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The Truth about Men, Women, and Sex

Recent revelations about sexual harassment, assault, and abuse underscore certain blunt realities about men, women, and sex. How can we confront those realities in a way that leads to less sexual violence?
People of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.
“Stigmarketing,” which is appealing to claims of stigma to motivate social change, has become the backbone of legal efforts toward that end. Stigmarketing capitalizes on gay–straight differences, and the way these disparities can be measured by the absolute surge in research on “minority stress theory,” or MST.
I consider myself lucky to have gotten to know George Cardinal Pell a bit—and that after his 80th year.
As a social scientist, I have grave concerns about the methodological mess that has characterized this synod’s massive, unwieldy data-collection-and-analysis venture.
In light of both Ukraine’s cultural stance on LGBTQ issues and the data showing drawbacks of same sex parenting, a presidential fiat legalizing same-sex marriage would be an affront to the nation. Furthermore, any capitalizing on Ukraine’s current dependence on the US and EU governments by encouraging its ideological colonization in the utter absence of popular support would be not virtuous but vicious.
A nation could recover from the loss of scores of men, as the twentieth century’s postwar societies all did. But it has no future without women and children and the moral order of the family and society that these not only represent but constitute. Civilization hinges on women.
While the average engaged Catholic continues to show signs of making peace with progressive trends in sexuality and relationship behavior, the same is not true among the clergy. The type of man who completes seminary intending ordination is more conservative about matters of sexuality—as well as other markers—than those who enrolled 20, 30, or 40+ years ago.
My marriage is an entity with ramifications and consequences that echo outside our home. The same is true in reverse: what happens in other marriages can affect ours. A marriage needs friends, and it can likewise supply friendship to others’ unions.
The Arkansas legislature knows something the governor apparently does not: hormonal treatment of adolescent gender dysphoria yields little across samples and studies. Transgender youth medicine involves numerous known and serious risks that are already identifiable, while the long-term effects and possible harms of off-label drug uses are completely unknown.
In an era of new options, more choices, greater temptations, high expectations, consistent anxiety, and endemic uncertainty, nothing about the process of marrying can be taken for granted—even among those belonging to a faith that has long encouraged it. In an era of independence, intentionally becoming interdependent seems increasingly risky.
The measurement, analytic, and interpretive decision-making displayed in much (though certainly not all) of the LGBT discrimination and well-being literature is troubling, indicative of a lack of standards, poorly defined concepts, impressionistic conclusions derived from small numbers of interviews, the politicization of results, and the overall novelty of the field.
Data from a new study show that the beneficial effect of surgery for transgender people is so small that a clinic may have to perform as many as 49 gender-affirming surgeries before they could expect to prevent one additional person from seeking subsequent mental health treatment. Yet that’s not what the authors say. That the authors corrupted otherwise-excellent data and analyses with a skewed interpretation signals an abandonment of scientific rigor and reason in favor of complicity with activist groups seeking to normalize infertility-inducing and permanently disfiguring surgeries.
A new study purports to prove the harms of “conversion therapy” for those who identify as transgender. But there are at least four good reasons for being leery of the results appearing therein.
Don’t delay your life. Don’t wait until you get a job, then tenure, to do the normal things that make life sweet, like marrying and having children. Remember the time-worn observation: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Professors who build their career around their own ego and cutthroat ambition tend to shrivel into something you don’t want to be.
Permissive sexual attitudes and practices have not stimulated the religious revival many Christians believe the extremes of Sexual Revolution will inspire. There is no evidence of it in the data. On the contrary: Christians seem to grow more complicit—or at least more quiet about their misgivings—by the year.
We find ourselves in a liminal spot, one between long-taken-for-granted traditional relationships anchored in marriage and the future relationship system characterized more consistently by “confluent love.” There will not be two dominant systems.
A new study is being used to make the claim that allowing conscientious objection to same-sex marriage leads to increased rates of mental health problems in sexual minorities. But is that really what the data show?
A study of consensual, overlapping sex partners unwittingly reveals the strengths of monogamy.
New research points to “internalized homophobia” as the problem, not external discrimination.
Two new studies use a small amount of old data to try to undermine the idea that it is abusive or damaging for adults to have sex with minors. Disturbingly, no one seems to be challenging this conclusion.
The legalization of same-sex marriage may be associated with a short-term emotional bump for youth who identify as sexual minorities, but it is not a robust, long-term panacea for the emotional struggles of teenagers.
The claim that there are no differences in outcomes for children living in same-sex households arises from how scholars collect, analyze, and present data to support a politically expedient conclusion, not from what the data tend to reveal at face value.
A new study examines the risk of depression and other negative outcomes among adolescents and young adults raised by same-sex couples.