Tag Archives: Mark Regnerus

News

Two things you can do to make your marriage last

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First, don’t have sex before you’re married.

Story from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Couples who reserve sex for marriage enjoy greater stability and communication in their relationships, say researchers at Brigham Young University.

A new study from the Mormon college found that those couples who waited until marriage rated their relationship stability 22 percent higher than those who started having sex in the early part of their relationship. The relationship satisfaction was 20 percent higher for those who waited, the sexual quality of the relationship was 5 percent better, and communication was 12 percent better.

The study, published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Family Psychology, involved 2,035 married individuals who participated in a popular online marital assessment called “RELATE.” From the assessment’s database, researchers selected a sample designed to match the demographics of the married American population. The extensive questionnaire included the question “When did you become sexual in this relationship?”

Couples that became sexually involved later in their relationship – but prior to marriage – reported benefits that were about half as strong as those who waited for marriage.

[…]Sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study, responded to its findings, saying that “couples who hit the honeymoon too early – that is, prioritize sex promptly at the outset of a relationship – often find their relationships underdeveloped when it comes to the qualities that make relationships stable and spouses reliable and trustworthy.” Regnerus is the author of Premarital Sex in America, a book forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Because religious belief often plays a role for couples who choose to wait, Busby and his co-authors controlled for the influence of religious involvement in their analysis.

“Regardless of religiosity, waiting helps the relationship form better communication processes, and these help improve long-term stability and relationship satisfaction,” Busby said.

Second, make sure you attend church regularly after you’re married.

From Citizen Link.

Excerpt:

It’s a number that is trumpeted from the rooftops — and the pulpit: Half of marriages among Christians and non-Christians alike end in divorce.

But the reality is that Christians who attend church regularly get divorced at a much lower rate.

Professor Bradley Wright, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, found that among people who identify as Christians but rarely attend church, 60 percent have been divorced. Of those who attend church regularly, 38 percent have been divorced.

W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, found a nearly identical spread between “active conservative Protestants” who regularly attend church and people with no religious affiliation.

Professor Scott Stanley from the University of Denver, who is working on the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, said couples with a vibrant religious faith have more and higher levels of the qualities that marriages need to avoid divorce.

“Whether young or old, male or female, low-income or not, those who said that they were more religious reported higher average levels of commitment to their partners, higher levels of marital satisfaction, less thinking and talking about divorce and lower levels of negative interaction,” he said. “These patterns held true when controlling for such important variables as income, education and age at first marriage.”

I think that young people who are serious about having a successful marriage need to study research to find out what works (chastity, pre-marital counseling, church attendance, etc.) and then demand that prospective mates demonstrate those skills before the wedding.

UPDATE: Commenter Mbelina has a third thing to do: Christians should choose to marry other Christians who take their Christian worldview seriously.

News

New study: feminism pressures women into unwanted sex

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This Yahoo News article explains, citing the research of Mark Regnerus. Notice that they use the phrase “gender equality” as a euphemism for feminism. The idea that men and women have no innate differences and no differing roles is the core feminist belief.

Excerpt:

In his presentation, “Sexual Economics: A Research-Based Theory of Sexual Interactions, or Why the Man Buys Dinner,” Baumeister, a psychologist, explained how applying economic principles helps understand people’s sexual decision-making, especially when they’re just beginning a relationship.

“Women’s sexuality has a kind of value that men’s sexuality does not,” he says. “Men will basically exchange other resources with women to have sex, but the reverse doesn’t work. Women … can trade sex for attention, for grades, for a promotion, for money, as in prostitution or sex with a celebrity.”

The idea, he says, is that men want sex more than women do (on average) and that sex in a relationship begins when women decide it’s time. Supply and demand rule, so whichever sex is more scarce has more power. The theory focuses on heterosexual interactions only.

When women outnumber men (as on many college campuses today) there’s more competition among women for those guys, says Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He addressed that in the book he co-wrote, Premarital Sex in America, out earlier this year.

Regnerus says Baumeister’s theory of sexual economics was a key element. “It’s a perspective through which to understand sexual relationships and sexual behavior,” he says.

Regnerus’ research attributes the rise of the “hookup” culture on campus to the fact that there are so many more women in college. He says Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs “wrote the key work on the subject” in 2004. Because a woman’s sexuality has a value to men, a man who wanted sex typically had to give her something of value, such as a marriage proposal.

Notice that marriage proposals don’t just come out of the blue. They need supporting evidence and accomplishments, or they look ridiculous.

Traditionally, a man would have to show a woman his suitability for the traditional roles of husband and father. He would have to demonstrate that to the woman, and to her father. He would have to declare his intentions, produce his “prospects”, including his degree transcripts, work history and financial holdings. That was before feminism. After feminism, women decided that men don’t have any special roles to fill, so there was no need for men to “apply for the job”, so to speak.

After feminism, we also had no-fault divorce made into law. This was done to accommodate women who had made poor choices when they married. No-fault divorce led to a massive exodus of fathers from the home. So now many women are growing up without fathers. We have also witnessed the rise of single motherhood by choice. With sex education, and the free availability of contraception and abortion, men have been taught to assume that sex is no big deal, and they are able to avoid committing and just get sex from the women who are giving it away for free. The remaining women who want a commitment quickly lower their expectations in order to avoid being passed up entirely. Consequently, many women have decided to get pregnant without a man, just so that they can have a relationship with someone who will not leave them. And this fatherless procreation is all taxpayer subsidized, often including free IVF for childless single women who put recreational sex and careers above marriage and child-bearing for the first 40 years of their lives.

Fatherlessness causes women to have sex at earlier and earlier ages, without any guarantee that the man can fulfill traditional roles or hold to a commitment. Feminism denies that men have distinct male roles, so women are giving up sex to men based solely on the man’s appearance and based on the approval of their peers, which is determined by a pop culture that denigrates chastity, courtship and marriage.

Fathers matter to daughters. In order to make a good choice of a man, a woman needs to see her father’s husband/father behavior to use as a measure. She needs to have a father to help her to moderate her emotions and to make romantic decisions based on practical demands of marriage and parenting. She needs to employ means/ends reasoning to evaluate a man for those roles. But feminism ejected fathers from the home, reducing the male role to sperm donor and taxpayer for welfare programs. Today, we have a generation of women who are basically giving away sex for free, with no romance or commitment in sight.

The feminist idea that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” sounded good to a generation of feminists who had been mistreated by the “bad boys” whom they freely chose, but now we can see the result of that policy for their daughters. Oral sex on the first date is not uncommon for many teens, with no expectation of a follow-up phone call. That’s what feminism got women. All this raving about rape epidemics… and it turns out that feminism is itself largely responsible for the epidemic of forced/coerced sex. Surprise!

It looks like all those bossy, controlling, judgmental, logical, exclusive, intolerant, Christian fundamentalism men were actually more concerned with women’s happiness than feminists were all along. Maybe those boundaries were there for a reason? Maybe the Bible knows what it is talking about when it speaks about marriage, courting, family and chastity? Maybe.

Commentary

New OUP book links premarital sex and promiscuity to poor mental health

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Found in the freaking New York Times of all places. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

[E]arlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.

Stacy McCain adds:

What if Regnerus and Uecker are right?

What would be the consequences of having scientific proof that pre-marital chastity and marital fidelity — “One Life, One Wife”  – confer socio-economic advantages not only on individuals who uphold such values, but also produce advantages for the larger society?

The implications for public policy, I’ll leave to the wonks. Rather, I suggest the likelihood that this scientific insight could lead people to consider the possibility that the Bible is actually true.

I have to confess that I am always hopeful of getting tweeted by Brian Auten on his Apologetics 315 twitter feed. And when I write posts like this, I just know that Brian takes one look at the headlines and says “tsk! tsk! another anti-feminist political post from WK! Nothing to do with Christian apologetics!”. Then he passes my post over for a philosophical term of the day (like “aseity”). But I wish he would read through my whole post and see what the purpose of these posts are – to show that real research can confirm or disconfirm what the Bible says, and that we need to be thinking, as apologists, about the many ways that we can defend the Christian worldview using evidence. Sometimes, people don’t become atheists because of scientific or philosophical arguments. Sometimes people become atheists because they way to have sexual pleasure without worrying about moral rules (men) or they want to get attention without worrying about moral rules (women). I’m sorry, but that’s really the kind of thing that causes people to become atheists. And broken families and missing fathers have a lot to do with that. So I think Christian apologists need to address that with evidence.

But there’s more to this story.

I get a lot of flak from Christian women (let’s face it – the men all agree with me) because of my intent to raise effective, influential children and my further intent to shepherd those children into good fields where they can make tons of money with impunity and/or have a big influence on society. (The make-money track is to support scholars who are going more for influence than money, like William Lane Craig). All I get when I say things like that is a lot of feminist kickback about how wives are happier when their children are happy, and children are happy whenever they do whatever makes them feel good. There is no room for the wisdom and leadership of fathers in a feminist Christian woman’s home. Their goal is feelings of happiness. But that’s not my goal. I want to raise effective Christian scholars, like Regnerus.

Consider the author of this OUP book that is being cited in the New York Times.

His faculty page at the prestigious University of Texas (Austin):

Mark Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin (PhD, 2000, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and a faculty associate at the university’s Population Research Center. Author of over 30 published articles and book chapters, his research is in the areas of sexual behavior, religion, and family. His book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying (Oxford University Press, 2011) is available beginning in December 2010. His previous book Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2007) tells the story of the sexual values and practices of American teenagers, paying particular attention to how participating in organized religion shapes sexual decision-making. Mark’s research and opinion pieces have been featured in numerous media outlets in the US and elsewhere. Forbidden Fruit has been reviewed in Slate, the Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The New Yorker. His op-ed on marital timing norms appeared in the Washington Post on April 26, 2009.

Two books with OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.

And do you know what else? He writes stuff for a Christian web site.

Excerpt:

Virginity pledges. Chastity balls. Courtship. Side hugs. Guarding your heart. Evangelical discourse on sex is more conservative than I’ve ever seen it. Parents and pastors and youth group leaders told us not to do it before we got married. Why? Because the Bible says so. Yet that simple message didn’t go very far in shaping our sexual decision-making.

So they kicked it up a notch and staked a battle over virginity, with pledges of abstinence and accountability structures to maintain the power of the imperative to not do what many of us felt like doing. Some of us failed, but we could become “born again virgins.” Virginity mattered. But sex can be had in other ways, and many of us got creative.

Then they told us that oral sex was still sex. It could spread disease, and it would make you feel bad. “Sex will be so much better if you wait until your wedding night,” they urged. If we could hold out, they said, it would be worth it. The sheer glory of consummation would knock our socks off.

Such is the prevailing discourse of abstinence culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. It might sound like I devalue abstinence. I don’t. The problem is that not all abstainers end up happy or go on to the great sex lives they were promised. Nor do all indulgers become miserable or marital train wrecks. More simply, however, I have found that few evangelicals accomplish what their pastors and parents wanted them to.

Indeed, over 90 percent of American adults experience sexual intercourse before marrying. The percentage of evangelicals who do so is not much lower. In a nationally representative study of young adults, just under 80 percent of unmarried, church- going, conservative Protestants who are currently dating someone are having sex of some sort. I’m certainly not suggesting that they cannot abstain. I’m suggesting that in the domain of sex, most of them don’t and won’t.

What to do? Intensify the abstinence message even more? No. It won’t work. The message must change, because our preoccupation with sex has unwittingly turned our attention away from the damage that Americans—including evangelicals—are doing to the institution of marriage by discouraging it and delaying it.

The article goes on to explain his ideas, supported by research, on how to solve this problem. (I disagree with everything he says about why there are more Christian women than men, but still… smart guy – his solution to the marriage problem seems to be similar to Danielle Crittenden in her book “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us”)

Do you see what I mean about people having an influence? What sense does it make to talk about what you like and what you are good at? No one cares. God doesn’t care about what you like nor does he care about what makes you happy. He cares about what increases knowledge of him, and what increases goodness in all of our behavior – Christians and non-Christians. You are expected to lay aside your need for happiness, and ease, and to do hard things. Hard things that will actually count.