English law no longer has a clear concept of marriage, a leading family lawyer has said.

Baroness Deech, the chairman of the Bar Standards Board, also believes that human rights law could soon be used to legalise full homosexual marriage.

She said the traditional Christian image of a lifelong union of man and woman is no longer accurate because of the changing nature of relationships and the introduction of legal rights for same-sex couples.

Lady Deech said she believes that human rights law may soon rule that it is discriminatory to ban homosexuals from marrying in the same way that heterosexual couples do.

But she added that some differences between civil partnerships and marriages should be preserved, and criticised recent Labour laws that allow same-sex couples to be named on birth certificates with no mention of a father.

Labels: civil unions, Fathers, gay marriage, gender, Marriage, United Kingdom

posted by Imapp Staff at 11:36 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

They weren't looking to make a political statement or to be pioneers of gender liberation. Each just wanted a familiar, decent roommate rather than a stranger after their original roommates left to study abroad.

That's how Pitzer College sophomores Kayla Eland, female, and Lindon Pronto, male, began sharing a room this semester on Holden Hall's second floor. They are not a couple and neither is gay. They are just compatible roommates in a new, sometimes controversial, dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing that is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation. ...

Although the number of participants remains small, gender-neutral housing has gained attention as the final step in the integration of student housing.

In the 1970s, many U.S. colleges moved from having only single-sex dormitories to providing coed residence halls, with male and female students typically housed on alternating floors or wings. Then came coed hallways and bathrooms, further shocking traditionalists. Now, some colleges allow undergraduates of opposite sexes to share a room.

Pitzer, which began its program in the fall of 2008, is among about 50 U.S. schools with the housing choice, according to Jeffrey Chang, who co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign in 2006 to encourage gender-mixed rooms. Participating schools include UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, Haverford, Wesleyan and the University of Michigan.

College officials say the movement began mainly as a way to accommodate gay, bisexual and transgender students who may feel more comfortable living with a member of the opposite sex. Most schools say they discourage couples from participating, citing emotional and logistical problems of breakups. Officials say most heterosexuals in the programs are platonic friends. ...

Parents cannot veto such a decision at Harvey Mudd, but Gerbick asks students to discuss it with their families ahead of time. He also asks applicants whether they are romantically involved; all of this year's participants said no. But if they were, the school could not forbid them from rooming together.

"If we are going into a post-gender world, then the regulation of private behavior is just not practical," he said.

Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, universities

posted by Eve at 4:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Norrie May-Welby, 48, was born a man but had a sex change operation in 1990, at the age of 28.

After becoming unhappy as a woman, May-Welby decided to become a “neuter”. The 48-year-old is now officially recognised as a person of no specific gender. ...

The UK’s Gender Trust welcomed the case. A spokesman said: “Many people like the idea of being genderless.”

Labels: culture, gender, transgender issues, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 3:57 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students. ...

Students interviewed here said they believed their mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew behavior.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Labels: culture, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, men, universities, women

posted by Eve at 11:22 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Rachel Downtain is a telecommunications project manager who says her friends would describe her as tall, slender, fit and active. Not someone you'd think would fail to find a mate. Yet, of late, Ms. Downtain has been sifting through sperm-donor Web sites. This is not her first choice for how to start a family, but at 35 she says she's quickly running out of options.

Ms. Downtain's story should sound familiar. In recent months the spike in college-educated women deciding to have a husbandless family has become a magazine staple. The New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted a cover story to the issue. There's been a 145% rise in unmarried births among college-educated women since 1980, more than twice the increase in such births among women without college educations. That's just births; adoptions are another outlet for women seeking families on their own. But there's a largely unexplored part to this story: Why is this happening?

Part of the answer is found in a Pew Research Center report released this week: A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with "some college" are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970. ...

There's no single answer to the "why" question, but social scientists agree that the education mismatch Ms. Downtain experiences with men is a significant player behind the increase in college-educated women choosing single motherhood.

Labels: gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, women

posted by Eve at 10:34 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Stand on the front lines of the recession, as therapist Erica Karlinsky has, and the view for married couples isn't rosy.

Karlinsky, a Lake Mary, Fla., psychologist, now spends a lot of her time counseling men who've lost their jobs -- or wives who are dealing with an unemployed husband who won't get off the sofa or won't stop crying.

The stress of job losses is impacting families from all backgrounds, but perhaps none are more affected than blue-collar families, who have been hit hard by the recession, according to a new report from the National Marriage Project.

And experts worry that when the recession ends and the economy improves, the divorce rate will spike again -- with many of the divorces concentrated among the working class. That may further widen what sociologists call the nation's "divorce divide" -- a growing gap between the divorce rates of working-class Americans and college-educated Americans.

"Working-class couples are already vulnerable," said Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. "The recession is probably shaping up to be one more factor driving working-class marriages down."

Men have borne the brunt of this recession, accounting for 75 percent of the job losses, according to the report, titled, "The State of Our Unions, Marriage in America 2009." And blue-collar men have been hit hard. In September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 4.9 percent of college-educated women and 5 percent of college-educated men were unemployed, while 8.6 percent of women with a high-school diploma and 11.1 percent of men with a high-school diploma had lost their jobs.

For those men particularly, the recession has been devastating.

Labels: divorce, economics, gender, Marriage, men

posted by Eve at 10:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The State of Our Unions monitors the current health of marriage and family life in America. Produced annually, it is a joint publication of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

The 2009 State of Our Unions makes clear that money matters for contemporary American marriages. In particular, this edition of The State of Our Unions answers the following questions:

* How is the Great Recession affecting the institution of marriage, as measured by changes in marriage and divorce rates in the U.S.?
* How do family finances—especially credit card debt and family assets—shape the quality and stability of contemporary married life in America?
* What do evolutionary psychology and the contemporary study of finance have to tell us about the best division of financial labor for husbands and wives?
* Is the Great Recession likely to foster egalitarian relationships between husbands and wives?

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, gender, gender differences, Marriage, National Marriage Project

posted by Eve at 4:59 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

If you're a heterosexual man, you've done at least one thing today purely intended to woo the ladies. The level of effort ranges from merely remembering to shower to training to be an astronaut, but the effort is there.

But it turns out many of the most important things you do to attract the opposite sex have nothing to do with skill.

#6. Be Effeminate.

Labels: contraception, gender, heterosexual couples, sex

posted by Eve at 9:30 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...These are the kinds of questions asked by anxious parents and, increasingly, academic researchers. Boyhood studies—virtually unheard of a few years ago—has taken off, with a shelf full of books already published, more on the way, and a new journal devoted to the subject. Much of the focus so far has been on boys falling behind academically, paired with the notion that school is not conducive to the way boys learn. What motivates boys, the argument goes, is different from what motivates girls, and society should adjust accordingly.

Not everyone buys the boy talk. Some critics, in particular the American Association of University Women, contend that much of what passes for research about boyhood only reinforces stereotypes and arrives at simplistic conclusions: Boys are competitive! Boys like action! Boys hate books! They argue that this line of thinking miscasts boys as victims and ignores the very real problems faced by girls.

But while this debate is far from settled, the field has expanded to include how marketers target boys, the nature of boys' friendships, and a host of deeper, more philosophical issues, all of which can be boiled down, more or less, to a single question: Just what are boys, anyway?

Labels: adolescence, boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, gender differences

posted by Eve at 4:05 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, divorce, gay marriage, gender, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 12:01 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...It is striking, then, how comparatively rarely children are mentioned as an argument in favor of gay marriage. The issue is framed as a debate over equality and justice, of personal freedom and the relation of church and state, not about what is good for kids.

That’s partly because, until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.

This growth, coupled with the passage of time, means there is a large cohort of children who are now old enough to yield solid data. And the portrait emerging tells us something about the effects of gay parenting. It also contains lessons for all parents. ...

In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families. ...

Heterosexual couples might want to pay attention to these results. While the gay-marriage debate is playing out on the public stage, a more private debate is taking place in kitchens and bedrooms over who does what in a heterosexual marriage (takes out the trash, spends more time with the kids, feels free to head out with their friends for a beer). The philosophical underpinnings of both conversations — gay marriage and equality in parenting — are similar, in that both focus on equality for adults (in the case of heterosexuals, mostly wives). But even if parents who seek parity do so for their own sanity and in pursuit of their own ideals, might it not also be better for their children?

Labels: culture, gay parenting, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:15 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

I’ve been mulling over a recent news story from Australia that someone sent to me. It’s a rather complicated tale.

Ms. Fabian and Ms. Halifax (they only give last names in the story) were in a relationship for about seven years. During that time, each of them gave birth to a child. Ms. Halifax used sperm from a family friend, identified as Mr. Dalton. That child is now seven. Ms. Fabian used sperm from an anonymous donor. That child, a girl, is the subject of the litigation. She is now three.

The two women separated when the daughter was 20 months old. At the time they lived in Queensland, but at least Ms. Fabian, and perhaps both, were from New South Wales. Ms. Fabian now wants to return to New South Wales.

Her request to move is being opposed not only by her former partner, Ms. Halifax, but also by a gay male couple. According to the newspaper story, this couple “cannot be named,” but one of them is apparently the donor for the other child, which would mean he is Mr. Dalton. An Australian court has determined that she should not move while the requests of the various parties are considered. ...

I cannot help but contrast this with the evidence women asserting claims to be de facto parents produce. You can find at least half-a-dozen cases that I’ve discussed on the blog–some where the women won and some where the women lost. But win or lose, the evidence offered by the women I’m thinking of is qualitatively different. It’s far more about the hands-on care offered than about the public acknowledgement.

In truth, it seems to me that the men are claiming rights on a basis akin to holding out. Perhaps that is not so surprising. If you go back and read that earlier post (and the ones that follow) you will see this is a historically male path to parenthood. It makes me wonder if this legacy of gendered family law will find its way into the legal regulation of decidedly modern families.

Labels: Australia, de facto parenting, Fathers, gender, gender differences, Julie Shapiro, motherhood

posted by Eve at 3:45 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: culture, gender, sex

posted by Eve at 10:19 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Meet Mitch McCabe, a filmmaker who dives deep into the allure of the anti-aging industry in Youth Knows No Pain. She attempts to answer the question: why are we so obsessed with turning back the clock?

The confessional-style documentary, which premiered on HBO last night (schedule of upcoming screenings can be found here) follows McCabe (who narrates the film) n her quest to uncover why so many people will subject themselves to injections, surgeries, and peels to regain the appearance of youth. It is a siren song that McCabe is well aware of: At the age of 38, she reveals she has been scrutinizing her body ever since she came across her father's slides from his plastic surgery practice. ...

I found it amazing to watch her dollar costs unfold. McCabe, a smart woman who acknowledges up front that she is not making a wise decision, still cops to being close to $70,000 in debt, makes about $30,000 a year as a temp, yet finds $200 every six weeks to keep her gray hairs at bay.

As the viewer is reeling from the cost, McCabe says, "I may drop my health care coverage, but I'd never stop covering my gray. It may be insane, but it's the truth." ...

Youth Knows No Pain was engrossing, depressing, and thought-provoking, made even more poignant by the candid self-examination of its creator. After chronicling her memories of her father and her longtime fascination with mortality, she ends the film with an astonishing admission: after all that she's seen during filming the documentary, McCabe decided to take the plunge and start on injectables like Botox herself.

"What about spirituality? Inner peace?...Well, that didn't work." After struggling to make sense of why women subject themselves to beauty treatments instead of aging gracefully, she succumbs to the promises of younger looking skin and a small chance at cheating time.

Labels: culture, gender

posted by Eve at 5:09 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Proposition 8

posted by Eve at 3:20 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

What's in a name? Apparently a lot, especially if it's your last name.

About 70% of Americans agree, either somewhat or strongly, that it's beneficial for women to take her husband's last name when they marry, while 29% say it's better for women to keep their own names, finds a study being presented today at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco.

Researchers from Indiana University and the University of Utah asked about 815 people a combination of multiple choice and open-ended questions to come up with the findings. ...

Hamilton says that about half of respondents went so far as to say that the government should mandate women to change their names when they marry, a finding she called "really interesting," considering typical attitudes towards government intervention. "Americans tend to be very cautious when it comes to state intervention in family life," she says.

Labels: culture, gender, gender differences, Marriage

posted by Eve at 1:30 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...So I'm all for resisting conformity. I just get so very sick of seeing the equation of marriage with conformity.

Do you actually think the dominant culture values marriage? It values heterosexual couplings, and maybe weddings, to the extent that they're an excuse to buy stuff. But the actual work of growing in harmony with another person, of shaping your lives to be a joint project of service to one another and the community, is vastly undersold. The joy of an ever-deepening connection that involves two people's bodies as much as their souls is nearly invisible in the mainstream media.

Instead, we're largely served a glamorized picture of singleness as perpetual youth, and promiscuity as self-empowerment. We see this in the adult entertainment that most men consume, and in TV series that continually break up their characters' romances in order to keep the storyline moving forward without pushing the characters to evolve beyond our initial impression of them. ...

Instead of this dead-end debate over whether gay marriage is assimilationist, let's work to make everyone's marriage a little more queer. There's no necessary association between a lifetime commitment to your true love and a retreat into apolitical consumer contentment. Think about gender: which traditional roles suit you, and which feel confining? Can your partner help you appreciate all the roles you play?

Labels: gay marriage, gender, Marriage

posted by Eve at 8:38 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Whatever happened to the Muse? She was once the female figure -- deity, Platonic ideal, mistress, lover, wife -- whom poets and painters called upon for inspiration. Thus Homer in the Odyssey, the West's first great work of literary art: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, of twists and turns driven time and again off course." For hundreds of years, in one form or another, the Muse's blessing and support were often essential to the creation of art.

Poets stopped invoking the muse centuries ago -- eventually turning instead to caffeine, alcohol and amphetamines -- but painters, musicians, and even choreographers have celebrated their actual female inspirers in their work up until recent times. And now, we learn, having a muse isn't a benefit restricted to artists.

According to a recently opened exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion," the muse lives on as the fashion model who inspires masses of women to dress in ways that capture the spirit of the age. With all due respect to the Met's curators -- and to the alluring fashion photographs that now grace the museum's walls -- such a definition of the muse would have made traditional muses run for the sacred hills.

Labels: culture, gender

posted by Eve at 4:35 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Glancing around her classes at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis and in the stands at basketball games, sophomore Velma Maclin has noticed something odd. Most of the so-called "Big Men on Campus" are women.

"The ladies pretty much run the yard," said Maclin. Several male friends recently got discouraged and dropped out. She has little sympathy. She works the overnight shift at FedEx Corp. and says if she can stay in school, they can, too.

Women have probably outnumbered men at HBCUs for most of their history, but the proportion has been gradually rising, the AP found — from 53% in 1976 to about 61% the last few years.

On 17 HBCU campuses there are two women for every man. At a few, the ratio is three-to-one.

"I don't think any of us have put our finger on exactly why this seems to be exacerbating," said Norman Francis, the longtime president of Xavier.

It sounds like easy living for men at HBCUs, and some joke about the advantages.

"You have so many beautiful women around you (that) you get to see and so many to pick from. The net is real wide," laughed Eric Jefferson, a senior at North Carolina Central University in Durham, which is two-thirds women.

But while HBCU women are doing relatively well, many note the lack of gender diversity in their classes. The gender gap also weighs heavily on social life.

Labels: gender

posted by Eve at 12:50 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

AT FIRST GLANCE, the Web site SeekingArrangement.com seems like any other dating site. Most of the men are looking for fit, sexy women, and most of the women want nice guys who can make them smile and laugh. But if eHarmony or Match.com is a chatty social mixer, Seeking Arrangement is a down-and-dirty marketplace where older moneyed men and cute young women engage in brutally frank transactions. They’re not searching for longtime soul mates; they want no-strings-attached “arrangements” that trade in society’s most valued currencies: wealth, youth and beauty. In the cheesy lexicon of the site, they are “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies.” ...

Consider B. K., a fit finance executive in his early 40s, who, last October, began “dating” a 20-year-old engineering major at a college 90 minutes from his house. Like nearly half the sugar daddies on Seeking Arrangement, B. K. is married. (Neither B. K. nor any other user of the site would allow full names to be published — certain the revelation would infuriate wives or boyfriends, shock colleagues and repel friends or family — and agreed to use only their first names, nicknames or initials.) B. K. and his wife opted against separation, for the sake of the kids, and for now, they have a policy — at least in his mind — of don’t ask, don’t tell. Between pangs of guilt about cheating, B. K. views his secret dallying as a safety valve, letting him feel desired so he can return home and appreciate the many things he loves about his wife, even if they don’t include giving him the attention he wants. ...

Other women on the site would happily forfeit conspicuous prizes and go for the cash instead, especially for tuition. One woman’s profile says, “That you can help me get through school and achieve financial stability through support and mentoring is more important than wowing me with diamonds and Prada.” In fact, Seeking Arrangement pays to have its ads pop up on search engines whenever someone types in “student loan,” “tuition help,” “college support” or “help with rent.” Lola was one of many to stumble on the site that way, when — behind on her rent and tuition and down to one meal a day — she Googled “student loan.” What popped up was hardly what she expected, but she was willing to try almost anything to stay in school.

Labels: adultery, culture, gender

posted by Eve at 9:16 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A couple's sexual orientation determines whether or not they prefer to adopt a boy or a girl. Gay men are more likely to have a gender preference for their adopted child whereas heterosexual men are the least likely. What's more, couples in heterosexual relationships are more likely to prefer girls than people in same-gender relationships, according to Dr. Abbie Goldberg from Clark University in the US. ...

Among those who expressed a preference, gay men were the most likely to have a preference and heterosexual men were the least likely. Couples in heterosexual relationships were less likely to prefer boys than couples in same-gender relationships.

The study participants provided a range of reasons for their preferences for girls. The most common reason among heterosexual women was their inexplicable desire for a daughter, whereas heterosexual men most frequently listed a combination of their inexplicable desire to have a girl, their ideas about father-daughter relationships and their perceived characteristics of girls. Men felt girls would be easier to bring up, and more interesting and complex than boys, and less physically challenging than boys. Lesbians tended to focus on their perceived inability to socialize a child of the opposite gender, and gay men most frequently cited concerns about boys being more likely to encounter harassment than girls.

The most common reason for preferring boys among heterosexual women was an inexplicable desire for a son, whereas heterosexual men's preference for a son reflected patriarchal norms, including keeping the family name going and gender identity considerations i.e. their own masculine interests. When explaining their preference for a boy, lesbians most frequently mentioned their own atypical gender identities, including the fact that their own interests tended to be more masculine and tomboyish, whereas gay men most often highlighted that they felt more confident about their ability to raise and socialize boys.

Labels: adoption, gay/straight differences, gender

posted by Eve at 4:31 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

From the time that Devin Alston-Smith became involved in George Washington University’s Zeta Phi Beta sorority, he made it clear that he was not your typical sorority sister. In spring 2008, Alston-Smith began what Zetas refer to as the “intake process.” He knew his sisters would have a lot to take in: He asked them to call him Devin instead of his legal name, Chanise. He told them he preferred male pronouns—”he” and “his” instead of “she” and “her.” At sorority events, he wore a button-down shirt and tie and a fedora over his long dreadlocked hair. ...

Alston-Smith’s place in Zeta Phi Beta is protected by a peculiar nexus of federal, District, and GW code. Federal law and GW’s Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities allow social fraternal organizations to discriminate on the basis of sex. The D.C. Human Rights Act, however, prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity. So while a female-born trans student, like Alston-Smith, could conceivably be legally barred from participating in an all-male fraternity, the law protects him against discrimination from a female sorority—even though his gender identity is incongruous with the traditional definition of “sisterhood.”

Labels: gender, transgender issues

posted by Eve at 10:02 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT