\u201cTHE PROPER BASIS FOR MARRIAGE IS A MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING<\/a>\u201c: Notes I didn\u2019t use for my review<\/a> of Premarital Sex in America<\/span>.<\/span> Sorry about the length! I thought this book did a good job of advancing the ball in terms of our understanding of American ideas about marriage and sex. It\u2019s worth your time. Everything that follows is something I thought as a result of this book, not<\/span> necessarily something the book said itself, unless it\u2019s in quotation marks.<\/p>\n Oh, and: I snagged the epigraph for my review from the Cigarette Smoking Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n p1: \u201cpremarital\u201d no longer typically implies sex between two people who eventually do marry one another\u2013pre<\/span>-marital sex. (Although Maggie Gallagher points out<\/a> that according to the CDC, \u201c32 percent of currently married women under the age of 45 say they have had only one sex partner in their life. \u2026 If the data are accurate, they suggest there are at least as many adult women under the age of 45 who have never had sex with anyone but their husband as there are gay people in the general population.\u201d)<\/p>\n p34: Especially after high school, oral sex isn\u2019t an alternative to intercourse; it\u2019s a warmup. Thinking of it as a birth control strategy, a means of maintaining \u201ctechnical virginity,\u201d etc, requires a lot of naivete about human nature.<\/p>\n p60: 1\/5 of sexually-active young men have had sex on the first day of knowing someone! And only 13% of s.a.y.m. have waited more than a year for sex.<\/p>\n pp 60-1: men w\/fewer economic resources tend to have more partners, not fewer<\/p>\n p61: guys who\u2019ve had more partners tend to be quicker to perceive women as less attractive after sex<\/p>\n (With all of these correlations and statistics, the point is not to say, \u201cThere are no exceptions, and people never change!\u201d If you don\u2019t think this stuff applies to you, maybe it doesn\u2019t!\u2013although I do generally think we\u2019re less exceptional than we\u2019d like. And the stats might help you see places where you or someone you love does<\/span> fit the average models, and therefore where you do need to put more conscious effort into changing or into addressing their issues. Knowing what kind of emotional baggage many people bring away from the experiences you\u2019ve had can help you jettison that baggage\u2013in part by suggesting that you\u2019re not uniquely messed-up if these are issues you have. Anyway, this is one of the many, many things I wanted to say in the AFF piece to mitigate its advice-column or preachy quality, but I ran out of room\u2026.)<\/p>\n p64: Birth control has made women slightly more like men (i.e. able to have relatively less-consequential, less-costly sex) rather than making men more like women (i.e. desiring high-cost, high-commitment sex)<\/p>\n p88: A girl says oral sex is \u201cvulgar\u201d but women should be nice and \u201cgiving\u201d in relationships and do it anyway. This gets at one aspect of what you might call the Dan Savage worldview<\/a> which I hadn\u2019t considered: If social norms shift such that the default is more like<\/span> the \u201cGood, Giving, and Game\u201d model where you do the sex act you\u2019d (strongly, in the case of anal sex, as Regnerus and Uecker find) prefer not to do, women have to give in a lot more often than men. (Assuming that this shift in social norms doesn\u2019t radically shift which<\/span> sex acts men vs women object to and how strongly.) The \u201cGGG\u201d model can be just another way of playing on women\u2019s altruism\u2013and our preference for justifying<\/span> our actions as altruism even when there are a lot of other motives in play.<\/p>\n [ETA: I should make clear that I think this gender imbalance is an unintended consequence of the \u201cGGG\u201d idea. I mean, I don\u2019t think Dan Savage came up with this phrase in order to prey on women\u2019s insecurities! But I do think it plays into some of those insecurities.]<\/p>\n p104: \u201cHooking up\u201d is more common at elite universities than lower-tier ones. Elite-U students are too focused on their educations and future careers to make time for an intense relationship, basically, but they still want sex.<\/p>\n p107: imbalanced campus sex ratios (i.e. more women per man\u2013an increasingly common situation) lowers women\u2019s control of sexual relationships<\/p>\n p110: The authors imply that there isn\u2019t a script<\/span> for regretting casual sex\u2013they write as if seeking out sex is scripted but regretting it is more authentic or less socially-condoned, and I\u2019m not convinced that\u2019s true.<\/p>\n p126: if college sex ratios remain the same \u201cfor long,\u201d 26 of 100 women will have to marry down educationally<\/p>\n p137: there\u2019s a minority of women for whom \u201cno strings attached\u201d sex is the ideal (though, p157, not an especially workable one). What I take from this is that there\u2019s a need to convey, culturally, that this preference is less beautiful<\/span>, that beauty requires vulnerability. (One danger is that in making that point we might unintentionally sound like we\u2019re invoking Love in the Western World<\/span>-style anti-marriage romantic tropes.)<\/p>\n p141: Very weak link between sexual behavior and depression in men (unlike the correlations for women between, e.g., more sex partners and a higher incidence of depression)\u2013did they look for links to aggression or self-destructive behaviors? In other words, when we look for \u201cdepression\u201d are we ignoring how the same emotional distress might manifest in people with more testosterone? They mention that men often express hurt differently, pp162-3, but don\u2019t really explore the idea.<\/p>\n p152: \u201cThe Sex Itself Is Not the Problem\u201d\u2013it\u2019s number of partners. Currently being in a sexual relationship typically makes women feel better. \u201cIndeed, the sex is operating as it tends to\u2013bonding persons, deepening relationships, and fostering greater interpersonal intimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n p161: \u201cOne study of casual sex in college notes that the most likely pairing is between self-confident men and distressed, depressed women.\u201d<\/p>\n They also explore the direction of the causal arrow here (i.e. which came first, higher incidence of depression or higher number of partners?)<\/p>\n p177: Catholics marry \u201cearly\u201d (before age 24) second-last<\/span> after black Protestants! And that\u2019s even though Hispanic men are more likely to marry early. \u201cCatholics, Jews, and the religiously-unaffiliated.\u201d I know there are a lot of reasons for those numbers, but I am pretty sure it\u2019s not a good sign for the spiritual and vocational formation of Our Young People.<\/p>\n p182: I would like to distance myself from the authors\u2019 sunshiney reading of our economic crisis. That is all.<\/p>\n p183: Young adults believe that identity-formation should happen before marriage, as vs. marriage being one of the biggest sources and shapers of identity; p185: If you change within marriage that\u2019s viewed as a threat<\/span> to the marriage, so marriage requires<\/span> you to stop changing and to have already done your identity-formation. This seems to me to be a result, in part, of divorce \u201cscripts\u201d like, \u201cHe\u2019s not the man I married.\u201d We don\u2019t hear nearly enough about how to reshape or renew a marriage when a spouse changes.<\/p>\n p186: wishful thinking and misinformation about peak fertility<\/p>\n p188-9: parental resistance to young marriage\u2013this is a major factor<\/p>\n p190: learning to be \u201cgood in bed\u201d as a \u201ctransferable skill set,\u201d rather than learning to please the specific person you love and marry<\/p>\n p194: idealization of marriage means no relationship can live up to it<\/p>\n p220: the effects of childhood\/youth mobility<\/span> on later marriage outcomes: maybe \u201cthey get used to breakups.\u201d p221: Early geographic mobility is correlated with both liberalism and a higher number of sex partners\u2013and the sex-partners correlation remains even after various common-sense things are controlled for like race, age, socioeconomic status, and parents\u2019 marital status.<\/p>\n p231: In discussing demography, the authors use this phrase: \u201cthe unintended byproducts of often rational and optimal decisions by regular people to have fewer children and a life richer in<\/span> economic success and personal experiences<\/span>.\u201d I have bolded the part that is bizarre and telling<\/a>.<\/p>\n