Rational BAC

My "Wedding" such as it was and my honeymoon WAS very cool. Thank you for your sentiments on that. I can remember almost every detail of it just like it happened yesterday. Wish I could remember what I had for breakfast this morning just as well. -----------Time does take its toll on memory.

I really do know that times have changed.

And am just a little bit younger today than all those "old pharts" my newly wed wife and I had to walk by so many years ago (at least I am not in a wheelchair). But I think that if the same thing happened today and I was in an old folks rest home and saw the same type of couple as my new wife and myself 40 years ago---------

--------I would have the biggest smile on my face as anyone.


PS--------and I am sure that there are horror stories about virginal honeymoons. But I have a great faith that percentage wise they are relatively minor. There are so many ways that nature ensures that sexually compatible couples DO get together. ----------I do not see it as a major problem--especially with the easy divorce available today. Divorce of course is the final solution for sexually incompatible couples. And that (sexual incompatibility) should be obvious in a very short period of time. ---------------long before children come and divorce can get messy and very costly.

scigirl

Heh I'm picturing having a honeymoon in an old folks home - scary! (that's probably what will happen to me, since I'm thinking about becoming a geriatrician, and I'll probably be on call my wedding night!)

I found these quotes interesting:
Then later,
Since nature ensures sexual compatibility, why is it that sexually incompatible couples exist? Do you think it's biological, or something else?

scigirl

Rational BAC

Fascinating discussion Scigirl--------but I really need to get off-line

Lightning fried my roadrunner connection almost a week ago and I am now on very expensive dial up aol with a 3 hour limit which I am WAY over.

Got to put something called a new NIC card in my 'puter to get back on unlimited cable access through Roadrunner.

Later----------- and take care.

luvluv

Loren Petchel:

How do you know this? How do you know there is a correlation between virginity and attitudes about divorce?

I suppose they do but I would imagine the intensity of ending a sexual relationship would have a greater impact than the intensity of ending a non-sexual relationship.

Non-virgins will have experience ending deep, sexual relationships. A person who has never had another partner could consider that a bigger hurdle to jump than someone who is used to leaving one sexual partner for another. That's a possible causative link having nothing to do with attitudes towards divorce per se.

There are unhappy marriages all over. Far more of them probably stem from financial issues than from sexual ones, so why are you sticking with just the sexual issue? People are unhappy in their marriages for all kinds of reasons.

James Krieger:

I'd like to see that study. Do you have a link?

From what I understand the data showing the correlation between chhabitation and divorce did not take into consideration previous instances of cohabitation.

In other words, they simply tracked the divorce rates of the previously existing couples. They studied how often people who lived together, and then got married TO EACH OTHER (not somebody else down the line), got divorced.

Firstly, understand that by the sexual revolution I do not simply mean the increased incidence of sex. I mean the following: the legalization of no-fault divorce, the removal of the social stygma from cohabition and single parenthood, the increased presence of sexual images in our media, and the rise in the average number of sexual partners per person.

The pathologies would be sexually transmitted diseases, poverty, fatherlessness and rampant divorce.

The mechanism behind the increased incidence of illegitimacy and sexually transmitted diseases should be obvious. Some STD's, like syphillis, have actually decreased in recent years because of advanced treatments. But non-treatable STD's generally speaking have risen since the sexual revolution. More people having more sex with more partners will cause a rise in STD's relative to a more or less fully monogamous society.

The single largest cause of poverty in this nation is single parent child-rearing. No group is more closely correlated with poverty in this country than unwed mothers. The lack of a second income, the necessity to pay for childcare or daycare, and the general expenses of caring for a young child are often enough to drive many women into poverty. Most of these women would have been fine on their own, or with a husband providing a second income.

Fatherlessness is a big issue. If you want to really get an in depth look at this, you should read Fukiyama's book. But this has been covered in many other books as well, including the work of folks like William Julius Wilson and David Blackenhorne, who provides the following statistics in his book Fatherless America:

· 80% of all adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from fatherless homes.

· 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes.

· 85% of all youths in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.

· 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes.

· 72% of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers.

· 71% of all pregnant teenagers lack a father.

· 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.

I cut and pasted this from a review of the book, but all of this information is well documented within. I don't agree with a lot of what the author said in the book (he's a conservative type and I'm more the liberal type... see there's two sides to every Schwartz...) but his statistics are reliable.

In Fukiyama's book he does a very thorough job of relating crime statistics to fatherlessness, particularly violent crime. There is a strong correlation there. And where there is massive correlation, it is just dishonest not to at least SUSPECT a causitive link.

The rise in incidence of fatherlessness stems from both the increased incidence of divorce and the increased incidence of illegtimacy, both products of the sexual revolution. Divorced kids whose fathers stay in their lives fair better statisitcally than fatherless kids (who never had any relationship with their father) but they still do much worse than children of intact homes. For some information on that, I'd reccomend The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce by Judith Wallerstein. I haven't finished that one myself, and while it's a little anectdotal it is pretty poweful. Children of divorce are statistically slightly more likely to engage in crime, but the likelyhood that they go psychological problems sky rockets relative to kids from intact families.

I've got the books, Mr. Krieger. And I can go through them and present a pretty compelling, well-documented, evidenced case. But as that will require a considerable investment of time on my part, I just want to ask you: will evidence persuade you? After I have dropped a huge pile of statistics at your feet showing the pathologies resulting from the sexual revolution, are you just going to handwave me and say statistics don't prove anything? That they just show correlation not causal links (of course they don't show causal links, but the correlations are so strong on things like fatherlessness that you'd just have to be willfully obtuse to miss them)?

I really would not like to spend a good hour and a half of my time gathering, synthesizing, and footnoting a bunch of statistics if you are going to ignore them.

If I provide some statistics that make a strong argument for a CAUSAL link between the sexual revolution and certain pathologies, and show you how societies with more intact families fair better in these areas, are you going to concede the argument or are you going to reach for another straw to preserve your argument?

That's cute, but probably not very realistic. All of our actions have consequences, and a considerable amount of our tax dollars goes towards fixing the bad decisions that individual make (in their sex lives and in every other area of their lives).

The fact is that the increased incidence of illegitmacy is one of the most profound effects of the sexual revolution. And it being that illegitimacy and fatherlessness are so strongly correlated with things like crime and poverty, the rest of society ends up having to pay for the bad sexual decisions of individuals. This could be in the form of expanded welfare rolls, and the increase of crime (which has been strongly statistically correlated with fatherlessness, see Fukiyama's book for that point. Further, inasmuch as children from broken homes statistically speaking underperform versus children of intact homes, the society loses from the decreased performance of many of it's members, who because of fatherlessness may never reach their full capability.

I could go on, but keep in mind the biggest social cost is crime, which is so strongly correlated with fatherlessness that the causal link is not even seriously questioned anymore among sociologists.

And understand, I am not saying we should invite the federal government into our bedrooms. I'm not saying the government should play any active role at all in regulating sexual norms. I'm simply saying that the sexual norms had a very common sense function. It was not to "ruin everybody's fun", it was to preserve society from signifigant, possibly even fatal, social disruption.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Life involves trade-offs. IF the increase in sexual freedom is worth the drawbacks, then have at it. But understand there will be drawbacks, and they won't be pretty. Furthermore, most of the people who experience the drawbacks will experience them involuntarily at the hands of other people. A fatherless child has no hand in his fatherlessness. If this child grows up to be involved in crime, his victim will have had no hand in this child growing up in a fashion which leads him to crime.

That's certainly an argument, but then again so is my take on this previously. It could be that people who have had and left multiple sex partners would not be as apprehensive about leaving a sexual relationship in search of another one. Whereas someone who has only had one sexual partner, and has only known intimacy with one person, might be more apprehensive about having to find another mate. It could represent a bigger hurdle to jump for the person who has only ever had one sexual partner.

I don't think it's an either or scenario. I think you're partially right, the attitudes of the virgins probably has something to do with it, but I think it would be wrong for you to conclude therefore that the actual sex had NOTHING to do with it. As has been pointed out previously on this thread, it is possible that simply having had much better sex with other people before you were married could lead to problems which the virgin couples, for lack of comparative data, would never encounter.

scigirl

luvluv,

Have you read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright? He analyzes human behavior, especially sexual behavior, in the context of evolution. It's a fascinating read, and it makes you think (at least it made me re-think) ideas about sexual norms. He almost argues for polygamy for society - since single males are dangerous, and like you pointed out, kids from "broken homes" don't do well either. I don't agree with some of his theories, but it's a very interesting book to say the least. One reason why I like it is that it doesn't come from a political standpoint, so he probably pisses off both the liberals and conservatives alike! I think it might make you re-think your idea that the church is the one that came up with these sexual "rules." Wright seems to think that evolution did that, but the church just took them to an extreme.

About your most recent post - all my views on casual sex are off when it comes to kids - so your last post is kind of irrelevant, at least to me. I think I agree with His Holiness the Dalai Lama about this issue:
Unfortunately, luvluv, most Christians in this country are not only against premarital sex, but also against birth control, access to birth control, education about birth control, etc. Yet the desire we all have to procreate is very strong (another reason to fight the creationists - if you believe in evolution, you will believe that our instinct to have sex is very very very tough to overcome).
You may blame the sexual revolution for the above statistics, I blame the anti-abortion and anti-birth control groups just as much, if not more. Sex does NOT NEED to produce kids, right?

And sorry about assuming too much earlier about your views. Unfortunately in Colorado, the "fundies" as you put them *are* the majority.

I'm still wondering about your opinion on whether or not we should discourage divorce, or discourage marriage. I'm not entirely convinced that the increase in divorce rate is a bad thing. Sure, a few years ago we had less divorce. But did you know that the crime rates really haven't changed in 100 years? I'll have to go dig out that web site again - but I remember reading that back when I was debating Emperor of the Universe - and it shocked me. The absolute numbers of crime are up because our population is up, but the rates have stabilized and in many cases are going down. So - while I agree with you that the breakdown of the family unit may be responsible for some of the current crime rate that we have, it certainly can't account for all of it. Plus if you watch the History Channel when they have their shows on sex - there have been times in the past when promiscuity before marriage was actually encouraged, and it didn't seem that the society went stark raving mad. I'll have to dig that out too. Boy I'm going to be busy.


Also missing in your analysis is the effect of mental health on poverty. I seem to recall that a large portion of people living on the street have some type of mental health condition, or drug/alcohol abuse - that predated their poverty. I'll have to dig that out too, I guess. Battle of the statistics!!

Nor am I convinced that this "sexual revolution" you speak of is a bad thing either. I don't think there's a way to elevate women in society without also changing our reproductive patterns. At the same time that women have been given these freedoms and powers, society has still maintained this "women should be barefoot and pregnant" mentality. Or perhaps our evolutionary origins have maintained it - who knows. No wonder we are such a mess. There has to be ways to resolve these conflicts without making sex this big taboo issue. Because it appears the church's method - which is deny all our human desires until you are married - frankly doesn't seem to be working.

scigirl

luvluv

It's okay. And sorry I got a little heated in reply. I've been in some mean, mean fights on this forum about sexuality, and I'm a little trigger happy about it now. I'll holster my pistol now.

I don't think the church came up with sexual rules. I think the church reflects the same sexual ethic that, generally speaking, is common to all societies. Most cultures eventually come to the conclusion that unrestrained sexuality is a socially destructive force, whether that comes in the form of uncared for children or jealous lovers.

I would agree that our innate responses (wheter via evolution or design) are probably the other half of where these restrictions come from.

For the most part I would agree with the Dali. In fact I think the protection of children has always been the driving force behind sexual norms. In ages where contraception was not very good, these social norms were all that protected children.

Divorce primarily. But I also think that people should get a much better briefing on precisely what they are getting themselves into when they get married.

Yeah, I know that. But given the strong correlation between fatherlessness and crime, I'd still say that society is suffering relative to a society without the fatherlessness.

Probably with the men, and with prostitutes, but there haven't been many societies where men wanted their daughters to be promiscuous before marriage.

Well, don't confuse homelessness with poverty. Most poor people live in homes. You might not believe this, but the majority of people in the United States who live beneath the poverty line WORK. Something life 40 percent of the poor in the U.S. work FULL TIME, but they do so at fast food resteraunts or in retail, and they are single parent heads of households.

Could you elaborate on this idea? I don't see the connection.

I don't think that, but what I think is probably even more controversial. I think women are the gatekeepers of sex, and that they have been dropping the ball recently in terms of limiting their sexual partners to dependable, suitable men. I think that is the biggest cause of unwanted and uncared for children, not a lack of access to birth control or abortion. Despite the activities of the religious right in this area, there isn't anybody in this country who can't get access to birth control or an abortion if they want it bad enough. I should know better than to say it, but most of the uncared for children stem from women consenting to sex under circumstances wherein there needs and the needs of a potential child are not considered. I'm not blaming this totally on each individual woman's decision, I mostly blame the media for this. The media teaches women that sexual equality means that women should pursue their sexuality as if their sexual interests were identical to men. Thus, we have a society in which women sleep with men for reasons that mirror men's sexual interests and not their own. They bed men for attractiveness and temporal pleasure. What this results in is a society where there is no female reproductive imperative, only male. Even the females are operating under male imperatives. And one of the problems with the male sex drive is that it does not consider consequences. With human beings throughout the ages it has been the females job to consider consequences and to limit sexual contact to men who are desirable for rearing children, not just sexual pleasure. When that is no longer the case, unintended pregnancies will occur. The same sexual imperative which will lead someone to sleep with someone for pleasure's sake can lead them to be careless about contraception, especially when there is no longer a severe social consequence for bearing illegitimate children (and they don't consider the financial consequences).

I paraphrase Dave Chappelle: "If sex was a stock, it would be plummeting right now because women are giving it away too easy. They've flooded the market with it."

To be honest, I think one of the main reasons people don't take sex seriously anymore is that it is so easy to get it. People tend to forget that something they do so easily and with so little consideration can have such serious consequences. And historically, it's always been the woman's job to keep that idea in the picture. If women require more in the way of commitment before consenting to sex, a whole lot of this can be cleared up. I realize that this is not simply a matter of women being more strong minded, I don't think they can do this alone. But this is one potential source of the problem.

I know that I have now eaten up what little good will I have been accumulating on this thread, and possibly taken it so woefully off topic that it will never get back.

You know, I just can't figure out why I get into huge fights on this subject.

Opera Nut

I'll give you a bit about the "good old days":

When Alfred Kinsey wrote his reports on the sexuality of the American Male and Female, the first report came out in, I think, 1948 and the other one 1952 or so.

Many of the older people he interviewed had had their first sexual experience in a horse-drawn carriage!!
He also found out that in the days when women were supposed to be virgins when they married, according to the double standard, that one-third of women had sex before marriage.

Furthermore, one reason there might be fewer illegitimate children back then was that in nearly all cases, if a boy got a girl pregnant, he had to marry her at the point of a shotgun held by the girl's father; and if they wanted a formal wedding they painted the shotgun white! (Bad joke there). In fact, my former brother in law had a shotgun wedding and the girl was 17 and he was 20. She left him as soon as the youngest kid was out of high school, so that meant she was about 35 when she left him.
He made plenty of money but would not buy her a house. They lived in a crummy trailer with a wood stove. Shotgun weddings don't make for good marriages. Adults would not tell teenagers anything about sex or birth control, so they start doing it and get forced into marraige with the first person they happen to sleep with. This is a horrible thought to me.


Also many people in the early 20th century got married at 14 or 15 or 16 just to get out of the house. One lady I knew who was born in 1901 in Indian Territory(Oklahoma before it was a state in 1906) got married at 14 to get away from her 10 siblings in a sod house (yes that's a house made out of DIRT BRICKS) and she had two children by age 18. That was the only two she had. Her parents were scandinavian immigrants, and strict seventh day adventists.

In societies with arranged marriages, they often marry the kids off at 14, or 15 or 16, and that solves the teenage premarital sex problem.

I think there was just as much cheating, drinking and adultery going on as there is now, or almost as much, but nobody talked about it and an unmarried mother was hush hush.

My dad's sister had a child in the 1930s. She found out her boyfriend was married, and dad's brother and his wife raised the girl. So do you know what happened?

My father did not talk to his sister for FIFTY YEARS because of that. That is sad, he prevented me from having a good relationship with a nice lady.

Furthermore, my mother's brother's wife had a boy who is legally my biological cousin -- but he's not really my uncle's kid, and the whole town knows about it except for him. The wife had a long term boyfriend on the side.

My family is well educated, but there is one non-legitimate child on each side of my family. So these things happen a lot. In fact, DNA tests indicate that about ten percent of the population have fathers that are not the mother's husband. So there is lots of cheating going on that never is found out about.
My point being, this stuff didn't get talked about in the old days.

Opera Nut

Even Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England, was a healthy "seven-month" baby, listed in the newspaper as premature, and he was born in 1880.

luvluv

I know shotgun marriages covered a lot of illegitmacy. I don't consider it to be a big deal if a kid is conceived illegitimately, but if they have to live without a father, that is another story.

My father is always bugging me about a statistic that he read somewhere. Somebody went through the census from something like 1900 to 1960 comparing the date of marriage to the date of first born child. According to that study (if my father can be trusted) 60% of white brides before 1960 were pregnant at the altar!

My dad swears by this, though he can never find the book the stat supposedly came from.

I say all this to say that shotgun marriages can work in societies where there are strong enough social institutions to support them. Arranged marriages work remarkably well in societies that are arranged around them. For many cultures, marriage has always been a practical matter rather than a romantic one. Now that is bad for individual happiness but it can be good for social stability. Which is more important? Who knows. Probably one has to balanced against the other. All I've been saying in this thread is that putting ALL emphasis of sexual ethics on maximizing individual happiness and NONE on social cohesion is as problematic as the reverse.

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by luvluv
Loren Petchel:

How do you know this? How do you know there is a correlation between virginity and attitudes about divorce?

I have seen some data on this but I don't have the foggiest idea where.

It should be quite obvious, though--virgin until marriage is almost always the result of strong religious beliefs these days. The same beliefs that say divorce is wrong.

I suppose they do but I would imagine the intensity of ending a sexual relationship would have a greater impact than the intensity of ending a non-sexual relationship.

I don't see that sex inherently makes a more intense relationship. It probably speeds the development of the intensity but that doesn't mean that those who don't have sex can't reach the same levels.

There are unhappy marriages all over. Far more of them probably stem from financial issues than from sexual ones, so why are you sticking with just the sexual issue? People are unhappy in their marriages for all kinds of reasons.

I'm not saying sex *CAUSES* most unhappy marriages. I'm saying that the same things that lead to sex-only-in-marriage also lead to not ending failed marriages.

The pathologies would be sexually transmitted diseases, poverty, fatherlessness and rampant divorce.

I'll agree about the STD's, but there is the counterbalancing ability to test for and treat them.

I do not agree about the rest of them. Neither poverty or fartherlessness is the result of the sexual revolution.

Rampant divorce is the result of recognizing that marriages fail and that it's generally stupid to remain in a failed marriage.

The mechanism behind the increased incidence of illegitimacy and sexually transmitted diseases should be obvious.

No. The increase in illegitimacy is because when she got pregnant it used to be hushed up. Either it was put up for adoption and the pregnancy hidden or they got married quickly.

Some STD's, like syphillis, have actually decreased in recent years because of advanced treatments.

Most STD's have decreased and it's not because of advanced treatments--we had perfectly good treatments for them before the sexual revolution.

But non-treatable STD's generally speaking have risen since the sexual revolution.

What ones were known before the sexual revolution?

More people having more sex with more partners will cause a rise in STD's relative to a more or less fully monogamous society.

True.

The single largest cause of poverty in this nation is single parent child-rearing.

I think our welfare system has a lot to do with it.

Fatherlessness is a big issue. If you want to really get an in depth look at this, you should read Fukiyama's book.

And you should read The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz.