Archive for August, 2009
Back to school part 2 – texts need critical reading
Thanks and congratulations to AtMP member Whitney J. in Florida, who sent us copies of pages of her textbook along with this note:
I have been taking a class on human sexuality this summer. The reading was pretty interesting, and I was enjoying it, until I got to Chapter 10. I was pretty disheartened at the description of cohabitation, and I thought I would share it with you. Maybe someone could send the texbook authors some less biased statistics and information? I really hate to think that students learning from this text may second-guess themselves and their relationships because two people decided to cherry-pick the research to use in their textbook.
AtMP’s student interns and I are impressed and inspired that Whitney is such a critical thinker and activist!
Whitney highlighted these lines from the textbook: “…these marriages [that follow cohabitation] are more likely to end in divorce than are marriages not preceded by cohabitation. … the seeds of divorce are sown in the pre-engagement relationship. … men in pre-engagement cohabiting relationships were less committed to the partner.” And, “…married men and women are significantly more satisfied than are cohabiting or single men and women in a continuing relationship.” The pages of the text that she sent did not offer any further caveats or alternate analysis.
As Whitney knows, AtMP has been addressing this kind of blunt negativity about unmarried relationships for over a decade. We’ve collected a variety of expert interpretations about the data on cohabitation, especially cohabitation and divorce. We also wrote our own careful, nuanced analysis of data that was widely misreported back in 2002.
Following Whitney’s suggestion, we’re sending this information to the textbook authors – a married couple!
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Uncategorized
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Aug 31st, 2009 by Nicky
Back to school resources
Whether you’re heading back to high school, college or grad school, as a student, teaching assistant or professor, wouldn’t you like to be handed something useful, unique, and completely free? Here’s our gift to you!
Statistics and expert commentary: are you gathering comprehensive data for a research report, or looking for one zinger to win a family argument? Turn to AtMP! As always, our goal is to be the most current, relevant, objective and non-judgmental site for information about unmarried Americans on the web. Check out what’s new in the Facts and Fun section of our website and tell us what you think. Then tell your friends – the public debate about un/marriage will only improve when more people have the facts.
Liven up your campus: inspired by our friends at the National Marriage Boycott, we’ve listed lots of resources and some guidelines to help you start a campus chapter. What else can we do to help you? We’re open to your ideas.
Only duds on campus? Meet like-minded people online: AtMP’s Facebook group has nearly 500 members, as does the social network at National Marriage Boycott. Our email listserve has over 500 members (mostly not the same people). And our virtual book club has nearly 50 members. There’s always someone to talk to!
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statistics
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Aug 28th, 2009 by Nicky
Matrimania at Yahoo
What a rude surprise I got this morning! Upon signing in to manage one of AtMP’s Yahoo groups, I was instructed to create new secret questions. Yahoo helpfully suggests lots of question possibilities. But strikingly, four of their top five suggestions assume I am married!
Thanks to Bella DePaulo for coining the wonderful word “matrimania” so I know what to call this!
I was so insulted (rather amused, too) that I dropped whatever I was supposed to be doing for the Yahoo group and wrote this post instead. Then I pasted this post, plus some statistics about the number of potentially offended unmarried people in the U.S., into Yahoo’s feedback form.
I encourage you to send Yahoo feedback as well – this is a perfect opportunity for unmarried consumers to show their strength!
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singlism
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Aug 21st, 2009 by Nicky
Unmarried, uninsured, out of luck?
Hunter, our demographic research intern, has put together some important, disturbing and highly motivating statistics.
Unmarried people are concentrated in economically disadvantaged categories. For example, unmarried Americans are disproportionately
- African-American: 69.1% of blacks adults are unmarried; 19.8% of all unmarried Americans are black.
- Women: 56.4% of unmarried adults are female.
- Young: 33.7% of unmarried adults are 18-29 years old.
- Poor or low-income: 14.7% of unmarried people aged 16 years or older live below the poverty level; 38.6% of unmarried households earn under $30K.
- LGBT: 100% of people in same-sex partnerships are currently counted as unmarried (though it looks like the Census will start crediting same-sex marriages soon!); of course, many bisexuals and transgendered people are married to different-sex partners, as are some people who identify as lesbian or gay.
Not coincidentally, the demographic groups that are most likely to be unmarried are also the same groups that get less health care, get sick more and don’t get well as much as other Americans. Making health insurance more affordable for unmarried people, and taking other measures to increase their access to care, could decrease disparities and increase health equity.
Unmarried workers disproportionately lack health insurance: 40.5% of the workforce is unmarried, yet unmarried people constitute 59.7% of all workers without coverage and only 36.4% of workers with coverage. The impact of marital status is even more pronounced among part-time workers, who more frequently lack coverage: 67.1% of uninsured part-time workers are unmarried. Unmarried people are also the majority (56.4%) of the unemployed uninsured. In all, 59.8% of uninsured Americans are unmarried.
Obviously, these stats do not mean that all unmarried people are out of luck, and clearly getting married would not solve everyone’s problems. But they should make you wonder, why aren’t health care reformers promising equal costs and access to all Americans regardless of marital status?
Do something about it! Download our free one-page fact sheet or tri-fold brochure “Why You Should Care about Barriers to Coverage for Unmarried People” and get it into the hands of the health reform advocate you admire most – be it your doctor, your state health coalition, your Congressperson, or the President. And let us know what they say!
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economics & poverty, health care
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Aug 20th, 2009 by Nicky
“What’s next, marrying your dog?”
Their lonely-hearts faces peer out of the advertisements, hangdog and looking for love. …In matrimony-mad India, where marriage is the central event of a lifetime, these posters could easily be for lovelorn, small-town bachelors, pasted up by anxious parents seeking a bride. But the suitable girl these single fellows seek is of the furry, four-footed variety. Finding one, though, is not easy. “I have been searching for months, but no luck,” said Kunal Shingla, who is looking for a mate for Foster, his 2-year-old basset hound.
This “only in August” article in today’s New York Times caught my attention for several reasons.
1 – A dear friend is preparing to move to New Delhi. As she packs she is also planning how to manage / hide / present her non-traditional relationship in this largely traditional society.
2 – Despite our U.S. focus, AtMP frequently hears from unmarried Indians seeking community.
3 – “What’s next, marrying your dog?” Real, normally intelligent, people have actually asked me this rude and thoughtless question upon hearing the mission of the Alternatives to Marriage Project.
At the moment, the best I can offer them all is a deep and compassionate sigh.
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India & Pakistan, international, singlism
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Aug 18th, 2009 by Nicky
Illegitimacy and advance directives in the news
I keep an eye out for news that affects the cultural context surrounding AtMP’s efforts to reduce singlism and marital status discrimination, as well as news about specific projects we’re working on. This week two aspects of the attacks on President Obama and his health care reform efforts caught my eye.
First, the over-publicized, utterly fabricated stories about the President’s birth certificate. How could that nonsense possibly be relevant to us? I have a Google news alert for “illegitimacy + birth,” and I’m concerned any time I see an increase in the use of that outdated combination of words. It’s worth remembering that the concept of illegitimacy was abandoned just a few decades ago, and that some people (who prefer divisiveness to diversity) keep trying to bring it back. AtMP has consistently spoken out against calling children “illegitimate,” from educating the conservative Washington Times in 2001, to chastising an anti-immigrant group in 2007. The current lies about President Obama don’t call for our intervention. But, it is nice to recall that (after being born in the U.S.) he was raised in perfect picture of family diversity, experiencing a single mother, an extended family household, a step-parent, and half-siblings with a variety of geographic and cultural origins. Just like so many of us!
Second, the mis-representation of a very small, very good element of health care reform – a proposal to help more people write advance directives. AtMP spends a lot of energy informing people that we all have the right to name our medical decision-makers and state our wishes through advance directives, regardless of our marital status. Too few people take advantage of this power, so we’re glad to see that Barack and Michelle Obama have written their advance directives, and that legislation might encourage more people to do so. Here’s how it’s explained at Salon.com:
The legislation would order Medicare to pay for consultations between patients and doctors on end-of-life decisions, which it currently doesn’t cover. But the consultations wouldn’t be mandatory; if your grandmother doesn’t want to go talk to her doctor about end-of-life care, she won’t have to. Because Medicare doesn’t pay for this kind of planning now, only 40 percent of seniors who depend on the government insurance say they have an advance directive that tells healthcare providers what measures they do and don’t want used to prolong their life, even though 75 percent say they think it’s important. The lack of planning actually costs a lot of money. Medicare spends billions and billions of dollars annually on expensive treatment during the last year of a dying patient’s life. Without allowing Medicare to pay for end-of-life consultations, it’s hard to know whether patients even want to go to such expensive lengths.
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health care, Uncategorized
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Aug 6th, 2009 by Nicky
