Ruth Institute Blog

A new article in the Journal of Family Studies looks at over 2,000 individuals in their first marriages and assesses the impact of delaying sex on the quality of their relationship.

Individuals were categorized as either having:
• Early sex (before dating or less than one month after they started dating).
• Late sex (between one month and two years of dating).
• And those who waited until after they married.

Relationships fared better and better the longer a person waited to have sex, up until marriage, with those hitting the sack before a month showing the worst outcomes. Read more…

Stuart Schneiderman explains why people are best served by being judgmental.

On hooking up:

Her post yesterday addressed the problem of judging the character of men who maintain friendships with cads, with men who use women for mere sexual pleasure.

No one approves of anyone using anyone else for anything, no less free sexual favors.

And yet, the hookup culture exists, to the point where it appears to have supplanted the dating culture, and the reason is that women allow it to exist. Read more…

Can this really be true?

by Carolyn Moynihan

I was inclined not to read a press release about new research on the sexual behaviour of Americans until my eye fell on the word “adolescents” and then “abstaining”, so I skipped to that part. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

There is an interesting alignment of seemingly quite different stars in China: Christian-inspired abstinence education and official population policy.

America’s Focus on the Family has won the ear of the Yunnan provincial ministry of education and is training teachers to educate Chinese teenagers about abstaining from sex before marriage, reports the Washington Post. The Chinese government wants young people to delay marriage and having a child, but delaying sex is another matter, especially as the country becomes more urbanised and susceptible to global trends. Read more…

From the web page of our friend, Wintery Knight:

Please click this link and read this post by an Australian medical doctor. (H/T Craig)

Here’s the graph which is based on data from the National Survey of Family Growth, 2002:

Marriage stability vs. number of lifetime sexual partners Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

There is an interesting alignment of seemingly quite different stars in China: Christian-inspired abstinence education and official population policy.

America’s Focus on the Family has won the ear of the Yunnan provincial ministry of education and is training teachers to educate Chinese teenagers about abstaining from sex before marriage, reports the Washington Post. The Chinese government wants young people to delay marriage and having a child, but delaying sex is another matter, especially as the country becomes more urbanised and susceptible to global trends. Read more…

I didn’t much care for this book.

The essence of the Cahn and Carbone’s version of class difference, which they wrongly attribute to “red states” and “blue states”, is delayed age at first marriage. Later marriage allows women to complete their education and enter into high-income, high-status jobs before beginning families. These high status women are likely to get married and stay married, which further enhances the family’s financial wealth and their children’s life-chances. …
Cahn and Carbone direct their fire at advocates of abstinence education and parental notification for abortion. They do not seem to realize that the early sexualization of the young and the decline in parental authority are a large part of the problem. The combination of Supreme Court decisions and federal promotion of contraception education amounts to a complete government take-over of sexual culture. Against this and the social disorganization of the lower classes, abstinence education and parental notification are, admittedly, impotent weapons. Advocates of an organic wholistic view of sex, marriage and reproduction have few weapons remaining in their armory. The federal government picked a fight with the traditional sexual culture and forced us to bring knives to their gunfight. Read more…

It’s a great way to keep your head clear. But does anybody care, I wonder?

by Carolyn Moynihan

It is always gratifying when research coincides with common sense and everyday experience, as in the case of a new study showing that a relationship in which sexual intimacy is delayed is more likely to endure. Read more…

Great post today over at the First Things blog.

It is odd that simply because of its “sexual freedom” our time should be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as a idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence.

Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty.

Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of sexual partners, orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication Read more…

by Bill Bumpas and Jody Brown

he full results of a national study that favors abstinence education is being withheld from researchers and the public.

The taxpayer-supported survey from 2008 found that around 70 percent of parents and their teenagers believed that teens should wait until marriage to have sex. Despite release of the study’s summary and its highlight at two major public health conferences last year, the Department of Health and Human Services is withholding the full results according to Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Foundation. Read more…

Washington Times Columnist Cheryl Wetzstein interviewed me for this article on the new book Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. Cheryl ably summarizes the basic premise of the book:

In blue states, families tend to be well-educated, have high-paying jobs, be tolerant of diversity and be politically liberal. They marry later in life, have children in wedlock and are dedicated co-parents….

Red-state families, however, seem to be stuck in a time warp — Read more…

I’m pretty sure a couple of movies have been made with topics similar to this. The difference here, of course, is this woman’s plan was not for the sake of comedic effect.

by Carolyn Moynihan

Maybe something is changing for the better out there among Generation Y. A British journalist in her early 30s has written a book about renouncing sex for a year in order to get control of her emotional life. It’s called Chastened. Read more…

The thought of kids having kids is really disturbing to me. I had my first child when I was 25, and I can say, it’s serious business. I can’t imagine doing it while trying to go to high school or even college. And who is really going to be raising these children anyhow? My guess is, the grandmothers. Let’s do a survey of how mothers of pregnant teens feel about teen pregnancy.

The picture a 13-year-old boy sitting next to his baby, which accompanied an article on this topic a while back, still burns in my memory. It was such a heart-wrenching sight. The thirteen-year-old  looked so tiny. Plus his face spoke volumes of “What have I gotten myself into?” This dad is still asking to have his pb and j cut into triangles and for rides to the library. I wouldn’t let a 13-year-old boy babysit my toddlers. Babies deserve more. Read more…

From One News Now comes this article about a high school student who dared to wear a T-shirt to school that promoted….(gasp)…..abstinence!

A middle-school student in Minnesota has regained his right to wear at school a T-shirt bearing an abstinence message.

Officials at Hastings Middle School had initially prohibited seventh-grader Johnathon Kinney from wearing the T-shirt with the message “Virginity Rocks!” On April 26, two school teachers confronted Kinney about the shirt, informing him that it was offensive and should be covered up. School officials also warned Kinney against wearing the shirt again.

After contacting the principal about the incident — and finding he supported the teachers’ decision — Kinney’s parents contacted The Rutherford Institute. John Whitehead, Read more…

Next up in our series on the Pill: how exaggerating the effectiveness of contraception causes serious problems. Read the statistics I quote in this column. If you don’t believe the stats I quote, you can go directly to the Alan Guttmacher articles where I first got them. Bottom line: contraception is least effective among women who are poor, young and unmarried. Yet these are the very groups to whom contraception is the most heavily marketed.

Over 70% of poor, cohabiting teenagers using condoms, will be pregnant within a year. By contrast, the middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 6% chance of pregnancy after a year of condom use. Read more…

Right on! This is right up te same alley as what the Ruth Institute is doing with its It Takes a Family conferences and with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s Smart Sex book.

by Carolyn Moynihan

CNN has run a story on the movement among college students to shun the hook-up culture prevalent on campuses and encourage dating and abstinence. Read more…

I recommend the book, The War on Intimacy. The subtitle tells the story, “How Comprehensive Sex Ed Sabotages Committed Relationships and Our Nation’s Health.” I met the author, Richard Panzer, Ph.D. at a meeting of the Abstinence Clearing House last year. He pressed this book into my hands, and I read it on the plane. He and coauthor Mary Anne Mosack have compiled a wealth of information, from academic studies on the psychological impact of early teen sexual activity, the spread of STD’s and much more. They have a wealth of information about how you can be involved on their site. They also have some You-Tube clips. Check it out.

Way to break it down. This is what they wanted to do. This is what they did. Thanks a lot. I miss the 50′s (had I lived during them).

by Joanna Bogle

As possibly one of its last acts as government, British Labour bids to make sex education compulsory.

Sex education. The very words strike a note of gloom. Long, long ago, back in the 1950s when schoolgirl pregnancies were a rarity, and anyone who gave children contraceptives and urged them to enjoy “safe sex” would have been arrested, things looked different. Read more…

I appreciate the author’s attitude on how ridiculous this is. Since when is it okay to usurp parental authority over a ten-year-old and teach them the “pleasures of sex”? When was sex ever a good thing for any child? Please, let’s teach children NOT to have any self-control. Let’s tell them to sneak around their parents so they can “do it,” get STDs to share with others, get pregnant, and have more abortions all for the sake of sexual pleasure. Fantastic idea, Planned Parenthood. Way to help them become responsible, healthy, well-adjusted adults. And I’m sure all parents would love their kids to start having sex as soon as possible. Get real!

Idiots.

Marcia Segelstein – OneNewsNow Columnist -

The International Planned Parenthood Federation is the umbrella organization for 180 Planned Parenthood organizations around the world. It recently released a report called “Stand and Deliver: Sex, health and young people in the 21st century.” The term “young people” refers to anyone over the age of 10.

The IPPF report includes a list of “Young People’s Human Rights.” Among them are the following: Read more…

Regular Ruth Readers know that I have been supportive of the students of the Princeton University Anscombe Society, and their efforts to obtain a center to support abstinence and chastity on campus. Their efforts have been smacked down by the University adminstration, for a variety of extremely lame reasons.  But now, the Christian Union, housed at Princeton, reports that the University’s refusal to support the students who value sexual integrity is nothing short of hypocrisy.  They claim that they want to remain neutral and not impose or even propose values to students, so they couldn’t possibly support an abstinence center on campus, to go along with the Women’s Center and the LGBT Center. But now, the mask is off entirely: the University supported events that quite obviously promote non-abstinence, non-monogamy.  I can’t make this up. Read more…