Source: XKCD. Click for larger image.

So here’s an intriguing lead paragraph from Erik Eckholm of The New York Times (emphasis mine)

The United States crossed an important marital threshold in 2009, with the number of young adults who have never married surpassing, for the first time in more than a century, the number who were married.

He said it here.

So… since I happen to know the Census Bureau’s been tracking married vs. single young people since at least 1860 I’m curious what circumstances were like when previous records were set more than a century ago.

Any American History or Gender Studies whizzes who read this should feel free to chime in.

There’s a possibility that Eckholm’s “more than a century” remark was more of a rhetorical flourish than a comparable fact. The Population Reference Bureau report he cites merely says

Among the total population ages 18 and older, the proportion married dropped from 57 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2009. This is the lowest percentage recorded since information on marital status was first collected by the U.S. Census Bureau more than 100 years ago.

Oh well. While was unable to quickly search marriage rates from the 19th Century I did find a chart for the 20th Century on the website Coffee Grounds that shows marriage rates weren’t much higher at the bottom of the Great Depression.

(This is going even deeper in apples-and-oranges territory but the same chart shows that marriage rates dropped fairly precipitously in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but that could be explained by the incredible… and also historically anomalous… spike in marriages, and especially younger marriages, between roughly 1945 and 1950. With everyone already married it might have taken years to replenish the supply of eligible marriage partners.)

One possibility for the recent decline, which seems to have only been accelerated by the recent economic crisis, might paradoxically be the appropriation of marriage as a political symbol of intolerance and conservatism.

Or it could have something to do with commercialization of weddings and the corresponding increase in cost to do it “right.” Back in 2007 the average price was trending rapidly towards $30,000! (Hint: That would be roughly equivalent to the average college student-load debt.)

Note: there’s no evidence that all long-term heterosexual domestic partnerships is in decline, just the percentage where the couples are married. Considering that roughly half of all marriages end before the average loan for a $30,000 wedding would be paid off that’s probably not actually a bad thing.

After that big digression, though, I’m still curious about my original question: were marriage rates more than a century ago ever lower than they are today?

James O'Keefe, source: PoliticsDaily
Zachary Quinto as Sylar, Source: TV Guide

 

Speaking of GOP activist James O’Keefe’s stupid self-hating stunts, according to his (current) Wikipedia page (emphasis mine)

O’Keefe has described himself as an “investigative journalist without formal training” who follows Saul Alinsky’s rule of making “the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” He has been called a “guerrilla documentarian” and a “daredevil videographer”, and usually confronts subjects undercover and caricatures their social values by carrying them to outlandish extremes.

Read the quote in context here.

So. Looking at his alleged attempt to make a sex tape of himself with CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau in this light you sort of have to ask which “book of rules” O’Keefe thought he was using, and exactly who’s set of “social values” he imagined he was carrying to outlandish extremes?

Without needing to know anything about the reporter herself (who obviously had no, zero, none role in the planning or attempted execution of the scheme) we can say that like roughly 90-94% of adult women she leans comfortably heterosexual.

In which case there’s probably no rule in her book saying

#1 It’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual desire.

or that

#2: It’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.

Yet without those Two Rules of Desire it’s hard to see how O’Keefe could achieve his intention of mortally embarrassing Boudrea by seducing her.

Abbie Boudreau
Photo from CNNFurthermore, do you suppose it would be Boudreau’s book of rules that says if a conservative activist (or anyone else) decides a woman is a “bubble-headed-bleach-blonde” then he has an automatic go-ahead to contrive to seduce her by means of falsehoods and insincerity?

And finally, do you think there’s a rule in her book that says that should the conservative activist successfully have consensual sex with an independent, autonomous adult woman that it would reveal anything more about her than a possible preference for weak-chinned men with a vague resemblance to Zachary Quinto’s “Sylar” character?

Don’t think so?

No. I didn’t think so either.

That book of rules would appear to be 100% O’Keefe’s. Which, again, explains much about O’Keefe.

Via Lindsay Beyerstein’s of Big Think and other sources, it’s being reported that Republican activist James O’Keefe conspired to film himself having sex with CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau in order to somehow embarrass her and her employers.

It says a great deal about O’Keefe that he and his colleagues would cook up a stunt like this.

It says considerably more that they agree he’s such unutterable scum that having sex with him ought to be a career-ending humiliation.

Sheesh! And these are the kind of people who go around saying feminists hate men!

Here’s that story by the way.

Dirty trickster James O’Keefe’s foray into gonzo porn has ended disastrously for him. O’Keefe schemed to seduce CNN investigative reporter Abbie Boudreau in front of hidden cameras. The right wing media activist, who recently pleaded guilty to charges of attempted phone tampering, tried to lure CNN’s ace investigative reporter to a small boat, excuse me, a “floating pleasure palace,” stocked with sex toys, strawberries, champagne, hidden cameras, and Mr. James O’Keefe.

...

The memo argues that Boudreau deserves what the conspirators hope she’s about to get: “The joke is that the tables have been turned on CNN. Using hot blonds to seduce interviewees to get screwed on television, you are faux seducing her in order to screw her on television.”

O’Keefe feared that Boudreau might get the better of him as a journalist, so he plotted to destroy her with sex. Once again, male privilege and misogyny eclipse common sense.

She said it here.

I think Beyerstein’s right that the episode exposes the roots of misogyny and privilege in the daft but deep conviction that men are fundamentally unlovable and unloved. That combined with the equally deep, and equally flawed conviction that only broken or damaged women desire sex (or conversely that desiring sex damages or breaks women) breeds the desperate and self-fulfilling resentment that fueled O’Keefe’s stunt.

And just to be really, really clear here, while the conspiracy says volumes about O’Keefe and his fellow Republican’s entirely juvenile inability to shed the both of bogus Two Rules of Desire it reveals no more about their intended victim that if O’Keefe had instead planed to meet her wearing a belt filled with explosives.

Owning emergency contraception doesn’t imply eagerness to engage in unprotected sex any more than owning a fire extinguisher implies eagerness to have a grease fire in your kitchen. And as luck might have had it, an editorial in a respected medical journal made that exact point in 2002.

Via Discover Magazine’s NCBI ROFL blog, here’s a link to a 2002 opinion piece available on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) PubMed.gov website. It was originally published in American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Volume 187, Issue 6 , Pages 1536-1538, December 2002.

“Fires and unintended pregnancies are important causes of morbidity, mortality, and financial loss in the United States. Home fire extinguishers and emergency contraception are both effective preventive interventions. The disparity between access to fire extinguishers and emergency contraception is irrational and indirectly hurts women’s health. Although fire extinguishers require the user to make a diagnosis, choose the appropriate treatment, and assume some risk of serious injury and death, these canisters of pressurized chemicals are widely available without restriction. In contrast, women face several unnecessary obstacles to overcome before using emergency contraception, which is both simpler and safer to use. Clearly, a double standard prevails in prevention strategies for women.”

Read the quote in context here.

Sounds like a great metaphor. Especially so considering it came up pretty early in the campaign for over-the-counter emergency contraception.

But if I may grind a personal axe for a moment, can I ask a quick question? How much would you be willing to pay to read the rest of that American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology opinion piece? $30.00? I didn’t think so either. Oh well, at least in this case and unlike the vast majority of pay-out-the-nose-to-read-it journal articles you can’t say the research for the opinion piece was paid for with public funds.

But it does illustrate the principle that a lot of very fine writing languishes behind some excessively high paywalls, largely unpaid for, and therefore largely unread, and therefore largely ineffective when it most likely would have made the biggest difference.

Photo by Flickr user Katie Stein. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So last weekend I wound up not only out of the house in the late evening but on my way to a restaurant in a trendy part of downtown. While cruising for parking we saw a number of majorly decked-out pedestrians heading towards one of the popular nightclubs. Maybe it’s because it’s been unseasonably warm for the usually chilly Pacific Northwest, or maybe it’s just because I don’t get out enough, but I noticed many of the women were wearing very short skirts and extremely high high-heeled shoes.

Call me a fuddy-duddy, or an incompletely reconstructed ex-hippie, or maybe just a prudish libertine but…

I know the idea behind high heels is they’re supposed to be sexy. But my very strong impression is that those things are pretty much impossible to walk around in without a kind of weird bent-knee gait that’s… actually a little more alarming than sexy to watch. Update: I ought to add that by “alarming” I don’t necessarily mean “oh those poor dears might fall over at any moment. “ Because obviously with just a little practice let alone longtime use even high heels are perfectly navigable. Nor am I referring to various reports of bunions, shortened tendons, and other potential medical complications. The people I usually see wearing high heels are capable, intelligent, coordinated adults who are perfectly aware of what they’re doing and why. I just mean I’m alarmed to be so evidently out of touch that walking on bent legs with your arms waiving around for balance just seems gawky and uncoordinated to me. Instead of cool, svelte, and drop-dead alluring.

And yeah, I know and appreciate the argument* that on many, many levels the way fashion is supposed to work is for the benefit of the wearer, and that the opinions of onlookers are supposed to be somewhere between irrelevant and intrusive. But…

I don’t know. I’m more of a fan of things that make knees weak and feet point and toes curl naturally. None of which, outside of certain branches of BDSM, involve trying to stay upright while crossing broken pavement.

That’s totally my personal, maybe even idiosyncratic opinion. There’s plenty of room in comments for opposing views. I’ll happily stand corrected.

* See Phoebe Maltz of What Would Phoebe Do for a far more nuanced take on who fashion is and isn’t for.

After dismissing the to main arguments for prosecuting abortion providers but not the women who hire them as sexist claptrap Scott Lemieux of the Center for American Progress’s TAPPED wades into the third in a way that resonates with my own memories of the days before abortion became legal (emphasis mine)

So this leaves us with the pragmatic justifications — essentially, “we would like to punish women, but we can’t because it’s impolitic.” Aside from undermining the case for anti-abortion laws, the problem with this pragmatism is that we need to go further. How effective are laws banning abortion in conditions where most people think women shouldn’t be subject to any punishment for obtaining an abortion? The answer is, “not very.” As Sunday’s episode of Mad Men usefully reminded us, plenty of safe, elective abortions were preformed in hospitals even when it was illegal for doctors to perform them. The effect of criminalizing abortion is not to stop women from obtaining abortions so much as to force those without the right social connections into the black market. So bans on abortion aren’t very good ways of lowering abortion rates, although they do make abortion much less safe for less affluent women. How this can be a good thing is, to put it mildly, unclear.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. I’m old enough to have been a newsboy going room to room in a local hospital back in the days before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. And, yeah, it’s funny how often “good girls” from nicer neighborhoods could be found in the ob/gyn wing recovering from their “appendectomies.”

The appendectomy rate for girls of less fortunate means was considerably closer to their demographic averages. As were their rates of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies.

This is why, of course, the affluent can remain sanguine about restrictions on abortion in their states and regions: such restrictions have never applied to them. They may choose not to take advantage of the… quiet options available to them. And some may not. But they all know it will always be there for them.

Photo by Flickr user Afroswede. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I’m an occasional subject-matter expert for Em & Lo’s popular Wise Guys feature. This week the question was “Why do some men — single, married, in relationships, straight, gay, bisexual, etc. — deny masturbating?”

Here’s how I answered

Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): Until maybe very recently, nearly all depictions of male masturbation have made it seem like the most disgustingly pervy, unhealthy, immature, and (worst of all) desperate thing a man can do. For instance, think about the archetypical dirty old man in a trench coat, or the loser characters in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Something About Mary.

When men in relationships do it, they or their partners often see it as “cheating.” Theologically, masturbation has been held to be a worse sin (a mortal sin with automatic damnation) than rape (a venal sin that can be repented!).  Medically, masturbation was until very recently believed, no kidding, to lead to insanity and early death. Legally, it’s historically been punished the same way sodomy was — with floggings, branding, and even hanging! Politically, just a few years ago the U.S. Surgeon General was fired for suggesting it was okay for adolescents to learn about in sex ed. Even today, the fact that every heterosexual porn scene ends with the male actors rubbing out a “money shot” doesn’t make us feel more like admitting it. And that’s just the short answer!

In retrospect, all that hoopla to discourage male masturbation seems foolish, as does the similar discouragement women got. Even though the stigma’s evaporating pretty quickly, it’s understandable that a lot of men — and a lot of women — are still reluctant to admit to it.

Read the quote in context here.

We all sent in our answers to this round of questions well before this year’s Delaware Senate primary catapulted ‘winger candidate Christine O’Donnell’s stance against masturbation became a national punchline. But her pronouncements… and even their nervous reception… strongly support my answer. O’Donnell’s opinions against it would have been absolute conventional wisdom as recently as the 1960s.

Image from Ebbra.com cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy.

Jennifer Welsh of Discover Magazine’s Discoblog says

The Emergency Bra, which won both the Ig Nobel prize in public health and a spot on TIME’s list of the Worst Inventions of 2009 is now available through the website, www.ebbra.com for $29.99.

She said it here.

According to Welsh, Elena Bodnar got the idea in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster in her native Ukraine where, in the first hours after the reactor meltdown when air for miles around was full of Iodine-131 and other radioactive particles, more gas masks and particle filters would have prevented more radiation sickness.

As for the bra itself, aside from slightly more filter-friendly material it sounds like the only real differences between Bodnar’s bra and a regular bra are extra clasps to make it easier to take apart and to turn the straps into headbands. Which suggests that in a pinch any old slightly padded bra might be useable in an emergency.

Would it be a much, much better idea just to keep a couple of regular old disposable particle masks around for emergences? Sure. And if you’re so concerned about possible particle-inhalation emergencies that you’d buy a special safety bra it would still be better to keep a regular filter on you… but not literally on you.

But I can see how if you were a survivor of Chernobyl and its aftermath I can see how inventing an emergency bra might… ok it still sounds silly. But not feel quite as silly.

I like Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions comics quite a bit. He’s a relocated local, the central premise relates to my old field of instructional design. And how advice-column premises correspond to what actually prompted the question. Plus this one’s about sex, heteronormativity or possibly naivete, and/or not necessarily responding to turn-ons or fantasies that aren’t your turn-ons or fantasies.

That plus some wonderfully juvenile-humor-shaped puns.

Via John Hawks, the anonymous Zinj of A Primate of Modern Aspect, a grad student specializing human and primate evolution, ponders

[F]or some reason, the only time primate sexuality gets any attention is when we turn it into a debate about how humans should be having sex.

We never say, “Hey, those muriquis are too promiscuous. Don’t they know that all of their close evolutionary cousins are polygynous? If they just did what came naturally to them, they’d have a lot less psychological stress.” Or, “Those gibbons are so sexually repressed. If they just gave in to their natural predilection for promiscuity, I bet those nasty gibbons would have fewer territorial disputes and gibbon society would be much more peaceful.”

Read the quote in context here.

Back in the 1960s the social theorist Hannah Arendt coined the term “ratomorphization,” an awkward but useful term describing the opposite of anthropomorphization, to describe the unfortunate habit of ascribing to humans the behavior scientists were then observing in their classic rats-in-a-maze experiments.

And no doubt about it humans are fascinated by animal behavior. Fascinated enough to mimic their behavior whenever we see it. Enough to compare ourselves to bulls, bears, lone wolves, lame ducks, lion hearts, lambs, chickenhawks, and of course chicks. And have been fascinated from time out of mind.

Which makes me wonder why evolutionary psychologists never seem to look into the evolution of that behavior?

I mean,

If I was an ev-psych,

And all I wanted to do all day fucking long,

Was explain how the behavior of pigmy shrews or ringworm colonies proved why even PUA tactics couldn’t get me laid,

The first thing I’d want to do is filter out a lot of the human behavioral “chatter” that interferes with collecting data for all the conclusions I’d like to draw,

And since humans from all over the planet mimic animal behavior,

And since mimicking animal behavior confounds our data collection,

You’d think all ev-psychs would get together,

And maybe find a “gene” that explained that!

Just sayin’