insurance coverage, compared to Viagra. In tough economic times, couples are likely more interested, not less, in family planning.

Isn’t it fascinating how birth control costs are “irrelevant to voters” according to the far-right?  The same people that want to ban all abortions are targeting your contraception, the best method for preventing unintended pregnancies.

He said it here.

So! If you’re of an age, orientation, and relationship where it matters is family planning: more personally important or less during stressful economic times?

Tue, 2008-10-28 09:23

Photo “Boston red light district” by Flickr user hebedesign. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Via Echidne Pierre Thomas of ABC News says (emphasis mine)

In the last three days, the FBI and police from 29 cities rescued 47 children from 73 alleged pimps and more than 500 others who authorities say sought to exploit them. Among those children saved: a 12-year-old from Texas; a 13-year-old from Ohio; and a 14-year-old from Michigan.

...

FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole vowed today that the effort would continue. “Those that exploit children should know they will be brought to justice,” Pistole said.

Read all about here.

When I saw that “more than 500 others” I thought if it’s 73 pimps it must be 500 customers. Finally, I thought to myself, we were going to see action taken against the customer. And, given the fiery rhetoric Federal authorities used to decry sexual exploitation of children, they’ll face penalties stiffer than a few weekends at “john school.” Maybe, I thought, prosecutors will finally get serious about those who pay for sex with children by throwing the book at them for having sex with children! Including, oh, say, sexual assault of a child, statutory rape, sexual exploitation of a minor, pedophilia or ephebophilia, and all the other appropriately extremely draconian laws reserved for adults who have sex with children. Oh, and followed by, preferably, spending the rest of their lives registered as class two or class three sex offenders, reporting to local police every time they change address, having their names posted on neighborhood-watch registries, and putting big orange signs on their front doors on Halloween that say “No Candy At This Residence.”

Imagine my dismay then when, dissatisfied with the meager information at the ABC site I discovered instead that (emphasis again mine)

“Operation Cross Country II” involved efforts in 29 cities and resulted in the arrest of 73 pimps and 518 adult prostitutes, the FBI said.

Source: CNN.

Actually, to the extent that any adult prostitute knowingly fails to report sexual exploitation of a minor (inside or outside trafficking) I think it’s actually hunky-dory that they, like any other involved adult, be charged as accessories to the crimes committed against the victims. (Although admittedly the fact that adult sex work, even when coerced, is criminalized makes it not only personally but legally perilous for them to report trafficking of children or anyone else.) Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case either — instead the 500+ adult sex-workers were evidently just swept up in the course of the investigation.

So. Seriously. If people were serious about prostituted children then why the sam hill are they giving a pass to those who pay to have sex with them? And if people are serious about reducing demand for prostituted children it ought to be extraordinarily efficient to employ already well-established criminal law against the customers of the pimps who traffick them.

Thus announcing the arrest of 500+ adult prostitutes is beyond unimpressive. Either they were coerced adults in which case they too should have been rescued rather than arrested, or else they were voluntary sex workers in which case their arrests were irrelevant to the stated purpose of the law-enforcement initiative to rescue prostituted children.

I mean, seriously, a year-long, multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction “Operation Cross Country II,” presumably directed by a team that had already conducted a previous Operation Cross Country didn’t turn up one single solitary customer arrest? Yielding not one solitary prosecution for sexual assault of a child?

Priorities, people, priorities!

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For the record I think it’s dumb to prosecute affirmative, non-coerced sex between consenting adults, including sex for compensation between consenting adults. (In fact as I pointed out above, it’s counterproductive to protecting conscripted or otherwise trafficked children and adults.) But there we’re talking about consenting adults: adults, plural. Minors, by legal, social, and developmental definition aren’t adults and consequently none of the arguments supporting sex work for consenting adults have no bearing whatsoever on this discussion.

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See also – Why Reality Trumps Fantasy – “Patrons” of Child Prostitutes Need to be Registered as Sex Offenders – The Fledgling Fund: Very Young Girls – Not Pretty Babies – “Who Pays the Price? Assessment of Youth Involvement in Prostitution in Seattle” (pdf)

Mon, 2008-10-27 19:10

June Carbone, guest-blogging at Feminist Law Professors says

After dramatic successes in the nineties, teen births are rising and rising most, not for those who like the Palins have the resources to support their grandchildren, but for those families who cannot support the children they already have.

The figures had been heartening. Teen pregnancy and birth rates fell dramatically during the nineties. Between 1991 and 2005, overall teen pregnancies declined by thirty-four percent. The most promising news was the decline in teen births to the most vulnerable mothers. African-Americans experienced the steepest drops with a 42 percent decline among adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 between 1991 and 2002, and an even greater decline (an astonishing 52%) among African American girls in the 15 to 17-year-old age group.

Abortions also fell during the same period, and commentators of the right (abstinence promotion) and left (contraception) competed to claim credit. The results are now in. John Santelli, in the American Journal of Public Health, reported that 86% of the drop in teen pregnancies were the result of more effective contraception; 14% from greater abstinence.

...

This progress, however, has not been maintained. Teen births have begun to edge back up.

Read the quote in context here.

Gee, do you think the 2005 law altering federal Medicaid subsidies that doubled and tripled contraceptive prices to student and low-income clinics is helping to decrease or accelerate this trend?

It’s very nice to have confirmation that sex education works. And to have confirmation that comprehensive sex-ed covering not abstinence, yes, but (evidently far more importantly effective) use of contraception works better than abstinence-only.

It’s not so great that we’ve started falling down on the job not only in sex education and, probably more important, availability of and encouragement to use contraception, but also in matters of boundary setting, establishment of self-worth, interpersonal negotiation, and personal responsibility for all parties. I mean, remember, while women alone become pregnant it takes a woman and a man to get pregnant. Therefore every unplanned, unwanted pregnancy isn’t a single failure (as virtually all abstinence-only and too many comprehensive programs tend to emphasis) it’s a double failure.

Make that a triple failure: by failing to take the matter seriously we adults are failing our children as well.

Mon, 2008-10-27 14:09

Jessica of Jezebel brings up a point I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: the consequences of all the political, economic, and social turmoil in the last few months.

In times of trouble, we all like to turn to a guru we know and trust: Dr. Ruth. On the Forbes website, the tiniest sex doctor in the U.S. cautions that sometimes sexual recessions and fiscal recessions go hand in hand. Dr. Ruth discusses the case of a sexually frustrated wife, whose husband was not in the mood for sex because he feared he was going to lose his job. “He didn’t tell her about his fears. He constantly imagined the dreaded day when he’d be called in to see his manager, sex was the last thing he craved,” Dr. Ruth explains. “But since his wife didn’t know what was going on—and since he was being especially silent about his activities during the day—she began to suspect that he was having an affair.” Not surprisingly, Dr. Ruth prescribes a healthy dose of communication.

“Only when couples understand the source can they avoid the mistake, which is thinking any growing distance between them is a relationship problem,” Dr. Ruth counsels. In addition to open lines of communication, Dr. Ruth also prescribes naked snuggling. “Even if a couple doesn’t feel like making love, they should make an appointment, take their clothes off and climb into bed together. Most of the time this will be enough to get them started,” the good Doctor notes.

Read the quotes in context here.

It’s funny… and I think I may have a whole post about this one of these days… but it seems like one of the consequences of living under the Cold-War promis of nuclear annihilation through too much of the 20th-Century is that our cultural models for coping with global crisis tend towards every-man-for-himself survivalism. (Where too often the assumption really is every man for himself.)

Consequently it’s not too surprising that too many people’s response to the current crisis keep circling the bowl of “stock up on beans, rice, and jerky and get a gun to protect it.” And even those not quite so caught up in visions of apocalypse… who think more in terms of the long winter of Desmet, South Dakota in 1880 or of bankrupt Europe after World War II or just the U.S.‘s more-moronic-than-oxymoronic stagnant upheavals in the early 1970s and early 1980s rather than, say, the utter breakdown of Mad Max seem to be feeling more isolated than connected to broader communities.**

Nor is it surprising that couples might lie lovelessly awake. If you buy the testosterone theory, well, testosterone declines in the face of anxiety and stress. If you buy the Hierarchy of Needs theory, well, concern for shelter, warmth, food, and the wellbeing of loved ones stand higher than concern for either ya-yas or reproduction. And if you buy sociobiology/ev-psych then for most long-lived and slow-to-reach-adulthood species then we probably have genes that “dollar cost average” reproduction, and thus horniness, so that in times of unusual stress we’re less likely to start pregnancies that might not make it. Heck, if you’re just a Bible Literalist then you’re already familiar with Jesus’s dire concerns for those who are pregnant during the end of days. Or, like a lot of people who don’t know about those kinds of theories, we and our partners might just be too bummed out for social, let alone sexual intercourse.

And so it’s really good to hear Dr. Ruth putting in a plug not so much for sex per-se as for communication. Which can be an amazing conduit to the sense of unity, solidarity, shared purpose, and community that makes sex just a heck of a lot more appealing.

[** Keep in mind that unlike the Cold War we really aren’t looking at global, physical annihilation, meaning rather than modeling a response from A Boy and His Dog we could draw on the experience of the no more fictional Who’s down in Whoville who stunned the Grinch by maintaining community after losing everything down to the last can of Who-hash. Just sayin’ —fl]