sex

The Crawler couldn’t resist the Wall Street Journal headline from yesterday’s paper: “The Sex-Housework Link: Housework Pays Off Between the Sheets.” The WSJ article begins…

Housework may seem like the ultimate romance-killer. But guess what?

A new study shows that for husbands and wives alike, the more housework you do, the more often you are likely to have sex with your spouse.

Earlier studies have hinted at this connection for men; the sight of a husband mopping the floor or doing dishes sparks affection in the hearts of many wives. But the more-housework-equals-more-sex link for wives, documented in a study of 6,877 married couples published online recently in the Journal of Family Issues, is a surprise.

But whoever thought vacuuming was sexy?

But for some high achievers who take a “work hard, play hard” approach to life, researchers say, working hard in one domain produces more energy for others. The study also found a correlation between hours spent on paid work and the frequency of sex in marriage.

“Rather than compromise their sex life” because of time demands at work or at home, “this group of go-getters seems to make sex a priority,” says Constance Gager, lead researcher and an assistant professor of family and child studies at Montclair State University, Montclair, N.J. The study doesn’t measure what proportion of spouses fall into this group, but she believes “they are on the leading edge of couples we expect to see more of in the future.”

More from the authors, one of whom is a sociologist…

Dr. Gager and her co-author, Scott Yabiku, associate professor of sociology at Arizona State University, Tempe, controlled the results for “gender ideology” and found the housework-sex link remained true, regardless of people’s views on roles. Results from the data, taken from the National Survey of Families and Households, were controlled for age, health, duration of couple’s relationship, religion, income, education and marital satisfaction.

The study defined housework as nine chores: cleaning, preparing meals, washing dishes, washing and ironing clothes, driving family members around, shopping, yard work, maintaining cars and paying bills. Wives in the study spent an average 41.8 hours a week on these tasks, compared with 23.4 hours for husbands—a split that is fairly typical, and often regarded by wives as unfair. However, the effects of any fairness concerns among wives weren’t measured in this study.

Outside the home, husbands spent an average 33.8 hours a week on paid work, compared with 19.7 hours for wives. Couples reported having sex 82.7 times a year on average, or 1.6 times a week, about the same as in other studies.

After a long national decline in time spent on housework, the study joins a growing body of research on how chores shape the dynamics of marriage. A survey of 2,020 U.S. adults placed “sharing household chores” as the third most important factor in a successful marriage, behind faithfulness and a happy sexual relationship, says the nonprofit Pew Research Center. That’s a sharp increase; 72% of respondents gave high importance to housework, up from 47% in a comparable study in 1990. In respondents’ minds, housework outranked even such necessities as adequate income and good housing, Pew says.

The article also links to another sociological study:

A 2003 study by Scott Coltrane, a sociology professor at the University of California, Riverside, linked fathers’ housework to more feelings of warmth and affection in their wives. And a survey of 288 husbands, reported in Neil Chethik’s 2006 book “VoiceMale,” linked a wife’s satisfaction with the division of household duties with her husband’s satisfaction with their sex life.

One husband, Mr. Chethik says in an interview, reported that his wife enjoyed flowers or a candlelit dinner out; but “if he wants to be sure of a romantic evening, he goes for the vacuum cleaner.”

Read more.

The San Jose Mercury News ran a story this weekend about how women’s role in sex crimes has resurfaced as an issue. Citing a handful of recent crimes in which women have played significant parts, the article delves into women’s roles in the crimes and the leniency they sometimes receive in the courtroom.

Charlene Williams of Sacramento lured six teenage girls and four young adults to their deaths as her husband demanded the perfect “sex slave.”

Michelle Lyn Michaud, also of Sacramento, customized curling irons to help her boyfriend torture and murder a 22-year-old student abducted from a Pleasanton street.

In Utah, Wanda Eileen Barzee was accused of helping her husband kidnap 14-year old Elizabeth Smart at knifepoint from her Salt Lake City bedroom so that he could secure another “wife.”

Now along comes Nancy Garrido of the Bay Area. Like the others, Garrido is accused of teaming up with a male partner — in Garrido’s case, her husband of nearly three decades — and allegedly committing unthinkable crimes against other women and children.

The arrests Aug. 27 of Nancy and Phillip Garrido revealed a stunning story about the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard, snatched off the street near her home in Meyers. Authorities say Jaycee, now 29, had been living for 18 years in the Garridos’ backyard near Antioch and is the mother of two children fathered by Phillip Garrido.

While attention focuses on Phillip Garrido’s history of sexual assault, his reduced prison term and evasion of parole oversight, the case also raises haunting questions about what role his wife may have played.

The article draws upon sociological commentary from Jack Levin…

One noted criminologist said he believes that some female offenders actually have benefited by the persistent notion that women could not possibly be the leaders — especially in a sex crime.

“The court typically throws the book at the man, believing that he was the instigator — that he initiated the attack. So he’ll get the death penalty,” said Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University in Boston.

“His female companion is considered an accomplice who went along for the love of her man. She gets a much lighter sentence.”

That view is not always accurate, said Levin, an expert in serial murder and hate crimes.

In one case in Canada, he said, a woman caught up in a rape and murder case involving teenage victims testified against her husband in exchange for leniency.

In a move decried in Canada as the “Deal With the Devil,” Karla Homolka got a 12-year sentence in 1993 for manslaughter in the murders of two Ontario teens.

Motivations vary widely

She is now believed to be living in Paris, Levin said. Her former husband, Paul Bernardo, was sentenced to life in prison in Canada, which does not have the death penalty.

But after the deal was struck, Levin said, videotapes showing the rape and torture of the schoolgirls revealed Karla Homolka was a willing participant.

“She was seen enjoying herself and participating fully,” he said. “Karla Homolka was just as guilty as her husband.”

But women in these types of cases can also fall into the category of being so passive they “just go along with the plan,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

He said besides women who are battered or psychologically controlled, some are simply “low-functioning” and dependent on their mates.

“It’s not like there’s a single profile,” he said.

Read more.

Yesterday Newsweek ran a story entitled “Like A Virgin No More: MySpace Generation Brides Go For Sexy, Not Virginal,” and explored “why modern brides are opting for racy gowns, wild bachelorette parties and sexy Maxim-style pre-wedding photo shoots.”

Newsweek reports:

Two decades ago, when young girls wondered how brides were supposed to look and behave, they’d most likely conclude—with some prompting from Cinderella—that on their big day they’d be a princess. They’d be blushing, virginal and wrapped from head to toe in tulle and lace.

So why is it that these days, some brides seem to be taking their cues more from Jessica Rabbit than Cinderella? More vamp than virgin, they’re having bachelorette parties that are as raunchy as their fiancés’ sendoffs. They’re selecting cleavage- or lower-back-baring bridal gowns that might get a gasp from conservative relatives. “A big-selling style is a sheer lace corset midriff,” says Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine. “It’s clearly meant to look like you’re seeing through someone’s shirt.” And today’s wife-to-be is hiring photographers for what are called “boudoir shoots,” where they pose Maxim magazine-style in lingerie or nothing at all and give the prints to their grooms—a trend that Bratten says began about three years ago. “It’s the ultimate display of freedom and empowerment,” says Bee-Bee Kim, the founder of Weddingbee.com, a wedding-planning site that gets more than a million unique visitors a month.

What is going on here? Lucky for us, they consult several sociologists…

Newsweek’s assessment?

While most sociologists agree that women admitting to lust and wanting to be sexually empowered is a good thing, they see a problem with making exhibitionism the centerpiece of the wedding ceremony: it might crowd out other aspects of the marriage. “You’re highlighting what should just be a piece of the relationship,” says Stephanie Coontz, a social historian and the author ofMarriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which looks at how recent the idea of marrying for love is. “I worry that it can take over. The message you’re sending about your appearance can override other conversations you should be having about your future.” And in what she wants for the future, Jessica Rabbit has got nothing on the average American bride.

Read more.

Forbes Magazine is running a story this week about peripheral effects of the economic meltdown, and for this they turn to the work of famous sociologist and criminologist Sudhir Venkatesh.

Elizabeth Eaves, for Forbes.com writes,

You may think the economic meltdown is hitting bankers and Realtors hard, but spare a thought for members of the underground economy–prostitutes, drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods, to name just a few participants. That’s what sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh does, having spent much of the last 15 years studying, and sometimes living within, the underground economies of New York and Chicago.

“The recession is engendering more violence,” says Venkatesh, a professor at Columbia University. “There’s far greater competition for whatever meager resources there are. The folks down on Wall Street peddling drugs, they’re fighting. The sex workers are trying as hard as they can to retain their clients,” he says, sitting in a Mediterranean restaurant a short walk from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where he’s on jury duty. Considering his well-documented friendship with a gang leader–the subject of his bestseller, Gang Leader for a Day–one might have expected the court to disqualify Venkatesh, but no such luck.

About today’s economic situation…

Today Venkatesh is watching black market workers slip into despair along with the rest of the population affected by the economy. Lest legal workers consider this a distant problem, one conclusion of Venkatesh’s work is that the underground and mainstream economies are intimately entwined. “The boundaries are fluid, particularly in the global city where the black market has become instrumental–one might even say vital–to the overall economy,” he says. In New York City illegal workers serve sex, drugs and takeout to the wealthiest members of society–or at least they did until financial sector layoffs began in 2008.

The underground economy includes a vast array of people providing services that are off the books but otherwise legal. Venkatesh enumerates those having a harder time in the face of the recession: office cleaners, squeegee men, informal security guards, “canners” who scavenge for recyclables (there’s less consumption now, so less to recycle) and nannies whose employers have been laid off. And as business contracts, underground workers face certain problems unique to their status. They have no unemployment insurance or other benefits, and, with little protection from law enforcement, they tend to resolve disputes by physical means.

Venkatesh prefers to leave detailed prescriptions to policymakers but nevertheless ventures a few. Microcredit loans, as well as education on risk management and planning, could help shift some black market entrepreneurial zeal above ground. He heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama–a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there–to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents. Sales taxes also hit the poor hard, he says; one way to help would be to let them use prepaid cards to buy goods tax free.

Venkatesh is struck by how much the black market resembles the wider society in which it is enmeshed. In the same Parisian banlieues that erupted in riots in 2005, he observed an “almost aristocratic,” highly centralized criminal operation. In the ghettos of Chicago, by contrast, he observed underground workers convene an ad hoc court to solve a dispute. His dismisses the “culture of poverty” theory, which suggests that poor blacks in America don’t work because they don’t value employment. “People in America want to work,” he says. They do so ever so industriously, even when they’re breaking the law.

Read more.

This morning the New York Times ran a story about new research indicating that teen pregnancies are on the rise once again. The Times’ Tara Parker-Pope reports, “Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome. It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.”

Building the case that this is a myth:

The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.

Call in the sociologist!

“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”

One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured — and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.

In that setting, teenagers often say they “fool around,” and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).

And another…

“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” (University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”

“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” Dr. Kefalas said. “What’s really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.

“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”

Read the full story.

The idea that virginity has a high value harkens back to the days of early humans — if a man has sex with a virgin woman, he knows for sure that her children will be his, anthropologists reason. In early civilizations, women were also considered the property of men, said Laura Carpenter, assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Through the 1950s in America, women were expected to remain virgins until marriage, Carpenter said. But with the availability of the pill and the IUD in the 1960s, combined with youth counterculture and gay rights movements, it became more common for women to engage in premarital sex, she said.

Attitudes shifted toward the conservative side in the 1980s with the worldwide HIV/AIDS pandemic, which made the stakes much higher for choosing a sex partner, especially for men. Abstinence-based education programs also took off around that time, with government support, she said.

Today, about 95 percent of Americans have sex before they’re 25, Carpenter said. But worldwide, virgin prostitutes can claim larger fees, certain cultures still attach larger dowries to virgin brides, and some women undergo reconstructive surgery to restore their hymens.

In looking at Dylan’s auction, “To some extent it’s not new. The new part is the Internet,” Carpenter said.

And Dylan’s take?

Some men may seek virgins because they want them as trophies, or desire purity. But as to why men would bid so much money on virginity, she said she has no answer.

“I honestly don’t know what they see in it,” she said.

If you think Dylan’s auction amounts to prostitution, she completely agrees. She also said she’s not breaking any laws — after all, prostitution in Nevada is legal.

“I feel people should be pro-choice with their body, and I’m not hurting anyone,” she said. “It really comes down to a moral and religious argument, and this doesn’t go against my religion or my morals. There’s no right or wrong to this.”

Read more.

Market Watch reported with a follow up to an article on ‘sexting’ previously discussed on the Crawler. This new blurb, from United Press International, clarifies that the original claim that 20% of teens were ‘sexting’ was overblown…

A sociologist says she believes claims many U.S. teens are using their cell phones to send provocative photos of themselves are overblown.

C.J. Pascoe, an assistant professor at Colorado College, told the McClatchy-Tribune News Service she and her research assistant interviewed 80 youngsters as part of the three-year Digital Youth Report study. She said her look at what teens actually do online did not match a poll’s claim that 20 percent of teens have sent sexy or nude pictures, a practice nicknamed sexting.

“No one brought it up,” she said. “I had them go through their last 10 messages, their last 10 photos and I never saw it.”

The 20 percent claim came from a poll by Teenage Research Unlimited for CosmoGirl! magazine and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Pascoe said she believes teenagers are doing what they have always done — at least since teen culture emerged in the 1950s.

“I think what makes adults nervous about new media is they have a window into a teenager’s world for the first time,” she said.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story this week about a new study from sociologist Chadwick Menning. The study surveys 300 Midwestern college students and suggests that ‘dirty dancing’ and an abundance of male guests are better indicators of danger at a party than whether or not partygoers are drunk, according to the students. 

Chadwick Menning, an associate professor of sociology at Ball State University, asked respondents to name signals that make women feel unsafe at a party. They cited such things as suggestive dancing and and a disproportionately high number of men. But they did not mention alcohol, Mr. Menning said.

“Drinking is considered normal at college parties, and that hasn’t changed in decades,” he said in a Ball State news release. “Students expect to drink lots of alcohol at both Greek and non-Greek parties. Yet they do look for secondary traits that may signal that there could be danger.” The study, “Unsafe at Any House?” is to be published in the October issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Mr. Menning pointed out that women who attend parties centered on drinking put themselves at risk of sexual assault, which he said ranks as “their biggest fear, even bigger than death.” So the students’ lack of concern about alcohol is noteworthy, he said, particularly given the efforts by college administrators to educate young people about the dangers of binge drinking.

Read more.

The folks over at the Freakonomics blog (housed by the New York Times) recently posed the question: ‘Who are the modern-day outlaws? Do we still have outlaws or did they die off with the last of the frontier towns — or maybe later, with the Hell’s Angels?’

Stephen Dubner, the post’s author, approached a number of experts on the issue, including well-known sociologist Chris Uggen. Dubner presented each expert with the following set of questions:  Does America still have an outlaw group? If so, why do you consider them outlaws?Does society need outlaws?

Check out this sociologist’s response…

Chris Uggen, Distinguished McKnight Professor and chair of sociology at the University of Minnesota, executive secretary of the American Society of Criminology, co-author of Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, and co-editor of Contexts Magazine.

Oh, hell yes, there are outlaws in America — and everywhere else, for that matter. Anyone who breaks rules is in some sense an outlaw, subject to social or legal sanctions if their outlawry is detected. These penalties operate on a sliding scale, depending on whether the outlaw smokes cigarettes or meth, pirates DVD’s or ships, or violates college hate-speech codes or state hate-crime laws.

But our standards for outlaws are relative, not absolute; they change over time and social space.

Societies are constantly raising or lowering the bar, outlawing formerly accepted behaviors — like smoking — and legalizing former crimes, like lotteries.

In any group, those with greater power tend to control the rule-making process. And they sometimes go to great lengths to make outlaws out of those who might threaten their power, by restricting their ability to vote or work or have children. Regardless of who holds power, societies operate with a basic set of rules that necessarily beget a basic set of rule violators.

Just imagine, as sociologist Emile Durkheim did, a society of saints made up of exemplary citizens. Would there be no outlaws in such a group? No! They’d pick at each other for minor peccadilloes and trivial misdeeds. In that crowd, even a burp or blemish could mark one as a real bada–.

Nobody is arguing that contemporary America is a society of saints. To the contrary, it often seems as though we’re “defining deviancy down,” as senator and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it.

Cultural critics of the hell-in-a-handbasket school worry that our blasé attitudes toward once-shocking behavior –- network telecasts of ultimate fighters beating the bloody snot out of one another, for example — diminish us all. But don’t forget that we’re simultaneously outlawing other nasty conduct that shocks our collective conscience, such as date rape or sexual harassment.

Whether you view our culture’s current constellation of outlaws as ennobling or diminishing is largely a matter of value preferences.

And remember that outlaws put in some important work for a society. When they expose their bodies at the Super Bowl, our reactions — the extent to which we freak out — tell us something about the current boundaries between proper and improper public conduct. When outlaws are arrested at a political convention, we get a heads-up that change is in the wind. When outlaws sell sex or drugs, we get a safety valve to release pent-up frustrations.

Even when outlaws commit consensus crimes like murder, we get a needed opportunity to publicly condemn them and reaffirm our shared values with our fellow citizens.

While society needs outlaws, it doesn’t need a permanent outlaw class. We’d do well to remember that today’s outlaws are tomorrow’s good citizens; and there’s no citizen more zealous than an outlaw redeemed.

Read the full story, here.

I recently discovered a series on Chicago Public Radio which features reports from Greg Scott, a sociology professor and documentary filmmaker. 

The most recent installment explores the daily lives of women working as prostitutes on Cicero Avenue in Chicago’s West Side. Scott’s story paints a vivid picture of the complex relationship between sex and pride for these women…

Listen to ‘Women of the Brickyard’ here.

For more of Scott’s stories, look here.