What can you say about a simple romantic story that spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, became the first modern blockbuster movie and saved Paramount films from collapse?

For myself, not much, because somehow I missed it. But London Independent columnist Liz Hoggard has this to say about the 1970 hit, Love Story, whose author, Erich Segal, died January 17.

I loved every minute of Love Story – from Ali MacGraw's severe parting and mini-kilts to the do-it-yourself-wedding. We swooned over Ryan O'Neal intoning, "What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me." But you know that movie sold women of my generation a pup. Romance is not like that.

The papers may be full of tributes to Erich Segal who wrote the screenplay for the 1970 film. Apparently he was a classical scholar and poet. But I'd argue he was a far more dangerous chick flick writer than the whole Mills and Boon oeuvre put together. Like most seven-year-old girls I grew up believing men liked feisty, working-class girls with dark hair and killer glasses. Even when they're difficult and hate sport and win all the verbal duels. And die. Oh boy did I have a lot to learn. As for the immortal quote from the book: "Love means never having to say you're sorry" – every star-crossed lover soon finds out, it means saying sorry every day.

Agreed. And I guess that Mr Segal’s career as a classics professor did more for the class of 1970 than his movie scripts.

Children, the most vulnerable members of Haiti’s population, are suffering terribly as a result of the disastrous earthquake, many losing parents, homes and health. As if that was not bad enough, they are now more likely than ever to be captured by traffickers who buy and sell children for sex and cheap labour, says an expert on the subject.

From her base in India, which has seen the same thing happen after natural disasters, Nicolette Grams of the International Justice Mission predicts that trafficking gangs will be moving in to seize their prey. She says human trafficking is a problem in Haiti at the best of times, affecting a quarter-million Haitian children each year.

These slaves, known as restavecs, are typically sold or given away to new families by their own impoverished parents. Physical and sexual abuse is common for restavecs. Many owners use the girls as in-house prostitutes, sending them to live on the street if they become pregnant.

Not all of these trafficked children end up as domestic slaves within Haiti—plenty of others are promised work in the Dominican Republic but are instead sold to work in agricultural fields or brothels across the border. Poor children who escape a life in bondage most often end up in street gangs; if they are fortunate, they may be accepted into overcrowded orphanages.

Given the life and death needs facing the authorities and aid workers, watching out for traffickers is most unlikely to be on their list of priorities. Some voices have been raised against whisking children overseas with a view to adoption, but at least those children are being cared for well and can always be reunited with relations if that seems best for them.

Better adoption than enslavement.

Meanwhile, an international organisation whose solution to the social problems of Haiti is to prevent children being born, also continues to ply its trade there. International Planned Parenthood is appealing for funds for “basic first aid, as well as obstetric care and family planning” in Haiti, where its two largest clinics have been destroyed.

Before the earthquake each of these clinics was dishing out condoms, chemical contraceptives and abortions to 200 Haitians a day through the local IPPF affiliate, Profamilia (sic), and has been doing that sort of thing since 1984. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Haiti has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, and the highest in the Western hemisphere.

One hoped these people would keep quiet about birth control, for once, as they deal with women who have lost children or other family members. Basic first aid and obstetric care could easily consume all the funds they raise.

One organisation that you can be sure is focused on helping mothers is MaterCare International, which is also appealing for funds for its emergency effort in Haiti.

 

Just when experts thought that children could not swallow another mouthful of media time, the kids went on to devour almost another meal of it, a new Kaiser Family Foundation study reveals.

Kaiser’s 2005 study showed that young Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spent a bit less than six and a half hours a day using electronic devices such as a smart phone, computer or television. By 2009 that figure had grown to more than seven and a half, or more than 52 hours a week -- and that’s without counting the hour and a half they spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones. And without Twitter…

“This is a stunner,” said Donald F. Roberts, a Stanford communications professor emeritus who is one of the authors of the study. “In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we’ve hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren’t enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it’s up an hour.”

In fact it’s worse than that. By multi-tasking (talking on the phone while watching a video, surfing the internet while listening to music…) kids are packing nearly 11 hours of media content into seven and a half hours. The trend is encouraged by parents who allow television sets and computers with internet connections in bedrooms, and who don’t have rules like: no television during meals and no cellphone/iPod use in bed at night. Rules do make a difference.

The big winners in this trend are obviously the mobile phone companies and the commercial world they bring to the fingertips (forget about “research”). But what is the effect on kids of spending almost every waking minute, apart from time in school, connected?

The heaviest users -- those consuming at least 16 hours a day -- were more likely to have poor grades and to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along with their parents and were not happy in school. Of course, it is possible that these problems are driving the excessive media use, rather than the other way around.

But even what is now normal use, according to this research, must interfere seriously with family life, real friendship, study and reflection -- amongst other things. And it can only entrench habits of consumerism and the desire for instant gratification.

In another article on this theme one expert suggests that the “I want it now” effect will be greatest for the youngest children now starting out with their touch screens and robot pets:

“They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,” he said. “They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not.”

A British study announces that texting actually helps children to spell. Well, great. But when do they get time to write a letter, let alone an essay, or read a book? Call me an old fogey, but a person who cannot do those things seems to me not quite civilised.

 

Polygamy has been in the news again, this time in Malaysia where Muslim authorities relaxed the law on this practice in the mid-1990s.

However, a large-scale study under way across the country indicates that, contrary to the claims of Islamic authorities there, polygamy harms everyone involved -- including the men, some of whom admit that it is “stressful”.

Many conservative Malay-Muslim politicians ironically claim they have women’s needs at heart, saying: “In the modern context, there are more and more educated, professional women who remain unmarried so we should encourage polygamy”.

When things are done properly, they say, polygamy can create harmonious family life.

But Malaysian women’s rights organisation, Sisters in Islam, says that results coming in from their research project -- launched in late 2007 -- show that stress, quarrels and neglect are the norm in polygamous families. Preliminary findings show effects on :

Children

* Children of first wives are very likely to be neglected by their father, especially if he has more than two wives or more than 10 children. Some say their father can hardly recognise them when they approach him.

* Children tend to resent their mother for not being able to prevent this neglect, and for becoming depressed and neglecting the children herself. Again, the effect is strongest for the children of first wives, because they have known something better. The children also lack confidence in their own ability to form a stable and happy family.

Women

* Although Islamic laws make the husband responsible for maintenance of all his dependents, women in polygamous marriages contribute even more financially than is the norm in society. In fact, it seems that many low-to-middle-income men take another wife precisely for her economic contribution. A polygamous wife does not qualify for welfare support available for divorced or widowed women.

* Sexual and emotional support is often lacking. The practice of giliran, or turn-taking, is unworkable and wives become competitive, many turning to black magic to try and keep their man.

Even some men admit the whole thing is difficult:

Some polygamous men even seem to be trapped in the fable of masculine prowess. Taxi drivers with wives in two different states, or those who lose time travelling between families, say they are sometimes simply too tired to give time to their other family. When asked “Would you recommend polygamy to your children, your son?” a number of the better educated, professional middle class men said, “Seriously, I have to admit I wouldn’t. It’s quite stressful.”

But it’s the children who may decide the issue:

The findings about the impact on children may offer an important opening for advocacy and change that can ultimately benefit women. Historically, changes to patriarchal interpretations of Muslim laws have often come in an effort to protect children’s rights. For instance, many Muslim countries now follow the principle of the best interests of the child when deciding custody, rather than rigidly applying traditionalist interpretations which deny mothers custody.

If Malaysian Muslims want a future, they had better start working on this.

A British feminist is sounding the alarm about the effects on teenagers of easy access to pornography, saying that a skewed view of sex is becoming the norm in society and the idea of intimacy is dying.

Natasha Walter tackles this subject in a book, Living Dolls, due to be published early February, which looks at the resurgence of sexism in contemporary culture. In an excerpt published in the London Times last weekend she laments the fact that, thanks to the internet, porn has become something that any child can see with the click of a mouse.

It is the prevalence of pornography consumption among children that is most striking. In a study in 2000, 25% of children aged 10-17 had seen unwanted online pornography in the form of pop-ups or spam. By 2005 the figure was 34% — and 42% of children aged 10-17 had seen pornography, whether wanted or unwanted. In another study in Canada, 90% of boys aged 13 and 14 and 70% of girls the same age had viewed pornography. Most of this porn use had been over the internet. More than one-third of the boys reported viewing pornographic DVDs or videos “too many times to count”.

But Walter’s concerns about this are limited to the “voyeuristic” view of sex that children are growing up with:

For an increasing number of young people, pornography is no longer something that goes alongside sex but something that precedes sex. Before they have touched another person sexually or entered into any kind of sexual relationship, many children have seen hundreds of adult strangers having sex.

And this, because it is bad news for women:

The massive colonisation of teenagers’ erotic life by commercial pornographic materials is something that it is hard to feel sanguine about. By expanding so much in a world that is still so unequal, pornography has often reinforced and reflected the inequalities around us.

This means that men are still encouraged, through most pornographic materials, to see women as objects, and women are still encouraged much of the time to concentrate on their sexual allure rather than their imagination or pleasure. No wonder we have seen the rise of the idea that erotic experience will necessarily involve, for women, a performance in which they will be judged visually.

The fact that children are being introduced to “erotic relationships” of any sort -- apart from timely instruction by their parents -- does not enter into Walter’s calculation of harm. And although she looks at the effects on adult relationships, including marriage, she makes no reference to the fundamental problem of cutting sex loose from marriage and how this has fostered uncommitted, self-interested and exploitive sex.

And so, although she distances herself from feminists who regard pornography as normal and argue “that the way forward really rests on creating more opportunities for women in pornography”, Walter only rejects porn that produces or increases “inequalities” between men and women. This is what is “dehumanising” for her, not the pursuit of eroticism for its own sake.

Walter says we must have a public debate on this issue. My contribution is this: If it's true intimacy and lasting relationships we want, forget feminism and go to the source of the problems in male-female relationships -- the divorce of marriage from children, and the consequent divorce of sex from marriage.

We hear a lot these days about giving children social skills, cultivating critical thinking, resilience, emotional intelligence and the like, but it all boils down to character -- a concept neglected for much of the 20th century.

So Family Edge reader Blanca Reilly was excited to stumble upon a great academic article on this subject recently in the US journal Reclaiming Children and Youth (interesting title). In “Building Strengths of Character” Nansook Park, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, reviews the literature in this field and describes a project he is involved in called Values In Action (VIA).

This project has a positive focus, identifying 24 widely-valued character strengths and organising them under six broad virtues. It uses a self-report survey which is available online (www.viastrengths.org or www.authentichappiness.org)

Once individuals register on the website and complete the strengths survey, feedback is given about one's top strengths--called "signature strengths." Helping youth to identify their signature strengths and use them in their everyday lives may provide a route to a psychologically fulfilling life (Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005).

Overall, says Park, youth in America show most of the components of good character:

Despite widespread negative perceptions of youth, the majority of young people have developed character strengths. Among them, gratitude, humor, and love are most common, whereas prudence, forgiveness, spirituality, and self-regulation are least common, much as is found among adults.

In general, the strengths of character consistently related to life satisfaction are gratitude, hope, zest, curiosity, and perhaps most importantly, love, defined as the ability to sustain reciprocated close relationships with other people (Park & Peterson, 2006; Park, Peterson, & Seligman, 2004). Thus, for a good life, individuals need to cultivate in particular these five strengths.

Park says that although character education programmes are proliferating, there is little assessment of the young people who participate in them. Strengths of the heart need attention as well as strengths of the head, he points out. And programme should be specific:

Saying "do your best or be the best you can be" is not an effective way to cultivate good character. Children and youth need to be instructed to choose a target strength that they want to focus on, set the specific and measurable goal, and devise a concrete action plan to achieve the goal. For example, if kindness is the target strength, saying hello to at least one new person each day at school is an effective goal and action plan. Continuous monitoring and journaling of progress and making a life style change are critical.

And although character education needs to deal with weaknesses as well as strengths, a strength-based approach is recommended.

*“Building strengths of character...”, by Nansook Park, Reclaiming Children and Youth 18.2 (2009): 42+

MercatorNet has published articles on this theme by Thomas Lickona and Andrew Mullins, among others.

 

 

Top of the New York Times Book Review list this week is Elizabeth Gilbert’s sort-of romantic travelogue, Committed. It's the kind of book the Times seems to love.

You don’t know Elizabeth Gilbert from Eve? She’s the New York journalist who hit the big time in 2006 with her Eat, Pray, Love -- described in one review as “a travelogue of spiritual seeking”. In plainer words is an account of how she got rid of one husband and found a new lover, along the way learning a bit of meditation technique in India and gourmandising in Italy.

In Committed she recounts how, with the help of more travelling and “research”, she overcomes her aversion to marriage because there is no other way for “Felipe”, the Brazilian-Australian lover, to live permanently in the US.

Felipe has also been through a divorce, he has adult children [she has none, deliberately] and he’s as determined as Gilbert not to ruin the good thing they have by marrying.

Researching marriage helps:

Gilbert is equally likely to quote Plato or her friend Ann, and equally keen to discuss how attitudes toward marriage changed from the Old to the New Testament, how important — according to evolutionary biologists — the vasopressin receptor gene is in determining male fidelity, and how her own parents have managed to stay together for more than 40 years.

(Vasopressin -- remember that, girls.) In the end, it’s happily ever after, supposedly:

Gilbert generously permits us to be virtual guests at her wedding, and for all her before-the-fact reluctance (she compares planning a wedding to waiting for a colonoscopy), the scene is as sweet and satisfying as the end of any movie where Hugh Grant plays the groom.

Well, isn’t that edifying? Just like two more titles on this week’s list: Siamese (“In this barren Norwegian novel, an ex-director of an old-age home fulminates and decays, and brutalizes his wife.”) and Unfinished Desires (“This powerful novel chronicles a hauntingly ‘toxic’ year at a Catholic girls' school.”)

An observant reader of the Times tells me that the failed marriages and toxic Catholic girlhoods mix “seems to be the pattern most weeks, actually”. How odd. Has the Times got it in for marriage and innocence?

In an essay headed “Female power” The Economist has celebrated “one of the most remarkable revolutions of the past 50 years” -- that is, “millions of people who were once dependent on men have taken control of their own economic fates”. In other words, women have gone out to work and stayed there.

More than that, they are taking over the workplace: within the next few months they will cross the 50 per cent threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. The Economist is chuffed that this has been a “quiet revolution” producing “very little friction” -- despite the fact that an increasing number of women are “taking a sledgehammer to the remaining glass ceilings.”

It’s the rich world the magazine is talking about, of course, and even there progress has not been uniform -- Japan and Italy are lagging well behind in female employment, and women earn substantially less than men on average and are severely under-represented at the top of organisations. Still, the glass “is much nearer to being half full than half empty.”

How has this been achieved? Feminist politics are only part of the answer, the essay suggests. In the rich world there has been a growing demand for women’s labour as the service sector has grown and manufacturing declined. The vacuum cleaner has played its part. Higher education has expanded and women have pursued business and management degrees rather than education.

But the most important innovation has been the contraceptive pill. The spread of the pill has not only allowed women to get married later. It has also increased their incentives to invest time and effort in acquiring skills, particularly slow-burning skills that are hard to learn and take many years to pay off. The knowledge that they would not have to drop out of, say, law school to have a baby made law school more attractive.

A recent Rockefeller Foundation/Time survey found that three-quarters of Americans were happy with this change.

But few are cheering. This is partly because young women take their opportunities for granted. It is partly because for many women work represents economic necessity rather than liberation. The rich world’s growing army of single mothers have little choice but to work. A growing proportion of married women have also discovered that the only way they can preserve their households’ living standards is to join their husbands in the labour market. In America families with stay-at-home wives have the same inflation-adjusted income as similar families did in the early 1970s. But the biggest reason is that the revolution has brought plenty of problems in its wake.

The Economist sums up those problems as “Production versus reproduction”. Many women can’t climb the career ladder far, let alone reach the top, because they have to choose between motherhood and careers. And -- bad news for ageing rich societies -- not all of them are choosing motherhood; in Switzerland 40 per cent of them are childless. Of those who do choose motherhood, a significant number don’t manage to return to the workforce and others have to settle for part-time work. Together with those who withdraw voluntarily these latter groups represent “a loss to collective investment in talent”.

And the problems don’t end there. Those who do work worry constantly that spend too little time with their children as they “juggle” the twin demands of work and child-rearing. Childcare is expensive and childminders untrained. Schools finish too early and the holidays are too long…

The solution lies, according to The Economist, in a combination of public and private sector initiatives that will allow women time to have babies and for child-rearing, and also substitute for them while they are working -- things like paid maternity leave, parenting allowances in the early years, flexible working, child-care centres, pre-schools.

One possibility that the magazine prefers not to consider is a stabilisation or reversal of the feminisation of the workforce. It says the trend is “almost certain to continue”. In the current crisis the flip side of this is men losing their (heavy lifting) jobs and higher male unemployment -- especially in the middle to lower ranks of society. Unhappy and unmarriageable men don’t sound like a good omen for the future. Nor does a female talent pool largely dependent on the pill (not forgetting the supporting role of abortion) for new blood, however great male economists and Economist editors think this manipulation of women’s bodies is.

There are a lot of issues to address here, but the most basic is the need to put the family at the centre of society -- not just women or men, let alone the economy or the workforce -- and work out what is best for the whole family unit. Without that, the rest is going to crumble anyway.

The life of man (and woman) in the state of nature, according to English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is, among other things, “nasty, brutish and short” -- and that pretty well sums up the way women dress in Australia’s Northern Territory, if the opinion of a visiting American Marine Captain is anything to go by.

After a night out in Darwin, the suggestively-named capital, Capt John Campbell wrote to The Northern Territory News complaining that the city’s women wore too little to attract “nice men”. “It’s about having standards, ladies,” he wrote.

"What are standards? Well, it can begin by dressing in a manner that leaves something to the imagination, to say the least."

Plus:

"Ladies have been conned into thinking that just because you have it means you should flaunt it."

And:

"Come on ladies, don't send us mixed messages. That's what you do every time you dress with less than nothing on."

“He’s got some guts to say that,” said a nightclub dancer consulted by the NT News -- and she wasn’t paying the captain a compliment. Nor were many of the 206 comments posted on News.com.au However a quick scroll through indicated that the yeas had it over the nays.

Said Anna:

Absolutely! Behind him 100%. Why show skin then shut down guys who approach you- you're clearly sending mixed messages, and let's be honest. You look better with clothes on anyway. But then really...it's hardly appropriate for a Yank to tell us Aussie girls need to put on clothes...have you not seen US girls lately?

Good work, captain, though perhaps your fashion commentary could only be delivered publicly by someone leaving town straight after. In the evolutionary struggle, it is not the aesthetically fittest who survive.

Thanks to Denise Pintado for this tip.

Africans have some excuse for polygamy -- after all, it is traditional. But how do certain Bostonians justify what they are calling “polyamory” and what is just a polished-up version of free love?

The Boston Globe kicked off the New Year with a feature on a group of 500 or so people who identify themselves as polyamorous. Meaning? A spokesman says:

“There’s monogamy where two people are exclusive. There’s cheating in which people are lying about being exclusive. And poly is everything else.”

Or again, says the Globe:

Though common descriptors used for monogamy don’t easily apply to polyamory, there is a recognizable spectrum of how open these partnerships may be. On the closed end, you might have a couple in a primary relationship who will then have one or more secondary relationships that are structured to accommodate the primary one. There’s also polyfidelity, in which three or more people are exclusive with one another. On the open end, there might be chains of people where, for example, Sue is dating Bill and Bill is dating Karen and Karen is dating Jack, who is also dating Sue.

The Globe dignifies this particular form of self-seeking with some nice words:

"Polyamory has a decidedly feminist, free-spirited flavor, and these are real relationships with the full array of benefits and complexities -- plus a few more -- as the members of Poly Boston’s hypercommunicative, often erudite, and well-entwined community will explain"

Oh, and they have a work ethic -- it is hard work maintaining two or more relationships, they say.

I would not have bothered reading the whole story about Jay and Mare and Allan and Michelle and all the others, including experts on the subject, except for a picture of a couple (married) with two children that was displayed at the beginning of the article. I wanted to know how the children fared.

But apart from a couple of references to poly people losing custody of their children -- or the risk of losing them -- it is not until the end of what is a very long article that we are told anything about how children might affect the lifestyle, and how it might affect them. Even then, it is precious little:

Then there are the kids, who in this case, according to Alan, understand as much about their parents’ lifestyle as they want to. The two boys have attended several Boston Pride Parades, and they know and interact with their parents’ partners as they would with any other close adult friends. But the Wexelblats have not yet explained the specifics of their lifestyle to their sons. “Kids deal well with things they think are normal,” says Alan. “To the degree that we can help them be comfortable with this, then they will treat it as normal. That’s the theory, anyway.”

An expert who has done a study says that “kids raised in poly families have access to many resources, such as help with homework, rides when needed, and the additional emotional support and attention that comes from having other, nonparental adults in their lives.” Big deal. But she also concedes that they “also sometimes feel extremely upset when their parents’ partners leave, if it means the end of the relationship between the kid and the ex-partner.”

No suggestion, though, that such emotional trauma would make the parents change a lifestyle that suits their own needs so well. A lifestyle choice that maybe can be traced back to what marriage scholars have identified as a change from child-centred marriage to the soul-mate model of marriage -- or non-marriage -- in which the emotional satisfaction of the couple remains the focus. With great risks for the wellbeing of children.