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Weiye Loh

Bishops vs. Obama - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...hops-have-a-case-against-obama

Religion Secularism Government Rights Birth Control

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • The second argument begins from the government’s claim that certain religious organizations are not “sufficiently religious” to warrant an exemption from government policy. It recognizes that the Obama administration did exempt, for example, individual parishes and dioceses from the health insurance requirement, but drew the line at institutions like hospitals and universities that are less closely related to the Church and its doctrines. This argument is willing to concede that religious institutions other than parishes and dioceses might not have the same rights to exemptions from government policy. But it insists that the government itself has no right to decide how and where to draw the line. That, it says, would allow the government to undermine the Church. For if the government can in a given case decide that, say, a hospital or university is not sufficiently close to the Church to merit the full religious exemption regarding rights of conscience, then there is no reason the government can’t do this in other instances, without limit. Therefore, the argument concludes, giving the government the right to decide such matters in effect gives it the right to destroy the independence of the Church.
  • This argument correctly points out that the government — in the sense of the executive branch — should not be the sole judge of what rights of religious freedom a particular religiously affiliated organization may have. But it is equally wrong to claim, as the argument suggests, that the Church itself should be the ultimate arbiter of its own claims. Nor does it make sense to claim that every effort of the government to restrict religious rights should be rejected on the grounds that it is a step toward the total undermining of religion. One could just as well argue that every restriction on individual liberty is a step toward totalitarianism.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Jun 12
     
    The first argument is based on the right of conscience. It agrees that all employees of a Catholic organization have a right in conscience to practice birth control, but that the organization also has a right in conscience not to pay for (or otherwise facilitate) the practice. The nub of the argument is that an organization's not offering birth control as part of its health insurance does not take away an employee's right to birth control; it would at most make it a bit more difficult to obtain. By contrast, the administration's requirement that the organization offer birth control coverage does eliminate, in this case, its right not to support the practice. This argument makes a valid point, but omits the rights of a third party: the government, which has a right (and duty) to set up rules for the common good of the nation. In some cases, this right takes precedence over the rights of conscience. The government has the right, for example, to force people to serve in wars they think are unjust or pay taxes to support activities like birth control that they think are immoral. Organized religions have, in our system, greater rights to conscientious exemption than individuals, but there is no absolute immunity that keeps a religion's claim of conscience from being trumped by the government's right to "provide for the general welfare." Once we take account of the government's right, we see that this argument does nothing to show that Catholic organizations' rights outweigh the rights of the government in this case.
Weiye Loh

Why Jeb Bush should pledge to roll out the welcome mat for Asian birth tourists - 0 views

theweek.com/...lcome-mat-asian-birth-tourists

Birth Tourism Baby China United States Immigration

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Aug 15
     
    Another benefit for these Chinese couples: Beijing's autocrats don't count children born with other nationalities against a couple's one-child quota. No doubt, a U.S. passport for their newborn is a huge attraction. But America is not the only destination for couples trying to dodge China's draconian birth control policies. Mainland Chinese couples also flock to Hong Kong (all of which the pro-life, pro-family conservative editors of National Review Online should understand and applaud rather than running confused pieces likethis conflating "anchor babies" and birth tourists to promote their anti-birthright citizenship crusade).
Weiye Loh

Mississippi 'Personhood' Amendment Vote Fails - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...nhood-amendment_n_1082546.html

Abortion Law Religion Personhood

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 18 Nov 11
     
    Mississippi voters Tuesday defeated a ballot initiative that would've declared life begins at fertilization, a proposal that supporters sought in the Bible Belt state as a way to prompt a legal challenge to abortion rights nationwide. The so-called "personhood" initiative was rejected by more than 55 percent of voters, falling far short of the threshold needed for it to be enacted. If it had passed, it was virtually assured of drawing legal challenges because it conflicts with the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a legal right to abortion. Supporters of the initiative wanted to provoke a lawsuit to challenge the landmark ruling. The measure divided the medical and religious communities and caused some of the most ardent abortion opponents, including Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, to waver with their support. Opponents said the measure would have made birth control, such as the morning-after pill or the intrauterine device, illegal. More specifically, the ballot measure called for abortion to be prohibited "from the moment of fertilization" - wording that opponents suggested would have deterred physicians from performing in vitro fertilization because they would fear criminal charges if an embryo doesn't survive.
Weiye Loh

Beliefs - G.E.M. Anscombe's Views Live On, Decade After Her Death - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08beliefs.html

Philosophy Sexuality Intention Action Morality

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, the Catholic philosopher whose work on subjects from Aristotelian ethics to the perils of birth control is enjoying a renaissance
  • she published “Intention,” which one philosopher called the greatest work on the philosophy of action — a sub-field concerned with how our brains cause our bodies to do things — since Aristotle.
  • “Modern Moral Philosophy,” which helped inspire the major revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Virtue ethicists argue that we ought to ask what virtues, like courage or patience, should be encouraged, rather than focus on rules to obey.
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  • In 1972, Miss Anscombe published “Contraception and Chastity,” a deeply unfashionable, and still widely read, argument against birth control. “Christianity,” Miss Anscombe wrote, “taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be.”
Weiye Loh

What Makes People Gay? - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.boston.com/...what_makes_people_gay

Sexuality Homosexuality Nature Nurture Conceptualization Paradigm Genetic

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Aug 11 - Cached
  • What makes the case of Patrick and Thomas so fascinating is that it calls into question both of the dominant theories in the long-running debate over what makes people gay: nature or nurture, genes or learned behavior. As identical twins, Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones. From the moment they came out of their mother's womb, their environment was about as close to identical as possible - being fed, changed, and plopped into their car seats the same way, having similar relationships with the same nurturing father and mother. Yet before either boy could talk, one showed highly feminine traits while the other appeared to be "all boy," as the moms at the playgrounds say with apologetic shrugs.
  • in 1991, a neuroscientist in San Diego named Simon LeVay told the world he had found a key difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, more than twice the size in heterosexual men as in homosexual men. LeVay's findings did not speak directly to the nature-vs.-nurture debate - the clumps could, theoretically, have changed size because of homosexual behavior. But that seemed unlikely, and the study ended up jump-starting the effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality.
  • Boston University psychiatrist Richard Pillard and Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey announced the results of their study of male twins. They found that, in identical twins, if one twin was gay, the other had about a 50 percent chance of also being gay. For fraternal twins, the rate was about 20 percent. Because identical twins share their entire genetic makeup while fraternal twins share about half, genes were believed to explain the difference. Most reputable studies find the rate of homosexuality in the general population to be 2 to 4 percent, rather than the popular "1 in 10" estimate.
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  • In 1993 came the biggest news: Dean Hamer's discovery of the "gay gene." In fact, Hamer, a Harvard-trained researcher at the National Cancer Institute, hadn't quite put it that boldly or imprecisely. He found that gay brothers shared a specific region of the X chromosome, called Xq28, at a higher rate than gay men shared with their straight brothers. Hamer and others suggested this finding would eventually transform our understanding of sexual orientation.
  • Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. "I'm not suggesting that most women are bisexual," says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. "I'm suggesting that whatever a woman's sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation." That's fundamentally different from men. "In men, arousal is orientation. It's as simple as that. That's how gay men learn they are gay."
  • researchers need a far deeper understanding of what sexual orientation is before they can determine where it comes from.
  • Female sexual orientation is particularly foggy, he says, because there's been so little research done. As for male sexual orientation, he argues that there's now enough evidence to suggest it is "entirely in-born," though not nearly enough to establish how that happens.
  • Bailey's 1991 twin study is still cited by other researchers as one of the pillars in the genetic argument for homosexuality. But his follow-up study using a comprehensive registry of twins in Australia found a much lower rate of similarity in sexual orientation between identical twins, about 20 percent, down from 50 percent.
  • Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem has proposed an intriguing theory for how CGN might lead to homosexuality. According to this pathway, which he calls "the exotic becomes erotic," children are born with traits for temperament, such as aggression and activity level, that predispose them to male-typical or female-typical activities. They seek out playmates with the same interests. So a boy whose traits lead him to hopscotch and away from rough play will feel different from, and ostracized by, other boys. This leads to physiological arousal of fear and anger in their presence, arousal that eventually is transformed from exotic to erotic. Critics of homosexuality have used Bem's theory, which stresses environment over biology, to argue that sexual orientation is not inborn and not fixed. But Bem says this pathway is triggered by biological traits, and he doesn't really see how the outcome of homosexuality can be changed.
  • Males and females have a fundamental genetic difference - females have two X chromosomes, and males have an X and a Y. Still, right after conception, it's hard to tell male and female zygotes apart, except for that tucked-away chromosomal difference. Normally, the changes take shape at a key point of fetal development, when the male brain is masculinized by sex hormones. The female brain is the default. The brain will stay on the female path as long as it is protected from exposure to hormones. The hormonal theory of homosexuality holds that, just as exposure to circulating sex hormones determines whether a fetus will be male or female, such exposure must also influence sexual orientation.
  • The cases of children born with disorders of "sexual differentiation" offer insight. William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated more than a hundred of these cases. For decades, the standard medical response to boys born with severely inadequate penises (or none at all) was to castrate the boy and have his parents raise him as a girl. But Reiner has found that nurture - even when it involves surgery soon after birth - cannot trump nature. Of the boys with inadequate penises who were raised as girls, he says, "I haven't found one who is sexually attracted to males." The majority of them have transitioned back to being males and report being attracted to females.
  • During fetal development, sexual identity is set before the sexual organs are formed, Reiner says. Perhaps it's the same for sexual orientation. In his research, of all the babies with X and Y chromosomes who were raised as girls, the only ones he has found who report having female identities and being attracted to males are those who did not have "receptors" to let the male sex hormones do their masculinizing in the womb.
  • "Exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically raises the chances of being sexually attracted to females," Reiner says. "We can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure may have something to do with attraction to males."
  • New York University researcher Lynn S. Hall, who has studied traits determined in the womb, speculates that Patrick was somehow prenatally stressed, probably during the first trimester, when the brain is really developing, particularly the structures like the hypothalamus that influence sexual behavior. This stress might have been based on his position in the womb or the blood flow to him or any of a number of other factors not in his mother's control. Yet more evidence that identical twins have womb experiences far from identical can be found in their often differing birth weights. Patrick was born a pound lighter than Thomas.
  • the research suggests that early on in the womb, as the fetus's brain develops in either the male or female direction, something fundamental to sexual orientation is happening. Nobody's sure what's causing it. But here's where genes may be involved, perhaps by regulating hormone exposure or by dictating the size of that key clump of neurons in the hypothalamus. Before researchers can sort that out, they'll need to return to the question of whether, in fact, there is a "gay gene."
  • There is, however, a towering question that Sanders's study will probably not be able to answer. That has to do with evolution. If a prime motivation of all species is to pass genes on to future generations, and gay men are estimated to produce 80 percent fewer offspring than straight men, why would a gay gene not have been wiped out by the forces of natural selection? This evolutionary disadvantage is what led former Amherst College biologist Paul Ewald to argue that homosexuality might be caused by a virus - a pathogen most likely working in utero. That argument caused a stir when he and a colleague proposed it six years ago, but with no research done to test it, it remains just another theory. Other scientists have offered fascinating but unpersuasive explanations, most of them focusing on some kind of compensatory benefit, in the same way that the gene responsible for sickle cell anemia also protects against malaria. A study last year by researchers in Italy showed that female relatives of gay men tended to be more fertile, though, as critics point out, not nearly fertile enough to make up for the gay man's lack of offspring.
  • Those same genes would work one way in heterosexual women and another way in homosexual men. The UCLA lab is examining how these genes might be turned "up" or "down." It's not a question of what genes you have, but rather which ones you use, says Bocklandt. "I have the genes in my body to make a vagina and carry a baby, but I don't use them, because I am a man." In studying the genes of gay sheep, for example, he's found some that are turned "way up" compared with the straight rams.
Weiye Loh

Parents of a Certain Age: Is there anything wrong with being 53 and pregnant? - 0 views

nymag.com/print

Age Parenting Birth Control

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • “If you look at it from an actuarial standpoint, I might not be around when she’s 30,” Fiona says. “If you sit down and look at the cold, hard facts, this is the truth.” But Fiona shrugs it off.
  • The age of first motherhood is rising all over the West. In Italy, Germany, and Great Britain, it’s 30. In the U.S., it’s gone up to 25 from 21 since 1970, and in New York State, it’s even higher, at 27. But among the extremely middle-aged, births aren’t just inching up. They are booming. In 2008, the most recent year for which detailed data are available, about 8,000 babies were born to women 45 or older, more than double the number in 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Five hundred and forty-one of these were born to women age 50 or older—a 375 percent increase. In adoption, the story is the same. Nearly a quarter of adopted children in the U.S. have parents more than 45 years older than they are.
  • just as important as those medical advances is a baby-crazed, youth-crazed culture that encourages 50-year-olds to envision themselves changing diapers when a decade ago they might have been content to calculate the future returns on their 401(k)s. Nothing—not a sports car, not a genius dye job—says “I’m young” like a baby on your hip. “He’s given the house a renewed spirit and purpose,” John Travolta told People magazine earlier this year about his new son, Benjamin. Travolta is 57. His wife, Kelly Preston, is 48.
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  • Reproductive technology accounts for the sharp rise in the numbers. Women over 45 who want to carry their own babies most often use donor eggs, though egg freezing, a more cutting-edge method, offers early adopters another option, a kind of reproductive DVR for circumventing the inflexible and often inconvenient schedules handed down by Mother Nature. (Save your shows, and watch them when you have time; put your own eggs on ice, and wait for Mr. Right.) Egg freezing now gets write-ups not just in medical journals but also in Vogue, where a long feature on the technology appeared this past May between articles on avant-garde gastronomy and the fashionable art of mismatching patterns.
Weiye Loh

Do Humans Have a Moral Duty to Stop Procreating? | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...moral-duty-to-stop-procreating

Population Food Chain Ethics Birth Control

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 03 Apr 16
     
    Whenever any animal population gets out of control, whether it be an overrun of deer or geese, humans usually step in and make plans to curb it through hunting or damaging nests. It seems cruel, but without natural predators to bring the population down, overpopulation could have devastating effects on the local environment. Yet, humans have shown themselves to be far more destructive than any other animal on this planet, so why don't we offer ourselves the same consideration? I'm talking about anti-natalism here, the philosophical position that opposes procreation.
Weiye Loh

The Conflict by Elisabeth Badinter - review | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lace-elisabeth-badinter-review

Naturalistic Fallacy Philosophy Feminism Motherhood Nature

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Because natural parenting is not just a harmless folly: it can be detrimental. Having a cuddle with a newborn baby is lovely, but the weighty ideological importance placed on immediate postpartum skin-to-skin contact in forming a long-term emotional bond between mother and child can be upsetting for parents denied this opportunity by a difficult birth or sick baby. The domination of modern maternal culture by naturalist ideology can generate extreme guilt in those who do not, or cannot, live up to its high standards: the guilt of feeling like a bad or unnatural mother. Naturalism thrives on such guilt (Badinter quotes a La Leche League member's call for the shaming of women who do not breastfeed), and encourages women to equate the extent of their self-sacrifice to their success as mothers.
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Sep 13
     
    "naturalism is a philosophy, not an objective truth. Badinter describes how ethological studies (such as those conducted by primatologist Sarah Hrdy) have been driven by an ideological conviction that females, across species, possess an innate "maternal instinct". The naturalist psychologist John Bowlby has tried to show that attachment behaviours in human mothers and children are instinctive and uniquely female. The field of ecology has provided the backdrop for widespread mistrust of infantile exposure to "unnatural" substances, such as epidurals in childbirth, immunisations and chemicals in baby bottles. But there are problems. First, this research has failed to produce a clear, incontrovertible picture of what, if anything, constitutes innate or "natural" mothering behaviour. Second, it is not a given that, because something is "natural", we should submit to or encourage it (the Enlightenment's achievements were founded on attempts to control and supersede nature). And, third, there is not much evidence that the behaviours celebrated by naturalists create healthier, happier children or parents. Even claims that breastfeeding boosts immunity in industrial nations or raises IQ are not on solid ground."
Weiye Loh

The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century - 0 views

m.guardian.co.uk/...first-sexual-revolution

Feminism Sex Sexuality Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • the first sexual revolution can be traced in some of the greatest works of literature, art and philosophy ever produced – the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the pictures of Reynolds and Hogarth, the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. And it was played out in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women, otherwise unnoticed by history, whose trials and punishments for illicit sex are preserved in unpublished judicial records. Most startling of all were my discoveries of private writings, such as the diary of the randy Dutch embassy clerk Lodewijk van der Saan, posted to London in the 1690s; the emotional letters sent to newspapers by countless hopeful and disappointed lovers; and the piles of manuscripts about sexual freedom composed by the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham but left unpublished, to this day, by his literary executors. Once noticed, the effects of this revolution in attitudes and behaviour can be seen everywhere when looking at the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It was one of the key shifts from the pre-modern to the modern world.
  • The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate with their slaves, and ordered that adulteresses be publicly disgraced, lose their goods and have their ears and noses cut off. Such severity reflected the Christian church's view of sex as a dangerously polluting force, as well as the patriarchal commonplace that women were more lustful than men and liable to lead them astray.
  • During the 17th century this figure had been extremely low: in 1650 only about 1% of all births in England were illegitimate. But by 1800, almost 40% of brides came to the altar pregnant, and about a quarter of all first-born children were illegitimate. It was to be a permanent change in behaviour.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • By 1800, most forms of consensual sex between men and women had come to be treated as private, beyond the reach of the law.
  • This extraordinary reversal of centuries of severity was partly the result of increasing social pressures. The traditional methods of moral policing had evolved in small, slow, rural communities in which conformity was easy to enforce. Things were different in towns, especially in London. At the end of the middle ages only about 40,000 people lived there, but by 1660 there were already 400,000; by 1800 there would be more than a million, and by 1850 most of the British population lived in towns. This extraordinary explosion created new kinds of social pressures and new ways of living, and placed the conventional machinery of sexual discipline under growing strain.
  • Urban living provided many more opportunities for sexual adventure. It also gave rise to new, professional systems of policing, which prioritised public order. Crime became distinguished from sin. And the fast circulation of news and ideas created a different, freer and more pluralist intellectual environment.
  • The idea that sexual freedom was as natural and desirable for women as for men was born in the 18th century.
  • the rise of sexual freedom had a much more ambiguous legacy. Women who were rich or powerful enough to escape social ostracism could take advantage of it: many female aristocrats had notoriously open marriages. But on the whole female lust now came to be ever more strongly stigmatised as "unnatural", for it threatened the basic principle that (as one of William III's bishops had put it) "Men have a property in their wives and daughters" and therefore owned their bodies too. Thus, at the same time as it was increasingly argued that sexual liberty was natural for men, renewed stress was placed, often in the same breath, on the necessity of chastity in respectable women.
  • the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.
Weiye Loh

Genetic Basis for Sexual Identity at the Cellular level « Mathia Lee ~ Plans... - 0 views

mathialee.wordpress.com/...identity-at-the-cellular-level

Sexuality Genetic Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The discovery provides new insights into the evolution of sex differences, and it may help doctors better understand sexual identity disorders and why some women go through early menopause.Scientists knew that the gene responsible for the fate switch, called Foxl2, was important to ovarian cells.
  • Female mice lacking the gene developed perfectly normal ovaries. After birth, however, the animals’ ovaries started to deteriorate. But it was not clear what was going wrong.
  • Treier and his colleagues genetically engineered a mouse in which they could selectively turn off the Foxl2 gene in adult ovaries. With the gene inactive, a dramatic change took place in the female mice. Within 3 weeks, their ovaries were full of tubelike structures usually found in testicle tissue. Upon closer inspection, the researchers found that the ovarian cells had become cellular cross-dressers, displaying all the characteristics of several types of testicle cells, some of which produced levels of testosterone typical of an adult male. (There were no sperm present, however.)
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Foxl2, it seems, is part of a larger genetic pathway that controls the identity of cells in the ovaries and testis. The researchers found that the protein made by the gene suppresses the activity of another gene called Sox9, which prompts the development of testicular cells. When Foxl2 is turned off, Sox9 is free to take over–and turn the ovary cells into testis cells
  • During embryonic development, there are several mutually reinforcing gene pathways that keep an organism either male or female.
  • there are so many overlapping mechanisms that keep the sexes developing in their own direction, “you would have thought that by the time you get to the adult, everything would be so hard-wired you couldn’t change it.” But the new work shows that by adulthood, the backup reinforcements are no longer active, so that a change in the levels of a single protein is enough to trigger a dramatic switch.
  • the Foxl2 and Sox9 genes are conserved in all vertebrates. So Treier says that the yin-yang balance between the two is probably active in maintaining sex in a wide variety of animals. Several species of fish are known to be able to change their gender in adulthood, and Sinclair says the new results may explain how that happens
  • the findings disprove the idea, long held by developmental biologists, that female characteristics are a default setting that is overwritten by male genes–a bit of gender equality at the cellular level.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Dec 09
     
    The difference between male and female is smaller than one might think-at least on a cellular level. Researchers have found that they can change ovary cells into testicular cells in mice by turning off a single gene.
Weiye Loh

Anthony Weiner and gender politics - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...main20071028.shtml

Feminism Family Sex Politician Power Gender Stereotype Gender Equality

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • for every disloyal and lewd male lawmaker, there's a woman (or two, or three, or more) who is all too willing to enable his behavior.
  • modern feminists have undermined the idea of marriage, discouraged romance and courtship, encouraged a laissez-faire sexual culture, and done everything in their power to eliminate gender roles. Add to this the academic and professional opportunities available to women today, and the access to affordable birth control, and it's clear that it's much easier for women to participate in our "no strings attached" sexual culture than ever before. But this freedom, which has benefitted women so much, doesn't come without consequences -- namely, that it has allowed so many women to think it's permissible to have an affair with a married man.
  • In our effort to bring about gender equality, we've lost sight of important differences between the sexes. And when it comes to relationships, the attitude that a girl should act like "one of the guys" has serious ramifications that often end up hurting other women most of all.
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  • It's hard to imagine that most women don't have at least a fleeting thought of what it would be like to be in the wife's shoes.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11
     
    Left out of the conversation, however, is a discussion about why so many women are willing to participate in these infidelities. If, as a society, we're interested in seeing fewer sexual scandals, we need to ask more than what's wrong with men today. Only when we consider how decades of skewed gender politics and a quest for a false sense of "equality" have contributed to this culture will we be able to have an honest conversation.
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