It seems that Brittany, who sent the comments shown farther down, has very strong opinions on the merits of marriage or lack thereof.  She sent a follow-up comment after I wrote back to her, and she may have more to say, for that reason I began two new categories, so that she will have a place to post her comments.

Brittany began by commenting on a few different subjects covered at the website of Fathers for Life, without pointing to specific quotes on particular web pages that her comments pertained to.  Such comments cannot be answered properly, but it was her first time she wrote to F4L, and she probably did not know any better.   Here is what she wrote:

I agree with most of what you are saying but women have made some gains since the 1960’s. If a woman wants to be a scientist or a doctor it is much easier for her to do so. Not evrything since the last 50 years have ven been bad. I do agree with you about abortion but not really about birth control. Yes abstinence is ideal and it is the best but will teens stop having sex? Things were not as squeaky clean in the old days as people think. There was more premarital sex than people admitted to. A lot of people just got married afterwards especially if a female was pregnant.

[1] http://www.norc.org/nr/rdonlyres/2663f09f-2e74-436e-ac81-6ffbf288e183/0/americansexualbehavior2006.pdf You should see the information around page 25. Women who were unwed mothers were shunned and judged even if they had sex with only one guy or even one time. Please look at The Girls Who Went Away on Google Books. I recommend trying to find this book at the library. The double standard was huge. Boys were not condemned if they had sex or got somebody pregnant. My grandmother was one of the girls who had to get married so the only difference between her and those girls was that my grandmother had a wedding.

I responded to Brittany:

 Hello Brittany,

Surely you would like others to read what you have to say.  So, rather than telling your thoughts just to me, in private and hidden from public view, why don’t you post your comments at [2] Dads & Things, the blog affiliated with our website?

In that fashion you can pick a specific topic of interest, select a given posting, and comment on it.

That will make it easier to respond to you, as long as you make it possible to respond by sticking to specific topics of interest, rather than to express generalities.  Do not try to read all of the website of Fathers for Life; it is far too large for that.  Rather, when you respond to something, quote what got your attention and show the URL at which you found it.

Still, to comment on your observation regarding your grandmother, as in “…so the only difference between her and those girls was that my grandmother had a wedding,” you overlook or downplay important aspects.

Your perception is quite incorrect, as to what you imply.  The absence of an important difference is not what you think it is.  Your grandmother made sure to marry the man who had helped her to conceive, whereby she was then also able to provide a stable home for herself, that child and others that were perhaps to follow, and for the father of those children, for whom all he was without a doubt the designated provider.

The important difference between that and having children out of wedlock is that she committed herself to marital fidelity, while her contemporaries were able to continue the pursuit of promiscuity (if they so wanted) and to let their children be raised as full- or semi-orphans, fatherless and often in squalor, as Father State was then not quite as ready and eager to jump into the breach left by expunged fathers.

The most important difference of all was that your grandmother was not a slut.

Brittany, if you wish to respond to that, it will have to be done at [2] Dads & Things.

–Walter

The PDF file Brittany referred contains a very large report.  Even though Brittany made a vague reference to one general location in the report (”You should see the information around page 25.”), that does not permit to make specific comments, as that could mean, for example, everything contained on pages 24 to 26 or perhaps in an even larger portion of the report.

Furthermore, she did not identify whether the report had ever been published in the peer-reviewed literature, not even whether it had ever been published in any professional journal at all.

Just in quickly browsing through the report I found a few statements that make me wonder how objective the whole report is.  For instance, as reported under “Premarital and Adolescent Sexual Activity” (p. 3), how can it be that men more likely than women have premarital intercourse.  Whom do those men have sexual intercourse with, married women, men, animals?  They surely cannot, according to the report, have sexual intercourse with women who have premarital intercourse, because those women are claimed to have premarital intercourse far less frequently than men do.

What the report states on that page is a statistical impossibility.  Given that only around 2 percent of men engage at some time in same-sex intercourse, it follows that the vast majority of premarital intercourse involves men and women to equal proportions.  It follows that either men are braggarts about their promiscuity and lie about their feats of sexual conquests, or women lie about being chaste.  It so happens that some research has been done on that.  The experiments run during those studies showed that women are more likely to lie about being chaste than men are likely to lie about their sexual conquests.

The study results showed a more reasonable conclusion, namely that men and women engage in sexual intercourse equally often.  That makes sense, whereas the report cited by Brittany appears to be very questionable in that respect.  (See: [4] Adultery is not abuse, and women don’t lie?)

The reason for the discrepancy in the numbers of sexual partners by either sex stems from the eagerness with which researchers who produce reports such as “American Sexual Behavior: Trends, Socio-Demographic Differences, and Risk Behavior”, by Tom W. Smith et al. swallow assertions by female study subjects without valid scientific substantiation.

Brittany had one more thing to say and did not quite know where to post it.  Here it is:

I know in this day in age there are women who want to be single mothers but sometimes the man leaves. In the case of many women like my grandma who had a shotgun wedding the man could have easily left. Some women were just unlucky.

Well, Brittany, bad luck just runs both ways.  That is because of the laws of averages.  Probabilities work against both sexes, and women are not more more stupid than men are.

Nevertheless, women have a way to influence their “luck”.  Divorces are filed in about two out of three cases by women.  Once children are present, they provide additional incentives for women to file for divorce, which they then do in three out of four cases, and they “win” child custody in most cases.

That is not due to luck.  It is due to biased court systems.  Those hardly ever fail to let women walk away with kids, car, cash and castle, leaving the man holding the empty bag and having the obligation to pay for the lifestyle the woman has become accustomed to during the marriage from which she removed the inconvenience of her husband and father of “her” children with the help of the courts.