Rachel’s Musings

As Bella DePaulo has pointed out in a recent blog post, there are several new documentaries on singles out. I wonder if I just watched the third one she mentioned (unfortunately, the spam filter at PT seems to reject any comment that contains the word “single,” so I can’t ask Bella…): “Single: A Documentary,” which shows DePaulo briefly but, unfortunately, not every time someone voiced a singlist or matrimanical opinion. I suppose that would’ve ended up being a documentary about singlism featuring DePaulo because she’d been all over the place! Unless they’re doing a complete 360 in the part that I missed, the message of the documentary is clear: If you’re single, you are selfish, suffer from ADD, too lazy to be in a relationship, and will live unhappily ever after. That people could choose to be single was completely not mentioned… That marriage is an institution that might need some serious questioning didn’t seem to occur to the film makers (although some of the people interviewed started down that path).

I am very disappointed because the documentary has a cast, which includes - aside from DePaulo - Stephanie Coontz. The trailer, though, already indicates the direction of the whole documentary: Despite doing lip-service to the idea that being single isn’t a problem, the goal in life should still be to get (and stay) married. So, I should’ve known that despite DePaulo, this wasn’t a documentary that would shatter myths. And if I had paid better attention, I would have noticed that Barbara DaFoe Whitehead, one of the cast members, is the author of “Dan Quale was Right,” an article published in 1993 that Nancy Polikoff sees as part of a rhetorical shift that “traced all social problems to the decline of marriage and invoked at the solution restoring lifelong marriage to its proper place” (67-68). Sigh. Well, don’t make my mistake and save your money or buy a book. Unless you’re interested in being depressed about being single or dating, you can skip this documentary…

Bella DePaulo blogged about a recent BBC report on a presentation of findings from a Finish study on Alzheimer’s disease. The headline everywhere seems to be: to prevent Alzheimer’s, we should marry! Digging into the study some more - which has not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal - the first thing that struck me: Alzheimer’s is not very prevalent. Out of 1,432 study participants,

139 were diagnosed with some form of cognitive impairment, including 82 with mild cognitive impairment — which may represent a transitional phase between normal age-related memory decline and Alzheimer’s disease — and 48 with Alzheimer’s.

Let’s see… 139/1432 = 9.7% and 48/1432 = 3.4%. So, out of a hundred people, about 3 people will get Alzheimer’s; 97 people will not. This are small numbers. Granted, having worked with people at the early stages of Alzheimer’s, the disease is devastating but apparently not quite as prevalent as the news coverage seems to suggest. In contrast, almost 4 times as many people have heart disease (11%). It is about as prevalent as stroke (2.6%, Table 2). And 7 out of a 100 people will get any type of cancer (Table 6)

Nevertheless, if we do want to prevent Alzheimer’s - the study claims - we just have to be married. Never mind that

The association with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease did not reach statistical significance.

But, okay, the difference in other cognitive impairments between singles and marrieds is statistically significant. However, there is something else that plays a role:

Having the APOE-e4 genotype — a risk factor for Alzheimer’s — was particularly damaging for those who were widowed or divorced from midlife through late life. Those who were married and had the high-risk genotype had a 3.44-fold (P<0.05) increased risk of Alzheimer's disease, compared with a 25.55-fold (P<0.001) greater risk for those who were divorced or widowed.

I have no idea what that genotype is but to me this finding that married folks have a lower risk of Alzheimer’s than divorced or widowed is, well, nice but not at all actionable. What are we to do? Ask people to get married to prevent Alzheimer’s? This would go down the (wrong) road of using marriage as a panacea, which it is not. Plus, causality - marriage prevents Alzheimer’s - cannot be established by this kind of study. It would require an experiment where people are randomly assigned to the “marriage condition.” Since that is not very ethical, we can’t conduct such a study. We can use longitudinal studies to approximate this, watching people with changing marital status. However, as the researcher pointed out, there might be other things at play here, too:

This suggested, Hakansson said, that other factors beyond cohabitation were involved in the associations. [...]

Hakansson speculated that those who were widowed or divorced — and remained so — were at a greater risk than those who were single because the loss of a partner destabilized the psychobiological system, enhancing vulnerability to disease.

Maybe stress is the mediating factor, not marital status? Loosing your spouse - through death or divorce - certainly is stressful!

Now, is there anything we can do to prevent Alzheimer’s? There is apparently a “general hypothesis of social stimulation as a protective factor against dementia.” So, be social and be active! Start a walking group where you skeptically dissect news reports on what benefits marriage are supposed to bestow upon us. If nothing else, you’ll prevent heart disease through the walking…

When challenging the preferential status of marriage, I am often countered with “but marriage is natural!” No, it is not. Reading about the history of marriage in general and in the US in particular, it is clear that marriage is an institution created with specific civic purposes, which changed over time but were always there. In the US, it is steeped in the Christian tradition of monogamy, which the founding fathers imposed on the new nation.

Of course, this is avoiding the real question: Is coupling natural?      Continue reading this post » » »

An interesting commentary at AlterNet made me realize how destructive the influence of the Religious Right really is (hereafter I call them the Wrong - they might be on the right-side of the political spectrum but they are dead wrong in their positions). The topics where their influence plays a role are ever expanding in my awareness. Here are some of them:

• Evolution: This is the most obvious one. Their attempts to derail science and teaching nonsense range from creationism, via creation “science,” to intelligent design.
• Global climate change: Here they try to cast doubt on the fact that we humans are influencing the weather patterns for the worse and are the major culprits behind climate change.
• Marriage: Not only are they opposing gay marriage but by imposing their standards of the heterosexual marriage as the only healthy family, they are attacking family diversity.
• Child rearing: Through ignoring research, they were able to perpetuate the myth that marriage is necessary for healthy child development.

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True Majority asks activists to sign a letter to the governors that calls for marriage equality. The call is framed as marriage equality being bigger than all other issues: “Marriage equality comes down to human rights.” I took issue with that and wrote them the following:

Thank you for your actions regarding marriage equality. As a single by choice, I take issue, though, with your framing marriage equality as a human rights issue: what human rights are we exactly defending by asking for marriage equality? The right to discriminate against other forms of relationships? Marriage is an institution; not a human right. People have human rights simply by being human, not by their relationship status. By expanding who can marry, we are perpetuating the inherent discriminatory policies that are endowed on people because they “tie the knot.” As a single by choice, I find it frustrating that people ignore that many of the 1,100+ benefits have nothing to do with human rights or protecting anybody. They simply privilege those who are in a state-sanctioned relationship, aka marriage. This discriminates against all of us who are in relationships other than marriages.

While I think that everybody who wants to marry should have the right to do so, I do not appreciate that this private commitment comes with a huge package of rights and benefits that are not available outside of marriage. I would love to see True Majority fight against singlism (the discrimination of singles) and marital status discrimination in all forms. We should fight for human rights for all people, regardless of their marital status, relationship style, sexual orientation, race, or gender.

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Although I am excited about the California Supreme Court’s decision to override a ban on same-sex marriage, I continue to be leery about the preferential treatment bestowed upon people simply because they “tie the knot.” According to a compilation of the General Accounting Office, in the U.S. married couples get at least 1,400 rights and benefits that non-married people do not get (an updated version is available as a PDF). While some of these rights clearly intend to protect children (although my own experience with the divorce law make me sometimes doubt that and there is also other evidence of that failure), many of those rights are simply discriminatory. As a single person, my social security benefits are not paid beyond my death. If I were married, my surviving spouse gets those benefits. I could add a spouse to my health insurance but not a very close friend who has lost hers with her job (or never got any health insurance). Although it certainly simplifies things, it does not make sense to me why these rights are not easily available outside of marriage. Easily is the key here because at least some of these rights could probably recreated through complex contracts. So, why not create a simple legal vehicle that would be available to people in any relationship, be it as a couple or siblings or friends? Something like a union contract that two (or more) people could sign that conveys similar rights and benefits no matter who those people are would be much less discriminatory. A marriage could simply be the expression of a commitment between two people - no special rights and benefits are attached to it, except through the union contract that every married couple had to sign. This would uphold the rights and benefits for married people but would end the matrimonial discrimination of other relationships. It is time that we come up with alternatives to marriage rather than perpetuating a discriminating vehicle.

There is an excellent editorial on courant.com, which brings up several good points along the lines I have argued here. Froma Harrop argues that “there is a marriage debate we ought to have — or to put it more accurately, a non-marriage debate.” She continues:

The troubling aspect of the push for gay marriage is the part that perpetuates the notion of marriage as a goody bag for sundry government and corporate benefits. A gay advocate asks, “Why can’t I leave my $4 million estate to my partner tax-free, as Jane and Joe Jones next door can do?” Valid question — but then one asks: “What about Widow Smith and her sister, who have lived together for decades? Shouldn’t tax law favor their estates, as well?” [...] Given the growing percentage of unmarried adult Americans, the whole obsession with same-sex marriage has become rather dated.

Keep marriage as a romantic and religious ideal for those who choose to partake. Public policy, on the other hand, should be marriage-neutral.

This is the marriage issue that the leading candidates should be addressing. You just know that they won’t touch it.

Excellent!