Ellen Goodman is predictably, a supporter of Nancy Pelosi and not surprisingly has nice things to say about her. Yet what she says presents an interesting observation.

Now, a grandmother of six and leader of 233 Democrats, Pelosi brags about her first career rather than burying it in her resume. So she may end up as one of the success stories that changes the way people think about ``opting out'' and ``opting in.''

We are in another long and heated debate about mothers who leave the work force. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows an uptick of about 8 percent in the number of married women at home with infants from 1997 to 2004. The biggest increase was among mothers with college degrees.

Nancy Pelosi had her five children in the 1960s--before an entire generation of feminists eschewed marriage and children for the "rewards" of a career, so its a bit of a reach to call her a role model for choosing motherhood as a lifestyle when that was still the default for women.

The real role models for the current trend are in my wife's generation, and the one before hers--educated women who not only had the opportunities, but faced the opprobrium of arrogant feminists who routinely characterized housewifery as selling-out.

Pelosi is simply the most visible example of how wrong the feminists were to castigate traditional female roles. Mature women are demonstrating all over the country that a mother who can successful raise children to adulthood is someone to be reckoned with.

My wife just started pursuing her career a few years ago and is currently in a masters program to help her along the management track. What strikes me about observing my wife and her co-workers doing their job is what good managers they are. They are organized, ethical and uniquely sensitive to the needs of their subordinates--management skills I know they learned from keeping the little monsters in line.

If we can thank Speaker Pelosi for anything, its for drawing attention to the accomplishments of millions of women demonstrate for their daughters and granddaughters everyday, that you can have it all without keeping it all for yourself.

A fascinating piece in the London Times

I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had — and I had more than my fair share — far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect.

And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead.

Dawn Eden goes into much more detail--a 37 year old woman who bought into the feminist myth comes around to realize that the stuffy old Christians were right--chastity isn't just moral, its the "right" way to live.

Its a surprisingly difficult subject to broach--most people either accept or reject the proposition instinctively and outright. The sexual moderns call a concept like chastity old-fashioned, which is supposed to be dismissive, but ends up telling us something important about traditional social mores--they persist, they last, they work. They are a self-evident truth about human nature.

I look back on my education sometimes, and marvel at how much it was absolute crap or quickly became irrelevant within a few years. What stayed useful year after year and decade after decade where whatever I had discovered about myself and others. Everything changes, but people don't change. Human nature is eternal.

It is for that reason that I find myself concerned about allegedly "new" ways of living, which of course aren't really new at all, but simply old failures dusted off, rediscovered and repackaged as brilliant, new ways of constructing our relationships. Free love? Old as dirt and never particular successful, in fact free love usually heralded some massive social disaster such as the plague. While there has always been homosexuality, where is the persistent social role for homosexual couples in world history? Even in those societies were homosexuality had an accepted and ritualized place, there was never any question of equality with the heterosexual institutions.

Over the millenia, everything has been tried, but we always come back to what works--men and women pair-bonding, raising children and forming the bedrock of societies all over the world.

I suppose its at least possible that our technology and modernity has made room for some new social constructs, but I doubt it. It strike me that in spite of all the wonderful things our knowledge and technology allows us to do, we always end up doing the exact same things, because after all, we are and always will be, only human.

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.

"The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in," said Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

I wonder what makes Sawhill and "expert" on marriage? I've been married a long time and while I would consider myself experienced, I am far from an expert.

I have to wonder if marriage is for rich people, or whether rich people are those that got married.

I doubt its as much a matter of economics as it is culture; I get almost one wedding invitation a week these days from friends of my children in their early twenties getting married. Its extremely common here in Utah and in spite of the conventional wisdom, poverty and divorce are less common here than elsewhere.

Married couples may well wait to have children until their financial circumstances are more stable, but instead of a merry-go-round of hookups, young people fall in love and get married. Its pretty frustrating for singles moving into the Utah area--all the nice-looking young girls have rings on their fingers.!

The idea that you can't get married and that somehow living together or even having children out-of-wedlock is the reasonable course of action just seems bizarre to me.

Yet more importantly, the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood tend to push men in particular to takes risks, work a little harder, seek to improve their education. In my case, the birth of my first son resulted in my more than doubling my income in a single year. I had a kid and I needed money to buy a house--the responsibility pushed me out of my comfort zone. In fact one of my good friends and I were on a road trip and got to talking about how much money we'd really need to live comfortably by ourselves. Basically I could work as the night manager at McDonalds and have everything I need. Providing for the wife and the kids had been a tremendous financial incentive. Ordinarily I'm just not that ambitious.

The idea that you have to be "secure" to get married is a little silly--why not build a life together from scratch? No need for prenuptial agreements that way.

There is a bit of a phenomenon occuring in the book world with The Dangerous Book for Boys. Its been a blockbuster in the UK and has now been updated for the U.S.

The book ressurects the forbidden knowledge of boyhood past, defying our litigious, feminizing culture to reintroduce risk and danger back into young manhood. At Everything2, they've expanded on this theme by recognizing that the current generation of young men are pretty much ignoramuses and klutzes compared to their fathers.

A highly speculative and unscientifically conducted survey indicates that most American males between the ages of 18 and 25 seem to be incapable of performing many of the chores and duties commonly fulfilled by their fathers.

The activities in questions would not initially appear to be directly related to having a child, though the presence of one may thereafter necessitate their constant use and development.

As young men in this age group approach their thirties, it is increasingly less likely that their fathers will be in a position to pass on their knowledge, leaving the next generation of fathers hopelessly at the mercy of more qualified personnel.

I'm not sure this is completely true. I had a father who was unbelievably competent; to the point that it became ridiculous. He designed and built his own fireplace inserts for the home he was building and it eventually cost him many thousands of dollars to put the fiasco right. Nevertheless, it was impressive to see him make the attempt, because that was actually a rare failure. Overwhelmingly, what he attempted succeeded.

His friends? Not so much. The urban, white collar guys were pretty much clueless, while those from agricultural and trade backgrounds had all sorts of interesting skills.

The manly skills divide also appears to come down to a matter of genetics.

I, like my father before me, am a guy you want around in the post-nuclear wasteland. So are my brothers. I even have a sister who is pretty damn clever. My oldest son has inherited "the knack" as well. By the time he was 22, he could pretty much build a house on his own and started doing fix-it work for the neighbors--painting, tiling, drywall, framing, etc...

My youngest son? Not so much.

He seems to have inherited my wife's family's talent--for accounting.

I personally know quite a few young men with admirable "manly skills"--wood working, mechanics, you name it. Notably, these fellas are always willing to learn something new and so they keep adding new skills--in the tradition of their fathers.

Why do we interdict and prosecute prostitution?

Its an interesting question because the nature of prostitution is changing. Back in the early 90s, I was in Washington D.C. on vacation with my young children and driving in heavy traffic. At the street corner were three hookers plying their trade, two of them rather aggressively.

"What are those women doing, Daddy?"

Obviously, most people would prefer not to see that kind of thing, and certainly would prefer that their children not be exposed to it. The coincidence of street walkers and the drug trade, muggings, shootings, murders and the rest of the social ills of the low-down culture, makes it a reasonable public policy objective to remove prostitutes from the streets.

So now prostitutes are on Craigslist, and off the streets.

What now?

While I find the sex trade morally repugnant, if I put on my public policy hat, I have to ask myself if the community has a right to interfere in personal decisions that have virtually no impact on the community at large. Prostitutes hawk their wares in the most discreet manner possible and the transaction itself is done in similar fashion.

Where is the rationale for apprehending and prosecuting prostitutes and their customers?

I strongly suspect that communities will increasingly ask themselves that question and cease policing on-line prostitution within the very near future.

When Larry Sommers pointed to the elephant in the room, biological differences, as something to investigate in the search of explanations in the disparity between men and women in engineering and related fields - he instantly touched that third rail and became a martyr to political correctness.

The American Enterprise Institue soldiers on however:

Last week, the American Enterprise Institute brought together top researchers on sex differences, ranging from the strongly feminist Brandeis women's studies scholar Rosalind Barnett to AEI scholar and co-author of "The Bell Curve," Charles Murray. The discussions were heated, but civil. No one got mad, fled the room weeping, or nearly fainted.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor at Cambridge University and one of the world's leading experts on autism, had an intriguing hypothesis. Autism is far more common in males than females. Those afflicted with the disorder, including those with normal or high IQ, tend to be socially disconnected and clueless about the emotional states of others. They often exhibit an obsessive fixation on objects and machines.

Ms Sommers writes "Sound like anyone you know?"

If you don't want your kids tagging (spray-painting graffitti), selling drugs or stealing, make sure they have sex early--in their pre-teens if possible.

Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. Many factors play into a person's readiness for sex, but in at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble, the researchers say.

[If you could only see the look of complete bewilderment on my face...]

Who wrote this study--Britney Spears?

If a sexually-active 13 year isn't trouble, then I don't know what is...

The Wallstreet Journal notes that fully 74% of women in their thirties would marry for money.

Fully two-thirds of women and half of the men said they were "very" or "extremely" willing to marry for money. The answers varied by age: Women in their 30s were the most likely to say they would marry for money (74%) while men in their 20s were the least likely (41%).

Then there is this apocryphal account:

In an infamous personal ad posted on Craigslist this summer, a twentysomething New Yorker who described herself as "spectacularly beautiful" wrote that she was looking for a man who made at least $500,000 a year. She'd tried dating men earning $250,000, but that wasn't "getting me to Central Park West," she said. The ad inspired all manner of parodies and follow-ups, including one by an investment banker, who replied that since his money would grow over time but her beauty would fade, the offer didn't make good business sense. She was, he said, a "depreciating asset."

The example is a little extreme, but its so much romantic nonsense to think that a girl doesn't contemplate the financial wherewithal of a prospective mate. Whether consciously or subconsciously, a woman marries with an eye on the welfare of her progeny.

The seeming raw cynicism of modern women is probably enhanced by the fact that they are getting married older, when they are established in their own careers and with their own assets. The men in the marriageable cohort have already demonstrated their alpha-male bona fides, and in a modern society--that translates into a bank balance.

Of course, as the ambitious young woman is no doubt discovering--alpha males can afford to be choosy. You'd better bring to the table as much as your demanding.

The news that Britney Spear's 16 year old sister is 12 weeks pregnant by her 19 year old boyfriend has provoked some discussion about the possibility that Casey Aldridge may well face legal troubles.

I'm somewhat of a hard-ass on this kind of thing, because the dynamic is so unfair to the girls. The reality is that young guys actively seek out 14-16 year old girls because they know they are far more easily manipulated into a sexual relationship than their female peers. To a fifteen year old, a nineteen year old seems like a "real man".

Should you put away a seventeen year old boy for ten years for having sex with someone two or three years younger than he is?

It depends. If its a pattern, I would say some prison time is justified. In my estimation, the courts should treat it like they do marijuana infractions--pleas in obeyance on the first offense and then progressive more serious consequences.

My kids are adolescents no longer, but I gotta tell you--I was worried sick about something like this happening. They are so horny at that age, and so incredibly stupid. The fact that Jamie Lynn Spears had a 19 year old boyfriend and that her parents were either ignorant of the relationship, or worse, knew of it--is unconscionable. Its a huge pain in the neck, but you've got to know what your kids are doing and with whom, and step in when necessary. There will be a lot of screaming and yelling and "I hate yous", but that's better than your daughter getting pregnant or your son making someone else's daughter pregnant.

The Sunday Times reflects on the allegedly more restrained libido of Generation X.

Restrained in comparison to the hirsute and hygiene-challenged hippies if the 60s and 70s.

His study, based on thousands of interviews, is expected to be released next year. “It’s clear that, while Generation X has sex, obviously, it’s probably not as much or as varied in styles as their parents or today’s teenagers and students,” he said.

According to Laumann’s preliminary findings, about 30% of Generation X-ers have distinctly different sexual habits from their parents or today’s Generation Y; they have “substantially” fewer partners and reject adultery.

Laumann’s findings were backed by Frank Furedi, 60, a sociology professor at the University of Kent. “Those raised in the 1980s are fundamentally influenced by Aids, Margaret Thatcher’s family values and the left’s reborn puritanism,” said Furedi. “I remember, at a dinner party, using the term ‘recreational sex’, which my generation said all the time, and everyone reacted like it was a perversion.”

The term Generation X was first used in the 1960s, but later came to be associated with those entering adulthood in the economic downturn of the early 1990s. In comparison with the liberated 1960s generation, they were sexually restrained.

At least the article doesn't characterize the greater degree of sexual discretion as a matter of repression.

I suspect its rather fruitless to characterize and entire generation this way. I think every generation has a contingent that pursues casual sex with a vengeance. Its also silly to create artificial boundaries like say, 1965, where everyone born in 1964 was a horn dog, while every body born afterwards was fundamentally chaste.

I am a tail-end baby-boomer, but post-hippie guy. There was plenty of sex going on in my cohort, but the hi-how-are-you? sex of our elders was certainly not in vogue. I would term it serial short-term relationships, where people were sexually active with one partner at a time for a few weeks to a few years. From what I've been able to observe of succeeding generations, this pattern has largely held true.

The historical reality, turned on its head in the article, is that those who came of age in the 1960s are the hyper-sexual anomaly in the otherwise normal course of human relationships. Gen-X'er appear to have instinctively understood, like their forebearers, that sex is the final stage of increasing intimacy. Those who might be tempted to argue that sex is just sex need to have a frank conversation with a sex worker. Strippers in particular make money on the come hither not the transaction. Its the prospect of intimacy, the illusion that the woman finds a man attractive, that makes a payday--not the mechanics.

I also find it interesting that the article characterizes the post-1985 born as more sexually active than their elder siblings. Having children in that cohort, I note that young men seem to be far less able to socialize with girls and women than those of my generation.

I blame the gaming.

While my friends and I were out chercher-les-femmes, the boys and young men of my kids generation were gaming late into the wee hours. Chatting up the ladies requires practice and the kids just don't get much these days. As a result, a lot of very attractive young women are spending the weekends either alone or with their girlfriends.

How pathetic.

Ann Coulter's eulogy for her father reminded me of two truisms.

You don't know what you've got 'til its gone.

You can't miss what you never had.

Ann Coulter is going to quickly identify with the first phrase because she had a father, and he was a good man. If you didn't have a father in your life, the second aphorism will be more to your liking.

That is one of the great paradoxes of human relationships--we can never really have any idea of what the impact of our relationships is going to be on us and so it becomes easy to become dismissive of their value. Yet when we experience those relationships, their power overwhelms us.

My father died when I was in my mid-thirties. I had a family and a career. My dependency on my father was a dim memory--or so I thought. When he died, I became aware of how emotionally dependent I was on this good man, and I was clinically depressed for years afterwards. My father hadn't just fed me, housed and me and kept me alive, he had infused me with a portion of his soul without having consciously lifted a finger to do it. As I've gotten older, I've only become more aware of what an incredible impact he had on me.

By the same token, I've become much more aware of the impact I'm having on my own kids, and that consciousness is hopefully making me a better father. Yet the whole concept of fatherhood--when it happens to you, is just as surprising and strange. Nothing can prepare you for it, or for how you will feel about it. The most selfish A-hole in the world is going to have a soft spot for his kids.

As a result of my experiences, both with my own father and with my children, when I hear of a woman opting for single motherhood, I feel an incredible sadness, a mourning for the children who will never experience the impact of a father in their lives. Can they survive and grow without a father? Absolutely, but people can survive and grow in mud huts, under repressive governments, as child-soldiers and sex slaves--that doesn't mean those situations have the same value as growing up in a stable, two parent home.

Give the kids a father.

Its a little amusing to read any number of posts on the subject of why Johnny won't get married when you live in Utah. The kids are still getting married here, and as young as ever. My youngest son, who graduated from high school only two years ago, reports that almost all of his female peers have already tied the knot.

The conventional wisdom that young marriage is a disaster waiting to happen is challenged by Utah's marriage and divorce statistics. Overall, Utah has the highest rate of marriage in the country--10.6 per 1000 v. 8.7/1000 for the U.S. generally. Its overall divorce rate is slightly higher than the national average as a result, yet among faithful Latter-day Saint couples whose marriages are solemnized in church temples, the divorce rate is around 5%--the lowest for any social group in the country.

This in spite of an average marriage age of 21 for women and 23 for men.

A recent post by Dr. Helen Smith on Pajama's Media solicited hundreds of comments, indicating how hot a topic this seems to be--everywhere else in the country except here.

A new study supports the idea that super models flock together while individuals lacking the perfect face and body also stick together.

"Beautiful people marry beautiful people and less beautiful people marry less beautiful people," said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and Sloan School of Management.

Fine work they do at MIT.

I've read a lot of crap about men and marriage lately in the wake of Helen Smith's Pajama's Media column, but Kim du Toit apparently gets it in a way most people don't.

Here’s how I explain it. I think that men keep a running ledger going in their subconscious—all the good/great things about their relationship on the one side, and all the bad/terrible things on the other. At some point or another, if the perceived negatives outweigh the positives, the man will quit the relationship—I mean, just bail out of the whole thing—and usually with a swiftness and finality which confounds women.

I didn't say it this way, but the meaning was the same when I said, "You know you've met someone you can marry when you can't imagine your life without them." The ledger thing is a great analogy because I can recall the process from my single days very well. I'd be dating some girl and click, she was outta there and often for reasons I wasn't really immediately conscious of. I've seen the same thing happen to my daughter--two, three dates and then suddenly the guy doesn't call any more.

Click.

Women of course have the same thing going on, but they are less abrupt about ending the relationship because having a relationship is often more important than its quality.

There is this tendency to believe that society's moral fiber was always greater in the past. I'm sure why we believe this, except that people were perhaps more discreet than they are now. Prim and proper Dame Julie Andrews was the unexpected product of an illicit affair and judging from my own family history, she had plenty of company.

This story is producing the predictable argument about sex education.

The first national study of four common sexually transmitted diseases among girls and young women has found that one in four are infected with at least one of the diseases, federal health officials reported Tuesday. Nearly half the African-Americans in the study of teenagers ages 14 to 19 were infected with at least one of the diseases monitored in the study — human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.

The 50 percent figure compared with 20 percent of white teenagers, health officials and researchers said at a news conference at a scientific meeting in Chicago.

Liberals of course are calling for more sex education, and conservatives are pointing out that young people practicing abstinence are not in danger of getting STDs.

It strikes me that both groups are arguing besides the point.

It was announced this morning that Heather Mills has won a divorce settlement of 50 million dollars, 12 million for each year of marriage.

You thought Eliot Spitzer paid a lot for female companionship.

John Hawkins has been interviewing female bloggers lately. Female bloggers don't hold a special interest for me as I get a ton of female perspective whether I want it or not, but todays post was remarkable for the poll results--extremely small sample notwithstanding.

Give me some pet peeves, things that guys do to annoy you in the dating arena.

Any kind of cockiness...the guys that come up to you and just think that they're hot sh*t and that you're lucky to have them grace you with their presence. That's annoying....

A guy that talks about himself too much on a date, that's annoying, too -- because they take it too far. You want to talk about yourself, but you want to ask her questions, too. A lot of guys don't do that.

That only confirms the impressions I've been getting from my focus group as well (my daughter, my niece, their friends...).

This is kind of a startling map--all the men appear to be west of the Mississippi river, and all the women are east of it. The head count doesn't really tell the story though. Its not just how much of a gender surplus there is, but the quality of men and women represented in that surplus.

In Utah, were kids get married very young relative to the rest of the country, the surplus of males is commentary on the rise of slackerdom as an acceptable lifestyle. My unmarried and dateless daughter observes that she meets plenty of nice, attractive men--all of them married in their early twenties. The ones who aren't? Well let's say she prefers catching up on American Idol than to spending time with losers.

I was fascinated by a recent interview (Donnie Deutsch) with Patti Stanger, host of Bravo TV's Millionaire Matchmaker, who characterized Los Angeles (vastly more men than women...) as nigh to a wasteland for women looking for a good man. The east coast was 'better' in her estimation because the men are culturally disposed to treat women better.

Could be.

The implications of that perspective are pretty dire though--in spite of the larger number of single men in California, its still a wasteland for eligible women.

I'll take a flyer here and muse as to whether the relentless institutional favoritism for girls and feminist educational theory hasn't produced a lost generation of young men and spinsterhood for a great many young women.

UPDATE: John Hawkins.

Because I work in politics for a living, I know a lot of women who live in D.C. and I've always been surprised at how hard they say it is to get a date in that town. I mean, we're talking about personable, successful, attractive women here -- exactly the sort you'd think would be in heavy demand.

I found this keen observation in Camile Paglia's Salon column.

The men you always see under her are to a person passive-aggressive, sadistic, mean, little, petty beta-male pieces of work who would not naturally succeed in a common male-type hierarchy. By that I mean an environment that values straightforward achievement rather than the darker political arts.

An elderly British feminist looks back 40 years, bemoaning motherhood and still quoting Erica Jong?! Yuck. Fear of Flying--how about fear of choice and competition? Women choose their professions these days, at least in the US, and if many choose motherhood as well, all the better. As Benedick said in the throes of new love, "the world must be peopled!" Just a note--when adjusted for age and experience the wage gap is negligible, leftie women bring this red herring up every year. Then there's this gem:

Girlification is worse than ever it was. So what happened to university women's studies and liberation from stereotype?

And this columnist accepts Jong's reinvention as some kind of role model for young women to not view themselves as strictly sex objects?!

Is lipstick an economic indicator, or will gloss rule the day? Well, it's the NY Times, not known for its economic perspicacity, but:

Banking on an economic downturn, Cristina Bartolucci, the creative director of DuWop Cosmetics, introduced Prime Venom, her first matte plumper designed to be worn under lipstick. “One of the main reasons we came up with this product is that we’re in a recession, or a difficult time with the war,” she said. “You always think of the classic lipstick and stockings doing well in wartime.”

NY Magazine's The Cut says buy lipstick, not dresses. What would Betty Grable have to say about that? A swimsuit.

Blackfive has an idea.

26 percent of New York City adults have genital herpes, compared to about 19 percent nationwide.

I happened across this today and thought I'd blog it because just recently I had to endure a discussion where a number of adults were bobbing their heads up and down about the "safety" of sexual promiscuity if one took sensible precautions. I always struggle in situations like this, because while I don't want to be a jerk, I think its unbelievable irresponsible to promulgate socially-acceptable lies like the global-warming hoax and of course "safe sex".

Promiscuity is safe the way cliff-diving into unknown waters is safe--not.

Hidden in these statistics according to a six year study done in the late nineties are some sobering realities.

83% of homosexual men had genital herpes a decade ago.

78% of prostitutes had genital herpes.

A Kentucky study of college-aged young adults saw a 10% per year rise in seropositivity (anti-bodies present) between the ages of 18 and 24-- the "sexually active" years.

Seropositivity climbed 30% overall in the 1990s (even before Bill Clinton's intern problem...) with the rise in popularity of oral-genital contact. Interestingly, 35% of young women who claimed to be virgins had engaged in oral-genital contact.

While its common to hear arguments about the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs--usually from people who would like to engage in drug use without the legal hassles--you never hear precisely the same argument applied to public policy promoting "safe sex".

In 2000, there were 9.1 million new cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among 15-24 year olds. Apparently they don't call it Californication for nothing, because in 2005, the estimate for California alone was 1.1 million new STIs.

There simply is no safe way to be sexually promiscuous--the odds are clearly against.