Café Philos: an internet café

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.

I've heard models described as vacuous airheads, but that doesn't describe Suzanne unless someone can be both a vacuous airhead and an intelligent, creative, buoyant, and artistic woman.

I believe she was all of 14 years old when she first modeled lingerie for Victoria's Secrets, the catalog and store company. She couldn't have been much older because I met her when she was 16 and she was no longer modeling by then.

Over the years, Suzanne has revealed a persistent talent for getting fired from employments, so I strongly suspect she was no longer modeling by the time we met because Secrets had refused anything more to do with her. She's not a vacuous airhead, but she is dysfunctional.

The story I'm prepared to tell you today concerns Suzanne, Victoria's Secrets, and her abusive boyfriend. I've already introduced Suzanne and Victoria's Secrets, so I'll turn now to the boyfriend.

Meet Jeff.

He's one of those males who prey on women much younger than themselves. Jeff is 20 years older than Suzanne, and very few women his own age have ever sustained an interest in him. Jeff can be charming. He can be witty. He can be exciting. He can sweep a naive and inexperienced girl off her feet. Yet, most women see the looser in him. So Jeff has learned to specialize in the young, naive and inexperienced women he has some chance of getting.

Once he gets them, he doesn't know what to do with them. He turns the affair into a drama, the drama into a tragedy, the tragedy into a nightmare. When you take some fish out of the water, their colors at first fascinate, then fade. Latter, the fish begin to stink. Any girl who lands Jeff sooner or later learns that in a relationship, he's a fish out of water.

Young people almost invariably overestimate the odds in their favor of significantly changing someone, and especially they overestimate their odds of changing a lover. Maybe that's because they are always being told by their parents, preachers, and teachers to change themselves, and so they assume it actually works when you tell people to change themselves.

In truth, the only person likely to change someone is the person themselves. And even then, seldom, if ever, is a person capable of a fundamental change: It's not in the nature of water to become stone, nor of stone to become air.

In the few years Jeff and Suzanne were together, Suzanne wanted two things, both absurd. She wanted to change Jeff against his nature. And she wanted her own nature to bloom. The latter was absurd because Jeff had her under his thumb and was abusing her emotionally, psychologically, and physically. No one blooms under those conditions. At best, they merely endure.

If you yourself have seen a few abusive relationships, you know they are all alike, except for the details. The only detail of the relationship between Jeff and Suzanne that surprised me was that Jeff apparently never tried to keep Suzanne from seeing me.

I'm clueless why he didn't. It's a classic pattern of abuse that the abuser tries to prevent his victim from having any friends who are outside of his influence or control. But through out the time she was with Jeff, Suzanne saw me almost daily. It's true she seldom associated with me in Jeff's presence, but we spent hours together while he was at work or off somewhere else. That sort of thing normally doesn't happen in an abusive relationship.

Suzanne would look me up almost every day. We'd then go to a coffee shop, a movie, the mall, "The Well" -- which was her favorite nudist resort -- or we'd go hiking, or drive around Colorado for a few hours. Whatever amused us.

Once, we even went to Victoria's Secrets. That was three or so years into Suzanne's relationship with Jeff. That day, we'd gone to the mall.

When we were passing the Victoria's Secrets store, Suzanne wanted to go in. The racks, of course, were full of lingerie, and Suzanne excitedly asked me to choose three sets for her to try on. She then took me back to a dressing room where she stripped and modeled the sets for me.

Christmas was a month off, so I asked her a lot of questions about each of the three sets, including which one felt the most comfortable -- if I'm going to give lingerie to a woman, it damn well better be comfortable, especially at Victoria's prices.

Looking at a young nude woman is at least as fascinating to me as watching a beautiful sunrise. Yet, I'm not attracted to most young women's sexuality, and especially not to Suzanne's. Their sexuality is more likely to depress me than to stimulate me, although I'm not quite sure why. At any rate, I certainly do not make a point of telling young women they aren't sexy -- I have my life to protect! So that day I told Suzanne, "This is a lot of fun for me -- watching you model that sexy lingerie. If I'm having so much fun, think of how much fun it would be for Jeff! Why don't you bring him out here?"

Suzanne didn't answer immediately. When she did answer, her voice had gone strange. There was a tone in it I'd never heard before. In a way, it was a little girl's voice. But perhaps it only sounded like a little girl's voice because she was having difficulty controlling it. She said, "Jeff wouldn't like it. If I did this with him, he'd call me a slut."

We fell into silence. Then she began taking off the last set of lingerie in order to get back into her own clothes, but she was trembling.

When you abuse a woman, you prevent her from being true to herself. At it's core, that's what abuse really is -- it's preventing someone from being true to themselves.

Sometimes it comes out in ways that are large enough and important enough to easily describe. Like the woman whose husband prevents her from developing her musical genius so that the world looses a classical pianist. But much more often, abuse comes out in ways that are harder to see, such as when a woman trembles in a dressing room because her lover will not, or cannot, accept her sexuality whole and complete, just as it is, without condemning it.

Those harder to see ways are as criminal as the other. You don't need to beat a woman to abuse her. You can just as well kill a person's sense of themselves, their self-esteem, their self direction -- by a thousand tiny cuts.

By the time I met Suzanne I was too old and had seen too much wickedness to harbor any fantasy that I could reason with her into leaving Jeff. I knew she was confused beyond reason, frightened into uncertainty, blinded by her feelings, and emotionally dependent on him. So, I did the only things I thought I could do, which were never that great nor enough.

For the most part, that amounted to just accepting her for herself.

Two years ago, the Republican mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, was elected on a platform that included opposition to gay marriage. Yet, on Wednesday, he suddenly dropped his opposition and signed a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California's gay marriage ban. He had previously promised to veto it.

Why the change of heart? It seems the most important reason is Lisa Sanders, the mayor's daughter, who it turns out is a lesbian:

The Republican mayor said he could no longer back the position he took during his election campaign two years ago, when he said he favored civil unions but not full marriage rights for homosexual couples.

He fought back tears as he said he wanted his adult daughter, Lisa, and other gay people he knows to have their relationships protected equally under state laws.

"In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana," Sanders said.

The move most likely carries some political risk for Mayor Sanders since, "in 2000, 62% of San Diego voters endorsed a statewide measure to restrict marriage to a union between a man and woman."

It seems quite understandable to me that through the love one has for one's daughter, one would gain insight and empathy for the plight of homosexuals. Yet, that is not always the case. Dick Cheney's daughter is gay, and Dick Cheney continues to oppose gay marriage. I think in Cheney we have a man willing to put political considerations above what his heart must tell him is the right thing to do. But do you think I'm being too hard on Cheney?


Reference:

San Diego Mayor to Back Same-Sex Marriage

Last night and this morning, I have been engaged in arguing about premarital sex with a friend on an internet forum. My friend is: (1) idealistic, (2) idealistic, and (3) idealistic. Apart from those three things, she's idealistic. But it's not entirely her doing, for she has been raised to be idealistic.

She's a bright, articulate, and humanely decent young person who has had the misfortune of having been sheltered from many of the realities of life by her parents.

Her parents even went so far as to home school her -- both in order to give her a superior education in some things and an indoctrination in other things. For instance: They did not think it was advantageous to her to know too much about the theory of evolution, other than why they considered it wrong. So now she's well educated about certain things and poorly educated about others.

I suspect her parents did a very good job indoctrinating her on the subject of sex and relationships. Added to that, she has never had a boyfriend. That is, she has had insufficient experience to contradict her ideals. She believes in Prince Charming. She really does! He is as real to her as the theory of evolution is wrong and she is holding out for him in more ways than one. Most obviously, she is holding out for him sexually. She wants to be a virgin on her wedding day. But more subtly, she is holding out for him emotionally. She does not want to date anyone who she thinks is not the Prince.

It has never really occurred to her that everything has a learning curve, and even love is no exception to that. In a vital way, we must learn how to love. And we can only learn so much about love from words, just as we can only learn so much about playing tennis from listening to words. At some point, if we are going to love well, then we must practice loving, just as we must practice tennis to play tennis well.

Ideally, in tennis, you hit the ball over the net, return each volley, and all goes well. But unless you have actually practiced doing that -- and practiced it and practiced it and practiced it -- you will be unable to do it well.

Of course, she would say she only wants to practice love with one special person, her Prince Charming. I think that's fine, if that's the way she wants to do it. I am not actually opposed to anyone holding out for their prince or princess. But I do object that she doesn't truly realize there will be a learning curve when she finally meets the Prince.

How do you keep your ideals when life smashes them down? In some cases, you simply don't. During the Korean War, the Americans attempted at first to conquer North Korea. Then the Chinese entered the war and the Americans had to change their goal or ideal from the conquest of North Korea to the defense of South Korea. They managed to accomplish this second goal or ideal, but had they not in time changed from the attack of the North to the defense of the South, they would have lost both goals, rather than just one. To accomplish anything in life you must sometimes be flexible about your ideals. And, somehow, I don't think my friend is flexible about her sexual and relationship ideals. She may very well end up loosing everything.

I wrestle with what to think about idealism. That's to say, I don't feel I understand it. And I don't feel I understand it because, for the most part, all I see are its follies and excesses. If you really understand something, then you tend to have a balanced view of it. But I do not have a balanced view of idealism: I see it's weaknesses, but not its strengths. So there is a large part of me that hopes she will find exactly what she wants in life. Even though I doubt that will be the likely outcome of her stubborn idealism.

According to an article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, it is common knowledge among geneticists that "5 to 15 percent of the men on birth certificates are not the biological fathers of their children."

That might not come as a surprise to folks aware that human males long ago evolved adaptions to human females having more than one sexual partner. It is known, for instance, that the shape of the penis makes it an efficient pump for removing semen -- presumably competitor's semen -- from the vagina.

If humans had evolved only one reproductive strategy, people would never debate whether this or that strategy was morally superior. Instead, we'd all follow that one strategy and probably not even consider the possibility there might be other strategies. Flexible mating arrangements sure makes our species morally interesting.

Perhaps I should begin by stating that I'm not in favor of folks cheating on their partners.

I'm not a chauvinist for monogamy either. But I believe that if you were so incomprehensibly foolish as to freely, and while sober, promise someone that you will remain faithful to them, then you should remain faithful to them. No excuses. You made the promise. Keep it.

That's Plan A.

In life, Plan A doesn't always work, and so most people always try to have a Plan B. Here, then, is Plan B: If you do cheat on your partner, then do so in the most ethical and responsible manner still possible. For instance:

• Don't bring home any STDs, babies, or psychotic lovers.
• Don't tell your partner you've cheated unless it's absolutely necessary.
• Don't tell anyone else you've cheated unless it's absolutely necessary.
  
• Put your partner first, ahead of your lover, for attention, gifts, resources and time. Give your lover the left-overs -- not your partner.
• Don't discuss your partner with your lover.
  
• Don't lie to your lover about where they stand with you.
  

Having seen a number of people cheat on their partners over the years, I've come to the conclusion that most people -- but not all -- are lousy cheaters. Once they start, they go to pieces, behaving much worse than needs be. Then, they wind up confessing everything to their partner and spending 10 years in therapy. And that's just for a drunken one-night stand. It only gets worse if there's more than one infraction.

When we have sex, our bodies release certain neurochemicals that cause us to bond with the person we have sex with.

For instance, our bodies release oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neurochemical that does a number of things in humans, but it should be noted here that it is addictive. That is, oxytocin is as much of an addictive substance as is alcohol or nicotine.

Most people readily describe the emotional effects of oxytocin as having "a warm and fuzzy feeling towards someone". If you gave someone a shot of pure oxytocin, they would experience a rush of warm and fuzzy feelings, among other things.

So what does all this mean? It means that when you have sex with a person, your body releases an addictive chemical that you come to associate with that person. If you cease having sex with that person, you will be able to go a few days with no problem. Then the withdrawl symptoms will set in and you will yearn for him or her (you are really yearning for more oxytocin, but your mind doesn't know that).

This pattern is why so many couples break up, are happy with their break up for a few days, and then plummet into yearnings for each other. Not realizing that they are chemically addicted to each other, they think their yearnings mean they are in love with each other. So, they get back together again. Only to face the same problems that caused them to break up in the first place.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: Be careful who you sleep with. If you sleep with them often enough, whether inside marriage or outside of marriage, you will become addicted to them. That is especially true for women: Estrogen multiplies the bonding effect of oxytocin.

I am not making an argument here for restricting sex to marriage, but rather am merely saying that sex has consequences we don't always think about, but should. Sex, after all, is something that evolved in us not just for procreation, but (at least in humans) also for bonding us to each other.

Carrie McCandless (left) is a 30 year old Colorado teacher who yesterday pled guilty to "unlawful sexual contact" with one of her students, a 17 year old boy.

Her lawyer maintains she's innocent of the charge, but unwilling to risk a trial that might send her to prison for years. The deal is for her to serve five years of probation in exchange for a guilty plea. If you're interested, you can read the details here.

Late last night, I was listening to a bimbo talk show host cough up his opinion that there ought to be a double standard about these sorts of things. He offered that it was acceptable for an older woman, like McCandless, to have sex with an underage boy, but that it was unacceptable for an older man to have sex with an underage girl.

According to the bimbo, a double standard is morally justified in these cases because of the very nature of human reproduction. In humans, the reproductive burden is not equally distributed between the sexes. Instead, women bear most of the burden (i.e. nine months of pregnancy followed in most cases by years of care-giving). Men, on the other hand, never get pregnant, nor are they usually the primary care-givers. Consequently, the bimbo pointed out, men have a much lighter reproductive burden than women.

He then went on to argue the difference in reproductive burdens between men and women obligated society to protect girls from older men, but did not obligate society to protect boys from older women. That is, girls have a lot to loose by getting pregnant from older men. Boys, on the other hand, have very little to loose by getting an older woman pregnant. Hence, we ought to be outraged if an older man has sex with a girl. But we ought to encourage -- or at least condone -- a boy having sex with an older woman.

It would be cruel to demand that talk show hosts think.

Now, I confess I admired the bimbo for his heroic effort to do something with the McCandless case besides condemn her to hell. It's always boring at midnight to hear a bimbo take the moral high road. Nevertheless, I found myself in radical disagreement with him.

The age and sex of a couple makes little difference to me. The way I look at it, the important things are mutual respect, shared expectations, sexually responsible behavior, a lack of abuse, mutual free and informed consent, and so forth. The same things that are important to me always. I'm not in favor of people so young they cannot give informed consent having sex, but apart from that I think the age of the partners doesn't much matter.

I'm not saying McCandless was right to indulge in groping a 17 year old, if that's what she did, because her specific case is complicated. For one thing, she was the 17 year old's teacher, and thus in a position to retaliate if he turned down her advances. Could he have given free consent under those circumstances? Maybe. The McCandless case hinges on that and other questions that cannot now be answered because the case will not go to trial. So, I'm reserving judgment on that case.

Instead, I have another bone to pick with the bimbo talk show host. Not only do I disagree with him that it's automatically immoral for an older man to have sex with a girl, and automatically moral for a boy to have sex with an older woman, but I also disagree with his notion -- he must have gotten this notion from the same "scientists" that keep telling Rush Limbaugh the jury is still out on global warming -- that only human males have evolved to have multiple sex partners. The truth is the best available science strongly suggests that both males and females have evolved to have multiple partners.

In the first place, there is no society in which it is unknown for some women to have more than one partner. This suggests the basis for multiple partners has a genetic component, rather than being merely cultural, since if it was merely cultural, we could expect to find cultures in which no women had more than one partner. But in every culture, there are women who have more than one partner.

In the second place, human males have evolved to cope with their females "getting some on the side." According to some scientists, the size of male testicles and the quantity of sperm production indicate that males evolved to have sex with females who were at least somewhat likely to have sex with more than one male. Again, the size and shape of the male penis is such that it seems evolved to be an effective pump for removing a competing male's sperm from a vagina prior to depositing one's own sperm. Last, males ejaculate significantly more sperm in circumstances when their females have had a chance to be with another male. None of these things would be the case if females were evolved to be perfectly monogamous.

So, in my opinion, the bimbo talk show host is wrong not just in his belief that we should have a double standard when it comes to older people having sex with younger people, but he is also wrong in his belief that only men evolved the reproductive strategy of screwing around.

You cannot clip the wings of a falcon and still have a falcon.

That should be a lesson to lovers who would try to clip each other's wings. You can call a clipped falcon a falcon and say it's the same bird as before, but you are only deluding yourself. In truth, your flightless falcon is only similar to the bird it once was. Why don't we see this?

A large part of the answer is language. We think we have the same bird as before because we call the bird by the same name as before. We call it a falcon when it could fly, and we still call it a falcon when it cannot fly, so we think we have the same bird. Yet, the bird behaves differently, we interact with it differently, we experience it differently. If we went solely by what we actually observe -- and did not rely so much on language to tell us what we should observe -- we would concede that a clipped falcon is not the same bird as an unclipped falcon.

I have seen in my 50 years that many lovers try to clip each other's wings. Perhaps they think they can clip each others wings and still have the same person as before; the one they fell in love with. Yet, every so often, those lovers wake up one morning thinking, "He's changed. I don't love him anymore."

Last night, May at Religious Forums revived a thread that I started some time ago. The thread asks, "Is Abstinence From Sex Before Marriage Really Best?". May, who is a pleasant person and a Jehovah's Witness, posted a link to a JW article, "What's Wrong With Premarital Sex?". Of course, the JW article takes the view that a great many things are wrong with premarital sex.

It seems if you go back far enough in this country, you will arrive at a time when very few couples had sex with each other before marriage. That's a finding reported in The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices In the United States. The generation that married in the 1920's and 30's very infrequently had sex before marriage. That is, they very infrequently had sex with their future spouses before marriage. Bordello's absolutely flourished back then, and it's a reasonable guess for that and numerous other reasons that many of the men who married in the 1920's and 30's were not virgins on their wedding nights. Yet, that generation actually did practice abstaining from premarital sex with their future spouses.

The scene changes during the 1950's. There are still plenty of whorehouses in the country, but they are on the wane, and premarital sex with your future spouse is on the rise. The rule of the day was that if a boy got a girl pregnant, they married. Because that was the rule, rather than the exception, the 50's saw more underage brides, and more pregnant brides, than any decade since. Contra the Religious Right, it was the 1950's, not the 60's and 70's, that firmly established premarital sex as the custom in America.

Today, a whole slew of surveys agree that nine out of every ten married American couples engaged in premarital sex. Thus the custom shows no real sign of waning. In my opinion, premarital sex between loving, committed couples -- couples planning to marry -- is also openly accepted as a good thing by most people now. "Testing the waters" is thought prudent as a way to prevent marrying someone you are sexually incompatible with.

So, the Jehovah's Witnesses -- as well as many other Christian denominations -- are a bit out of step with the American consensus on premarital sex.

Cynics will point out that to be out of step with the overwhelming majority of Americans is usually a sign of sanity, but the cynics might not be right this time. It could be the overwhelming majority of Americans are evolving a sane sexual morality -- without much help from Christianity.

When my former neighbor Hannah was 17, she decided to, as she phrased it, "terminate her virginity with extreme prejudice." Although she was raised Southern Baptist, it never occurred to Hannah to ask her preacher for advice. Instead, she called up an older female friend and asked her for help.

Hannah's friend took a day off work, took Hannah to Planned Parenthood for birth control, then to Victoria's Secrets for lingerie. The two later went to lunch for a long girl chat that answered the sort of questions Hannah needed honest answers to but couldn't expect to get such answers from a Southern Baptist preacher.

The church later lost Hannah from its flock, and part of the reason she told me she quit attending was simply because the church had become irrelevant to her on sexual matters. "If they lie about sex, what else are they lying about?", she said.

In so many ways, traditional Christianity is having a hard time adapting to the world today. Even many believers are finding their religion is largely irrelevant to them in crucial areas of their life. To be sure, most are not dropping out of Christianity like Hannah. Instead, they are remaining nominal Christians while increasingly reinterpreting the Christian message to suit them. Americans are not going to give up Christianity any time soon, but they will almost certainly continue to quietly evolve their own values and views despite it.

"Americans are the worst, both at having affairs and dealing with the aftermath. Adultery crises in America last longer, cost more, and seem to inflict more emotional torture than they do anyplace I visited."

So says Pamela Druckerman, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who for several years travelled the world to chart international patterns of infidelity. Her findings will be published next month in her book, Lust in Translation. Given that Druckerman believes other cultures and societies handle infidelity significantly better than Americans, her book promises either to be controversial or largely ignored.

Whatever the case, the book should be interesting to those of us who ponder the incomprehensible sexual dysfunction of Americans, or the always-just-seething-below-the-surface sexual hysteria that accompanies it. We Americans can put a man on the moon -- a feat we are rightfully proud of -- but we cannot quite shake ourselves of our dysfunctional sexual culture.

As recently as 2000, we led the Western world in nearly every category of sexual problem, from teen pregnancy through domestic violence and on to rape and incest, according to the World Health Organization. Since then, I haven't seen any studies that suggest much has changed about our leadership role. America basically ranks as a third world nation when it comes to sexuality.

There will never in this country be the brilliant equivalent of a science based moon program to deal with our sexual problems. Americans simply are not that serious about solving their sexual problems. If we were serious, passionately serious, we would solve them. We have the resources to do it. We lack only the will.

Some years ago I was happily browsing the Free Books Bin at a used bookstore --- searching among the rejects the store couldn't sell --- when I came across something as good as an overlooked gem: James Dobson's Love For A Lifetime. I almost yelped with delight.

If you are not familiar with James Dobson, he is one of America's most powerful evangelical leaders, a man with whom the White House conference calls every Monday, and an activist on every aspect of family life. Dobson is highly controversial for his views on the family, and while I would not spend to buy a book of his, I can certainly delight in making off with a free copy of one of his works. Who wouldn't grab a free book by such a controversial figure?

Love For A Lifetime represents itself as a serious book of sound advice for folks who are about to get married.

That's odd, because to all the world it is no more than a slick little book designed from the foundations up to live on coffee tables. It's glossy pages are lavished with pastel pink and blue borders; the writing is far too easy to browse; and the tone is flippantly inspirational. Not the sort of design that tells you you're in for some real how-to advice.

Yet, the book is striking in at least one respect: It's tone is almost wholly negative, even fearful. If you pick this book up from a coffee table and browse it for nuts and bolts suggestions on how to make a good marriage, you will be disappointed there are very few nuts and bolts in the book. On the other hand, if you want a dire sermon full of warnings about all the things, real and imagined, that can go wrong in marriages, then this book is your godsend. It even has a call to save yourself from the traps and pitfalls of marriages by turning to Jesus.

For the longest time after reading this book, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was so profoundly wrong about it. Then, it came to me one day while I was out walking that the book almost entirely lacks any notion of overcoming challenges, surmounting obstacles, or healing from mistakes. Everything the book mentions that can go wrong in a marriage it casts in the light of catastrophe. For instance: Dobson believes in sexual abstinence until marriage, and in his eyes there is no reasonably sure way to overcome the problems he believes are caused by being a non-virgin before your wedding night. Your lack of virginity, if that's the case, has undermined your marriage, and that's all there is to it. No hope, no solution, not even any advice on how to lessen the damage.

All of which makes me think about Dobson the man. Is he really that fearful? Does he really see the downside of everything in such extraordinarily sharper focus than the upside? Is he really at such a loss to solve problems?

I suppose to some extent he really is all those things. I say that not just because the book, Love For A Lifetime, cannot have been written by an optimist, but also because of other things I know about Dobson. e.g. his belief that allowing homosexuals to marry will result in the destruction of the "traditional" family. Anyone who believes that certainly does not believe in the resilience of the family. No, anyone who believes that sees nearly every challenge, no matter how slight, as a potential catastrophe.

In Love For A Lifetime, James Dobson creates an ideology and a mythology of marriage based on fear. The book is a "depravity and hellfire" sermon that fails to mention even in passing the remarkable ability of humans to solve problems, adapt to circumstances, or heal from wounds. It has a bleak, dark soul.


By the way, anyone who is interested in my poetry might want to know that the book was part of the inspiration for the poem you find here.