I’ve been blogging long enough and have witnessed enough scandals that it’s pretty hard to take my breath away anymore.

Well, “Sex Positive Week” at (Jesuit-founded, Catholic) Georgetown University did.

Folks, looking at what activities this week included, it’s pretty clear we’re not even on planet earth anymore. I can’t write about what they talked about, because I don’t want Google to blacklist my blog as pornographic.

Last year (yes, they’ve done it before) coincided with the first week of Lent. ...

Catholic News Agency notes that similar events are taking place at (Jesuit) Loyala University of Chicago and (Jesuit) Seattle University.

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, premarital sex, religion, sex, universities

posted by Eve at 3:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Sociologist and gay rights activist, Li Yinhe, continues to stun the country with her comments on hitherto taboo topics such as sex and same-sex marriages.

She has submitted, for the fifth time, to the ongoing 2010 annual sessions of the NPC and CPPCC, proposals to allow same-sex marriages, and rescind the ban on sexual orgies as a violation of the Criminal Law of the PRC. ...

In 2006, Li caused a flutter with her support for one-night stands and polyamory (multiple sexual partners). Explaining her stance, she says unmarried people have the legal right to one-night stands. And while it may be morally wrong for married couples to do so, there is nothing illegal about it. ...

She says polyamory offers important evidence for her sociological studies.

"I know of three lovers living together in harmony, in China and in other countries. They are straight and are not jealous of sharing lovers," she says, adding this proves that the human emotion of jealousy stems from social rather than physiological reasons.

Labels: China, gay marriage, polyamory, premarital sex, sex

posted by Eve at 6:55 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

More social science research findings regarding Catholic colleges and universities are being reported and discussed. The focus has been on an article in the peer-reviewed Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion called, “‘Hooking Up’ at College: Does Religion Make a Difference?”

The study concluded that Catholic women attending non-Catholic and Catholic colleges “display roughly a 72 percent increase in the odds of ‘hooking up’ compared to those women with no religious affiliation” (p. 544). The study also finds that women [Catholic and non-Catholic] at Catholic colleges and universities “are almost four times as likely to have participated in ‘hooking up’ compared to women in secular schools” (p. 544). Thus, there are results regarding Catholic women at all colleges and for all women at Catholic colleges and universities.

There are some important methodological issues to consider:

* A “hook up” is very widely defined as “when a girl and a guy get together for a physical encounter and don’ necessarily expect anything further” (p. 540). As the authors caution, “‘Hooking up’ may refer to a broad range of physical acts ranging from kissing to sexual intercourse” (p. 548). It is difficult to know just what respondents are reporting in responding “yes.” ...

* Thus, there are only interviews with 39 Catholic women attending Catholic colleges in the study. A conservative estimate of the number of Catholic women attending Catholic college at the time is 85,000. The margin of sampling error for 39 interviews generalizing to a population of 85,000 is +/- 15.7 percentage points.
* Furthermore, these large margins of error are compounded by the small number of Catholic colleges these women attended at the institutional level. ...

The authors have made no mistakes—what they have produced is rather standard practice in academic social science survey research (although I would have strongly recommended controlling for household income which is related to college enrollment and choice). They have identified a compelling statistical association in the data. Rightfully, they note the limitations of the exploratory analysis and welcome additional research. This is what is needed. Replication with a larger sample would tell us if this is an anomaly of small sample size or a real effect (for both religious identity and college affiliation).

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, hooking up, premarital sex, universities

posted by Eve at 10:10 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education. The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication. On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor. ...

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless. But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy. Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

Labels: abstinence, culture, premarital sex, sex

posted by Eve at 12:07 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.

The findings are the first clear evidence that an abstinence program could work.

"I think we've written off abstinence-only education without looking closely at the nature of the evidence," said John B. Jemmott III, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who led the federally funded study. "Our study shows this could be one approach that could be used."

The research, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, comes amid intense debate over how to reduce sexual activity, pregnancies, births and sexually transmitted diseases among children and teenagers. After falling for more than a decade, the numbers of births, pregnancies and STDs among U.S. teens have begun increasing.

The Obama administration eliminated more than $170 million in annual federal funding targeted at abstinence programs after a series of reports concluded that the approach was ineffective. Instead, the White House is launching a $114 million pregnancy prevention initiative that will fund only programs that have been shown scientifically to work -- a program the administration on Monday proposed expanding to $183 million.

Labels: abstinence, premarital sex

posted by Eve at 12:03 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

My initial response to the question--and I'm not being facetious--is the following: Stop talking about marriage when you talk about saving sex. ...

The unpleasant, unfulfilling realities of hookup culture have made abstinence more attractive. But tying a discussion about abstinence to marriage, in my opinion, is a pedagogical mistake. Most students need help in seeing their way out of hookup culture for this coming weekend, never mind being asked to see years beyond graduation to the second half of their 20s, when the average college graduate is likely to marry.

There is so much talk about sexual experimentation during the college years. Choosing abstinence is a kind of sexual experimentation. We just don't often discuss it in such terms. But college students love the idea, and, once they have thought about it for a while, are often eager to experiment with it.

...What we can change, however, is our widespread misunderstanding of how marriage happens. Christian scholar James Olthuis reminds us that entering into Christian marriage is not a light switch that's flipped on at the wedding, but rather a process in this intended order: a pledge of fidelity, reliability, integrity, and friendship between a man and a woman, a covenant between the two persons and God, a communal recognition of the marriage, and sexual consummation.

In one sense, there's no such thing as premarital sex. There is only non-marital sex and marital sex. When couples skip some of the steps, it's the job of the church to make sure the others occur, or to call non-marital sex the sacrilege it is.

Far too many Christians link sexual morality to the issuance of a legal document by a secular state. But the state does not permit marriages; it only recognizes them. The biblical writers never presumed that marriage was the domain of the state, nor did they presume that it belonged to the church. It was simply an institution among institutions.

Unfortunately, most young Christians move into their 20s without realizing that a vocational calling--to marriage or singleness--has already been given to them by a loving Creator. Instead, they imagine marriage as the capstone to the self and a wedding as its commencement, to take place when they wish it to.

Labels: abstinence, Christianity, Christianity Today, Donna Freitas, Mark Regnerus, premarital sex, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 5:39 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...They asked more than 1,300 young Minnesota adults about their most recent sexual encounters, their self-esteem and their emotional well-being. Interestingly, only about one-fifth of the subjects said their last encounter was casual. But their overall emotional status was no different than the four-fifths who said they were in committed relationships with their most recent sexual partner. ...

The researchers surveyed 1,311 young adults in Minnesota, pulled from a group they began following years ago as part of a major ongoing research study in adolescent health and nutrition. All the people in the study were sexually active and answered a series of survey questions about their last sexual encounter, depressive symptoms and self-esteem.

The researchers divided the responses by how the subjects described their most recent sexual encounter. About 25 percent said it was with a committed partner, 55 percent said it was an exclusive dating partner, 12 percent said it was with a close, but not sexually exclusive, partner, and 8 percent said it was a casual acquaintance.

That breakdown fits with other similar surveys of young adults, Eisenberg said.

But what was different is that they found no differences in reports of depression or self-esteem, regardless of gender or the type of most recent sexual encounter, she said. ...

They did find some differences among the groups. Black men, for example, were more likely than white men to describe their last sexual encounter as casual. And twice as many men as women said their last sexual encounter was casual - 29 percent compared to 14 percent.

That difference raises the obvious question: How can there be twice as many men having casual sex as women? The answer, Eisenberg said, most likely lies in cultural norms that make it more acceptable for men to describe their sexual encounters as casual.

"Young women have more of a tendency to characterize it as more special than, perhaps, the man did," she said.

Labels: committed relationships, gender differences, premarital sex, sex, universities

posted by Eve at 2:20 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Counselors and those who study dating, marriage and divorce say plenty of couples get married when they shouldn't. And their numbers may be increasing, because more couples are casually living together, which can complicate decisions about whether to marry, says Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver.

Stanley says his research on couples who cohabit before marriage has found that "some of those wouldn't have married if they hadn't been living together."

"People have committed themselves before talking about the commitment to the future, and that can get you walking down the aisle not being sure that's the right thing, or what you want to do," he says.

Stories of people entering marriages they felt were doomed from the start intrigued Carl Weisman of Torrance, Calif., whose book, So Why Have You Never Been Married? 10 Insights Into Why He Hasn't Wed, arrived last year. He says a divorced woman he knows said something he thought was quite profound: "I didn't listen to my inner voice. I knew I was going to divorce him before I even married him." That led Weisman to thinking about others who went into a marriage knowing it wouldn't last. But he couldn't find any academic research on the subject.

So Weisman, 50, who recently married for the first time, surveyed 1,036 people across the country and conducted in-depth interviews with dozens more for his new book, Serious Doubts: Why People Marry When They Know It Won't Last.

Those surveyed had one thing in common: "They all ignored their inner voice," he says. "They knew it wasn't going to last." ...

Donahue, who cohabited before her 11-year marriage (which ended five years ago), says she didn't heed some early signals, including religious differences. Her parents also didn't approve of their living together without being married, which Donahue says encouraged her to wed. "I was thinking that we were in love and we're going to make it work. I believed in this whole fairy-tale thing on marriage."

Other reasons for proceeding in the face of doubts may also sound familiar – like pregnancy.

That's why Neumann, 26, a non-profit market researcher from Chicago, says she went ahead with it. "I had some concerns in the relationship, but I thought if I got married, we would grow together," she says. "I was 18 at the time and thought it would all work out in the end."

Others may think a partner is too good a catch to pass up – even though there's no spark.

Rasmussen, 51, an office manager in Boise, says she tried to convince herself that she and her second husband were a good match. They enjoyed many of the same activities, including travel. She had financial resources, yet he offered to help her with her kids' college expenses.

She wasn't head over heels, but he was attractive and generous, so Rasmussen told herself "You can learn to love this guy."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Marriage, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Eve at 5:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

It's no secret to students that coed dorms are more fun than same-sex dorms. But they can also fuel very unhealthy behavior that might otherwise be moderated.

A new study finds university students in coed housing are 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week. And no surprise, they're also likely to have more sexual partners, the study found. Also, pornography use was higher among students in coed dorms.

Some 90 percent of U.S. college dorms are now coed. ...

In light of the finding, the natural question is whether a selection effect is in play. For example, do partiers and teetotalers sort themselves out in the housing application process?

That doesn't appear to be the case, the researchers said in a statement today. College housing offices generally assume students prefer coed housing and give them the option to "opt out" if single-gender housing is available. Very few exercise that option.

"Most of the students who live in gender-specific housing did not request to be there; they were placed there by the university," said Brian Willoughby, lead author of the study. Willoughby recently earned a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and returned to BYU as a visiting professor.

A wealth of information on the study participants allowed the researchers to examine other factors that could predict binge drinking. Their statistical analysis took into account the effects of age, gender, religiosity, personality and relationship status.

"When we first identified these differences with binge drinking, we felt certain that they would be explained by selection effects," Willoughby said. "But as we examined the data further we found that the differences remained."

Labels: premarital sex, sex, universities

posted by Eve at 3:31 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Most of us know people who are in love, plan to marry and currently live together. It’s sort of the new premarital counseling program. I visited a church out West that had a “pre-marriage” ceremony for a couple living together. No license. No wedding dress. Just a prayer of blessing to hold them over until the couple walked down the aisle—a kind of marital “appetizer,” I guess. I asked the pastor why they did it. He said, “The couple believes they are married in the eyes of the Lord, and we just wanted them to feel affirmation in our community.”

Labels: cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

posted by Eve at 4:45 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births. By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and 5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. …

Most of the state and private programs responding to nonmarital births over the last 40 years have poured their energies into “taking the baby out” of the sexual encounter via birth control. Abstinence programs, which are less common, try to teach young people how to avoid nonmarital sexual involvement. “Big-picture” efforts have aimed to boost young people’s educational and job attainments, in order to steer them toward a different future. While occasionally, policy experts have referenced the need to help young people think more healthfully about the meaning of their lives, including about the importance of their heterosexual relationships, no extensive efforts have ever been directed to addressing the intertwined issues I have surfaced above. For brevity’s sake, I would say these issues might be identified as: the moral weight of heterosexual relations; the public nature of heterosexual relations; the intrinsically parental orientation of heterosexual relations, and the crisis of fatherhood.

Also for brevity’s sake, as well as to get at the conceptual nub of my proposals, I would suggest that any response to these issues must “put the baby back into sex.” By this I mean that men and women need to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of heterosexual relations’ orientation to the procreation of children – helpless creatures who require decades of intensive labor, a lifetime of interaction, and who apparently come into the world with an inbuilt desire to remain connected to both their father and their mother. No matter the heights and depths of couples’ romantic aspirations and experiences, these can never be divorced from the crucial reality that heterosexual relations are procreative. The law has always known this. Most churches did or still do. And now couples must acknowledge it too, with help from every possible governmental, religious and other social institution. Once the baby is re-introduced into couples’ sexual consciousness, they can better understand that nonmarital sex has its own intrinsically public significance; the door is also opened for women and men to understand the “giftedness” of the other precisely in connection with procreation. They might further be open to the realization that men and women were literally “meant for each other,” meant for “communion,” and that what they can do together is more than the sum of its parts. This is a fundamental approach to helping men and women internalize a view of one another that is more respectful, more elevated, than what obtains today, especially among the most disadvantaged. Motherhood and fatherhood have not lost their fan base in these communities; were each sex to be helped to see the other, beginning in adolescence, as potential mothers and fathers, leaders of their children, of the next generation, and of their community, this might help to transcend current gender mistrustful stereotypes. Tantalizing indications of the possible beneficial effects upon young men and women of learning about their mutual procreative capabilities have come from “fertility awareness” programs like TeenStar.[6]

Who might act on the goal of “putting the baby back into sex”? And how might they proceed? The most likely actors are of course families themselves, churches and governments.

Labels: babies, culture, Helen Alvare, heterosexual couples, out-of-wedlock births, pregnancy, premarital sex

posted by Imapp Staff at 1:23 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The Church of England is offering couples a two-for-one service - marriage for them and baptisms for their children.

The church says it is recognizing the changing reality of British families. Statistics show that 44 per cent of children in Britain are born to unmarried women. ...

The church said it was responding to demand, but still believed the best place for sex was within marriage.

Labels: Church of England, culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, religion, sex, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 7:21 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A National Health Service leaflet is advising school pupils that they have a “right” to an enjoyable sex life and that regular intercourse can be good for their cardiovascular health.

The advice appears in guidance circulated to parents, teachers and youth workers, and is intended to update sex education by telling pupils about the benefits of sexual pleasure. For too long, say its authors, experts have concentrated on the need for “safe sex” and loving relationships while ignoring the main reason that many people have sex, that is, for enjoyment.

The document, called Pleasure, has been drawn up by NHS Sheffield, although it is also being circulated outside the city.

Alongside the slogan “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”, it says: “Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes’ physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?”

Labels: adolescence, premarital sex, sex, sex education, United Kingdom

posted by Imapp Staff at 7:17 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The hookup -- that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students — is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating.

It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University.

Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren't necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.

"The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening," Bogle says. "In the hookup era, something sexual happens, even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating."

Labels: premarital sex, sex

posted by Eve at 10:52 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A battle over sex education is under way in Sonoma County, pitting a longtime abstinence-only group against California Department of Education officials who say the group breaks state law when it teaches in the classroom.

Among the players in the unfolding debate are the ACLU of Northern California, the California Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Free to Be, a Sonoma County group that has been promoting abstinence until marriage for 17 years. ...

“The law specifically requires that all elements of sex education be balanced and accurate,” said Phyllida Burlingame, sex education policy director for the ACLU of Northern California, which has worked for months to keep Free to Be from giving presentations in public schools.

“Students (need to) receive a consistent message that is based on science, that includes accurate, effective information,” she said.

Free to Be was established in 1992 in association with Catholic Charities as an abstinence-until-marriage outreach program relying heavily on teen presenters. Free to Be ended the affiliation with Catholic Charities approximately 18 months ago, said executive director and founder Sue Bisbee.

As far back as 2000, Free to Be has received annual federal funding for its abstinence program, which helps train teen speakers to spread the word about waiting until marriage before having sex, as well as living drug free and making what it describes as “healthy choices.”

In 2007, the group received approximately $540,000 in federal funding from the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to federal tax forms filled out by the nonprofit.

To receive that money, groups must abide by federal guidelines that include teaching “that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity . . . that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects . . . that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society.”

“Those guidelines are in direct conflict with California education code,” said Sharla Smith, HIV/STD prevention education consultant for the Department of Education.

“California never took the federal abstinence-only-until-marriage money and certain groups did and Free to Be is one of them. They can do that education — they can’t do that education in California’s public schools.”

Not so, said Bisbee.

“What the department of education seems to be saying is that anyone who goes in has to thoroughly cover all issues, but that is not what the ed code says,” she said. “Public Health or Planned Parenthood goes in and does the contraception piece, United Against Sexual Assault goes in and does the sexual violence piece. There are many options for them. . . . We are a piece of the pie that teens need to hear.”

Labels: abstinence, California, contraception, culture, premarital sex, schools, sex education

posted by Eve at 4:19 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

There’s no doubt that Yalies are interested in sex. From conspicuously empty plastic baggies hanging in freshman entryways to Porn in the ‘Morn’s overflowing enrollment, signs abound that Yalies want to learn about it, watch it and even do it. Still, while drunken hook-ups and steamy relationships may be fodder for salacious Sunday brunch conversations, pregnancy, typically, is not.

But despite its lack of visibility, pregnancy is far from a non-issue on campus.

In fact, according to a News poll sent to 2,000 Yale undergraduates last week, one in three of the 281 female respondents reported having used Plan B at least once to prevent a possible pregnancy during their time at Yale. In addition, 20 percent of female respondents reported having believed they were pregnant at some point, while five students indicated that they had actually been pregnant. (Plan B is an emergency contraceptive that reduces the chance of pregnancy by 89 percent if taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sexual intercourse or contraceptive failure. Unlike the abortion pill, RU-486, it does not affect an existing pregnancy.)

Concerns about pregnancy are perhaps unsurprising, considering that, of the 55 percent of respondents who indicated they had previously had or were currently having heterosexual sex, nearly 20 percent said they either used ‘the pull-out method’ or no form of contraception at all.

Meanwhile, the most widely used form of contraception among the poll’s respondents was condoms, at 45 percent. Last year, Yale University Health Services provided 10,000 of them to undergraduates, said James Perlotto, chief of student medicine at YUHS.

Still, in actual use, condoms fail 11 percent of the time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is potentially 11 pregnant Yalies for every 100 who only use condoms to protect against pregnancy.

So what’s a girl to do if contraception fails, if she has unprotected sex — or if she winds up pregnant? ...

But even if Plan B is used, it is not 100 percent effective. Of the poll’s 281 female respondents, five reported they had gotten pregnant while at Yale — three of whom reported that they had terminated the pregnancy.

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, pregnancy, premarital sex, sex

posted by Eve at 4:55 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT