Tag Archives: Premarital Sex

News

Is the root cause of crime poverty or fatherlessness?

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If we were really serious about stopping gun crime, then we should go after the root cause of gun crime. So what is that root cause? The answer might surprise you.

Here is Dr. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation to explain:

Census data and the Fragile Families survey show that marriage can be extremely effective in reducing child poverty. But the positive effects of married fathers are not limited to income alone. Children raised by married parents have substantially better life outcomes compared to similar children raised in single-parent homes.

When compared to children in intact married homes, children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; be expelled from school; and drop out of high school.[19] Many of these negative outcomes are associated with the higher poverty rates of single mothers. In many cases, however, the improvements in child well-being that are associated with marriage persist even after adjusting for differences in family income. This indicates that the father brings more to his home than just a paycheck.

The effect of married fathers on child outcomes can be quite pronounced. For example, examination of families with the same race and same parental education shows that, when compared to intact married families, children from single-parent homes are:

  • More than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime;[20]
  • Twice as likely to be treated for emotional and behavioral problems;[21]
  • Roughly twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school;[22] and
  • A third more likely to drop out before completing high school.[23]

The effects of being raised in a single-parent home continue into adulthood. Comparing families of the same race and similar incomes, children from broken and single-parent homes are three times more likely to end up in jail by the time they reach age 30 than are children raised in intact married families. [24] Compared to girls raised in similar married families, girls from single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to have a child without being married, thereby repeating the negative cycle for another generation.[25]

Finally, the decline of marriage generates poverty in future generations. Children living in single-parent homes are 50 percent more likely to experience poverty as adults when compared to children from intact married homes. This intergenerational poverty effect persists even after adjusting for the original differences in family income and poverty during childhood.[26]

People on the left claim that poverty causes crime, but they don’t look for the root cause of poverty. The root cause of poverty is the decline of marriage, which produces fatherless children. Unfortunately, some people promote the decline of marriage because they do not like the “unequal gender roles” inherent in marriage. So what is the main tool that the anti-marriage people use to increase the number of fatherless children?

Dr. Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute explains one of the causes of fatherlessness in his testimony to Congress:

Welfare contributes to crime in several ways. First, children from single-parent families are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. According to one study, children raised in single-parent families are one-third more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior.(3) Moreover, O’Neill found that, holding other variables constant, black children from single- parent households are twice as likely to commit crimes as black children from a family where the father is present. Nearly 70 percent of juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes, as do 43 percent of prison inmates.(4) Research indicates a direct correlation between crime rates and the number of single-parent families in a neighborhood.(5)

As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted in her seminal article for The Atlantic Monthly:

The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation’s mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.(6)

At the same time, the evidence of a link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is overwhelming. There have been 13 major studies of the relationship between the availability of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock birth. Of these, 11 found a statistically significant correlation. Among the best of these studies is the work done by June O’Neill for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Holding constant a wide range of variables, including income, education, and urban vs. suburban setting, the study found that a 50 percent increase in the value of AFDC and foodstamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.(7) Likewise, research by Shelley Lundberg and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington showed that an increase in welfare benefits of $200 per month per family increased the rate of out-of-wedlock births among teenagers by 150 percent.(8)

The same results can be seen from welfare systems in other countries. For example, a recent study of the impact of Canada’s social-welfare system on family structure concluded that “providing additional benefits to single parents encourages births of children to unwed women.”(9)

The poverty that everyone complains about is not the root cause of crime. The poverty is caused by fatherlessness. The fatherlessness is caused by welfare. Fatherlessness is also caused by laws and policies that make it easier for people to divorce, e.g. – no-fault divorce laws. Again, it’s people on the left who push for no-fault divorce laws. So the left is pushing two policies, welfare and no-fault divorce, which cause crime.

News

Bro-Choice: understanding the motivations of the pro-choice man-child

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Ben Sherman: man-child
Ben Sherman: man-child

Ask the Bigot first alerted me to a post by a pro-abortion male (not man, male) in which he explains why males such as himself favor abortion.

Now the context of this post is the Texas bill banning abortions after 20 weeks.

Here’s the point I want to focus on:

How #HB2 Hurts Straight Texas Men

Your sex life is at stake

Can you think of anything that kills the vibe faster than a woman fearing a back-alley abortion? Making abortion essentially inaccessible in Texas will add an anxiety to sex that will drastically undercut its joys. And don’t be surprised if casual sex outside of relationships becomes far more difficult to come by.
It’s clear: if the Legislature basically takes away a Texas woman’s right to choose, having sex becomes a much, much riskier proposition for women and men.

Now let’s see what AtB thinks of this. She writes:

Hey Ben.  BRO!  Sex is not primarily recreational and women’s bodies don’t exist to serve your every-72-hours-discharge needs.  Sex has life-creating properties, and this bill will make it harder for you to separate that reality from your weekend hook-ups.

(An aside. LADIES. You are a fool to chance a lifetime connection with a man-child of this caliber. You and your future children deserve MUCH better.  Free love has done so much damage to women and children. Sex without consequences makes us women exactly what we claim we don’t want to be. Objectified, disrespected and used.)

Unfortunately for you, Bro, the Texas House approved HB2 this morning.  Much to the silent rejoicing of the in-utero babies created in your “relationships with women that may have lasted anywhere from a few minutes to many years,” you might now have to act like a real man by living for someone other than yourself. Or perhaps, at least, stop treating women as sperm depositories.

I know that this legislation puts your Peter Pan lifestyle at risk.  But look at the bright side.  If your sexual expression is limited by this legislation, you could always move to one of the 49 states where unfettered infanticide paves the way for your never-ending, hedonistic sexual “freedom and choice”.

So this post by the man-child explains why pro-abortion men are pro-abortion. They basically think that they should be allowed to have recreational sex with a woman without having to deal with the consequences of their own actions. They think that it is OK to kill an innocent child aged 20 weeks or more in order to keep the flow of consequence-free recreational sex flowing. They think it’s OK to motivate women to give then free recreational sex by using abortion as a form of birth control. Pro-abortion men think that it’s OK to legalize what Kermit Gosnell was doing to women after 20 weeks, so that women continue to give them recreational sex without having to love and serve women in a lifelong commitment. Ben Sherman is the beneficiary of Kermit Gosnell’s practice. Kermit Gosnell is Ben’s enabler.

Before I go any further, let me say that according to the latest Gallup poll, more men are pro-life than not, and more women are pro-abortion than not. Young unmarried women are especially likely to vote for abortion and gay marriage (about 75% voted for Obama). This man-child Ben Sherman is the exception to the way that men normally are, while women on the other hand are more likely to agree with his conclusions about unborn children. Most young, unmarried women vote the way Ben Sherman votes. Let’s get that clear. This man-child is the exception to the way men normally are.

My real concern about the man-child’s point of view is this. How is it even possible that a woman would come within 10 feet of a man who said such a thing? It seems to me that women ought to prefer relationships with good men who have a worldview that grounds responsibility over hedonism. Women ought to prefer men who want to take responsibility for the well-being of others over the long term. Women ought to prefer men who want to protect the innocent and the weak. That sort of moral character used to be highly prized by women. Now they just seem to want “nice” – meaning inoffensive and entertaining.

When a man like Ben Sherman says what he said, it really makes me wonder about what women who choose him for sex are thinking about. When a woman pays attention to a man, she endorses his worldview. And vice versa. If women stopped talking to selfish, immoral men like Ben Sherman, then there would be no abortion. The man thinks that babies should die so that he can have a good time with no strings attached. He doesn’t want to have to deal with the needs of others, he would rather use them for pleasure and then kill them when they stop pleasing him. Is that attractive in a man? Ben Sherman continues in his views because some women are rewarding him with sex.

Abortion plays right into the hands of men who want to use women merely for sex. Legal abortion = more casual sex for men without the inconvenience of a relationship where they might need to think of the woman as a person instead of a means to sexual pleasure. I am concerned by the trend away from formal courtship towards anonymous hook-up sex. Abortion is definitely one of the reasons why that is happening. If the group of women who give men sex without commitment grows, it will put even more pressure on women who want marriage to do things the right way. It gets harder and harder for marriage-minded women to hold out as sex without commitment leads to sex without any meaningful communication. We need to push back against the trend to treat women as objects, and women have a role to play in that: they can refuse pro-abortion men.

UPDATE: Another reaction here from my pro-life friend Neil Simpson.

News

A closer look at the hook-up culture at the University of Pennsylvania

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Stuart Schneiderman linked to a balanced article from the New York Times Magazine which offers scary insights into the hook-up culture at one of our elite universities.

First, feminism is definitely a driver of the hook-up culture, and women are voluntarily choosing it:

At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep.

Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls.

“We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that “we literally can’t sit down and have coffee.”

Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.

“I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too,” she said.

“And I know everyone says, ‘Make time, make time,’ ” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but agreed to be identified by her middle initial, which is A. “But there are so many other things going on in my life that I find so important that I just, like, can’t make time, and I don’t want to make time.”

It is by now pretty well understood that traditional dating in college has mostly gone the way of the landline, replaced by “hooking up” — an ambiguous term that can signify anything from making out to oral sex to intercourse — without the emotional entanglement of a relationship.

Until recently, those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men, and that women were reluctant participants, more interested in romance than in casual sexual encounters. But there is an increasing realization that young women are propelling it, too.

Hanna Rosin, in her recent book, “The End of Men,” argues that hooking up is a functional strategy for today’s hard-charging and ambitious young women, allowing them to have enjoyable sex lives while focusing most of their energy on academic and professional goals.

And a bit more about “A”:

For A., college is an endless series of competitions: to get into student clubs, some of which demand multiple rounds of interviews; to be selected for special research projects and the choicest internships; and, in the end, to land the most elite job offers.

As A. explained her schedule, “If I’m sober, I’m working.”

In such an overburdened college life, she said, it was rare for her and her friends to find a relationship worth investing time in, and many people avoided commitment because they assumed that someone better would always come along.

“We are very aware of cost-benefit issues and trading up and trading down, so no one wants to be too tied to someone that, you know, may not be the person they want to be with in a couple of months,” she said.

Instead, she enjoyed casual sex on her terms — often late at night, after a few drinks, and never at her place, she noted, because then she would have to wash the sheets.

[…]“‘I’ve always heard this phrase, ‘Oh, marriage is great, or relationships are great — you get to go on this journey of change together,’ ” she said. “That sounds terrible.

“I don’t want to go through those changes with you. I want you to have changed and become enough of your own person so that when you meet me, we can have a stable life and be very happy.”

In the meantime, from A.’s perspective, she was in charge of her own sexuality.

“I definitely wouldn’t say I’ve regretted any of my one-night stands,” she said.

“I’m a true feminist,” she added. “I’m a strong woman. I know what I want.”

At the same time, she didn’t want the number of people she had slept with printed, and she said it was important to her to keep her sexual life separate from her image as a leader at Penn.

“Ten years from now, no one will remember — I will not remember — who I have slept with,” A. said. “But I will remember, like, my transcript, because it’s still there. I will remember what I did. I will remember my accomplishments and places my name is hung on campus.”

These high-powered feminist students are having sex with strangers because they are “hot”, not because they are in love or because the man is marriage-enabled.

I think the key point about this is that these women think that they are actually on a path to marriage by focusing on themselves and their careers. Their alcohol abuse is a path to marriage. Their promiscuity with bad boy men who have no interest in marriage is a path to marriage. Their career and selfishness is a path to marriage. This despite the fact that research clearly shows that the number of sexual partners that a woman has before marrying directly impacts her ability to perform in a relationship. It raises her expectations of who she thinks she is entitled to while diminishing her ability to perform marriage obligations for a marriage-minded man.

Nothing that these women are doing is preparation for actual commitment and support. They can’t even converse with men, much less do the duties of a wife. Their ability to choose a man who can perform actual husband/father duties is not being formed by study or courtship. There is no wisdom. There is no self-sacrifice. There is no chastity. There is no support. There is no communication. These women are pro-abortion – that’s their view of  the rights and dignity of children. They are pro-gay marriage – that’s their view of providing for children’s relationship needs. These are literally the worst women in the world to marry. Their ignorance of what they must do to be good wives and mothers, and their messed up criteria for choosing men who can be husband and fathers makes them the worst women in the world to marry.

Read this carefully:

Some women went to college wanting a relationship, but when that seemed unlikely, they embraced hooking up as the best alternative. M., an athletic freshman with long legs and a button nose, arrived at college a virgin and planned to wait to have sex until she had her first boyfriend, something she expected to happen in college. But over the course of the fall, as she saw very few students forming relationships, she began to lose hope about finding a boyfriend and to see her virginity as a hindrance.

“I could be here for four years and not date anyone,” she said she realized. “Sometimes you are out, and there’s a guy you really are attracted to, and you kind of want to go back home with him, but you kind of have that underlying, ‘I can’t, because I can’t just lose my V-card to some random guy.’ ”

At a party in the spring semester, she was taking a break from dancing when she ran into a guy she had had a class with in the fall. They started talking, then danced until the party was over. M. went back to his room, where they talked some more and then started making out.

By this time, she said, “I wasn’t very drunk — I was close to sober,” which made her believe she could make a considered decision.

“I’m like, ‘O.K., I could do this now,’ ” she recalled thinking. “ ‘He’s superhot, I like him, he’s nice. But I’m not going to expect anything out of it, either.’ ”

The alternative, she said, was that “I could take the chance that one night I get really drunk and sleep with someone that I don’t want to sleep with, which probably is what would have ended up happening.”

So she had sex with him. In the morning, he walked her home.

“Honestly, all of my friends, they’re super envious, because I came back with the biggest smile on my face,” M. said. As she had expected, she and the guy remained friendly but nothing more. Yet she was still happy with her decision.

“All of my friends are jealous, because I had such a great first experience,” she added. Over spring break, she slept with someone else.

In general, she said, she thought that guys at Penn controlled the hookup culture. But women played a role as well.

“It’s kind of like a spiral,” she said. “The girls adapt a little bit, because they stop expecting that they’re going to get a boyfriend — because if that’s all you’re trying to do, you’re going to be miserable. But at the same time, they want to, like, have contact with guys.” So they hook up and “try not to get attached.”

Now, she said, she and her best friend had changed their romantic goals, from finding boyfriends to finding “hookup buddies,” which she described as “a guy that we don’t actually really like his personality, but we think is really attractive and hot and good in bed.”

I think I would really like everyone reading this to just read that over a few times, and let that sink in. You have a minority of good looking athletic men having sex with most of the women on campus, while the majority of men who opt-out of the hook-up culture and want to court and marry are left wondering where all the women went. And many of those will reinvent themselves as “bad boys” in order to at least get some contact with women, so that there are even fewer chaste, marriage-enabled men.

So, what are we seeing? We are seeing that women think of extra-marital sex as a form of recreation. When I was a student, I completed a Bachelor degree and Masters degree, both in computer science, and this is what I saw women doing. There was no interest in courting or marriage whatsoever, and no concern about preserving chastity or courting effectively with the goal of marriage. They did not want to hear about moral values, moral obligations, theological debates or apologetics. They were all into feeling good and being popular – a popularity facilitated by “hooking up” with good-looking promiscuous athletes.

I really recommend reading some of Dr. Schneiderman’s comments on this article. He is really not happy about it, and he puts the blame squarely on feminists. As do I. Radical feminism is the ideology that gave us abortion, fatherlessness and divorce come from. We should call it what it is: selfish and destructive.

Update: Nancy P. posted a link to this rebuttal to the NYT article on Facebook to talk me down from the ledge.

Quote:

The article somehow overlooked a recent survey of 3,907 students that found only 1 in 10 people in college said they had had casual sex in college, with men being twice as likely as women to have such an encounter. Or that at a comparable Ivy League school, Harvard University, two-thirds of the class of 2013 said in a survey they had two or fewer sexual partners during college.

That’s good data that does calm me down a little.

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