LeeEsq says:

So many traps for me to fall into. Just a note that many of Herr Professor Wolfinger’s links do not work.

WT2: When Queen Victoria got engaged to Prince Albert, there were debates in parliament about who should propose to who. It was eventually decided that Vicky would do the proposing.

WT3: IIRC, one of the scandals about Ashley Madison was that there weren’t that many real, actual woman on the site and it was a big con. That might be a good thing considering its selling point.

WT6: I still think Saul is right and your really overestimating how much cross-class dating and marriage occurred in the past. It just seemed that more cross class dating occurred because fewer career options were available to women in living memory. This means that young upper class women became teachers, store clerks, nurses, and secretaries just like young middle class or working class women.

WT8: I’ve read somewhere that inviting more people to the wedding leads to a lower divorce rate because it creates a community of interest in the marriage. There was also a brief clip that I saw years ago about a young woman, who was also an economist, doing a little study on why wedding dresses cost so much. The main reason is that they tend to be worn once and even if you have more than one marriage, chances are your getting a different dress for each one. The materials used are chintzy though. The young bride in question seemed positively shocked to learn how much polyester was in her expensive dress.

SS1: From an educational standpoint it is possible to teach teens and kids to watch porn more critically. From a political standpoint it isn’t. American sex education is going to have to go in a more European direction and your going need a teacher to deconstruct porn with examples to students. I’m pretty sure that even the more broad-minded American parents would be aghast at this. Since the Internet makes porn more widely available than previously, we might not have an option about this though unless we want to go down a particularly dangerous rabbit hole.

SS2, NW1: There seems to be something of a 20/80 thing happening with sex. A relatively small number of people are having most of the sex while most other people, unmarried or married, aren’t having that much sex. As a bachelor, I’m not sure whether to be happy that other people are in the same boat as I am or even more depressed.

SS3: There might be a lot of willful blindness going on here.

NW6: I think this makes a lot of intuitive sense, disclaimer I didn’t read the study and I’m just hypothesizing. Less educated people are socialized into expecting traditional gender norms. There have been studies that shown that working class or lower middle class women really don’t want universal pre-k while more educated women want universal pre-k so they can have kids and maintain their career. What they want is to be able to be stay at home moms. More educated people tend to be socialized into more egalitarian gender roles.

This means that more egalitarian gender roles makes marriage a more attractive proposition for educated women because it means they won’t be forced into a traditional wife role that they don’t want. For less educated women, it means they might be with a husband, assuming heterosexuality, who doesn’t act the way they were socialized to expect.

NW7: Does this take into account that younger people are more likely describe themselves as polyamorous and have agreements about seeing other people? I think a broader definition of adultery to include open marriages is necessary because of changing social standards to determine how many people are really seeing other people besides their spouse/primary partner.

NW8: Yeh?Report