I had never really questioned the efficiency or stability of monogamous marriage system of ours before reading the article Why monogamy is natural by an Emory Law School professor, John Witte Jr. I always thought that faithful monogamy was the normal and standard pairing system that is just for everyone and prevents families from degenerating. However, I was not much convinced by the article’s reasoning, and actually became more suspicious about the nature of monogamy. I still think monogamy is the most fitting system, and personally I have never cheated even in my past ‘not-serious’ relationships, but the explanations of the article, which perhaps also include people’s common beliefs, looked quite questionable.

The first point was that “unlike most other animals, humans crave sex all the time.” With no further explanation, one can possibly infer that he was meaning that each member can have its designated mate when he/she needs it. However, being assigned with one mate for the rest of his/her life is only eliminating other possibilities outside the relationship. What if the married husband/wife does not want to be involved in sexual activities in a particular occasion? Of course, looking for another mate would mean another ‘opportunity cost’ as evolutionary biologists would say, but how much applicable is that to humans, especially females? These arising questions made the first argument somewhat seem like a reason why polygamy is natural.

The second reason was that “human babies are born weak, fragile, and utterly dependent for many years” and need help from both parents. However, chimpanzee society, which also has fragile infants with extended period of ‘child care’, raise their infants among their group members. Especially female members, together with the mother, take care of the young until it matures. Vast differences between human and chimpanzee do exist and would complicate the argument, but this counter example shows that monogamy is not the only solution for overcoming our vulnerability when young.

The third reason that “most fathers will bond and help with a child only if they are certain of their paternity” seems weak for supporting the argument ‘why monogamy [for humans] is natural.’ I am actually little curious if Brad Pitt will feel offended or really good about himself after hearing the quoted sentence. The author’s argument is quite true if we look at the example of infanticide shown by lions and some primate species who kill babies of other males upon taking over a new group. However human ethics are much more mature than that as shown by good adoption system. Adopting fathers are probably not the most fathers, but we do have many opposing examples of altruistic fathers who take care of children who are genetically not his.

The last point the author mentions is that “men have historically been more prone to extramarital sex than women.” This sentence, again, seems to say that polygamy is the ‘natural’ form of our relationship, at least for men, since extramarital sex would mean that the person’s instinctive desire, which should be ‘natural,’ was not satisfied by his marriage. The author also mentions in the same paragraph that “humans have the freedom and the capacity to engage in species-destructive behavior in pursuit of their own sexual gratification.” However, he is also inevitably saying that humans have the freedom and the capacity to engage in species-productive behavior against their own sexual gratification by submitting to the societal norm, monogamous marital system, which sounds little ‘unnatural’ now.

Polygamy in the history or some primitive societies of Africa or Asia are sometimes viewed as barbaric and looked down upon. However, isn’t something barbaric less artificial and closer to our unpolished nature? One of the readers of the article, ‘reformthesystem’ commented, “In English language, “naturally” is only a synonym for: of course, customarily; not absolutely.” I guess we would need to define the word, ‘natural’ in the first place in order to have a proper discussion of whether monogamy is natural or not. However, I arrived at my own conclusion that monogamy can sometimes be ‘unnatural’ for each individual, but would be ‘natural’ for the human society as a whole, in terms of promoting the stable environment for everybody.

Why monogamy is natural by John Witte Jr.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/why-monogamy-is-natural/2012/10/02/08080120-0cc0-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_blog.html

“Human beings are sexual beings throughout their entire lives. At certain points in life, sexuality may manifest itself in different ways” (DeLamater 64). Usually, most people begin to question and experience their first signs of sexuality in their pre-teen years; puberty causes many changes physically and in sex hormone levels. In later teen years, rates of premarital heterosexual intercourse have shot up showing that, yes, many teens are having sex (obviously we knew that).  The progression of sexual exploration proceeds to mature in the adult years by learning how to communicate and connect in relationships intimately.

So where does college fit in to all this? “Approximately 80% of college students have engaged in sexual intercourse yet only about one-third report they regularly use condoms” (Abbey 469). “In one survey, 75% of college women indicated they had gotten drunk within the last year…in fact, 17% of college women reported deliberately drinking more than normal to make it easier to have sexual intercourse with someone” (Moore 173). Women in college just don’t have that much experience and are usually sexually-insecure. Referring back to the readings two weeks ago about the culture of hooking up, freshmen are especially at risk for risky and dangerous sexual behavior. Most freshmen and sophomore girls just want to hook up and aren’t really looking for a relationship; but because of the lack of experience and sexual confidence, they’re more likely to engage in this risky behavior.

“Lower condom use occurs among college women with high perceptions of relative vulnerability, absence of negative emotions, lower perceptions of present risk, and endorsement of the ‘relational idea’ (i.e. love and commitment as a prerequisite for sexual intercourse)” (Abbey 471). Binge drinking and the idea of getting hammered before encountering a sexual exploit is putting both people in danger of an intoxicated state; one that would probably forget, or not even bother to use a condom. I think that now, in contemporary times, many women in college are on birth control and rely on that as their primary form of contraception. There are many men that would opt for not using a condom for the “better feeling” or waste of time it takes to actually get on. What I think many women are forgetting is that they should have the confidence to have condoms/tell the men to actually use condoms, and the fact that diseases can be still be spread without a condom.

It’s interesting to read research done about women my age (in college) and data about their sexual explorations. Should it be reaffirming what is normal or contradicting personal or closely-related instances of what I’ve experienced?

Abbey, Antonia, Michelle Parkhill, and Philip Buck. Condom Use with a Casual Partner. Print.

DeLamater, John, and Wiiliam Freidrich. Human Sexual Development. Print.

Moore, Nelwyn, and Kenneth Davidson. Communicating with New Sex Partners. Print.

Being on yearbook duty this week, I learned some interesting things about the 1970’s. By the end of the 1973 Emory yearbook, my iPad was full of pictures exhibiting nudity, recreational sex, hippies, and “far out” mustaches. From my understanding, these and many other social trends played major roles in the sexual revolution or sexual awakening.

The late 1960’s and early 1970’s was a psychedelic time that started a brand new perspective on human sexuality. From the Playboy Penthouse to the invention of birth control (“The Pill”) in the 60’s, there surely was an outgrowth of the counterculture that cast aside traditional (outdated) views on sex. During this decade, adolescent sexual activity increased with skyrocketing numbers, which indicates that many, if not all, sexual taboos were broken.

The Pill played a major role in the sexual revolution. It may not have been the actual start of the revolution, but this contraceptive certainly changed moral standards across college campuses, especially the ones that could afford it. During the revolution, people talked about sex more openly, and birth control was certainly a heavy topic. If one were to be taking birth control, they were considered sexually active. There is one thing I am not sure about, is birth control partly responsible for earlier sexual interactions? The risk of pregnancy, and the stigma that went with it, was something that freaked out most traditionalists from having recreational sex. In my opinion, the pill served as a fairly convenient scapegoat during the sexual revolution among these social traditionalists.

Open homosexuality was another part of the sexual revolution during the 1970’s. During this time, shame had turned into joy when it came to looking for gay sex because of the gay bars and bathhouses. Many gay liberation fronts and gay activist organizations were prevalent in the United States and Canada during the 1970’s, many of which consisted of students at a University/college. The one big example I can think of is Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay man to run for office in a city where same-sex behavior was punishable with jail time.

I always associated the 1970’s with heavy drug use, psychedelic rock, and sex. However, before this week, I was not aware of how prevalent the sexual revolution was during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. Below are a few examples of nudity in the 1973 yearbook.

http://www.isis.aust.com/stephan/writings/sexuality/revo.htm

http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/sexual_revolution.html

I’m a numbers guy, so I love seeing statistics used to prove a point. Percentages and figures allow me to understand the extent of the results, but it seems that the results from “Condom Use with a Casual Partner” and “Communicating with New Sex Partners” contradict each other.  Both discuss the use of contraceptives based off different variables such as age of first sexual experience, onset of puberty, sexual self- esteem, etc. I was irked that both authors attempt to scare the reader (aimed at young adults) into using contraceptives- either in fear of pregnancy or for transmission of a disease. I am absolutely in favor of contraceptives, but I dislike deception.

I understand trying to educate people about the common occurrence of these life-changing events, but scare tactics are ridiculous. I’m sure you’ve heard 80% of car accidents occur within a 10-mile radius of your house, and that’s why you should wear a seatbelt- even on short drives. This is an example of alarming people into seatbelt safety. Regardless of accuracy, it’s an obtuse statistic because the majority of your driving is also done within that 10-mile radius. It seems obvious that there would be a correlation with the location of your accidents and the area in which you spend the most time driving.

Similarly, we saw that there was a high risk of STDs among college student. This source also mentioned that binge drinking occurs more frequently at college. The other article off handedly mentioned that there is a higher risk of sexual behavior among college students and these rates are actually dependent on drinking. I read this as “college kids drink more, drinking increases sexual activity, and increased sexual activity leads to increased transmission of diseases”. The authors phrased it to make us believe college kids are at high risk for STIs when I believe it should be aimed at anyone who drinks heavily (and therefore their sexual inhibitions are decreased). In reality, these rates of transmission are lower than we’ve been made to believe. Transmission of the HIV infection during intercourse is 1/300 for women and 1/1000 for men in heterosexual relationships. Until I heard that statistic, I was made to believe that HIV would be passed on in an instant.

Maybe the last example was a stretch, but let me point out another incident. The purposes of the articles were to inform us of the consequences of sex- mainly unwanted pregnancy or passing of STIs. In order to scare us about pregnancy, it was made clear that single parent pregnancies have been occurring at a higher rate in the past 40 years. Is it because the frequency of sex has increased or use of contraceptives decreased? My take is that marriage is happening later and later (26 is the average age of marriage instead of 21 from 1960). I think that sex is occurring at the same rate; it’s just that by brute numbers, there is an extra 5 years in between for an unwanted pregnancy to occur.

Just making it clear that I support the ideas the authors had, but I don’t agree with the sneaky way of scaring impressionable minds. I was always told “correlation is not causation”, and I am just skeptical this is what the authors were doing. I think there are better ways to educate people, but in the meantime there are more effective ways of prevention amongst college students. The biggest in my opinion is making sure situations such as the one suggested in the Emory Wheel from 1995 are avoided. It said that freshmen girls are allowed to frat houses while freshmen boys are barred from that area. It seems like a good prevention method to stop girls who are supposedly ignorant of proper safety from boys who have an agenda in mind (don’t mean to stereotype, but all frat guys were put into a negative light in this article).

Cruising through the Emory yearbooks this year at MARBL left me impressed. While most of the photos continue to be displayed in black and white ink, I felt my cheeks turn rosy red every time I turned the page.

1974 inevitably was a year Emory students showed the most ease displaying acts of sexuality and bare skin. Page by page, clothing was slowly being removed, forgotten, until naked bodies were photographed streaking the Emory campus. What has happened since then? Acceptable social content seems to have regressed some compared to 1974. If we were to review this year’s yearbook, I’m sure to find drastic contrasts between images of then to today. I’m sure to find students lying in the quad, books in hand, but with full clothing. I’m also sure to find some exposure of skin but still covering the genitals and breasts. What was going on in 1974 year that compelled the students to show such liberty? They seem so free from judgment, media, and personal image.

On the concluding pages from this particular yearbook was a section devoted to poems composed by individual students. One poem was easily separated from the rest. “First Time” by Barry Marks, describes a heated moment. While the title seems obvious on the content, the poem itself can also be translated to first experiences of any and everything. “I put myself into you” Opens the poem up to the first heterosexual experience. Taken from a male point of view, the poem is both dominant and recessive at different points. This poem innocently enough, follows the transformation of a boy into manhood. How his submission of putting himself into girl was similar to how a “child sticks his finger into a tree.”

On the flip side, this poem also indirectly follows the transformation of a girl into womanhood. This idea, marked in blood, also is a major theme of this poem. Both of these adolescents linger in the joys of innocence.

Compared to the rest of the yearbook. I can say that this poem summarizes the intentions, transformations, and feelings of the students of Emory in 1974. I can relate each photo of nudity, student, and act to this poem: the transformation of young adults into college students and their epic moment together-heated and unafraid.

"First Time" by Barry Marks Emory Yearbook 1974

In our classroom discussion on hooking up, we covered the article “Hooking Up: Men, Women and the Sexual Double Standard,” and we spent and extensive amount of time sorting through the double standard presented for men and women. Also, we covered how after a certain point in college women begin to have hopes of marriage while men continue to prolong the idea of this. There exists a part of hook-up culture today that we failed to even touch on though and it continues to grow as a phenomenon of hooking-up. As a class, that integrates a high amount of technology, we can all attest to the ease and efficiency that technology allows to occur. Well, this ease and efficiency has flowed into the hook-up culture to what we now refer to as sexting.

Channel 2 News here in Atlanta organized a feature back on April 22, 2012, about “the social media revolution” (which I happened to have been invited to attend). During the segment, Monica Pearson, Justin Farmer and Scott Slade moderated questions as they introduced risks associated with sexting through social media. They showed examples of girls who had been exploited by having their pictures unknowingly posted on third party websites, but these examples were not limited to just females. Examples of how men had been exploited through sexting and social media were also shared through testimonials. Instances such as this obviously break through though the gender double standard presented in the article mentioned above.

The rate of commonness that sexuality occurs now has sparked websites such as askmen.com to write an article called “Sexting Etiquette,” which provides men recommendations of how to avoid a scandal, and even GQ has published a similar article called “A GQ Guide to Sexting”.  Now an interesting fact about this article is that is written by a female, but when it comes to giving advice to guys in a guys magazine, why not have a female write it? Fox News took a similar approach as well in their article “The Do’s and Don’ts of Sexting.” With this article though, you get an education beyond just sexting though, it even includes a list of acronyms to make sexting more efficient.

None the less, the evidence of how main stream culture has adapted to accepting sexting with relatively little opposition. This acceptance of sexting in our culture certainly adds a new dimension to the hook-up culture, but in this realm there would appear to be little to no double standard. Beyond scandals though, how does sexting affect our culture today? I briefly touched on how youth are now exposed and subjected to adult experiences sooner, but are they the only ones negatively affected, or are all of those who engage in this negatively affected in some way? Additionally, since adolescents are engaging in sexting now and seemingly unaware of its implications for their future, how does this affect our future politicians and “leaders” of the future?

http://www.askmen.com/dating/dating_advice_400/477b_sexting-etiquette.html

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/201107/sexting-rules-when-to-sext

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/02/16/dos-donts-sexting/

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/online/channel-2-presents-social-media-and-your-kids/nMcfm/

From the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/10/18/us/ap-us-gay-marriage.html?hp

Might be something interesting to blog about and make connections to our class readings.

Emory Wheel- November 24, 1987

While reviewing the Emory Wheel and Emory Reports of the late 1980’s/early 1990’s it is no surprise that I found more and more articles pertaining to the fears and the education of AIDS. There are articles that educated the Emory community on the spread of AIDS and how it is contracted (NOT by causal means as most feared) while other articles concentrated on the support the community must share with the AIDS positive individuals.

I also found numerous advertisements for Safe Sex Lectures for students and even a questioner that posted questions by students on the AIDS epidemic. Common questions such as “Can you get AIDS/ HIV from a toilet seat?” and “Is AIDS more common in poor neighborhoods?” These and many others are questions that Emory students received answers to.  Sign up sheets for AIDS walks also made an appearance in these issues of the Emory Report and Wheel which shows the growing support for the AIDS community. All of these articles serve to understand AIDS and show support for those who had fallen ill.

The most interesting of them all, for me, was a particular article called “AIDS is ‘human disease’ according to panel.” It discusses the impact that this disease can bring to the human race and that it is indeed a human disease in that it can be contracted by anyone; no matter your gender, sex, religion, nationality, AIDS can be contracted by anyone.

The most powerful quote, given by Max Pessess, a worker from Center for Disease Control said “AIDS is a human disease which can and does threatened our society, (It) is not a gay disease.” This quote carries significant weight in that it proves wrong that only gays are contracting AIDS and that it can also infect heterosexuals: that the entire human race is in the same boat and thus all eligible to contract the disease. AIDS is not discriminatory so it is not correct for us to assume that it is only spread in the gay community. It is indeed a ‘human disease.’ Roy Griffin (AIDS positive) also appeared in the article and quotes, “All walks of life are afflicted with the AIDS virus; babies, women, blacks, Hispanics, straights, gays and even a 69-year-old grandmother.” These two quotes are significant in that they challenge the stereotype that AIDS is only a gay disease.  We as a community need to realize that “people who have AIDS are just that: People, who have AIDS (Karen Genry).”

This article is appropriate for the time because it not only serves to educate and others on the severity of the AIDS epidemic but it also serves to enlighten others that people with AIDS are no different from anyone else and thus they shouldn’t be neglected. People should not fear those with AIDS but should fear AIDS itself as an un-discriminatory virus that could potentially have devastating effects on the human race.

Society today has a habit of scrutinizing sex and attempting to operationalize an act that to many, has different determining factors. This week’s in-class discussion regarding hook-ups and bootycalls simply serves as one example of the varying ways to interpret sexual acts while taking into account the context in which these acts take place. Kathleen A. Bogle in “Hooking Up: Men, Women, and the Sexual Double Standard” conducted interviews with college students on multiple subjects including the difference between certain sexual actions like, for example, a bootycall and a hook up. According to her findings “a bootycall is a late night phone call placed, often via cell phone, to an earlier hookup partner, inviting him or her over for another hookup encounter.” With terms like this circulating throughout the societal word bank, I cannot help but wonder what it was like back in the day. Were the Emory students of the 1950s and 1960s, or even the 1990s, going to parties in search of a hookup and potential bootycall, according to Bogle’s definition? If so, were they calling it this? The prevalence of sex in society of these time periods is something I have wondered about before.

What better place to seek clues regarding how sexual society was than the health services section of the yearbook? This section outlining the different services that the Emory clinic offers often implies something. For example, many health services excerpts one would encounter today would likely include something about contraceptives and ways to avoid a plethora of sexually transmitted diseases and infections. In addition, I would not be surprised to read about forms of birth control that are available or even simply something about how condoms can prevent unwanted pregnancy. Yet, even in 1999, the Health Services section of the yearbook simply mentioned HIV testing. Not to say that I would expect the Health Services portion today to seem like a brochure from Planned Parenthood, but rather that in current times, certain sources of health services would likely mention more about health issues related to sex. My hypothesis is that this is because we are more comfortable talking about sex (or hookups or bootycalls or whatever you may what to call it) today that people were in the past.

This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, the fact that we are accepting sex can positively contribute to a “Sex-Positive Society,” as Elroi J. Windsor and Elizabeth O. Burgess would put it. Yet on the other hand, this acceptance has lead to a highly sexualized society in which sex is seen as more than just an action, but a tool; a way of persuasion and manipulation. In the media, sex sells. It is the carpool lane on a freeway packed with vehicles of politics, the economy, and religion. It is, perhaps, a universal language. But the fact of the matter still remains, sex, today, seems to be more widely discussed than in past times. This is reflected in ways ranging from pop culture to the way in which healthcare is pitched.

Note Oct 11, 2012 (13)

Note Oct 11, 2012 (12)