GUYS AND LADIES: My post about Damsels in Distress, at AmCon.

"THE DECLINE OF DECADENCE": I wish I had seen Damsels in Distress before its closing night here in DC, so I could tell you all to go see it! It was terrific--funnier and more wide-ranging in its satire than Metropolitan, I thought. In When Sisterhood Was in Flower, Florence King's obvious love for the '70s feminism she satirized made the satire itself sharper and brighter. WSWIF:70's feminism::Damsels:"Beauty will save the world."

THE FINE MISMATING OF A HIM AND HER...: Something I've been thinking about without much coherence or resolution. I have a couple footnotes which I may post later, but for now I figured I'd let my readers whack at this pinata for a while!

As you know, Bob, I got a lot out of Christopher C. Roberts's Creation and Covenant. Nestled among its more central claims and arguments, it makes a very strong theological case for something I’ve already thought about, w/o much resolution, when considering the "theology of the body": Women and men are made for one another, and yet celibacy is in some way a witness to that fact just as much as marriage is. So how does that actually work?

It’s an especially weird or fraught question for me because so much of my conscious development of a spirituality which supports my celibacy has been devoted to finding chaste, Catholic ways to honor and express my love of women. So I'm very aware of ways in which my prayer life, my volunteer work, my friendships, and my writing are ways in which I can serve and love women. And I stand by that as a necessary and fruitful lens through which to focus my spiritual life. But I'm a lot more vague on how I relate, in my spirituality, to men or Man or Adam (?) or whatever I should be picturing here!

However, when I was thinking about this question, I realized that the one prayer I return to most insistently (I don't count the rosary as one prayer) is the Anima Christi. And this is such an enfleshed, almost lurid prayer, very visceral--you become inebriated by Christ’s blood and hide in His wounds. I wonder if perhaps this prayer is so powerful for me, or calls to me so much when I'm in need, in part because it does offer such a strong spiritual connection to Christ-as-Man?

I am really not able to express myself very well on this subject or form any interesting conclusions, so I suppose I'll just throw this out there and ask whether people have any reactions. And for a) the celibate, especially those celibate by vocation rather than circumstance, and b) the gay/same-sex-attracted/your-term-here among us, do you all perceive, in your own lives, a need for some kind of spiritual practice which "brings together the two halves of humanity"? Have you found ways of living as woman for man, or man for woman, outside of marriage?

CHILDREN'S LONGING FOR GENDER: I basically agree with this email from a friend. I'd add that, as she says, parents can and should meet kids' longing for gender in some ways... while resisting kids' tendency toward really rigid and sometimes destructive ideas about gender (for example, the tendency to mark out some activities which are generally fruitful for both sexes, like crying or art, as the territory of only one sex). As I indicated here, a unisex world would lack some necessary beauty--but so would a rigidly-gendered, stereotype-affirming world. Parents can teach flexibility while modeling adult life as man and woman. At least, I think they can...!

Hi Eve, this is a bit late but I have been thinking about your post about whether we can have gender roles without reducing them to functions. It's been a quandary to me for a long time, so I don't have the answer, but your opener about young kids' clothes reminded me of taking developmental psych as an undergrad. A common refrain I heard, in my feminist-leaning college, was, "I thought gender roles were something society imposed on kids, until I actually had kids." One person who had a revelation along those lines was the psychologist Vivian Paley, not so much from having kids as teaching kindergarten, which inspired her to write an entire book about how her kindergarteners tried to define themselves as male and female. Since they were years away from the business end of gender, they tended to latch on to secondary and sometimes arbitrary things. I don't remember many details after 20 years, but sometimes the kids would make up rules like "Boys skip, girls hop." So when you're looking at little kids' clothes -- at least if they aren't too little to talk -- keep in mind that a lot of these choices may have been insisted upon by the kids themselves. (It helps, of course, that there's a whole industry of children's products happy to pander to this.)

Many people outgrow that sort of thing, but still, 'the child is the father of the man,' especially when you're talking about a physical discipline like figure skating that people have to start in childhood to get really good at. But that's also all the more reason for kids to have strong adult figures of both sexes in their lives -- like, say, parents -- because otherwise the random rules their peers make up can end up defining gender for them. At five, a child isn't going to understand abstract concepts like 'icon' and 'genre', but they can look at an adult and say, 'I want to be like that,' and grow into understanding by imitation. If I do end up going to grad school in psych, it will be very interesting to find out what's happened in the last 20 years on this front. Once you've realized 'OMG gender differences are probably innate!' the next issue is, 'Now what do we do about it?'

GENDER AS GENRE: Twice in the past two weeks, while rooting through bins of children's clothing to find the best things for the women we serve at the pregnancy center, I've found cute little t-shirts emblazoned with figure-skating logos. Cute, ruffly, pink, indisputably girly t-shirts. And I mean, I love Oksana Baiul as much as the next person, and this program makes me want a cigarette afterward, but my overall preference turns out to be for men's singles skating. I want a way of thinking about gender which allows men and women to be different--allows Man and Woman, He and She, to be iconic realities whose divergences are as vivid as their similarities--without parceling out some activities or emotions as pink or blue.

There needs to be a way of talking about gender which neither marginalizes la difference, nor falls back on rigid and deeply culturally-contingent patterns of behavior. Saying, for example, that children do best with both a mother and a father is not reducible to saying that children need both a nurturing person and a challenging person. Gender isn't function. I've written about this here (actually, that post says much of what I wanted to say in this one, so maybe just consider this a reminder and footnote!), and I liked a lot of what Christopher C. Roberts said about it in his book Creation and Covenant.

One partial analogy might be genre. Every emotion and gesture can be found in different genres, and yet those emotions are evoked differently and those gestures signify different things depending on genre. A woman standing at her window, nervously twitching the curtain with her fingers, means something different in a romantic comedy as vs. a suspense flick. Hope is evoked differently in horror vs. noir.

The analogy is only partial. For a Catholic, while the specifics of gender are culturally-contingent the existence of gender difference is not; and you do have to pick one, man or woman are your only options within the Catholic faith as far as I can tell. Obviously those things aren't true of genre. But I hope the analogy can illuminate the possibility of talking about real difference without being reductive or functionalist, without dressing boys in the camouflage onesies and the soccer/football/basketball sleepers while girls get the flower- and butterfly-decked outfits.

I'd be interested in any thoughts you all have along these lines....

DEVELOPING CONFLICTS: Some quick thoughts about Time Stands Still, at the Studio Theater through 2/12.

The play is about a war photographer and her reporter boyfriend; when she's almost killed on the job, they retreat to their Brooklyn apartment and try to figure out how to move forward with their lives. There are only two supporting characters, Richard the somewhat plastic editor and his new fiancee Mandy the cliched, saccharine Americaness. (After one scene with Mandy I found myself thinking, "Wait, but I thought this play was written by a woman?" It wasn't.)

There are a lot of problems with this play. It can be cheap and predictable (of course the photographer's much-divorced, horrible father is a conservative Christian! of course Mandy is much younger than Richard!) and the big-idea lines are often pat. The shifts in audience identification are what you might expect: Mandy gets her moments, etc. The actual war-zone descriptions are a bit tinny--I wasn't super surprised to find out after the show, from the playwright bio in the program, that David Margulies wrote it because he was troubled by his life in Connecticut rather than because he was troubled by his many trips to Iraq, you know?

That said, the play's heart is clearly in its portrayal of "emerging adulthood," anchorless people who are no longer as young as they act, people to whom life is starting to catch up.

I think one contrast between Sarah the photographer and Jamie the reporter/boyfriend is that he's trying to be a man, and she's trying to be an adult. Her task is more straightforward, and she's a more straightforward character in general. The way longing for connection and stability shapes a man is portrayed very keenly and subtly here. (I initially thought that Sarah had been captured, and that the suppressed aggression in Jamie's haunted eyes would come forward more directly. That didn't happen, and I think the play is better for it. Holly Twyford is pretty terrific as Sarah, but on the basis of those sunken eyes I'm giving the award here to Greg McFadden as Jamie.)

There are also some hints about the ways in which disaster-journalism requires the complicity of the suffering locals; the ethical dilemmas inherent in the practice are sharpened when the locals don't hand themselves over to the camera.

I'm glad I saw this and I'd generally recommend it, despite its flaws.

"THE PROPER BASIS FOR MARRIAGE IS A MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING": Notes I didn't use for my review of Premarital Sex in America. Sorry about the length! I thought this book did a good job of advancing the ball in terms of our understanding of American ideas about marriage and sex. It's worth your time. Everything that follows is something I thought as a result of this book, not necessarily something the book said itself, unless it's in quotation marks.

Oh, and: I snagged the epigraph for my review from the Cigarette Smoking Blog.

p1: "premarital" no longer typically implies sex between two people who eventually do marry one another--pre-marital sex. (Although Maggie Gallagher points out that according to the CDC, "32 percent of currently married women under the age of 45 say they have had only one sex partner in their life. ... If the data are accurate, they suggest there are at least as many adult women under the age of 45 who have never had sex with anyone but their husband as there are gay people in the general population.")

p34: Especially after high school, oral sex isn't an alternative to intercourse; it's a warmup. Thinking of it as a birth control strategy, a means of maintaining "technical virginity," etc, requires a lot of naivete about human nature.

p60: 1/5 of sexually-active young men have had sex on the first day of knowing someone! And only 13% of s.a.y.m. have waited more than a year for sex.

pp 60-1: men w/fewer economic resources tend to have more partners, not fewer

p61: guys who've had more partners tend to be quicker to perceive women as less attractive after sex

(With all of these correlations and statistics, the point is not to say, "There are no exceptions, and people never change!" If you don't think this stuff applies to you, maybe it doesn't!--although I do generally think we're less exceptional than we'd like. And the stats might help you see places where you or someone you love does fit the average models, and therefore where you do need to put more conscious effort into changing or into addressing their issues. Knowing what kind of emotional baggage many people bring away from the experiences you've had can help you jettison that baggage--in part by suggesting that you're not uniquely messed-up if these are issues you have. Anyway, this is one of the many, many things I wanted to say in the AFF piece to mitigate its advice-column or preachy quality, but I ran out of room....)

p64: Birth control has made women slightly more like men (i.e. able to have relatively less-consequential, less-costly sex) rather than making men more like women (i.e. desiring high-cost, high-commitment sex)

p88: A girl says oral sex is "vulgar" but women should be nice and "giving" in relationships and do it anyway. This gets at one aspect of what you might call the Dan Savage worldview which I hadn't considered: If social norms shift such that the default is more like the "Good, Giving, and Game" model where you do the sex act you'd (strongly, in the case of anal sex, as Regnerus and Uecker find) prefer not to do, women have to give in a lot more often than men. (Assuming that this shift in social norms doesn't radically shift which sex acts men vs women object to and how strongly.) The "GGG" model can be just another way of playing on women's altruism--and our preference for justifying our actions as altruism even when there are a lot of other motives in play.

[ETA: I should make clear that I think this gender imbalance is an unintended consequence of the "GGG" idea. I mean, I don't think Dan Savage came up with this phrase in order to prey on women's insecurities! But I do think it plays into some of those insecurities.]

p104: "Hooking up" is more common at elite universities than lower-tier ones. Elite-U students are too focused on their educations and future careers to make time for an intense relationship, basically, but they still want sex.

p107: imbalanced campus sex ratios (i.e. more women per man--an increasingly common situation) lowers women's control of sexual relationships

p110: The authors imply that there isn't a script for regretting casual sex--they write as if seeking out sex is scripted but regretting it is more authentic or less socially-condoned, and I'm not convinced that's true.

p126: if college sex ratios remain the same "for long," 26 of 100 women will have to marry down educationally

p137: there's a minority of women for whom "no strings attached" sex is the ideal (though, p157, not an especially workable one). What I take from this is that there's a need to convey, culturally, that this preference is less beautiful, that beauty requires vulnerability. (One danger is that in making that point we might unintentionally sound like we're invoking Love in the Western World-style anti-marriage romantic tropes.)

p141: Very weak link between sexual behavior and depression in men (unlike the correlations for women between, e.g., more sex partners and a higher incidence of depression)--did they look for links to aggression or self-destructive behaviors? In other words, when we look for "depression" are we ignoring how the same emotional distress might manifest in people with more testosterone? They mention that men often express hurt differently, pp162-3, but don't really explore the idea.

p152: "The Sex Itself Is Not the Problem"--it's number of partners. Currently being in a sexual relationship typically makes women feel better. "Indeed, the sex is operating as it tends to--bonding persons, deepening relationships, and fostering greater interpersonal intimacy."

p161: "One study of casual sex in college notes that the most likely pairing is between self-confident men and distressed, depressed women."

They also explore the direction of the causal arrow here (i.e. which came first, higher incidence of depression or higher number of partners?)

p177: Catholics marry "early" (before age 24) second-last after black Protestants! And that's even though Hispanic men are more likely to marry early. "Catholics, Jews, and the religiously-unaffiliated." I know there are a lot of reasons for those numbers, but I am pretty sure it's not a good sign for the spiritual and vocational formation of Our Young People.

p182: I would like to distance myself from the authors' sunshiney reading of our economic crisis. That is all.

p183: Young adults believe that identity-formation should happen before marriage, as vs. marriage being one of the biggest sources and shapers of identity; p185: If you change within marriage that's viewed as a threat to the marriage, so marriage requires you to stop changing and to have already done your identity-formation. This seems to me to be a result, in part, of divorce "scripts" like, "He's not the man I married." We don't hear nearly enough about how to reshape or renew a marriage when a spouse changes.

p186: wishful thinking and misinformation about peak fertility

p188-9: parental resistance to young marriage--this is a major factor

p190: learning to be "good in bed" as a "transferable skill set," rather than learning to please the specific person you love and marry

p194: idealization of marriage means no relationship can live up to it

p220: the effects of childhood/youth mobility on later marriage outcomes: maybe "they get used to breakups." p221: Early geographic mobility is correlated with both liberalism and a higher number of sex partners--and the sex-partners correlation remains even after various common-sense things are controlled for like race, age, socioeconomic status, and parents' marital status.

p231: In discussing demography, the authors use this phrase: "the unintended byproducts of often rational and optimal decisions by regular people to have fewer children and a life richer in economic success and personal experiences." I have bolded the part that is bizarre and telling.

p232: The fruits of the Second Demographic Transition are money and freedom

p234: "Blues grow... by conversion... higher education and social class mobility. Reds tend to grow by reproduction."

p234: "Reds" are guiltier, more conflicted (earlier we've seen how much they're torn between a script in which marriage and family life is the primary goal and a script in which career and economic stability is the primary goal--and those scripts really do conflict for them). They're torn between two worldviews, marginalized--they don't stand within their own POV the way "blues" seem to. (Obviously this is wildly generalizing, but as a wild generalization I think it works. There's a reason I wish I'd titled my review of Red Families vs. Blue Families, a book written from an intensely "blue" perspective, "Written by the Victors.")

And on that depressing note, I guess I'll end. I like the authors' decision not to do the obligatory last chapter where they offer their ten-point plan for cultural renewal. You'll note that I couldn't resist it myself. They're humbler than me.

"BREAKING 'THE RULES'": In which I review a couple books:

Why don’t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get married someday. And yet we delay, we divorce, and we churn through relationships so quickly that in 2004 only 61 percent of American children were living with both of their biological parents. Why can’t we get and keep what we say we want?

Maybe we lack role models. As we wander around aimlessly, the pejorative term “extended adolescence” has become the euphemism “emerging adulthood.” Kate Bolick’s much discussed Atlantic article, “All the Single Ladies,” seems to offer this explanation for its author’s eventual surrender to singleness.

And yet two recent books argue that a big part of our problem is that we do have role models, conventions, cultural mores, and rules to follow. It’s just that the rules don’t work. Paul Hollander’s Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker’s Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying take very different approaches to the question of how Americans mate and marry. Extravagant Expectations is a work of pop-philosophy that muses about how modernity and the Romantic movement have influenced personals ads and internet dating. Premarital Sex is a research-based look at the sexual practices and beliefs of young Americans from a broad range of class, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Yet both end up arguing that Americans today are working from fairly well-defined “scripts” about love, dating, marriage--and selfhood. Perhaps, they conclude, our marriage problems ultimately spring from a flawed understanding of what it means to become an adult.

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I'm not really satisfied with this piece, and I ended up leaving out a lot of important stuff from the Regnerus/Uecker book, so later I'll post some of my notes from that book.

THE FORGOTTEN LOVE: Chuck Colson on Bert and Ernie:

...And blogger Alyssa Rosenberg summed up the biggest objection. “I think it’s actively unhelpful,” she wrote, “to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple . . . Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way.”

Strange indeed. It teaches the ridiculous and deeply destructive idea that same-sex friendships are necessarily sexual. And that’s the last thing we want to teach our children, because it will spell the end of friendship, particularly friendships between young men.

Yet that is precisely the message that’s communicated over and over. It’s the reason gay apologists want to eroticize Bert and Ernie, David and Jonathan, Jesus and the apostle John, and Achilles and Patroclus from Homer’s Iliad.

Some in our culture are apparently incapable of understanding close friendship without sex. And that flies right in the face of a Christian understanding of friendship.

more (and Mark Shea's second paragraph is also really poignant--I stole the title of this post from him)

IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN, BABY: Some scattered notes on that Christopher Roberts talk (I've ordered his book, as well).

* CR argues that Augustine speaks, against several other early Christian theologians, for the body and for sex difference as a feature of our life in Eden, not a precursor or foreshadowing of the Fall. For him, to have a sexed body is to have a vocation.

* CR: Progressive theology of marriage separates creation and redemption--for progressive, pro-gay-marriage theologians, sex difference is about creation/procreation and is private, while redemption (linked to marriage?) is ecclesial but unisex.

* Some good if glancing cultural criticism, calling for a switch from a dating model of young adulthood to a discernment model.

* One questioner deploys transgender people as wedges to get gay marriage for cis people. I disapprove of that as a rhetorical strategy [eta: because it uses other people to get what you want, rather than attempting to serve or understand them]. It also tends to obscure the actual theological questions involved in transgender experience. (More.)

* CR gives really interesting pushback on JPII's “genius of women” stuff and whether there are inherent characteristics of gender i.e. boys don't cry, girls are nurturing.

* From my perspective, his least-satisfying answer to audience questions is the one about gay adoption, where he chooses trivializing language, so just be aware of that going in.

Celibacy is a sign that intercourse between men and women is not compulsory--that sex is a gift, not a law or a right.
--Christopher Roberts, here; more on this in a moment

AND SOME WE DO FOR LOVE, LOVE, LOVE: Some brief comments by me on that NYTM cover story about Dan Savage and adultery-for-your-marriage. Let me know if you see any interesting commentary on the Times piece.

SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS: I guess what's so weird to me is that evo-psych explanations expect that their readers prefer equality-first.

They often act as if gender is the regrettable fallback; we wish we didn't have gender, but oh gross, there it is.

And I guess I want someone to stand up for Antony. I really want gender differences. I don't know how art happens without gender.

EDGE OF FIFTEEN: On a recommendation from Kindertrauma, I watched the 1969 suspense flick I Start Counting--and found a melancholic, adolescent movie, all elbows and knees and awkward longing for what used to be and what is still to come.

The basic story: In a small English town where the old houses are being torn down for redevelopment, a Catholic schoolgirl begins to suspect that her (adoptive? step-?) older brother, on whom she has a severe crush, is the local serial killer. The movie portrays England as a culture in its awkward adolescence, childishly trying on big-girl sexy clothes, unaware that its panties are showing. The mystery moves quickly and yet the movie itself feels quiet and lingering, with the girl going back to her ruined childhood home and swaying back and forth in the backyard swing, or bumping her way down the staircase on her bottom after her first encounter with pale ale.

The movie's portrayal of adolescent girls' sexuality is surprisingly sensitive, maybe because it's based on a novel by a woman. Wynne and her friend Corinne skitter nervously from tarting themselves up and enjoying boys' and men's attention to pulling away when masculine aggression goes from thrilling to scary. The movie shows, quickly and fairly subtly, how often men pass off their threats as "only protecting you." These teenage girls' skins prickle when they're around certain older men, but they're also still the kind of foolish virgins who brag about how many men they've slept with.

The movie's flaws pretty much all come in the actual suspense/killer narrative. The two twists are both handled somewhat clumsily, the main villain's Big Villain Speech is wrong-footed in several different ways (although his final line is unexpected and good), and the pacing is strange. I didn't feel much suspense by the time we start finding out what really happened. That's fine (and anyway Kindertrauma disagrees, so you might as well), since I was so invested in the characters and their emotional journeys, but just know that this is a thriller in which a shot of a bulldozer plowing over a sewing machine is much more intense than the reveal of the killer.

PLAYING TO THE GODS: Last week I saw Venus in Fur, at the Studio Theater through July 10. Basic story: Pompous playwright/director who thinks nobody really feels passion anymore is auditioning actresses for the role of Wanda in his adaptation of Sacher-Masoch's novel (i.e. the one masochism is named for). A blowsy New Yorkeress stumbles across his transom in hooker heels, too late for her audition (which isn't on the schedule anyway), but insists on reading for him. She is more than she appears! An erotic game of cat-and-other-cat ensues as power shifts from director to actress and each one struggles for the upper hand--or are they really fighting to be the one who submits?

So far so cliched, really. The whole "topping from the bottom" power-shift dynamic seems really played to me at this point. It's so often presented as sexy and edgy and challenging when it's really a rejection of the idea of genuine submission, suffering, or unwanted self-knowledge. Four things raise Venus in Fur--by the same guy who wrote that Spinoza play I loved so much--above the old joke about the masochist who says "Beat me!" and the sadist who says "No!"

1. It's very funny! And it doesn't rely on faux shock or spray-on sexiness. The laughs allow the audience to relax enough that the genuine danger can sneak up on us.

2. Studio found two superb actors. Christian Conn is convincing as the playwright, whose shallowness hides hidden depths of his own, and Erica Sullivan is just terrific as the actress. She gnaws the scenery with aplomb! I loved watching her.

3. The power dynamics do come to a resolution, and it's not one which simply affirms the usual American preference for individuality, self-control, and self-acceptance.

4. This play made me think about the gods in a slightly new light. It suggests, or at least it suggested to me!, that genuine submission can only be submission to divinity, for two reasons. First, with any human-all-too-human beloved or master, there's a moment when it becomes obvious that their judgment is no more intrinsically or universally reliable than mine. There's a sort of "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" moment--when O ditches Rene for Sir Stephen, for example, giving the lie to the personae all three are pretending to embody. No merely human woman is going to know this playwright thoroughly enough to devote herself completely to his education. Actual humans make mistakes, say dumb things, miss their cues, fail to suss us out when we wish they would, and have their own agendas which are often pettier than the agendas we project onto them.

And then, too, any mortal beloved will be conquered by death. Death can in turn be conquered to some extent by art--this is one of the subtler themes of the play, surfacing now and then like a gilt thread in a big dark tapestry--but for real mastery you would need a real immortal.

Anyway I do recommend the play if it sounds at all interesting to you; it's very well done and I feel validated in my decision to make David Ives a playwright I watch for.

The theme [Marina Zoueva] had created for us with the Moonlight Sonata was that of man celebrating woman as the mother of all mankind. She said that Sergei should get on his knees before me, because only the woman can give birth, only the woman can give him his children. ...

The beginning of the program was very soft, and we opened our arms to show the audience and judges that we were opening ourselves up to them. We were showing them not a program, but the story of our life. If you listen to the Moonlight Sonata, the music can only represent a man and a woman's life together. It can't mean anything else. It can't mean a season, or a march, or a dance, or a storm, or an animal. It's more, even, than love. Romeo and Juliet, that music was about love. But the Moonlight Sonata is for older people who have experienced real life. It expresses what changes love can bring about in people, how it can make them stronger, make them have more respect for each other. How it can give them the ability to bring a new life into the world.
--Ekaterina Gordeeva, My Sergei: A Love Story

You can watch Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov do what she considered their best performance of their Moonlight Sonata program here. I also love this Moonlight skate, by the Protopopovs, very much.

PASOLINI IS ME: What's the difference between a stereotype and an archetype?

DAY JOB, DRAW BACK YOUR BOW/AND LET YOUR ARROW GO: Now and then I try to sell you guys on following MarriageDebate or, if you want a digest version, at least subscribing to IMAPP's weekly top-5-marriage-and-family-stories newsletter. I do this because I think many readers would find the site fascinating and thought-provoking, not because I'm being paid for it. I think md.com posts a lot of stories which readers interested in gender, sexuality, and family structure would want to read.

So I'm telling you that right now we have earning more than your man, wrestling a girl, the dark(er) sides of oxytocin, High Fidelity vs. your heart, what is and isn't in his kiss, proposed revisions to Chinese law on marriage and adultery, bad stats in the UK, gay marriage in ditto, the best story I've seen so far on Ashley Madison (the adultery company), where have all the Presbyterians gone? (long time passing), and a pretty hardcore column about the emotional realities of a lesbian couple raising children with a "known donor."

Oh and happy belated Valentine's Day, via TKB.

Love is anywhere you hang your head....

"SCIENTISTS DISCOVER HOW TO MAKE SQUIDS GO COMPLETELY BERSERK."

A single protein found on the surface of squid egg capsules will instantly transform a placid cephalopod into a eight-armed undersea terror, scientists discover.

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To be fair, I was never that placid. Link via JWB.

THE SILHOUETTES OF CANA. A lovely picture; and the point Sullivan is making in this post, while I disagree with it, proves once again that he is basically an aesthetic thinker rather than a rationalist. Good for him!