Post Script: Maybe a little bit of nothing?

I will admit that sometimes it's fun to make black and white statements and observe the impact. I fully gave into this by ending yesterday's rant with Edwin Starr inspiration. I also sat down this morning (coffee in hand) and re-read what I wrote and decided it needed a post script.

War may be good for absolutely nothing, but I can't reasonably say that applies to marriage also. For me, marriage carries with it heavy Christian connotations, and since I'm not a Christian and have no strong financial need to get married, it has little value to me. But obviously for the millions of people who are Christian or hold Judeo-Christian values, it would have significant meaning.

As with most thing, I think properly agreeing on a definition of things aids in its discussion. To me, the institution of marriage is standing in front of a priest and saying I Do. Even on the legality side of things, it's still heavily shaded with Christian influence (stand in front of a judge and say I Do). Where I live the laws regarding common law spouses is catching up quickly to those regarding married couples. We already to our taxes together, have our joint incomes influence each other, check all the boxes marked "common law", and if we were to have a child together, in the eyes of the law we would essentially be treated as married.

Which is why I really want to share this tidbit from that Times article:

Sociologists tend to believe the answers lie outside marriage. Coontz [Stephanie Coontz, marriage historian, Evergreen State College] thinks that if we changed our assumptions about alternative family arrangements and our respect for them, people would be more responsible about them. "We haven't raised our expectations of how unmarried parents will react to each other. We haven't raised our expectations of divorce or singlehood," she says. "It should not be that within marriage you owe everything and without marriage you don't owe anything. When we expect responsible behavior outside as well as inside marriage, we actually reduce the temptation to evade or escape marriage."

My writing yesterday got a bit disjointed, jumping from foreign cultures to economic status and viability to child rearing. Sorry about that. So here's a succinct version of one of the things I was trying to say yesterday.

Marriage is becoming less common or popular among low income couples. Yes, the marriage industry has exploded, and the cost involved obviously plays a role -- anyone who's shopped for flowers knows that as soon as you tack on "wedding bouquet" to the name, the price triples. "The loss of decent-paying jobs that a high-school-educated man or woman could get makes it difficult for them to get and stay married," says Andrew Cherlin, Sociologist at John Hopkins University. "...people are living together because they don't have enough money to live alone, but they aren't going to get married until they have enough money." (Time magazine)

But let me suggest an alternative explanation. Andrew Cherlin in that Time article said that: "Getting married is a way to show family and friends that you have a successful personal life... It's like the ultimate merit badge." I posit to you that with the waning of Christian influence, marriage has become less important to building a committed and loving relationship with someone, and more about the status symbol it represents. For low-income couples -- and I'd say even a fair number of educated middle-class couples -- it becomes more practical to save that money in order to build that loving relationship and life together. Save for a house, children, a car, a vacation, a new fridge, etc. Relationships between educated, not particularly religious individuals no longer requires the stamp of marriage approval.

I said that marriage was good for absolutely nothing. I'm adding an addendum to that. The traditional idea of marriage is becoming no longer valid in a modern sense, unless done for personal conviction or religious reasons. Commitment and love should carry the same responsibilities and strength without the marriage moniker, and they do. More and more.

Absolutely nothing?

I stumbled upon Time magazine this week, and was arrested by the front cover, which loudly proclaimed: "Marriage: What's It Good For?" Which, when you stop and think about it, is an excellent question.

Of course, I have stopped to think about it, having lived with my partner for the past 5 years, and for the past year I've been sporting a solid looking diamond (they are far more sparkly in person than you would imagine). Aye, but there's a rub: We decided not to get married. Halt your rabid assumptions of betrayal and lost love, we're both perfectly happy and committed and all that jazz. But somewhere amid the frenetic planning of a wedding, the crunching of numbers that always wind up having too many zeros to sit comfortably with my bank account, we looked at each other and said: "Wait a minute. Why are we doing this again?"

Which seems to be a growing trend, according to Time magazine and the Pew Research Center. On a personal note, I'd like to think it has to do with the broadening of our definition of marriage, or what being committed and in love means, of the waning of Christian influence. All of that certainly is an element of it -- "We're just more flexible about how family gets defined," Time proclaims -- but what surprised me in this article was the parallels they drew between income and marriage.

On the dichotomy of the sexes side: "Well-off women don't need to stay in a marriage that doesn't make them happy." Which could be a rather good thing, as my partner points out, especially in cases of spousal abuse. The ongoing march of women's rights has brought this element of matriarchal independence into marriage. Women are equal partners, emotionally, sexually, and most importantly financially. I'm still working my way through Sex At Dawn (as you may recall me waxing long-windedly about) and so naturally while reading through Time I was mentally drawing all sorts of parallels between the two. What particularly leapt to mind (and had me leaping up to paw frantically through my book until I found it again) was the Mosuo of southwest China.

Briefly, Mosuo culture slants towards the matriarchal, in the sense of title, family, belonging is centered with the women. They have a unique sense of "marriage", a term I use very losely here since they, for all intents and purposes, have no marriages. Men will meander into a woman's home (invited, of course), spend the night, and leave the next morning. Sometimes these are long-term companionships, sometimes not, and any children born stay with the mother and are raised in her household.

Which brings me right back around to Time mag. They devoted some time to looking at children, and how the recent trends in marriage may or may not be affecting them. Although three quarters of those surveyed said that raising kids is "best done married", in 2008 "41% of babies were born to unmarried moms... an eightfold increase from 50 years ago, and 25% of kids lived in a single parent home, almost triple the number from 1960". It goes on to describe what is supposedly the predominant situation for unwed mothers, saying that a quarter of those who didn't marry the father had moved on to live with or marry another man. Andrew Cherlin, Sociologist at John Hopkins Univ, is quoted as saying: "About 21% of American children will see at least two live-in partners of their mothers by the time they're 15. And an additional 8% will see three or more."

For the Mosuo culture, not knowing who exactly your dad is (although many of them do, there just isn't a particular emphasis on it) has no adverse effect on the children. They have male role models in the community, in their uncles, grandfathers, older siblings. Without a possessive sense of paternity, the community as a whole loves and cares for children equally. Similar to an account of a female truck river in Polynesia (page 108 in Sex at Dawn if you're interested), who gave two of her nine children to an infertile friend, which seemed the normal, and imminently practical, thing to do. "All of us love all the children," she said.

Yes, I may be kicking an unwed horse with my nigh obssession with this book, but it's hard not to point wildly and yell AhHa! when looking at the statistics kicked up by this marriage data. The wedding industry has become bloated, and the trends point solidly towards lower-income couples not getting married while also not waiting to start a family, while higher-income couples are getting married as a show of "the ultimate merit badge" (another Cherlin quote). There's a wonderful graph showing the percentage of births outside of marriage along a timeline from the 60s until 2008. All lines point up. 41% in 2008 versus somewhere along the 5% mark in 1960. Again in the 60s, roughly 70% of American adults were married, and today that number sits somewhere south of 52%. 

All signs point to the institution of marriage going the way of the dodo, and yet almost half the people surveyed said they wanted to get married (64% in the group of unmarried people living with a partner), and there's that previously cited quote saying that three quarters said having kids is best done married. "Half or more of the respondents in the Pew poll say that marital status is irrelevant to achieving respect, happiness, career goals, financial security or a fulfilling sex life. When it comes to raising kids, though, it's a landslide, with more than three-quarters saying it's best done married."

So here's this whole article, this slew of data, showing that an overwhelming number of us are eschewing marriage, while maintaining this tenacious grip on it's sanctity. The article -- after spending several pages statistically proving it's dodo-esque nature -- naively claims that "marriage is still the best avenue most people have for making their dreams dome true... not all the old traditions of marriage are obsolete."

I remain solidly unconvinced. What's marriage good for? Absolutely nothing.

The United Nations of WTF

I sat down to write something about an article I found in Time (which I will still write), but got sidetracked by learning that the United Nations voted to "removed “sexual orientation” from a resolution that protects people from arbitrary executions. In other words, the UN General Assembly this week voted to allow LGBT people to be executed without cause."

Oh joy.

You can read the article in its entirety over this way, which is at once disturbing and worrisome. It immediately brought to mind the slew of editorials I read after Canada lost it's bid for a UN security council seat. We've been on the council for the last 60 years, and it's been said that we lost this time around due to some of Canada's decisions being "unpopular with the international community".

There's a whole "omg the arabs are taking over the UN" panic side to this story, which I won't touch with a ten foot pole at this time, but at a basic level it seems that to a certain degree it's wise to have "unpopular" opinions around, to force you to question decisions, policy, ideas, votes... you get the idea.

Like the majority vote to give "a de facto green light to the on-going murder of LGBT people by homophobic regimes, death squads and vigilantes."

Anxietas Redux

Ola, mi amigos.

Yes, I went and disappeared. That happens sometimes. I took a few days off work, and took some time to realign my chi.

Alright, actually my chi feels horribly out of alignment, but I'm working on that. Since I was purposefully ignoring work for a few days, I'm completely out of the loop in terms of exciting new media events and stories. So I would love to offer unique insight into the latest buzz, but my buzz is more of a pathetic honking noise.

In truth, my mind has been pre-occupied with two things: Mental Health and Dogs.

Mental Health because I've been struggling with being off my medications (there is no possible way to say that and not sound koo-koo) and getting my ducks in order to return to school and finish my Psychology degree. It has been suggested that I am indeed koo-koo to attempt work and school and managing an  anxiety/panic disorder at the same time, but nothing risked nothing gained. Except possibly peace and quiet. One would imagine that if you didn't risk anything, you'd enjoy a pleasant life of peace and quiet.

Dogs because the hubby and I have been shopping around for a new dog. The loss of our shepherd Mandy was devastating in its abrupt violence, so the journey towards deciding we were ready for another dog and the ongoing pursuit of finding the right dog has been emotional, at best. Both Mandy and Sunny (who is still with us and coping poorly with the loss of her companion) found their humans; we were, respectively, not looking for a dog. They simply made their way into our lives. So actively searching for a new dog to enter our life has been... difficult.

But life trucks on.

The Sexual Narrative - Part 3

Okay, let's bring this all back around.

I've waxed long and hard about large concepts involving the evolutionary tree of mankind. Societal influences and cultural narratives. Why, oh why, am I doing this?

My large point, and one I've harped on for a few years now, is that we (as a society) do not talk about sex enough. When we do talk about sex, it's largely biological in nature, images of static diagrams in highschool sex ed classes. Urethra. Ovaries. Prostate.

We are bombarded with images of sexuality (see: beer commercials) and the sexualization of people at younger and younger ages (see: kids beauty pangeants) and yet there's no real discussion about the reality of sex. The full reality of sex. The biological, the emotional, the societal, the cultural. Sex at Dawn does an amazing job at looking at why our culture has evolved the sexual taboos it has, why our sexual narrative has played out in this particular way, and how it relates to our current sexual world.

I took an amazing class in university on human sexuality. At one point, our teacher showed images from various text books regarding the human body, the sexy bits in particular. She asked the class if any of the images of the various vulvas looked anything like the real deal. (Note that I didn't use the word vagina. Vulva is the outside bits, vagina is the inside bit that you can't see without a speculum or a camera. Mistake #1 in almost all textbooks). The consensus was a giggling no. She then showed us the art of Georgia O'Keefe. Seriously, go google images Georgia O'Keefe and tell me that her flowers aren't just a wee bit erotic. They certainly did a better job of conveying the reality and variety of vulvas better than any of the textbooks we had did. (And they're just paintings of flowers, so totally work safe).

We're terrified of talking about the reality of sex, but we're obsessed with it. As well we should be, it's a major social bonding medium. I call shenanigans that sex is for reproduction. For the majority of the animal kingdom it is, but primates are unique in their enjoyment of sex. There's a reason we enjoy it. Yet heaven forbid we talk about how good it feels.

Let me just quote some fairly stunning numbers that made me laugh out loud from Sex at Dawn:

The American Medical Association reports that some 42 percent of American women suffer from sexual dysfunction, while Viagra breaks sales records year after year. Worldwide, pornography is reported to rake in anywhere form fifty-seven billion to a hundred billion dollars annually. In the United States, it generates more revenue than CBS, NBC, and ABC combined and more than all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises. According to U.S News and World Report, "Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and nonprofit theatres, the opera, the ballet and jazz and classical music performances--combined." ... This split-personality relationship with our true sexual nature is anything but news to entertainment corporations, who have long reflected the same fractured sensibility between public pronouncement and private desire. In 2000, under the headline "Wall Street Meets Pornography," The New York Times reported that General Motors sold more graphic sex films than Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. Over eight million American subscribers to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, were spending about $200 million a year on pay-per-view sex films from satellite providers. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Fox News Network and the nation's leading conservative newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, was pulling in more porn money through a satellite company than Playboy made with its magazine, cable, and Internet businesses combined. AT&T, also a supported of conservative values, sells hard-core porn to over a million hotel rooms throughout the country via its Hot Network.

If the sexual narrative we are currently living out is "how it's suppose to be", why are divorce rates rising, marriage rates declining, and the prevalence of mates seeking sexual satisfaction outside of this supposedly natural "central family unit" obviously so high?

You may not agree with the ideas set forth in Sex at Dawn. You may not be comfortable talking about sex. The church wasn't too comfortable talking about the earth moving around the sun in it's spherical shape. To me, I think the evidence is piling up that our sexual narrative isn't working for us anymore.

I'm of the firm opinion that dialog is good. It's about damn time we had some serious, open dialog regarding sex.

The Sexual Narrative - Part 2

The entire idea that our society and culture has gone askew has so many far reaching tendrils. A few posts ago I alluded to the fact that I was pondering big things, and mentioned Gaia Theory but never followed up on it. The reason being that the idea that our entire culture is... wrong, for lack of a better word, is so large and unwieldy that although I am intrigued, I am willing to accept that, I am interested in how to change that, it remains difficult to wrap my head around and put it down on paper. There is no spoon. Woah.

Ishmael posited the idea that we used to live, when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, as if we "belonged to the world", we were the Children of Gaia (forgive my waxing hippieness), and lived in this symbiotic relationship with the world as a whole. Gaia Theory is the idea that everything is interconnected in a giant symbiotic relationship encompassing every element on Earth in order to sustain a state of homeorhesis, not to be confused with homeostasis. (Homeostasis: properties of a system to regulate its environment to maintain a stable, constant state. Homeorhesis: properties of a system to regulate its environment around a trajectory. Elements working in cohesion to maintain certain static points, but those points will change depending on various elements).

Confused yet? Stay with me. Daniel Quinn and Gaia Theory (the brain child of James Lovelock) have nothing to do with each other as far as I know, but I can't help but love the complementary nature of their ideas. That we used to "belong to the earth" and we lived in this giant symbiotic, fluctuating eco-balance. That when tracing our evolution, we ceased to belong to the earth and began to think the earth belonged to us. Now we have domesticated animals, and crops, and property, and therefore I must own what is mine in order to protect what is mine. And protect what is mine in order to own it.

I began this whole rant because of Sex at Dawn, and we may seemed to have strayed from our original path which was the current sexual narrative but trust me, it was only a minor detour.

Sex at Dawn also traces our cultural past to the Neolithic Revolution (remember, the agricultural revolution) and this huge societal shift from hunter-gatherer to domesticated settler. The traditional idea surrounding the interplay of the sexes was that men need to protect their paternal rights, so they want exclusive access to the female so they can assure their offspring is theirs. Women need to trade their reproductive capability for security and food that men offer. So it's this constant monogamous byplay of horny man versus reluctant woman. Men want sex, potentially lots of it with many women to ensure their genes get passed on. Women don't want to trade sex for someone who isn't going to stick around and take care of their pregnant selves and their offspring.

This was Darwin's idea (and others) when he was doing his whole evolution song and dance, and it largely hasn't changed in the intervening years. This book says wait a second. Is that actually how we evolved? Is that our true origins, or is that the culture in which we live projecting it's own taboos upon history?

When the British first started wandering around Australia, they reported that the Aborigines were miserable and starving, in a state of chronic famine. Why? Because they saw them eating bugs, rats, grubs, etc. To the Brits with their tea and crumpets, eating bugs was a last resort of a starving man. To the Aborigines, it was an excellent source of protein and part of their daily diet. They weren't starving or miserable. Has man always lived in a state of tense monogamy, of gender inequality and byplay, or do we assume that because that's how we've lived for the last two thousand years?

Remember, we weren't always sedentary. Our nomadic ancestors lived in a state of "belonging to the earth". Due to the nomadic lifestyle, our population was kept in check by the availability of food. You didn't store food or possess many things, because you took with you what you could carry. Instead of individual owning rights -- this is my property, my home, my crop -- man lived in bands of nomads who shared because that was the best way to ensure the survival of yourself and your band. You did not own anything that your tribemate did not also own or have access to. If they shared everything, why wouldn't they have shared sex? Without land to pass on to offspring, the knowledge of paternity loses importance. The raising of children was a communal affair. The best way to pass on your genes as a man would be to regularly screw all the women in your tribe. And the woman didn't have to worry about being left starving and pregnant, because the band would take care of her and her offspring. With the availability of food and the culture of sharing, women weren't dependent on men, they were equal members of the nomadic tribe.

Is this starting to make sense now?

To be continued...

The Sexual Narrative - Part 1

I had intended to pick up and talk about the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear which went on this weekend -- since I am, naturally, a Stewart/Colbert fan -- but I've been reading this book which has dominated the last few days and so I can't help but want to wax philosophical at it. (Also, I'm desperately trying to avoid ranting about Glenn Beck, Fox News, and the state of modern media because, let's face it, nothing good will come of that).

I'm going to warn you right now, you're going to have to bear with me because I'm kind of writing this off the cuff. I had intended to be a good little researcher and actually finish my book before talking about it, but I got excited and am prematurely spewing my opinion.

The book is called Sex at Dawn, and is not a guide to how to get freaky in the bedroom. Written by Christopher Ryan Ph.D. and Cacilda Jethá, M.D. (who both have extensive and interesting backgrounds), their website describes the book as showing "how our promiscuous past haunts our current struggles regarding monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics." I have to give credit where credit's due, I wouldn't be reading this book right now if it wasn't for listening to Dan Savage's podcast where he had Christopher Ryan on as a guest. I recommend listening to it for an interesting discussion and dynamic... I would double check which podcast it was and link it directly for you folks, but the government blocks his website. You can't see me, but I'm rolling my eyes and muttering about censorship under my breath.

I'm going to take a quick step back here, and potentially do this whole post in more than one part as I get increasingly long winded. When I was in highschool and feeling idealistically young and full of save-the-world energy, I read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It was one of those books that changed my outlook from then and largely helped shaped my current views on my world and my place on it. (Note: that link is to the Wiki entry for the book, and should come with a giant spoiler alert sign since it gives the entire breakdown of the story. The author's website is here if you're interested). Ishmael asked an immediate question that I think all teenagers can relate to, and most adults if they really stop and think about it: What the hell is wrong with the world? I'm over simplifying it. It's a book based on the assumption that we feel there is something innately wrong with how things are turning out, and it traces back man's societal and cultural development to track down the place where we took a wrong turn.

At the risk of giving it all away (trust me, read the book, the journal is worth as much as the answer), the central premise is that with the advent of agriculture, with man kind turning from hunter-gatherers to animal domestication and sedentary societies, it fundamentally changed our society, destroyed the previous "tribal groupings" and that this change is not for the better. The societal change that came from now being a sedentary culture meant that although we have more control over our food supply, our mentality regarding the possessive nature of our food supply had to change. You no longer shared with your tribe-mates, you bartered with your neighbours. More stable food supply led to population explosions, increasing disease and shorter life expectancy. Owning land led to wanting more land led to warring with your neighbour to take his land. Matriarchal hierarchies gave way to patriarchal ones and the subservience of women who now had to barter their bodies for the land, food and protection of the controlling male class.

I'm skipping along past all the proofs for the above claims. I'm not about to re-write both books here, so if you would like the in-depth account of where all these claims are coming from, read the books and read the footnotes found in the books.

The reason I'm laying out these theories regarding man's development going back to the Neolithic Revolution (ie, the agricultural revolution) is because Sex at Dawn takes the same stance that Ishmael does, but in regards to human sexuality. They look at the current story being told about human sexuality, the accepted narrative of why our sexuality is the way it is and why men and women are the way they are, and conclude that it doesn't compute.

It made me want to cheer out loud. Sex has been my focus of study for the last few years as I waned in and out of school, and I've been of the stoic opinion that our current sexual narrative is woefully lacking. What is taught in schools is pathetic. The lack of real, actual, useful and true information is embarrassingly deficient. Human sexuality is an omnipresent fact of life, and yet the discussions surrounding it are hush-hushed, the information is tightly controlled and editted for "respectability", the taboo is alive and thriving.

A 13 year old can go into a movie theatre and watch someone be brutally chopped to bits, but heaven forbid there's a penis on screen.

To be continued...