Posted on 12/22/2014 8:22:56 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
There could be an unlikely contributor to the decline of marriage in this country. And it's free pornography on the Internet.
A team of researchers, who published their findings in The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany, determined that the rise of free Internet pornography is not only correlated with a pronounced decline in percentage of young adult males who are married, but might actually be contributing to the trend.
"The results in this paper suggest that such an association exists, and that it is potentially quite large," the study notes.
The researchers used data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a comprehensive, nationally representative survey, to analyze how 18-to-35 year-old men used the Internet between 2000 and 2004. They focused on how many hours each participant spent on the Internet per week, and how many reported having used the Internet to view pornography in the past 30 days, but also observed other activities, including the use of religious websites.
"We asked ourselves, what is helping determine whether people are married or not?" said Dr. Michael Malcolm, a professor at the University of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and one of the study's authors. "One of those things, we thought, could be the use of pornography."
~snip~
The reason, Malcolm explains, is likely tied to the relationship between marriage and sexual gratification. If pornography is viewed as a means of alternative sexual gratification, then it could be undercutting the need for marriages to serve this function, at the very least during a younger age. Think of it as a milder form of premarital sex.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
“People aren’t getting married these days because of financial reason”
I certainly see no reason to inform the government of a marriage in a two-income marriage so the family gets cranked up into a higher tax bracket (as a group) or the lower-paid spouse has to pay a higher tax rate than she would if married.
Lot more to it than porn.
I think feminism has played a huge role in it (i.e. who needs a man anyway). The movement has sought to emasculate and virtually eliminate men. If men think we don’t need them, then why would they want to marry?
Some men have fallen into the trap and now want a woman who doesn’t necessarily hold to traditional roles and values. I know a couple of men like that. One never married and has two kids. The other is divorced with 4 kids. They are both players and don’t see any value to women other than for sex and hold no interest in marriage.
Stinks for women like me who value marriage, want a man who is a man (not a girly man, he doesn’t have to share his feelings), and embraces the differences between men and women.
Also, it used to be that eventually a guy ran out of buddies who weren’t married, so you couldn’t just go out with the boys anymore, so there was no choice but to get married or be considered a laughingstock.
Again the stigma of not being married isn’t what it used to be.
I wasn't ready to settle down, and I wasn't financially ready for the commitment of a family.
That said, if my wife dies before I do, I will never get married again for some of the reasons that have been cited.
43 here, and I don’t see my marital status changing.
I do not envy my married friends after seeing what they go through. It’s not for me.
The real problem is why porn is so popular.
It is because of the segregation of boys and girls until they are 18, then expecting them to have normal relations, date, and happily marry. It’s not going to happen.
Most people think that children cross-gender socialize “either in school or in church”. But this doesn’t happen, because in either case, adults keep the children so busy they cannot socialize.
What is desperately needed as a social imperative, is to create *chaperoned* settings for boys and girls to have extensive interaction, not permitted to self gender segregate, which they are inclined to do. And not so burdened with complex tasks that they are too busy to socialize.
This must begin at Kindergarten level, especially when boys and girls realize what gender is. And it cannot be continually randomized, so that they cannot have socialization in depth. Instead, a given boy should have a group of the same half dozen girls that he interacts with over years, and likewise with girls, that they socialize with the same half dozen boys.
Another important element that socialists reject is that boys and girls must have clear and established gender roles. These are not simple to develop, and can be quite complex, but are more appropriate for one gender or the other.
But if society can do this, boys and girls would grow up with enough understanding of the other gender that they would not have any great interest in pornography, sexual perversion, or other aberrant sexual behavior.
Married a long time, here, as well. With only daughters.
My eldest daughter, who is a doctor, married a very nice young man who is a doctor in the military. They have failed to notify either Israel or the USA of their marriage, and probably will not, as it would result in a huge tax hit because he does not make the money she does.
Did someone say “major causal factor” or did someone say “part of the problem”.
sorry I guess my life was just boring to you folks....
I guess if you did it naked, someone would pay attention. And if you were naked on a Harley...that would be better!
[I am, of course, kidding.]
I agree with everything you are writing. I grew up going to live “on the farm” during the summer. Nothing like a city boy learning where the food comes from—and how hard it is to grown it.
That is fine, and I respect your position.
There have always been “confirmed” bachelors (and not homos.) Some people are just not wired for it. That’s cool.
But there are a lot of people dropping babies all over the place and then leaving them with moms (or Dads) who are not equipped to deal with them.
My marriage aged sons say it is because young women who actually “want” to be in a traditional marriage are few and far between. Most want to be able to go out everyday, facebook constantly, shop without having money, sexually loose, and trash men.
The basic bargain of marriage in traditional cultures has been: men provide financial security and women provide sexual release for men.
The biggest reasons for decline in marriage? Financial independence of women and ease of sexual access for men without marriage (whether it be porn or non-marital sex). Like it or not, women in past generations needed a committed man to support them and men needed to commit to a marriage to get some.
1). Marriage is hard and takes work to be successful. No one is willing to work hard.
2). Marriage has risks ( financial, social, emotional)
3). Marriage fail. We have all seen the impact of failed marriage and its brutal to everyone involved especially kids and men. It’s hard on women also but they are the least hurt in the process. Female and male children of divorce both see nothing but the pain
4). Marriage is now more legal than moral. Legal ramifications dwarf the moral ones.
5). No one is championing marriage.
I’d put our legal system at the top of the list regarding the destruction of marriage. Women can basically whore-themselves-out for a short number of years, and then have a steady income flow, maybe for life. Men, of course, know this, and are responding as expected.
But many want the baby without the man... or they want the baby and the man's money, but not he man...
Anyway, the biological imperative to reproduce hasn't been entirely lost.
While I agree with everything else in your post and with the top 1/4 inch of the above quote, that's not the whole story. Porn has never before in the history of the U.S. been so widely, deeply and ubiquitously available — nor available to the point of unavoidability even to small children. People had to be of age, and had to go to certain stores and bear the shame of being in those stores in order to get porn up until the rise of Playboy and Hustler and the lawsuits over porn in the late 1960s, when many of us FReepers were already young adults and our values formed.
Now, ads on tv and in print, song lyrics, movies and the internet are awash in the types of imagery that would certainly have been labeled obscene prior to 1970. Every younger girls are wearing obscenely revealing clothing and aspiring to get boob jobs at younger and younger ages. Mothers have actually been petitioning stores over the sexualization of girl and toddler clothing, particularly Halloween costumes. When I went to my niece's dance recital ten years ago, the three-year-old beginners were dressed in sparkly black bathings suits like hootchie mamas, with very bare legs, lurid make-up and feathers on their heads, and did a boom-boom dance, to hoots of appreciation from their relatives in the audience -- in this day of child abuse, I was completely appallled.
There has been a net increase in the open and available imagery of porn, no matter how long the history of its existence.
If you want to see a woman become unhinged, describe a third-person female as a ‘cool chick’ who is easygoing, has a sense of humor, is not possessive/paranoid, and might be girlfriend/wife material.
Despite these innocuous and sincere compliments directed at female B, female A’s jealousy gene will hit 5,000 deg Fahrenheit instantly and that same gene has been simmering and frequently boiling over since the contrived launch of so-called feminism.
“Marriage is legally very risky for a successful male.”
Without question it is. I don’t know a successful man that doesn’t think about that when dating. I did. Everyone that I knew did.
I met way too many baby factory little girls that didn’t want to work, didn’t want an education, but wanted to use children as the excuse to stay home. Childrearing and home-making are lost arts these days and the most valuable of all professions, but, these little girls didn’t want that, they just wanted an excuse to stay home and not work; as though being a homemaker and a mother isn’t the most demanding of work. They never were taught that lesson by their mothers.
“Personally, I’d love to be married, but fear of pain, along with my aversion to divorce, lawyers and the high price of “I do” then followed by “I don’t”, have kept me single, maybe even past my “Best before _____” date.”
Consider what a lot of conservatives do and marry into a culture that views divorce as a failure, rather than a money spigot. My wife (from halfway around the world) has lots of siblings, and none of them have ever been divorced...and none of them want to be the first one, and there may well not be a first one.
But your basic point is valid...no way would I advise my boys to marry an “American” girl, simply way too risky, and, most likely, the first time he leaves the toilet seat up, the wife’s sisters and friends would be screaming at her to divorce him...you don’t want to be part of THAT culture.
Add that it’s an institution increasingly undermined by homosexuals and their ilk.
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