Hi Folks!
I've finally decided to move this blog over to Wordpress. It was a tough decision, but I feel it is the right one. Please click on this link to visit the new blog site!
Also, I would very much appreciate it if you would update your blog rolls with my new link:
http://cafephilos.wordpress.com/
Thank you!
Paul Sunstone
I've noticed for sometime now a steady stream of traffic to this blog because of a brief post I made back in May on fatherless girls. So, tonight, I was trying to count all the fatherless girls I've known in this town.
I would count a few, think I'd finished, then remembered another one or two. In the end, I simply gave up. It's overwhelming. Not the numbers, but the faces. Overwhelming.
I wonder if we will ever again be a society in which it is unusual to grow up without a father. My own father died when I was two years old. At the small school I attended, I was the only child in my class of about 100 students without a dad at home. What are the numbers today?
When I came to Colorado at midlife, I landed in a coffee shop that was a hang out for an eclectic crowd that included everyone from the mayor of the city to a group of homeless gentlemen. The coffee shop was also two blocks from the city's largest high school, and it attracted very many mildly disaffected youth who enjoyed its eclectic atmosphere as much as I did. Most of the first 200 or so people I met in this town were mildly disaffected kids.
Some of those kids attached themselves to me. When I look back it strikes me that the boys who attached themselves to me usually had fathers. But the girls who did were usually fatherless.
I wonder why most of the boys had fathers, while most of the girls didn't?
Growing up a male myself, I knew the boys at that age are not usually looking for a father figure when they attach themselves to an older man. Instead, they are most likely looking for help in entering the adult world. That is, at that age, they want to work out how to relate to adults who are not their father. I suppose the girls wanted pretty much the same thing.
Yet, I don't know. I don't know why most of the boys who wanted to associate with me had fathers while most of the girls who wanted to associate with me didn't have fathers. Nor do I know whether there was any difference between the boys and the girls in why they wanted to associate with me. Some things seem bound to remain a mystery.
At any rate, my experience of fatherless children -- or more precisely, my experience of fatherless girls -- has convinced me they are especially vulnerable, they are often overlooked, and that we all could do more by them. So, I've decided to make my own small contribution to their cause by blogging from time to time about some of the fatherless girls I've known, what kinds of problems they've faced, how they met those challenges, and what wonderful people they are. I hope you'll be interested.
How old, on average, is a person in the West before they first have sex?
Well, according to Julien O. Teitler, the median age for first sex among people living in Western industrial nations dropped steadily from 1960 to 1995, before stabilizing at around age 17.
(Damn! If I'd only known that sooner, I wouldn't have held out until 50.)
Although the median age for first sex has declined, the median age for marriage has risen in those same countries. Clearly, it is now normative in Western industrialized countries to have sex before marriage. In America, for instance, fully nine out of ten people have sex before marriage.
(Damn! If I'd only known that sooner, I would never have promised my latex love doll a wedding ring after our first night together.)
The problem is our ideals have not kept pace with our actual morals. So many people in the West still act as if it is reasonable to expect kids to hold out until marriage, even when they themselves failed to do it! Instead of merely expecting kids to hold out until marriage -- something only one in ten of them will do -- we should be teaching kids how to deal with premarital sex.
Teaching kids how to deal with premarital sex involves much more than merely teaching them to use a condom. Among other things, it involves teaching them a whole morality, a whole sexual ethics, and even a sexual etiquette.
A few years ago, when I was hanging out with dozens of kids here in town, I was often asked questions about ending relationships. Naturally, if you are going to start having sex years before you get married, you are almost certainly going to face the prospect of ending one or a few relationships. But when and how is it best to break up? Kids need to be taught a practical morality that addresses those issues.
That's only one example. There are many more moral, ethical, and etiquette issues that are not being adequately addressed in part because we still hold to the ideal of waiting for marriage to have sex.
Our failure to adequately address those issues goes beyond idle interest. Morality, ethics, and etiquette are ideally ways in which generations pass down what they've learned of life. When all we pass down are failed ideals, we are relinquishing our responsibility to the next generation to share what real wisdom and learning we have to share.
Stumble It!
