In a poignant, heartwrenching essay on Natural Family Planning method birth control use in the alt-conservative Protestant counterculture Sarah Morice-Brubaker of Religion Dispatches reflects on her own experience and that of a couple, Sam and Bethany Torode, who's book Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception is a best-seller in it's small but ideologically passionate niche.

Morice-Brubaker makes the awesome case that "an ideal method for the couples who can make it work" isn't the same thing, at all, as ideal period.

I know couples who say that they’ve had a very positive experience with NFP. I don’t second-guess their reasons for saying so. There’s no reason not to take them at their word, as far as I’m concerned. But would their testimonies have made for a telling rejoinder to Oppenheimer’s column? I don’t think so.

Remember, Open Embrace does not advance the view that natural family planning might be a fun thing for married couples to try just for kicks—like a book club or dance lessons—on the off chance that you might be one of the married couples that turns out to bond over it. Open Embrace presents natural family planning as a really good thing for married couples, as such, to do. It is predicted to bring them closer. Married couples. In general. As a group.

In their early 20s, the Torodes believed they could predict this—about themselves, and about all the potential married couples who might read their book; including, presumably, couples facing mental or physical health problems, lack of support, or simple inability to reliably take body temperature at the same time every day.

So, really, the question is not: “Are there NO couples out there who ever have a positive experience avoiding artificial contraception?” Surely there are. Rather, the question is this: “Can every married couple everywhere really benefit from avoiding artificial contraception—and more to the point, who in the heck could possibly be in the position to know this?”

Source: Religion Dispatches

In other words? No.

In fact, so "no" that just a few years after writing their "classic" pean to NFP as the ultimate bonding experience the Torodes were divorced! Sam Torodes now says "I am out of the business of trying to tell people what they should do. I am out of that business for good."

Good rule for authors of parenting books to live by? Don't write a book about the success of... well, pretty much anything related to parenting or domesticity when you've only been doing it two years. And definitely don't wait only two years to start bragging about how radical, bonding, nurturing, and foolproof your controversial method of birth control method is until, you know, you've successfully managed to, say, space two pregnancies.

Say what you will about the (smug? extremist?) Duggar parents with their 20-odd children but at least they had the sense to wait till their first four children were out of high-school before starting to issue propaganda tracts about white Christian men's duty to keep their wives continuously pregnant and white Christian wive's duty to let them.

As Morice-Brubaker puts it

[A]s I read them, the authors of Open Embrace have thus presented their own “balance.” In 2002, they proffered the view that natural family planning is an inherent benefit to marriage as such, with the implication that it’s possible to honestly make such pronouncements about people’s lives whom one does not know. Now, in 2011, they’re saying that it’s more complicated than that

Yeah, that.

Despite being really, really not fond of MRAs Amanda Marcotte is actually pretty ardent about her support for men. Case in point: while she things divorced and separated men still support their children she also thinks it's evil to force indigent and imprisoned men to pay it.

There's a twist to the story, below, that I think makes the point that traditional, conservative anti-feminists are far more brutal to men than even the dead, white "radfems" of the decidedly radical 1970s. Emphasis mine.

But throwing men in jail for not paying child support is just stupid. Charging men who are in prison and literally cannot make the money to pay child support for child support is just stupid. These are policies that not only hurt men that might very well intend to pay child support but can’t, but it doesn’t actually do anything to get the child support paid.  Men who can’t make money can’t pay child support, and being behind bars pretty much means you can’t hold a job.

I realize [expletive deleted] blame feminists for this, but it’s worth pointing out these backwards, punitive laws tend to be in place in anti-feminist, conservative states.  The reason behind them isn’t “feminazis out to get paid”.  It’s actually because conservatives believe that mothers are on public assistance not because they’re poor, but because they’re not married.  They still subscribe to this ridiculous notion that Mom + Dad + Baby = No Problems Ever Again, and figure that if people are struggling financially, it’s because they’re sexual deviants.  And so their child support laws are geared not towards making sure men pay for their children so much as punishing people for not being married, and punishing people for being poor.  It’s no good for the mothers, either, because they’re often expected to go to great lengths to try to get the money from the fathers before they’re permitted to get public assistance to feed their children. This is all rooted in a highly punitive view of gender roles and responsibilities, and no one benefits from it.

Source: Pandagon

I think that's about right. It is evil to hold non-custodial parents (it's not just men) responsible for child support if they're simply and legitimately unable to pay. It's particularly evil to use child support as just another way for legislators and prosecutors to pile on punishment than either law, justice, or (more to the point) penal theory would otherwise allow. And finally, as Amanda makes clear, it's also evil for social service agencies to refuse to provide assistance for children and their custodial parents (usually but not always women) when the primary-earning parent (usually but not always men) are also indigent. Or in jail.

But do check remember that not only do such laws tend to be more draconian in jurisdictions where feminism has less influence, many or most of those laws predate feminism by decades!

So once again, who really hates men? And if you were genuinely interested in men's rights, against whom would you rationally expend most of your efforts to resist their influence? In fact, who might you most logically want to form alliances to combat such oppression?

Oh, and last point?  At least in progressive jurisdictions legislators and courts, legislators, and society in general are all at least sympathetic to two crucial-to-men's-rights issues.

1) That divorce law and child support aren't strictly gendered, such that it's not enshrined that mothers stay home with children and fathers are responsible for all financial support, with the result that if a mother abandons her children or if a mother has more financial resources than the father then child support can go the other way, and

2) That opportunities exist for women such that they are economically, socially, politically, and legally capable of earning a living wage and supporting themselves and their children... or even their children and their ex-husbands if the husbands instead provided most of the primary care.

Items #1 and 2 aren't fully distributed yet, even in progressive, feminist-friendly jurisdictions, but they're a lot further along than in conservative, feminist-antagonistic ones.  Thing is, though, that traditional anti-feminists don't want women to have equal rights (these days they don't seem to want women to have rights at all!)  Such jurisdictions actively don't want men providing anything but financial support for their children (ok, maybe laudably beating them with their belts "when your father gets home.")  But sure as shittin' you're not going to find many feminists who want that for themselves or men.

Screenshot of the first website Google turned up for the keyword “Branson, MO.” No comment on the town slogan or it’s interest in attracting “groups.”

So effete conservative snob Charles Murray (he of the Reagan-era anti-welfare tome Losing Ground) talked the equally snobby conservatives at the Washington Post into letting him snub a few liberal elites on the op-ed page last week. It begins…

The tea party appears to be of one mind on at least one thing: America has been taken over by a New Elite.

“On one side, we have the elites,” Fox News host Glenn Beck explained last month, “and the other side, we have the regular people.” The elites are “no longer in touch with what the country is really thinking,” Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle complained this summer. And when Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell recently began a campaign ad by saying, “I didn’t go to Yale,” she could be confident that her supporters would approve.

All this has made the New Elite distinctly touchy (see Maureen Dowd’s “Making Ignorance Chic”), dismissive (see Jacob Weisberg’s “Elitist Nonsense”) and defensive (see Anne Applebaum’s “The Rise of the ‘Ordinary’ Elite”).

“Elite?” they seem to be saying. “Who? Us?”

Source: Charles Murray in The Washington Post

He continues with cliché “you say potato, I say potato“ comparisons until reaching this exciting conclusion.

They take interesting vacations and can tell you all about a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada or an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor, but they wouldn’t be caught dead in an RV or on a cruise ship (unless it was a small one going to the Galapagos). They have never heard of Branson, Mo.

I probably wouldn’t have picked Branson as emblematic of lowbrow Americana but Murray does. Therefore I’m going to use Branson as the example in the rest of this post.

Jeana Jorgensen of My Sex Professor went to a lecture by relationship sociologist Curtis R. Bergstrand at the Kinsey Institute. She brought back the following demographic data on swingers in America.

Bergstrand administered an online survey in 1999, with just over 1,000 participants, including questions from the General Social Survey such that many of the swingers’ answers could be compared to those of the general population.

During the course of the lecture, Bergstrand only had time to give us a partial glimpse of his data, but we learned that the swingers in his study are:

• Around 40 years old on average (respondents ranged from 22-82 years old)
• A wide range of occupations (some doctors and lawyers, but the bulk are miscellaneous blue collar workers)
• Semi-educated
• 90% white
• Primarily Democrat (but on a liberal-conservative spectrum, tended toward the center)
• Psychologically normal (lacking pathological traits, as has sometimes been assumed of people who veer outside monogamous normalcy)
• Happier and more excited in their marriages than non-swingers

• At least as devoted to their families are non-swingers

Bergstrand concluded that swinging seems to enhance strong marriages, but has negative effects on weak ones (this trend is anecdotally corroborated by people in the swinging and polyamory communities).

Source: Jeana Jorgensen of My Sex Professor

That sounds about right. It also happens to sound about like the non-elites Murray valorizes in his op-ed.

There’s a pervasive belief (among both left and right) that sexual “liberation” is and always has been limited to the elite, the effete, the overeducated, or either coast. Instead it’s as likely to occur in Charles Murray’s heart-of-America fantasy Branson, MO (which I’d imagine he’s never visited) as Berkeley, Boston, or Greenwich Village.

Aside: The following data points are totally non-scientific and they use non-orthogonal criteria* but

• Data point #1: a small amount of tweaking still turned up at least 60 male and female OKCupid users within 25 miles of Branson who match the looking for “casual sex” or it’s loose affiliate “activity partners” who’ve been online at least once in the last year.
• Data Point #2: according to numerous sources the population of Branson is… 6,000 people. Which isn’t the same as all the people within 25 miles. But I’m just sayin’

Anyway, I think the real takeaway from both Bergstrand’s presentation and Jorgensen’s post is the part where swinging per-se isn’t an indicator of either strong or weak relationships.

* But then I don’t recall sloppy methodology ever particularly bothered Murray in his own work.

Anna N of Jezebel, in a post on the general state of “men’s reproductive rights” activism, raises a persistent point that… I wonder… well, let’s go with the quote first

But sometimes it’s men who shut women out. In her thorough article for The Nation on reproductive coercion (which we’ve also discussed), Lynn Harris writes of “the striking frequency with which it is in fact young men who try to force their partners to get pregnant. Their goal: not to settle down as family men but rather to exert what is perhaps the most intimate, and lasting, form of control.” She cites one study finding that 15% of sexually active young women who visited reproductive health clinics had suffered birth control sabotage by a partner, and another in which 26% of a sample of teens in abusive, sexually active relationships said their partners were “actively trying to get them pregnant.”

She said it here.

So…

I’m wondering…

Y’know how all those “pro-life” types will do just about anything to stop women from getting an abortion… or even avoiding pregnancy in the first place… except, y’know, make it actually safe, easy, inexpensive, and socially acceptable for women to, y’know, actually stay preganant, have, and raise their unplanned, unwanted pregnancies?

And how instead they try and make it, and keep it, as close to social, economic, moral, even corporal punishment as possible? How they present it as the ultimate in dependency? In sacrifice? In pain, and exhaustion, and tedium, and frustration, and helplessnes? In stigma? In shame?

So…

I’m wondering…

How much do you think all that plays into this notion of coerced pregnancy as intimate control (a.k.a. as a form of partner abuse?)

I mean…

Not to put too fine a point on it but it’s well within society’s capacity to make unplanned, unwanted children (if not pregnancy itself) not just not just not punishment, and not just easy, but downright enjoyable. In the grand scheme of things it involves beginning social investment in children’s lives just a few years earlier than we do now — call it 3-6 months before birth instead of 3-4 years after.

And it’s not like the returns on that social investment wouldn’t be appropriate — I mean, even after 18 years of exacting all those “wages of sin” from the mother on behalf of traditionalist/conservatives, those same children will spend somewhere between four and seven decades as real adults — equal with all other adults for responsibility for the world. To invest in children as future fellow citizens instead of present punishments for parents would be to reap fantastic benefits in the future.

And…

Finally…

Not to put too fine a point on it but just how enthused might callow youths be to sabotage their partners pills or to pinhole their condoms if the outcome was not lasting “who’ll love you now, bebbeh?” control but a little more respectability, more rather than less independence, and a whole lot more support?

I’m not saying let’s all go out and encourage teen pregnancy. I am, however, saying that to the extent society would like to avoid teen pregnancy and, especially to also avoid pregnancy terminations, the incentives are currently… perverse.