sexuality

A few days ago the Washington Post ran a story about how University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz tutored an elderly friend in the basics of online dating…

The Post reports:

A few weeks ago Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist who studies relationships at the University of Washington, spent the day giving a friend a crash course in online dating. Never mind that the friend in question is an 80-year-old woman — she wants “what every girl wants,” Schwartz says, “love, compatibility, someone to experience life with.”

And with a few clicks, Schwartz’s octogenarian pal joined the legions of seniors turning to their computers for a second (or third or fifth or 25th) shot at romance. By 2007, the over-50 set had become the fastest-growing group of subscribers for online dating companies, and double-digit growth has continued since, according to industry watchers.

But keep in mind that Schwartz actually works for one of these companies:

Schwartz, an adviser to online dating company Perfectmatch.com, cheers the trend. If a person in their 60s or 70s lost a spouse 20 years ago, “the chances of pairing again were small,” she says, because the avenues to meet new people were limited mostly to churches, senior centers and friends of friends.

Today single seniors can go online and “be opened up to literally thousands of options,” she says.

The story concludes with some of the potential risks for seniors using these services, but ends on an optimistic note.

…Schwartz says the desire for companionship doesn’t decrease with age: “Neither love, nor romance, nor adventure are the private property of the young.”

There are pitfalls, of course. Safety is always an issue with online dating, and so is disappointment. Just like their younger counterparts, seniors who log on to find love are also risking heartbreak. “The downside,” Schwartz says, “is when you meet someone you think is wonderful, but they don’t think you are. You’ve gotta be resilient.”

And about that 80-year-old friend of hers? She had a coffee date lined up by the end of her first day online

Read the full story.

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.

With the murder of a physician who was a regular target of anti-abortion activists this past Sunday, news outlets have returned to covering the schism in our country on the abortion issue, this time focusing on a new study linking the likelihood of having an abortion to religiosity.

MSNBC reports:

Unwed pregnant teens and 20-somethings who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to obtain abortions than their peers from public schools, according to research in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

“This research suggests that young, unmarried women are confronted with a number of social, financial and health-related factors that can make it difficult for them to act according to religious values when deciding whether to keep or abort a pregnancy,” said the study’s author, sociologist Amy Adamczyk of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

More from Adamczyk…

Adamczyk examined how personal religious involvement, schoolmate religious involvement and school type influenced the pregnancy decisions of a sample of 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women age 26 and younger from 125 different schools. The women ranged in age from 14 to 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Twenty-five percent of women in the sample reported having an abortion, a likely underestimate, Adamczyk said.

Results revealed no significant link between a young woman’s reported decision to have an abortion and her personal religiosity, as defined by her religious involvement, frequency of prayer and perception of religion’s importance. Adamczyk said that this may be partially explained by the evidence that personal religiosity delays the timing of first sex, thereby shortening the period of time in which religious women are sexually active outside of marriage.

Despite the absence of a link between personal religious devotionand abortion, religious affiliation did have some important influence. Adamczyk found that conservative Protestants (which includes evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians) were the least likely to report having an abortion, less likely than mainline Protestants, Catholics and women with non-Christian religious affiliations.

Regarding the impact of the religious involvement of a woman’s peers, Adamczyk found no significant influence. However, Adamczyk did find that women who attended school with conservative Protestants were more likely to decide to have an extramarital baby in their 20s than in their teenage years.

“The values of conservative Protestant classmates seem to have an abortion limiting effect on women in their 20s, but not in their teens, presumably because the educational and economic costs of motherhood are reduced as young women grow older,” Adamczyk said.

The LA Times also picked up on the story in their Health section this week. They report: 

In a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, a sociologist at the City University of New York analyzed the abortion decisions of unmarried teenagers and young twentysomethings. Specifically, she was looking at how those decisions were affected by personal religious devotion, schoolmates’ religious devotion and the type of school (public or religious).

Come decision-making time, religiosity —  the importance attributed to religion and the involvement in it — didn’t make much difference.

Maybe that’s surprising to you, maybe not.

But of note, she writes: “Conservative Protestants appear less likely to obtain abortions than mainline Protestants, Catholics, and women of non-Christian faiths. Regardless of personal religious affiliation, having attended a school with a high proportion of conservative Protestants appears to discourage abortion as women enter their twenties. Conversely, women from private religious high schools appear
more likely to report obtaining an abortion than women from public schools.”

Read more from MSNBC.

Read more from the LA Times. 

The New York Times has posted a story entitled, “For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?'” But does the dramatic rise in teen hugging really signal a culture shift?

The Times reports:

There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type:

There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out.

There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace.

There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple — any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once.

There seems to be some inter-generational bewilderment about these rituals…

Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other — the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five, are often baffled by the close physical contact. “It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, “13 Is the New 18.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other,” she continued, describing the scene at her older son’s school in Manhattan. “No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five — just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language.”

For heaven’s sake, call in the sociologist!

Some sociologists said that teenagers who grew up in an era of organized play dates and close parental supervision are more cooperative with one another than previous generations — less cynical and individualistic and more loyal to the group.

But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said the teenage embrace is more a reflection of the overall evolution of the American greeting, which has become less formal since the 1970s. “Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture,” she said. “We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people’s bodies.”

Hugging appears to be a grass-roots phenomenon and not an imitation of a character or custom on TV or in movies. The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.

…But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth.

Read more.

Early this week USA Today ran a story about last weekend’s Council on Contemporary Families conference in Chicago, during which experts discussed how topics such as sexual orientation, sexual labeling, and gender-bending were no longer “x-rated or adults-only topics, but rather subjects that young people talk about as they figure out how they fit in.” Psychologist Braden Berkey told conference attendees, “Youth are saying they don’t want to be defined by gender or orientation.” 

USA Today reports:

Berkey is founding director of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute at the Center on Halsted, which opened in 2007 to offer support services and programming for the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He talked about the evolution of sexual and gender labels and how young people today are trying to dissolve them. He says the terms created in the early days, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, are giving way to other descriptions, such as polygender or multisex. Young people, he says, reject narrow gender definitions and say they don’t want to be defined by their sexuality.

However, a presentation by sociologist Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that for the middle-schoolers she’s studied, attitudes about sexual orientation are less open-minded, especially for boys. She says these boys fear the label “gay.”

More from Barbara Risman…

Among boys, “homophobia in middle school is used to police gender,” she says. In-depth interviews with 43 students at an urban middle school in the Southeast found vast differences between the sexes.

“Today, girls are free to do sports and be competitive. No one thought they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. The women’s movement has done great things for middle school girls,” she says.

“It’s another story with boys. I feel like we’re in a time warp. We have not dealt with men and masculinity in a serious enough way,” she says.”Boys police each other. There’s no room not to do anything not traditionally masculine.”

Risman says it’s important not to generalize the findings to most American children, but she says the fact that boys are labeled quickly suggests that this is a developmental stage. The study, she adds, was limited by many rules requiring parental permission for contact with minors.

Risman says it’s the stigma of homosexuality that looms among young boys. Being emotional or caring too much about clothes or liking to dance are reasons that boys give for describing someone as “girlish,” she says.

Read more.

This past weekend Pink News, a UK-based media outlet, ran a story on a new study out of the University of Derby suggesting that lesbian women in abusive relationships may resist seeking assistance for fear of being outed. Findings from the study were presented at the British Sociological Association’s annul meetings last weekend in Cardiff and indicate that abusive relationships between gay women “can can include physical assaults, sexual coercion and emotional cruelty but victims are put off seeking help because of fear of being outed to friends, colleagues and family.”

The scale of the problem:

Forty women between the ages of 21 and 70 were chosen for the study, believed to the most detailed research into abusive lesbian relationships to date. All of those who took part had experienced abuse in some capacity.

Around 88 per cent of those questioned had suffered physical abuse such as punching, kicking and slapping. Forty five per cent reported had been bullied into performing unwanted sexual activities and ten per cent admitted to having been forced into having sex.

Thirteen per cent had been threatened with being outed by their partner to friends, family and colleagues or outed altogether by the abusive partner, while 18 per cent had felt suicidal or had attempted suicide during the abusive relationship.

The author’s comments:

Dr Rebecca Barnes, who led the study, said: “Only women who had been abused by a previous female partner were invited to participate in the study, with the aim being to examine these relationships in detail rather than trying to establish what proportion of lesbian relationships as a whole is abusive.

“The findings show that women in abusive same-sex relationships experience very similar challenges to women in abusive heterosexual relationships.

“However, being in a same-sex relationship poses additional barriers to seeking and receiving effective support. My findings also showed that abuse in lesbian relationships can involve wide-ranging forms of emotional, physical, financial and sexual abuse, as it can in heterosexual abusive relationships.”

“One of the key differences with same-sex abuse is the secrecy which surrounds many same-sex relationships – a few of my participants had had relationships lasting years which their family or colleagues knew nothing about or which only a few close friends were aware of. This particularly applied to women who were in their first same-sex relationship.”

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.