When politics turn personal

A Republican senator now favors gay marriage because his son is gay.

He framed his reaction in terms of equality of opportunity: ""It allowed me to think of this issue from a new perspective, and that's of a Dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister would have."

The story is similar to how one of the legislators who blocked a bill that would legalize abortion in Indiana later came to my grandfather (a pediatrician), asking for a referral to an illegal abortion for his 16 year old pregnant daughter.  Naturally this politician wanted to ensure that his daughter had the opportunities to succeed, in spite of any mistakes she may have made. 

Same-sex marriage is a wonderful example of where John Rawls' concept of the veil of ignorance applies:  we don't know whether our children will want to marry someone of the opposite sex or same sex, but we all want them to have the opportunity to marry.

About 3-5% of children of conservative politicians are likely to want to marry the same sex --- the same as in the general population --- so we may continue to see evolution like this on same-sex marriage.

It's too bad that conservative politicians are unlikely to have the same experiences for social policy.  Now that social mobility in the US is at a stand-still, the children born in the top quintile of income are likely to end up there themselves, and likewise for the bottom quintile.  Few policy makers make decisions informed by the personal experiences of people who are disadvantaged by the current system.  They are unlikely to know adults trying to support a household on minimum wage, and may truly believe that health and economic disparities are due to personal failings.

About 3-5% of the US population is gay, and aside from some predictors (e.g., having older brothers), gayness is more-or-less randomly assigned.  Not even 3% of children makers are randomly assigned to be socially disadvantaged.  If they were, we would have a situation paralleling Rawls's veil of ignorance, and we might have fewer social disparities.

Vaginismus: Blame the victim

I've been eagerly reading this blog on vaginismus. The writer has been married over a year without sex. She has visited a sex therapy clinic, and seems to be making progress.

Many of the commenters blame the writer's religion for her problems. When bystanders are confronted with a really difficult situation, some will go to extreme lengths to convince themselves that it could never happen to them. They may think that being in an unconsummated marriage for over a year seems so extremely difficult, there must be some reason that it happened to her and not to other people they know. Presumably it could happen to anyone.

Some criticisms relate to ignorance, but there are so many issues that people never need to think about. How many women know what the hymen looks like? I study sexual initiation, but the anatomical details have never been relevant to me professionally, and I didn't know what the hymen looked like until I saw the above pictures.

Another area of broad agreement: adults aren't sexualized enough

Camile Paglia says that upper middle class adult culture isn't sexualized enough, which is the same point that many conservative religious movements do. Femininity has been devalued, different roles for men and women has taken out the mystery and magic of relationships, we oversexualize young people and undersexualize adults. Young people are having sex before marriage, and older people are not marrying or not having sex in marriage. These points appear in many evangelical Christian, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish assessments of culture, and in dating books from across the spectrum. (An example of the latter: Rachel Greenwald, a secular Jew who did a qualitative study of 1000 men about their dating histories, found in her study that one reason that men cite for not continuing a relationship past early dates is that the women dress and behave on dates in the same way as they do in the office.)

We can keep in mind that every model is wrong, but some models are useful: these statements are of course oversimplifications and generalizations. But it's really interesting to see a point where some from the left and some from the right can agree, when they would agree on so little else.

Hormonal contraception makes women less attractive and choose worse partners, says review paper

A few months ago, I said that hormonal contraception (the pill, Depo, etc.) messes up women's choice of mates because of results we knew that women choose differently and asked whether that's responsible for higher divorces in those couples. We still don't know that information, whether divorce is more likely among women who chose their partners using hormonal contraception.

But a review paper has come out solidifying that finding that women choose partners differently on hormonal contraception than off and adding that women are less attractive while they're taking it because it suppresses ovulation (during which women are more attractive to men).

That's another reason to add to the book that just came out saying that women ought to consider other methods besides the pill.

Hormonal contraception is a standard, and evidence probably won't change that, but there are other equally reliable methods of pregnancy prevention such as intrauterine contraception (IUC) that currently have miniscule proportions of women using them. I wonder whether we'll see even a slight shift.

(Conflict of interest disclosure: I have a very nice pen given to me by the company that makes an IUC device that I happen to have used this morning, but really that's not why I wrote that. This is just the first time I've ever had one of those legendary conflicts of interest.)

Early marriage reactions

Dallas TV news story giving reactions to early marriage idea, especially concern that they are pushing women away from education and towards early motherhood. Orthodox Jews have been promoting early marriage for a long time, and anecdotally I know that plenty of Orthodox Jewish women who marry young do go to medical school or other career pursuits they were planning on anyhow. It would be an interesting study to see whether marriage deters any from as extensive a career. My anecdotal impression is that married women get degrees from impressive schools but may be less likely or less interested in reaching the tiptop of their careers. So they will become a psychiatrist or internist or pediatrician with an MD from a top school, but may not become a neurosurgeon or med school professor.

Sociologist suggests lowering age of marriage

Mark Regnerus, one of the world experts on the sexual behavior of Evangelical Christians, wrote a long article in Christianity Today that states a few important facts.

1. Evangelicals are only slightly more sexually conservative than other Americans: about 80% have premarital sex by his estimate, and other estimates have higher numbers.

2. On average, like most Americans, Evangelicals have increased their average age at first marriage by 5 years, which goes along with a change in the view of marriage. As Regnerus puts it, "Most young Americans no longer think of marriage as a formative institution, but rather as the institution they enter once they think they are fully formed."

3. Women who want to get married have trouble finding men because 60% of evangelical young people are female: 3 women for 2 men.

My addition: recent research from Journal of Evolutionary Psychology indicates that a favorable male:female ratio alone may cause men to dally in making commitment to marriage, as is predictable.


The implications of these facts are not straight-forward because there's little good research on the subject of age of marriage, so conclusions are necessarily speculative. His conclusion is that people should get married earlier. My conclusions are that marriage age among evangelicals will probably stay high until there is an equal gender ratio, but there's unlikely to be an equal gender ratio because across societies women are in general more interested in religion than men, so pronouncements about what should happen aren't useful.

Just stating these facts may help to reframe the abstinence discussion.

Hare-brained idea of the day

I'm a total non-biologist, but I'm just putting this idea out there.

My understanding is that a woman's sense of smell allows her to figure out who is a good immune match --- men who smell good to her have complementary immune function and she would have healthier children with them. Oral contraceptives (OCs) interfere with this function so that a woman on OCs might marry someone who isn't genetically complementary and doesn't smell good to her after she goes off them. The number of women who chose their husbands while taking oral contraceptives has increased enormously since their invention. I wonder whether this has any social or medical implications: are the children of women who met their husbands while taking OCs less healthy in some way? Are these couples more likely to get divorced?

Anyone know any research on this idea?

Free wedding for abstinence

Contest for a free $10,000 wedding to a couple in the Atlanta area if they agree not to have premarital sex, or at least that they shouldn't have premarital sex, serve alcohol at the wedding, and open the wedding to up to 100 members of the public, but they haven't had any entries. I wonder how much the no alcohol at the wedding rule is what is holding people back from entering, or allowing random guests, or if 10,000 isn't enough to have a good wedding anymore especially with 100 extra guests.