Jane Jacobs Was an Urban Giant, Like King Kong

Ok, I just made that up.

Jane Jacobs, whose Death and Life of the Great American Cities is one of the most inspiring books I have ever read, died this week.

I was raised in the suburbs. For me, the city was a place for field trips and occasional cultural adventures. I never thought of it as a place people could actually live. Death and Life opened for me, as for the generation of new urbanists my age and older, the vision of cities as the most vibrant form of human existence. I have since lived in and enjoyed cities, as well as lamenting their defects (I did live in D.C. for three years, after all). And I am the first to say that small towns, like the one in which I am now blessed to live, is a great place to raise kids.

But cities really do drive civilization. I thank Jane Jacobs for convincing a generation of suburban kids like me that urbanity is vital for everyone.

College Drinking, Part 2: Same-Sex Intimacy

Yesterday's blog argued that college drinking lets people from families with intimacy-preventing rules to temporarily suspend those rules. With the "social lubricant," men and women are freer to get close to members of the opposite sex, without permanently undermining the rules. This brought some very interesting comments, especially from Ken Lammers, that another function of college drinking is to allow members of the same sex to bond with one another. I agree entirely with this point.

Peggy Sanday, in Fraternity Gang Rape, posits that fraternity members have a strong homosexual attraction for one another, which they ruthlessly suppress through shared lust for women. Thus, frat boys talk dirty, watch porn, brag about hook ups, and, in the extreme case she studied, gang rape women in the frat house. I think Sanday is wrong in her basic thesis. But she does point to a problem for fraternities and other men's groups.

Fraternity men do bond strongly with one another as brothers. Their brotherhood would be ruined by a hint of homosexual attraction (as literal brotherhood would). Fraternities need a way to temporarily suspend the strong rule against intimacy with other men without confusing that intimacy with sexual attraction. Drinking games and drunken revelry suit that need.

I still think my main point is right: people from the Level 3 Rule-Bound families most need a social lubricant to get close to others. Men, and to a lesser extent, women, from such families would find that alcohol would make other solidarity-building activities easier. Even for men from more flexible and intimate families, though, I suspect that the rules against intimacy with other men are pretty strong. This would explain why fraternities have such a strong drinking culture, even when women are not present. Sororities also drink quite a bit, but in my experience they do not do so when men are not going to be involved to nearly the same degree.

I thank Ginny Anderson and Ken Lammers, two fine examples of different eras of Centre students, for advancing this interesting discussion.

College Drinking: from Academic Pressure, or Family Functioning?

In my family life class we study the Beavers Scale of family functioning. In the middle of the Beavers Scale is the Level 3 family, which he describes as "rule bound." In such families, order is maintained by a set of rules, yet these same rules often prevent intimacy. I (not Robert Beavers) speculated that this kind of family is the most common kind, the kind that most Centre College students come from. This would explain to me why most, but by no means all, students drink so much alcohol: the "social lubricant" lets them suspend the rules and allow intimacy temporarily. In the morning, though, the rules, and their authority to create order, snap back into place.

Ginny Anderson, a fine student in that class, offered this further insight in her class journal:

You suggested in class today that your average “fraternity party-goer” comes from a Level Three family, using alcohol to suspend the inhibiting family rules and foster a sense of intimacy with others. Although this would never have occurred to me, I’m inclined to agree, because it fits so well into the pattern of alcohol use at this college.

In general, when Centre students drink, it isn’t a glass of wine at dinner, or a beer while the game is on. It is “split a pitcher” margaritas at dinner, rum and coke at the pre-party, and an extra helping in the solo cup as you head out the door. This isn’t about enjoying a refreshing beverage – it is absolutely about being at least moderately blitzed before you have to interact with people of the opposite gender. Groups like SMART (alcohol peer educators) and the Panhellenic Council [the sorority coordination board] sometimes postulate that this behavior is academic-related escapism – the “work hard, play harder” mentality. But I don’t think that really gets to the root of the problem. Alcohol (ab)use is fairly standard across the spectrum of colleges and universities (with notable exceptions, of course), even at schools where the workload is lighter than Centre students experience. The great equalizer in this case could be the number of the students that were born and raised in rule-bound families.

I feel like a lot of pieces of information start coming together when you consider college social scenes in this light. Alcohol use as a method of shedding inhibitions. The way that college women say it’s easier to sleep with a guy than have a genuine conversation with him. And a study that I read in intro psychology, which observed the “placebo effect” of alcohol. Women who thought they were drinking beer but were actually receiving a non-alcoholic substitute still act as if the rules are suspended (which is often manifested in provocative and forward behavior). All of these become “intimacy crutches” for people (especially women) who never learned how to find real intimacy. But with this behavior, all they ever get is the substitute, never the real thing.

Defending Opal Mehta

Kaavya Viswanathan, teen author of the best-selling How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, has been accused of plagiarism. She borrowed phrases and structure from other novels about young adult life, especially from Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts. Viswanathan, who is very apologetic and calls herself a big fan of McCafferty's work, said the plagiarism was inadvertent. Some commentators and legal scholars have been skeptical of this defense.

I believe her.

I live with teenagers, who borrow and sample phrases from so many sources that they have no idea where they came from. They will take a line – from conversation, from reading, from the radio, from a movie – and use it as their instant message screen name for a couple of weeks, and move on. In the mean time, everyone they communicate with reads the phrase, perhaps dozens of times, without knowing where it originally came from.

My daughters introduced me to the wonderfully silly novels of Louise Rennison featuring English teenager Georgia Nicholson. Georgia has a distinctive way of speaking, and I find myself using her constructions – "My heart leapt like a leaping thing on leaping pills" -- without thinking of sources or attribution. Therefore I fully sympathize with an actual teenage author who has fully absorbed phrases from teen fiction in her own writing without knowing it.

I bought Opal Mehta, and await the end of our busy school term to enjoy it.

Students Show More Sense Than Grownups In T-Shirt Case

Tyler Harper, a student at Poway High School in Poway, CA, wore a shirt to school which read "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned'' on the front and "Homosexuality Is Shameful'' on the back. Not surprisingly, this provoked a response from some other students. They discussed the issue, stated their disagreement, and left it at that. No violence, no disruption, no breakdowns. "While words were exchanged, the students managed the situation well and without intervention from the school authorities. No doubt, everyone learned an important civics lesson about dealing with others who hold sharply divergent views.''

That is the assessment of Judge Alex Kozinski. Yes, the grownups turned this t-shirt into a federal case. Literally. The school banned the shirt on the grounds that it might injure homosexual students and might interfere with learning. When the case got to the notorious Ninth Circuit of the federal appeals court, the court sided 2 – 1 with the school's ban. Judge Kozinski issued a sharp dissent, partly quoted above.

Judge Kozinski is right. Tyler Harper expressed his views civilly. The other students, according to the record, responded the same way. Free speech wins. The marketplace of ideas is served. Students actually learn something in school.

The attempt to enforce anyone's political correctness in schools backfires. It teaches students that school officials are hypocrites when they talk about critical thinking, and cowards when they don't support actual critical thought. When the common schools are captured by one ideological faction, it fuels the movement to create separate schools and undermines support for the very idea of common schools and a common culture.

The remedy for speech you don't like is more speech.

The Bank of Mom and Dad is the Right Way to Transfer Wealth

The New York Times has a popular story now about parents continuing to subsidize their twenty-something and even thirty-something children. They cite a University of Michigan study by Bob Schoeni that found that 25 and 26 year olds get from their parents an average annual gift of $2,300. This is often in the form of payment for particular things, like cell phone bills, or childcare, or insurance, rather than a general cash subsidy.

Some lament this trend as exacerbating young peoples' "failure to launch." I think it is a good thing. Economists have been wondering for years how the Baby Boom's massive accumulation of wealth will get transferred to the next generation – or taxed, or just spent. Investing in your children so that they can begin adult life seems to me an excellent, nuanced way for this transfer to begin. People are at their most thoughtful in investing in, and for, their own families. I would trust parents to calibrate their support correctly much more than I would count on the government or the market to do so.

I now sit in a house made possible with a down payment loan from my parents, to whom we are all daily grateful. I have already begun to calculate how we can save for the junior Gruntleds once their massive tuition payments end. I see down payments on my hypothetical grandchildren's childhood homes in the dim distance. And that is a good next thing to save for.

Church Organists, Tremble

Sociologist Mark Chaves, in Congregations in America, reports that the largest 10 percent of congregations contain about half of all churchgoers on an average Sunday.

Scott Thumma, the leading expert on megachurches, found that about 80% of them use electric guitar or bass and drums “always” in their services, and over 93% do so “often” or "always." Megachurch attenders are notably younger and have more kids than the mainline denominations do, so this preference is likely to multiply in coming generations.

Add to this that Roman Catholics, the nation's largest denomination, do not rely on organs.

The era of the church organ, which we think of as ancient, but is really less than two centuries old, may draw to a close in a generation or two.

The DTR Talk

Students have been describing a new phase in their ambiguous courtship ritual: the "define the relationship" talk. They dread it.

They hang out. The group does things together. Two people start "talking" (or are "at the talking stage"). Some kissing may happen about here. Or more. Possibly with alcohol involved. While still hanging out, and doing group things, and talking.

At some point, the couple starts to wonder if they are a couple. Often, he is enjoying the ambiguity, especially if the kissing and more is included. Usually, she will crack first. She will say, "we need to define the relationship." Then an earnest and often uncomfortable conversation follows, which, she hopes, will result in clarity.

How will she know for sure if they have moved up to boyfriend and girlfriend?

He lists her that way on Facebook.

Space Your Babies Close Enough to Mess Each Other's Roles

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that the ideal spacing for babies is at least 18 months, but fewer than five years. Too close together and your risks of low birth weight go up, at the rate of 1.9% per month. Too far apart, though, and you start to run the risk of birth defects or sheer difficulties in having children, though co-author Dr. Agustin Conde-Agudelo acknowledges that these reasons are more speculative.

This five-year gap reminded me of another aspect of family life: birth order effects. Frank Sulloway, in Born to Rebel, says that birth order effects are strongest for siblings who are fewer than five years apart. If there is more than a five-year gap between one sibling and the next it is as if you started over, and the next kid is more like another first born.

Putting these two things together, the Expert Advice of the moment would lead to this conclusion: Have your kids far enough apart that they can occupy distinct niches (unlike "Irish twins" born nine months apart). On the other hand, don't have them so far apart that they don't shape and influence one another.

I am happy to report that the Gruntled kids just about fall within the parameters: 17 months between the first two, then four years to the next. No birth weight of birth defect problems. And they definitely influence one another's roles, in the family and in the world.

Divorce is a Polarizing Institution

The family sociology class is working through Marquardt's Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, which I have written about before. This time I was struck by a point I had missed before.

Institutions are made up of sets of related roles. We make the institution real by enacting the roles.
Marriage is an institution in which men and women learn to be husbands and wives by doing it. The structural logic of marriage draws a couple closer, and works best if they act in a unified way. It is especially important for a married couple to present a united front to their children.

Divorce is also an institution. Ex-husband and ex-wife are roles, too, though they are less defined by law and custom than are their affirmative counterparts, husband and wife. The structural logic of divorce pushes a couple apart. The natural drift of people who no longer have to accommodate one another would produce a widening gap. More than that, though, the divorce will be easier for each of the exes to bear if the couple is demonstrably different from one another, too different to live together. The more different they get, the more the divorce seems justified, even inevitable.

Marquardt's point is that the more different the parents become, the harder it is for their kids to construct one coherent moral worldview.

Blogging

Today's post will be a more interactive than usual. I am being interviewed by Melinda Roeder from our local television station, Channel 36 in Lexington, about blogging, while I am writing this blog. One of my main points is that blogging is an interactive medium. So if you happen to be reading this while the story is running tonight at 11, please reply, thus completing the loop and/or introducing a wrinkle in the space-time continuum.

I have been blogging for the whole school year. I have come to welcome the daily discipline of collecting and organizing my thoughts. Francis Bacon wrote that "writing maketh a precise man," and I have found it to be ever so. I tell that to students when they fuss about the number of writing assignments in their Centre College classes. That is the glory of a small college, though – the professors can take the time to read (and improve) student papers, one by one.

There have been several stories about this blog on the college webpage and in our local newspaper, the Danville Advocate-Messenger. My Introduction to Family Life class produces a wonderful blog based on the studies we read together. My students have been reading other blogs and joining in their wider conversations. Melinda Roeder mentioned that she has a blog on MySpace.

Yet the spellchecker in Word still does not know "blogging" as a real word. I imagine in the next edition of Word, blogging will be included. According to Technorati, there are 35.6 million blogs in the world. By this time next year, there should easily be 100 million. Students take to it as a normal way to communicate. Some of them get in trouble for being too candid. They imagine, as young people do, that their friends will read what they write – forgetting that the other billion computer users can read it, too.

Blogging will shake out eventually. Many will try them, and stop. The discipline of writing regularly is a hard one, like sticking to a diet. But blogging will also become a standard way for people who want an interactive conversation about a very specialized topic to get instant information, and informed responses.

Recruiting Vandals is No Way to Teach

Sally Jacobsen, and English and Women's Studies professor at Northern Kentucky University, saw a pro-life display on campus. A student group had set it up with permission, the sort of thing that happens as part of the normal exchange of ideas at campuses everywhere. Professor Jacobsen disagreed with the display. She felt her personal beliefs were "horribly violated."

What would you expect a decent professor to do here? Go on a rampage, like Islamist cartoon rioters? Write a letter to the campus paper? Set up her own counter-display? Or perhaps, if the professor saw her job as, you know, teaching students, go talk to the students she disagreed with and have a civilized argument?

No, she thought up a possibility that would never have occurred to me: she recruited students to destroy the display.

University president Jim Votruba has, to his great credit, strongly and publicly criticized the professor and the students. They will not only face campus discipline, but the case has also been turned over to the police.

As you know, we at the Gruntled Center are not prone to advocating harsh remedies. But in this case, I think Sally Jacobsen deserves more that just being fined. She deserves more than being fired. In my opinion, she has shown that she does not understand what a professor is.

Sally Jacobsen should be banned from the profession.

Matzoh Brie

It is the custom of the Gruntled family to honor the Jewish part of our heritage (we are very much American Mixed-Breeds) with matzoh brie for Easter morning. It used to be hard to get matzoh in Danville, Kentucky. The growing cosmopolitanism of our world, though, means that not only does our local Kroger always stock matzoh this time of year, but in multiple varieties. I like the everything kind, but the more delicate palates of the junior Gruntleds leads me to get the plain kind.

So here is the one and only recipe to appear in The Gruntled Center:

Break some matzoh up into a bowl of warm water.

Beat some eggs.

Scramble them together in a frying pan over medium-high heat to the consistency you like.

Good with a bit of salt, I think.

Happy Easter.

Unkatunk

Students "hook up" at Centre College, as they do at most other colleges. The term is deliberately ambiguous, covering all sorts of ill-advised physical intimacy from kissing to intercourse, usually while drunk.

Not all students hook up, though. Recently one of those who does not was describing a conversation among a group of students, in which they started listing all the people each had hooked up with. It became a game to see if they were all linked indirectly in this way. All of them were – except my student (and bully for her, I say).

I passed this on to my brother-in-law. He says this issue arose one day in his Cornell University dormitory, Risley Hall, where they made a giant hook-up map which connected all of the dormitory's residents – save my brother-in-law and his roommate. And bully for them, too. He says this conversation led the Cornell students to create a special term to describe how two people who have hooked up with the same third party are related to one another. The word they came up with is "unkatunk," which, as far as he can recall, was just a nonsense sound that appealed to them. And sure enough, the word appears on UrbanDictionary.com, with this definition:

unkatunk

defines the relationship in which you and someone you know have slept with the same person. kind of a variant on the transitive property of sexual multiplication.

a < -- sex -- > b
b <-- sex -- > c
a < -- unkatunk --> c

orig. Risley Hall, Cornell University

My surveys at Centre revealed that hooking up does not go all the way to intercourse as often as other people think it does. I expect the same is true at Cornell. Nonetheless, if, say, Facebook were to connect all the various hook ups it notes, I would guess that three quarters of the entire national college-going class are within six degrees of unkatunk of one another.

Should You Get Serious About Marriage in College?

A thoughtful woman in my family class posed this question in her journal for me:

In my experience, many of my girlfriends do not want to pursue “anything too serious” during college, in their words, “I am young, I don’t know where I’m going to be next year and I want to keep my options open.” The mutual feelings among college males about their uncertain future, and natural inclination to short-term sexual relationships, creates this liminal space as well. … It seems a career track is problematic for women all around when it comes to marriage and family. Aside from providing extra resources, it works against marriage in general. Although it can be overcome, it seems like the pursuit of a career almost always works as an antagonist to family and the pro-marriage ideas. This is the most frustrating realization I have come to in this course. Have I misconstrued it?

I don't think careers are antagonistic to marriage and family. Indeed, smart women need brain food and challenges, as smart men do. Family is great, but it is not all you will do in a long life. However, delaying marriage in favor of your career throughout your twenties does run a risk of making family impossible.

I would counsel an opposite strategy – you don't want to get too serious about careers now, because who knows what spouses and children the future will bring. Family first, then career, is the more likely strategy to let you "have it all."

New Hope for Second Marriages

My students come to the family class knowing one big scary fact about marriage: 50% of marriages in this country end in divorce. I am therefore always happy to help unpack that idea. The most encouraging fact I can give them in response is that most first marriages endure. Indeed, since they have managed, with only a couple of exceptions, to get beyond their teenage years without kids or marriage, and are likely to graduate from a good college and be employed, the odds for their marriages working out are quite good, indeed.

So how can we have a 50% divorce rate if most first marriages last? Because most second marriages don't, and the odds go down with each new iteration as you approach the Elizabeth Taylor/Jennifer Lopez asymptote. The divorce rate for first marriages is under 50%. The divorce rate for second marriages, though, is over half, closer to 60%.

Recently, though, I have read some good news about second marriages, too. Barry and Emily McCarthy, in Getting It Right This Time, report that second marriages which make it through the first two years successfully have the same divorce rate as first marriages. That is, most second marriages which make it past the first two years will endure.

At the Gruntled Center, we are strongly in favor of first marriages enduring and thriving. But we also believe that it is never too late for a happy ending. For those who are already divorced or in a second marriage, it is cause for celebration that you can get it right the second time. The McCarthys go into detail about how to have a healthy second marriage, and we are definitely all for healthy marriages. A healthy second prevents a sad third, a disastrous fourth, and the death spiral beyond that.

The divorce rate for first marriages is going down, for good reasons and bad. It is now a little below 50%. We may hope that if the opinion leaders of America come back to supporting marriage, we might get that rate below 40% in a decade or so. That would mean fewer people in the position to consider second marriages. But it would also be good to bring down the divorce rate of second marriages. It would be realistic, I think, to aim to get the second marriage divorce rate below 50% in this same coming decade.

How to Have a Traditional First Date

Last night I had a discussion with a number of students about dating. The common complaint of college students, at Centre College and elsewhere, is that it is impossible to date, that there is no structure to courtship. As Elizabeth Marquardt and Norval Glenn demonstrated, between "talking" and "joined at the hip" there are no intermediate steps. So we set out to do something about it. We came up with a rough protocol for a first date.

The first thing that all agreed on is that he has to take the initiative. This puts men in the position of being shot down (again and again). But the basic fact is that ultimately she does the deciding, so the first step in the dance of courtship has to come from him.

Here was the list we came up with from there. He should:

Make it clear that is it a date when he asks.
Ask nicely and confidently.
Give her sufficient time to prepare.
Have a plan.
Show up on time.
Plan something short and fun, which could be extended if things go well.
Offer the chivalrous courtesies – opening doors, waiting for her, etc.
Plan to pay. (This was a little contentious, but the consensus was that he should pay on the first date, even if she offers to share, because he picked the place and the plan.)
At the end of the evening, politely thank one another in words, and no more.

Two things struck me as important about this plan.

First, they were all supportive of the idea of having a standard protocol for a date, to cut through the debilitating ambiguity of the college "hook up/quasi-married" dating life.

Second, almost all of the ideas about what to do and not do on a date where about him. Even when I asked, "what is the woman's role in a date?" nearly all the answers concerned how she should respond to his initiative. The students thought she should be attentive and attractive, and go with the flow.

I think there is a further unsaid action that both of them are doing on a date, but much more so in her head: assessing the other as a potential mate. In this conversation, and in many other studies, men and women turned out to be different in how long a list they had of what they wanted and didn't want in a potential mate, and how early and automatically they applied it. Women are not passive on a date: they are constantly assessing. Indeed, most of the women will go directly from the date to a post-mortem assessment with their girlfriends. The men, on the other hand, are less likely to go in their minds all the way from first date to first child, much less rehash it with the guys later.

I think there is a crying need for some structures to courtship in college life. My hope is that discussions like this one can help start that revolution, which comes from the bottom up, from the students themselves. It is too late for in loco parentis at campuses like mine. But it is not too late for grownups to help young people pick their mates with more structure and deliberation.

I would very much welcome your comments and suggestions.

At-Home Mother vs. Housewife

Caitlin Flanagan, in her new book To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife, makes a useful distinction. She is not a housewife, but an at-home mother. The difference is that a "housewife," defined herself "primarily through her relationship to her house and her husband," while "an at-home mother feels little obligation to the house itself." This distinction is especially valuable for women who are wives and mothers, like their own mothers, but unlike their own mothers, have full-time careers even when their children are small.

I am grateful that, among the many forms of compatibility that my wife and I share, we have about an equal tolerance for clutter. We have had to adjust to one another's quirks in that regard – the symbol of which is that one side of our bed gets made each morning, but not the other. And we have hugely increased our mess threshold with each child. We have hopes that that will get better when everyone is grown.

As I think about this distinction, neither of us was an at-home spouse for very long, but both of us have seen our primary family obligations to be to the people – spouse and kids – and not to the house. We are blessed with a goodly place, but only essential work will get done on it until the last tuition is paid.

At-home mother is a workable status. A clean house is gravy.

Second Generation Polygamy Raises Girls to be Child Brides

The ongoing trial of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect that has been practicing polygamy for decades, shows what happens after polygamy gets established. The patriarchs of these extended clans raise girls for the purpose of giving them as teenage brides to other polygamist patriarchs. The girls are told it is their religious obligation to marry whoever their father picks, and be a dutiful wife and mother to him. Period.

Proponents of polygamy, like the ACLU, are imagining adults who are free to choose whatever domestic arrangement they like. First generation polygamy might even work that way. But after that, girls become a trading asset, passed from one polygamous clan to another. Even the young woman who testified in the trial, who was told by her father when she was 16 that he was marrying her off to "some Barlow boy" (he couldn't remember the name) the next day, was reluctant to testify. When asked to explain why to the mystified jurors, she said, "We were taught that we would go to hell" for speaking out. "After I got away from that religion, I still felt like I would be damned if I 'spoke out' because that's just how I was raised."

If ever there should be a feminist issue, fighting polygamy should be at the top of the list.

The "Wicked" Gospel of Judas

I went to see the musical "Wicked" last week with my daughters and one of their friends. It tells the backstory of the Oz witches, the good one and the wicked ones. I will not be spoiling the story to say that the title character turns out not to be so wicked, but misunderstood. She is the only one who understands the true nature of the magic of Oz and its wizard.

There has been a bit of a flap recently about the "Gospel of Judas," an ancient Gnostic text recently translated and made available to the public. It tells the backstory of Jesus' apostles, the good ones and the wicked one. I will not be spoiling the story to say that the title character turns out not to be so wicked, but misunderstood. He is the only one who understands the true nature of the gospel of Jesus and His God.

Both seem to me to be interesting explorations of possible alternative pasts. Neither is likely to shake my understanding of the nature of reality. Nor is either text likely to convince me of the intellectual's favorite fantasy – that the universe has a secret at its heart that only special people can know and understand.

And "Wicked" has better songs.