PoAC: Life lessons for my kids

x-posted to ontario_teacher and perfect_parent

The newspaper this week has been full of a heinous crime. A young woman in a small town near here was gang-raped while passed out drunk at a friend's nineteenth birthday party. Her whole school knew about it before she did - she knew something had happened, but not what. Yesterday, the boy whose birthday it was, was sentenced to two years less a day. That leaves him in provincial prison instead of federal, probably a good thing for a first offence. He won't go on the sex offender registry, but he will be required to submit a DNA sample to be stored and compared in any future rape cases.

Meanwhile, the young man's mother was downstairs in the same house. She had supplied the party - consisting almost entirely of underage boys - with jello shooters, her son's private beer fridge was well-stocked, and she didn't check on the party even once - not even when one bystander got up and left, leaving a hint that she should go check on her son. He was the only one to leave out of ten observers and three perpetrators.

( More personal connections, and reflections thereon. )

PoAC: Musings on Dr. Dobson

A week or so ago, I dug up a book that had been taking up shelf space since we were married - a lovely, hardcover, gift edition of Dr. Dobson's advice book for newlyweds, "Love for a Lifetime." It has languished on a forgotten shelf for nearly seven years, and I've never felt the need to read it.

When I came across it, I briefly considered simply pitching it. I think I know who it came from, but they'd never know we threw it out, so that's not an issue. I have huge issues with many things that Focus on the Family does, and quite a few issues with Dobson's child-rearing and educational advice as well - some of it is just plain bad. So I wasn't expecting too much worthwhile advice from this book. Still, I decided to dip into it, just to remind myself of how the Christian right thinks about the institution of marriage, and to possibly critique it a bit.

Disclaimer: These are completely unresearched thoughts. I haven't looked anything up or read any other viewpoint. It's all me against Dr. Dobson.

First, the two pages he devoted to the sexual revolution are deserving of attention.

They include phrases like "unmitigated disaster," which is not really surprising. They point out that the morals of all of human history were turned on their heads in a very brief span of time, and the result was chaos that had a profoundly detrimental effect on the family. He attributed to the sexual revolution:

1) An increase in marital infidelity
2) An increase in premarital sex
3) An increase in the spread of STDs
4) An increase in homosexuality and other "deviant lifestyles"
5) An increase in the number of children born out of wedlock and thereby suffering from lack of good homes
6) A huge increase in the number of divorces.

In short, the entire breakdown of society can be found in the sexual revolution.

Let's take this one part at a time, shall we?

I think #1 and #2 are probably partially true. There are probably plenty of people, male and female, who permitted themselves some infidelities at that time, and for whom those infidelities led to divorce. There are certainly plenty of girls, in particular, who become sexually active before being married - something that was probably rarer before the sixties. I do not, however, agree that this was entirely brought about by the sexual revolution; I think it would be more accurate to say that what was already happening was brought out into the open and celebrated as freedom from traditional constraints. If you listen to the music from the eras just before that, you get an awful lot of sexual references. I'm not prepared to believe that Cole Porter became as famous and as popular as he did by singing songs about things that didn't happen in an awful lot of lives. No, it was happening, but nobody acknowledged it openly. There's a big downside to keeping all mention of sex as a private thing: it means the darker side of sex, the side connected to power, control and the abuse thereof, was also hidden. More on this when we get to #6.

Again, #3 can be partially attributed to the fact that it was discussed more. In Victorian times, many doctors had dolls in their desks to show to prudish ladies so that they could point to the part of their bodies that hurt, without having to mention them by name. Probably, they didn't know the names. I know of one elderly lady, deceased now a few years, who didn't know what a gynecologist did and had never been to see one. The cancer she had might have been caught sooner if she'd known and taken advantage of the knowledge. The secrecy surrounding sex and reproductive functions was detrimental to women's health. The sexual revolution gave women permission to understand their bodies for the first time without fear of censure (or at least, with gradually diminished fear of censure.) If there was more disease spread, it was at least as much a matter of ignorance as it was of loose morals; and I question how much more disease was spread, as opposed to how much more we now know about it. If stats on STDs weren't available until midway through the sexual revolution or later, then how can a comparison between before and after be legitimately drawn? We simply don't know how much disease there was before, because people didn't talk about it and because some of the diseases in question had not yet been identified (and in a few cases, were not yet circulating.) Conclusion: more, almost certainly; as much as Dr. Dobson claims, certainly not.

4) I don't want to even dignify this with a response.

5) This is true, up to a point. It's also true that fewer unwanted babies were abandoned or given up for adoption after this point, because girls weren't necessarily forced into giving up their babies. Abortion and birth control both became legal during this time, which of course is another evil that Dr. Dobson expounds upon. I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, it was happening in a hidden way, and a lot of people were badly hurt by it; on the other, bringing it out into the open didn't necessarily diminish the hurt. I see the side effects all the time of girls who had babies too young, kept them, and had no resources to do well by them - but I question if they would have done any better, forced to marry the person who got them pregnant or quietly give the child up. A few more babies up for adoption would probably be better for the children than some of the homes that they end up in now.

Aside: Have you ever tried teaching the historical meaning of the word "bastard" without offending half the kids/parents in a class? It's difficult, believe me.

Now the biggie: #6. More divorces. The breakdown of the family.

This is, basically, true. Many families break down, not because of any particular abuse, etc, but because the people involved simply aren't committed enough to each other to make it work when the going gets tough. Fifty years ago, they didn't really have that choice. So they either worked it out, or they lived in misery in the same house for the rest of their lives, or possibly one abandoned the other. The relative ease of divorce nowadays has allowed marriages to break down that might have been saved and might have worked, but it also allows for a legal end to a big mistake - in other words, it allows for a second chance. If it also allows for some irresponsibility in regards to marriage, that is the price society pays for allowing people second chances.

Without quoting stats I haven't actually researched, it seems to me that domestic violence is still fairly prominent in our society. This is not an increase over previous generations; it's just an increase in the reporting of it. These families need to break down, for the safety of all concerned, but especially the abused partner and the children. Women now can report abuse; be believed; be supported by the court system; and end the relationship. How often could that have happened before the sexual revolution? My impression is, very rarely. For those families, divorce was an improvement.

My conclusions: Dr. Dobson significantly under-represents the importance of improved reporting and openness about sexuality and reproductive health, and their effects on the institution of marriage. He idealizes the family unit, failing to recognize some of the benefits that may accrue to some families through divorce and forcing a very insular view of sexuality - a view that is not supported by anyone who has actually studied history. There was no idealized time when marriages worked well most of the time, people were consistently faithful, and children were raised in harmonious environments. I don't have a great deal of appreciation for people who manage to ignore historical reality because it suits their agenda to do so.