Via Em & Lo, Emily Nussbaum, writing in New York Magazine says

Earlier this month, the journal PLoS Medicine analyzed data from a study of over 50,000 pregnant women and came to a simple but stunning conclusion: Older fathers have dumber kids. The more geriatric the dad, the dimmer the progeny, on measures including “thinking and reasoning, concentration, memory, understanding, speaking, and reading.” (Luckily, geezer offspring had no problems with motor skills, making them ideal for wheeling around their elderly dads.)

It was another unsettling addition to the growing pile of evidence that men have their own biological clocks, with older fathers also producing higher rates of schizophrenia and autism. But what really caught my eye was the secondary finding, which was that older mothers were associated with smarter children. I quickly did the calculations and was pleased with my findings. The most intelligent children, I deduced, must be the outcome of 45-year-old career women inseminated by their 21-year-old personal trainers.

Read the quote in context here.

Oddly usual amen chorus of ev-psych/sociobiology apologists are silent on this confirmation of the exact opposite of traditional gender ideology and sexual stereotype.

Mind you the actual authors of the study (who I’ve heard interviewed) are clear that the decline in intelligence with paternal age is very real, it’s also very, very slight — on the order of one IQ point drop for every ten years or so after the father turns 35.

Not that that’s ever stopped pop-evobios before…

Hmm, must be some other reason. Can’t imagine what that might be.

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Seriously, a one or two point IQ drop isn’t a terribly serious liability for offspring of older parents. Certainly not compared to the many other, potentially much more serious liabilities.

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And speaking of other liabilities, the most recent but still substantially scientifically unverified being a sixfold correlation between older fathers and children with autism. And considering how, um, cautious people have been about extremely difficult to confirm links between autism and vaccination a strong, 6x correlation with paternal age ought to be a category-five, slam-dunk, outta-tha-ballpark red flag.

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It might not be the most important reason for older gentlemen to become “extinguished members” of the vasectomy party. But it’s not a bad one. (By contrast an excellent reason being that sex is just more enjoyable when the possibility of unplanned, unwanted pregnancy is remote.)

[Note: “Continue reading…” image is… almost modest but still better viewed in private. —fl]

In a meditation on a recent outbreak of scares among his students, and on the circumstances leading to pregnancy scares in his own past, Hugo Schwyzer asks and then I think nicely answers a really important question.

I’ve been thinking more about why so many young people I know choose not to use contraception. The gal who came to see me yesterday had been on the Nuvaring, but her insurance coverage lapsed, and she couldn’t get the scrip refilled. She and her beau had condoms available, but chose not to use them. “I don’t know why we’re so stupid”, she said to me yesterday. The young man I work with who came to me last week, worried his girlfriend might be pregnant, also reported that “condoms were available” at the key moment, but “we went ahead without them anyway.” I wasn’t shocked. When I got my high school girlfriend pregnant, we had condoms nearby as well. I didn’t like wearing them, and my girlfriend said she hated the way they felt. So we used them “some of the time”. And predictably, a pregnancy resulted.

The $64,000 question is: “Why?” Why do bright, educated young people who are very clear about how exactly babies are made choose to have unprotected heterosexual intercourse so very often? Why, on many occasions, do they find such flimsy excuses for not using contraception, even when contraceptive devices are easily available? In some cases, of course, lack of affordability is an issue — condoms aren’t as cheap as some folks think, and other forms of prescription contraception have grown much more expensive in recent years. In other cases, one partner (almost always the male) will nag the other about how “uncomfortable” condoms are. But in plenty of cases, these young people have access to reliable methods of birth control, and choose not to use them. Ignorance is not an all-encompassing explanation, and neither is expense. Something else is at play.

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The sex education we need is about more than “protection.” It’s about more than providing access to abortion as a last resort, thought that remains an important component of justice-centered sex ed. Proper education will center on what sex means and what it doesn’t. And we can start by gently, firmly, and lovingly tearing down the myth that unprotected heterosexual intercourse represents the most intimate and magical expression of trust and love. Until we deconstruct that lie, we only tempt the unprepared to jump too quickly the lives they have to come.

He said it here.

That’s an amazingly thoughtful suggestion for inclusion in comprehensive sex education.

At least in most progressive circles we’re already good at pointing out that millions of people manage to have perfectly wonderful sex lives without penis-in-vagina intercourse to ejaculation — the central… sometimes the only (“I did not have sex with that woman”) significant heteronormative sex act.

And thanks to concerns about sexually-transmitted diseases (if nothing else) we’re already pretty darn good at stressing the importance of condoms.

But yeah, we haven’t been so good about busting the idea that unprotected PIV intercourse without a condom is as intimate, or maybe as ultimate, as sex gets.

Speaking for myself I was never that crazy about intercourse while fertile. I mean, sure, after my vasectomy reversal it was nice having the intention of being reproductive. But I got my vasectomy in the first place, at age 21, because the prospect of reproduction (in the pre-herpes, pre-HIV days when all known STDs were treatable with a single shot of antibiotics) stressed me to the point that I just wasn’t up to it. (Sometimes literally.) And I already had an appointment for a second vasectomy before our last planned, wanted child was born. (I think I had it only ten days after.)

Call me a prudish libertine, or a libertine prude, but carrying either transgression nor romance past a certain point approaches the objectification of a third person. And if that construction makes one squeamish then… well… so much the better! However the individuals ultimately deal with such a resulting pregnancy it’s a very big deal that, no matter how you slice it, is best avoided.

The key, maybe, is instilling an understanding that a “planned” (by omission) but unwanted pregnancy isn’t an ultimate thrill.

Update: Prompted by a comment from Five of Nine I need to clarify that while I zeroed in on Schwyzer’s point about the need to address attitudes towards unprotected intercourse in both sex education and popular culture, going beyond education initiatives it’s also really, really important to continue pressing for policies that make contraceptives for both genders that are safe, effective, easy to use, available, and affordable!