Women HERE, who are made to feel guilty about using contraception because the Catholic Church defines it as a sin.

Well, but that is an issue for the Catholic Church to decide - it doesn't have much to do with feminism per se. What I mean is that there are plenty of Christian churches, including very conservative evangelical fundamentalist ones, who do not object to contraceptive use in the context of, say, marriage. The Catholics have their own view, which they are well entitled to have as a matter of religious freedom. Wouldn't the feminist thing to do be, using the independence they have, to opt for another church if one disagrees with the Vatican position on contraception? I know the arguments against doing that, but frankly given the wide diversity of religious communities available in the US, I just don't understand the feminists who are thinking that they are going to use the same methods the feminists did to change the law and culture in the US and be effective in changing the Vatican's mind about contraception. It really is odd to see it listed as a main contemporary feminist issue. If people don't like the Catholic position on contraception and think that the Vatican is wrong, you can either dissent from it and remain in the Church (which is seemingly what most American Catholics seem to do) or find a new religious community. I don't have a dog in that fight (I am not a Catholic), but making the internal dogma of the Catholic Church the subject of feminist agitation is a recipe for epic fail.

We'll see as the comments develop.

The storyline so far, as far as I can tell, is that Obsidian has a long-running feud with the so-called "HBD" blogger community, which he says (rightly I think) tends to harp on the nexus of race and IQ, talking specifically about black disadvantages in that area. Obsidian has pretty consistently countered this by saying that white guys with high IQs are generally laggards in today's sex/mating/dating market, and particularly lag black men, so at the end of the day the "advantage" that the HBD crowd talks about when it discusses IQ is a false one, since the black guys are the ones who are getting laid and reproducing, while, according to Obsidian's theory, the white guys with high IQs are like the horse and buggy -- an anachronism that the dating/mating market is now weeding out of the gene pool.

So I take this post as a means to gather data which supports that view. As I say, we'll see what the comments say, especially the comments from Obsidian himself.

I think the answer to your question over there as to why most of the "comps" are black v white is obvious -- that's the point he's going to be trying to make in his post: black guys are now sexier than white guys, and white guys are in declining favor among women. It's one of his more persistent memes.

It's not necessarily an implosion scenario. I think that things will change when the pain of the current system becomes high enough such that the incentives on behavior change. I think that tipping point matters much more than the ideology on either side, really. Incentives drive behavior.

Sweden has a regime like that, with the resulting support payments being based on actual cost rather than lifestyle level support as in the US, because both parents are supporting homes for the kid(s) in any case. I do think that this is a viable approach as well for marriages with children. The main obstacle I see in it is that groups like NOW pretty consistently oppose the idea of default joint custody -- they say because it encourages abusive men to remain involved in the lives of their children and ex-wives (even though every proposal for joint custody has provided exceptions for cases of abuse or other clear unfitness), but in reality I think the reason is because it results in both a loss of control over the process for women, as well as a financial loss. It would be better for children, and better for society (and in an indirect way therefore for women, too), but in a "direct" way it would be a "give" for women in terms of the default setting, which currently has them in control -- hence NOW's opposition to changing the status quo to favor shared parenting arrangements. The politics of family law are really quite troubling, unfortunately. There is a bill currently pending in Tennessee. Let's see where that one goes.

I'd imagine the groom is under a good deal of pressure to be a guy who is "secure in his masculinity" and "comfortable in his skin" ... which means lump it when it comes to the wording his bride wants.

The interesting thing about marriage contracts is that they are quite common in continental European countries, with no real harm done it would seem to divorce rates (lower than in the US). I was chatting with one of my Euro colleagues a few months ago and he explained that due to his recent promotion he'd need to amend his marriage contract. He then smiled at me and said "I know you Americans find it funny, but everyone here has them, and frankly we think you're nuts for not having them". Not the only conversation I've had along those lines with a male European colleague.

I suspect that we see them as cynical or self-fulfilling prophecies in the US because we cling to a romantic vision of marriage -- something which is satisfying for us in the shorter term, but which can lead to unrealistic expectations and undermine us in the course of marriage's ups and downs. I do think it at least has something to do with our highish rate of divorce relative to other comparable countries.

Yeah I think what I have heard at a couple of ceremonies is more along the lines of "for so long as love shall abide between us" or something along those lines. Same basic idea, more flowery language.

I think one way to "do" marriage, if we're sure to be stuck with the no-fault regime, would be to allow people to customize the legal/dissolution aspects of their marriages more than they can now, and have courts respect those decisions. That way people who want the "as long as we both feel like it" marriage can have that, and people who want the "till death do us part, barring bad behavior" can have that. Right now we have a one size fits all approach that also happens to be a least common denominator -- and it's having a negative impact, I think, both on expectations as well as on how marriages play themselves out.

The Tien article is no more scandalous than the Tsing-Loh article describing how she ditched her kitchen bitch husband and about how her upper-middle class middle aged married girlfriends in Pasadena were all bored with their husbands and envious of their single cougar musician friend who had scads of men in their 20s chasing her for sex. It's a wild world right now, in the institution of marriage.

The problem is that it permits people to leave marriage on fair or even favorable terms regardless of their behavior in the marriage. That works for both men and women alike, of course, but given that most divorces are initiated by women it appears that women use the benefit of no-fault divorce more than men do.

No fault divorce was ostensibly instituted to reduce litigation and relieve people from having to air their dirty laundry in court – save time, money, emotional aggravation and so on. But the problem is that the system as it stands allows people to misbehave in marriage without penalty. That creates very odd incentives for people in terms of how they conduct themselves in marriages. In most contractual relationships, a party who breaches the contract cannot elect to terminate the contract for no reason and exit the contract on equal or better than equal terms – the policy reason for that is that if contract law worked this way, the economic system would be in chaos because no-one could rely on contracts as being binding obligations on people – the kinds of obligations that can only be suspended under limited circumstances, and the breach of which otherwise exposes one to claims for damages. The marriage dissolution system would be more rational and fair, and involve less moral hazard, if we were to limit the grounds for divorce to the big “A”s – adultery, abuse, addiction, abandonment, alienation of affection, etc. These acts by one party should entitle the *other* party to terminate the marriage at their option, and on terms that compensate them for the loss -- that is, favorable property division, in some cases ongoing support and so on. It should not, however, be the case that a spouse simply gets bored, or actually misbehaves (say, an affair) and then gets to terminate the marriage on his/her terms with equal division of assets and even financial support going to the spouse who misbehaved! That creates moral hazard in terms of the lack of a detriment to bad behaviors in marriages.

At a minimum I would say that no fault should be reconsidered where children are involved. In many cases involving marriages with children, there will be litigation anyway about the child custody issue due to the huge financially beneficial impact of one parent winning sole custody – so the justification of using no fault to cut down on the hassle of getting divorced is much less applicable to these marriages. In addition, the state has an even stronger interest in having these marriages stay together in terms of positive outcomes for the children, again barring marriages featuring one of the big “A”s which would entitle one to a fault-based divorce in any case.

Of course the feminists, being currently the group that is "in power", is threatened by any serious explanation of inter-sex issues from a perspective that differs from party line feminism. For good reason. They're right to feel uneasy, because people like Tiger, Sommers and Nathanson & Young are quite trenchant in their critiques of the reigning feminist intellectual and media mafia.

I find it quite telling that the Newsweek feminist blames boys themselves for their own lagging behind in schools. That's just ... so typical it's priceless. When women have problems, it's the fault of men. When men and boys have problems, it's the fault of men. Women are never to blame for anything, and men are, in turn, to blame for *everything* that happens to *everyone*, whether it involves themselves or anyone else. After all, that teacher who treated Susan's son and daughter differently in school was being controlled by men and the patriarchy. This is why feminism, as a "belief system", is similar to Marxism -- it provides a global explanation for all of the world's ills -- not the "monopolization of the means of production by the bourgeoisie", but rather the "monopolization of structural power by males". It is used to explain all the ills of the world and place them on male shoulders, while women, akin to the socialist notion of the noble proletariat, are pure, snow-white, blameless, perfect and so on.

This will develop slowly, and it will be fought tooth and nail by the feminist academic establishment without question. But I think it eventually will come to fruition. Enough people are beginning to realize that when it comes to the hardline academic feminist theory, the emperor really doesn't have any clothes.

Agreed, hence the importance of social structure. A kind of "free for all" social structure leads to weak male "buy-in" into a self-organizing hierarchy, and much less trust among males. I think that's what the current dating market looks like, really.

But you're right that in a closed system the hierarchy forms up almost effortlessly and, interestingly, it permits men at different levels of the hierarchy to collaborate and interact with each other fairly easily. I can remember a recent example of this at work. One of the maintenance guys was going around running temperature checks on the heaters positioned along the windows) and he had to wait for the thermometer to register. So he sat down at my desk and we started chatting about family life and he told me about his son's new business and so on -- it was a pretty interesting 10 minute chat. When the reading was finished, he collected the thermometer and thanked me for the conversation and went on to the next office. We're at two very different points in the hierarchy, and we knew that, and nothing in our conversation *changed* that, but somehow being comfortable with knowing where we each stood in the hierarchy facilitated a fairly easy-going conversation all the same by taking that issue off the table. In most situations, hierarchies work pretty well for males, because they facilitate male cooperation. The problem with the current dating/mating scene is that it is very free-for-all and unstructured, meaning very little cooperation and trust among the males.