The End of Egalitarianism

Ross Douthat faces off with Dan Savage in a Bloggingheads debate on the role of monogamy in marriage and, parenthetically, the effect of widespread gay marriage on sexual exclusivity.

Before I comment on the specifics, let me recommend the entire debate as well worth the watch.  I would add the caveat that even if we take Dan’s protestations of concern for marital stability as being made in good faith, I should note that not all advocates of gay marriage share that concern.  Dan’s may be the public face that the gay community likes to show to mainstream audiences, but other homosexuals are more forthcoming about the hope that extending marriage to gays will undermine the social “privilege” of marriage in general.

That said, I was particularly struck with this exchange:

Dan is a fag, but he makes a point not unfamiliar to this corner of the blogosphere:  the history of marital dissolution is mostly the story of female emancipation.  Ross, as a mainstream so-con, really doesn’t want to go there for regrettable if understandable reasons.  But he makes the forceful rebuttal that Dan’s proposed alternative – that standards of monogamy be subject to ongoing negotiation – inevitably benefits the stronger half of the relationship at the expense of the weaker half.  Prior to 40 years ago, the stronger half was almost always the husband;  thus, our culture yet carries around in its collective memory the image of the philandering Don Draper.  Our society’s ongoing effort to elevate the status of women at the expense of men makes this image increasingly anachronistic.

Given the differences between the preferences of men for polygamy and women for hypergamy, Dan is naïve in believing that greater egalitarianism strengthens marriage, and it is cold comfort to a man getting screwed over in family court to know that somewhere, a woman is also getting screwed over.

Applied Rationalizing

In an otherwise thought-provoking post on adultery and divorce, Athol Kay writes:

Which leads us obviously to the question of "What about the children?"

My feeling is that someone who is a terrible spouse, is very frequently a terrible parent.

• An alcoholic husband, is an alcoholic father.
• A Batshit Crazy wife, is a Batshit Crazy mother.
• A chronically unemployed husband, is a chronically unemployed father.
• An absent cheating wife, is an absent neglecting mother.
• A criminally involved husband, is a criminally involved father.
• A slovenly hoarding wife, is a slovenly hoarding mother.

And I'm sure you get the idea....

So yeah... what about the children? Shouldn't you be doing something?

Unsurprisingly, I’m oppose divorce on first-order grounds.  Perhaps surprising is that I do so knowing that what I ask – spending one’s entire life intimately attached to another human being – is supremely unnatural.  So I get the frustrations and disappointments, and I understand that many people will fail to keep the vows they make.  Yet I reply:  be as happy as you can, enduring what you must.

Precisely because the project is so difficult, we should be especially keen to avoid abetting the female (and let’s face it, when we’re talking about people who initiate divorce, we’re usually talking about women) tendency towards self-rationalization, and nothing reeks of self-rationalization like claiming to be getting divorced “for the good of the children.”

First of all, the data on the negative outcomes for the children of divorce is sufficiently established that it hardly needs citation.  I’m frankly surprised that Athol writes as if he is unaware of it.

But second of all, let’s walk through the list above:  alcoholism, unemployment, infidelity, criminality, slovenliness, and “batshit crazy” (by which I assume Athol means mental illness).  Of these, only two, alcoholism and mental illness, have any relationship to a child’s physical safety, and not always even then.  The other flaws are certainly bad examples to set for children, assuming the children are aware of them and lack any forceful countervailing influence.  More than likely, though, it is the aggrieved wife that brings her husband’s shortcomings to the children’s attention as a way of self-validation, which kind of deprives her of the moral high ground regarding bad examples.

Even so, the parenting would have to be, not just bad, but pathologically bad for single parenthood to be the preferred solution.  The generality is that children are made worse off by divorce; that you happen to know of counterexamples doesn’t mean you are smart enough to predict yourself one of them.

Is this a compelling reason for a woman (or a man, for that matter) to stay in a bad marriage?  Maybe, maybe not.  The point is that someone contemplating divorce should be fully cognizant of the tradeoff he is making:  his own happiness and well-being (possibly) for his children’s (probably).

Premarital Sex Causes Divorce!

The Social Pathologist has the numbers:

H.T.:  WKSB.

Working Women Cause Divorce

I know that the Prince of Darkness already reviewed this article in detail, but I wanted to highlight one passage anyway:

Rutgers University biological anthropologist Helen Fisher sees the rise of working women as a cause of women asking more from marriage, but she's not worried.

"Women have always commuted to work to gather fruits and vegetables, and for millions of years women were just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. ... Data suggest that many ancestral men and women had two or three spouses across their lives," she wrote on The New York Times' Room for Debate blog.

"The same occurs today: I have examined divorce patterns in 58 societies and everywhere that spouses have some independent means, both sexes leave bad marriages to make better ones."

Put me down in favor of social arrangements that don’t lead to women abandoning their husbands.  But at least we’re not disputing the facts of the case anymore.

Parenthood on Adultery

In episode 10, the adult children confront Zeek about his financial woes stemming from a bad real estate investment. For some reason, they do this in front of his wife Camille, who is predictably upset. In her anger, she reveals what we had long suspected: Zeek had an affair.

The show is remarkably honest about how the dynamics of this play out. Camille had turned a blind eye to the affair while she believed Zeek to be financially successful. But, a few years after the affair had already run its course, and Zeek is on the rocks financially, now the affair becomes her justification for putting him out of the house.

In an era in which no-fault divorce is a moral norm, obviously Camille can divorce Zeek for any reason or no reason. But to those who, like me, believe that adultery is a singular justification for divorce, I ask you: is there a "statute of limitations" beyond which an affair can't be considered the real reason for divorce, as opposed to a mere pretext?

Remember the name Ethan Stacy.

R.I.P.

H.T.: Welmer

Kramer vs. Kramer

On the recommendation of a Spearhead post, I watched Kramer vs. Kramer on Netflix Instant Play.

Random Thoughts:

• Hoffman was 42 years old in 1979. Streep was 30. I wonder how many first marriages really involve 12 year age differences, but let's do the math: At the time of the trial, Kramer says he's been in advertising "since college, maybe ten or 15 years". Let's say 15. That puts his movie age at around 37. He'd been married for eight years at the time of the divorce, plus 18 months since, so let's say 9 years, which makes him 28 at the time of his marriage, at which point, Mrs. Kramer would have been . . . 16? But, of course, in the movie she was closer 24. Hollywood sucks at arithmetic.

• Either Dustin Hoffman overacts through the first 20 minutes of the film, or I am really, really glad my father was never a New York Jew.

• Kramer invites an attractive divorced woman, who lives in the same New York apartment building, upstairs for a heart-to-heart talk the night his wife leaves him. They continue a platonic relationship throughout the movie. Really? What kind of 42 year old married man has these kinds of female friends? I don't. I'm friends, if you can call it that, with the wives of my male friends, but of these, I can think of only one that I might have this kind of conversation with, and then only if it started incidentally.

• Speaking of New York apartments: Kramer, an advertising executive, lives in an itty-bitty, kinda dingy two-bedroom apartment, and eats Salisbury steak for dinner. This is probably realistic, but why does Hollywood blanch at that level of realism today? Compare it to the spacious accommodations that the Friends characters somehow afforded on waitressing salaries.

• Nude scene. You know, I've been meaning to remark for a while now that, frankly, mainstream Hollywood had no idea how to competently execute a nude scene before the mid eighties. Consider, for instance, the movie Body Heat (1981). As I understand cinematic history, Kathleen Turner, for better or worse, blazed the trail as a mainstream American actress doing full-frontal. (Caligula, by contrast, employed exclusively Italian actresses for this purpose.) But even though Turner was an attractive woman at 27, that scene would never survive the cutting room by the standards of today. Likewise here, Jo Beth Williams (I think) was also looked very pretty with her clothes on in 1979, but her (brief) nude scene conjures nothing but embarrassment for her; she would never be cast that way today.

  Are the standards of beauty higher for actresses now than they were? Does Hollywood put a higher premium on a woman's body than her face? Have filmmakers become more skilled at displaying a nude woman in a flattering light? The only thing obvious I can point to is: tan lines. Jo Beth Williams had some pretty obvious tan lines that are distracting an unattractive (and, while I'm at it, fairly implausible on a Manhattan career woman in the middle of winter). You never see those on actresses nowadays, fortunately.

• Kramer's son greets Daddy's naked sleepover with nonchalance. Wouldn't a little boy be intimidated by a strange naked woman? I'm pretty sure that by age six, I was embarrassed to catch sight of my mother's nakedness.

• Interesting the difficulty that a divorced man has: most of the women Kramer knows are other career women whos maternal instincts are firmly suppressed. Where would he get the opportunity to meet Mom-type women if he doesn't go to church?

• What a shame that Kramer's big self-revelation was that the divorce was his fault.

• Kramer's son falls and gets stitches. I had stitches in my head as a kid. It was earlier than '79, but the doctor had a special board to strap me still while he worked. It prevented the thrashing around we see in this movie.

• The platonic divorcee says of her ex-husband, "If he really loved me, he wouldn't have let me divorce him." But what choice did she give him?

• Kramer is fired for taking too much time off from work. He performs his steely-eyed negotiations for his next job pretty well, but without explaining to them the stakes (he can't arrive in divorce court without a job), I can't see how his prospective employers wouldn't perceive his ultimatum as desperate. It would be wildly unlikely that they would hire him.

• Kramer shows his son his new office. My Dad had a downtown office with a view like that. I didn't have the sense to be impressed with it at the time. It wasn't in New York though.

• The uplifting music when Billy finally sees his mom was a bit jarring; did they forget who the protagonist is? Realistically, though, I'm pretty sure that one of the consequences of divorce is that the children tend to glorify the non-custodial parent.

• The custody battle will cost Kramer $15,000, six months worth of his gross salary. Do divorce cases really go to the Supreme Court of NY?

• Maybe Streep's psychobabbly narcissistic testimony had more resonance with audiences in '79.

• I was surprised -- to the point of thinking it implausible -- at the extend of the grilling to which Mrs. Kramer is subjected.

• Hoffman sounds like Woody Allen during his testimony.

• It's really touching -- and naive -- the way the platonic divorcee pleads with Mrs. Kramer that, really, Kramer is a good father. She obviously doesn't understand the psychology of what's going on.

• So, Mrs. Kramer actually granted her husband legal custody in the divorce decree, then shows up 18 months later, and not only wins custody but also gets child support even though she now makes more money than he does? That's the family court we all know and love!

Braver on Who Leaves the Marriage . . . and Why It Matters

In Chapter 7 of Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths, Sanford Braver discusses the question of who initiates divorce and why. The answer to the "who" question is straightforward: all studies consistently show that divorce is initiated by the mother in two-thirds of all cases. In fact, while men initiate divorces at about the same rate as in 1950, the rate among women has risen six-fold, accounting for the entirety of the increase in the divorce rate over the last 50 years. This fact is evident from both studies of court filings and survey data, although it supposedly still surprises many people when they learn of it. Braver reports on his own research showing that three years after the divorce, women view the divorce far more positively than men. When women are granted custody of the children, fully two-thirds of them are happy with the divorce even when the husband had initiated it. Among non-custodial fathers, only 50% of the initiators were happy that they had done so, and only 38% were happy with the divorces that their wives had initiated.

Braver also quotes a 1989 study from the National Center of Health Statistics that shows women with children as significantly more likely to be the initiator of their divorces than women without children.*

The following table shows the reasons that both men and women give for their divorces. This data was taken from surveys of divorcing couples; thus, the differing accounts that men and women give can be directly compared. Note that the percentages shown reflect the number of respondents affirming the listed factor as "Very Important" to the breakdown of the marriage and the decision to divorce.

Table 7.1: Listing of Factors Contributing to the Breakdown of Marriage and Decision to Divorce

Factor	Mom %	Dad %	Mom Rank	Dad Rank
Gradual growing apart, losing a sense of closeness	57	52	1	1
Serious differences in lifestyle and/or values	54	33	2	2
Not feeling loved or appreciated by spouse	45	30	3	6
Spouse not able or willing to meet major needs	41	32	4	4
Emotional problems of spouse	38	24	5	11
Husband's extramarital affair	37	9	6	22
Severe and intense fighting, frequent conflict	36	33	7	3
Frequently felt put down or belittled by spouse	35	22	8	13
Spouse not reliable	33	21	9	14
Problems and conflicts with rotes, i.e., division of responsibility for household jobs or other chores outside of house	29	21	10	15
Husband's alcohol abuse	29	5	11	25
Violence between you and spouse	20	10	16	21
Husband's drug abuse	19	3	18	26
Wife's extramarital affair	5	30	24	5
Wife's alcohol abuse	3	8	27	24
Wife's drug abuse	3	6	27	24

The respondents are characterized, here and in the book, as mothers and fathers; the implication is that only divorcees with children participated in the survey. As we can see, respondents could and did list multiple factors as "very important". Significantly, the reasons -- infidelity and abuse -- that, in the public imagination, drive most divorces turn out to be infrequently listed. Infidelity is cited by women in only 37% of divorces and by men in only 30%. And domestic violence didn't even make the top ten reasons. In contrast, the reasons most often cited are the least forensic: "growing apart", "lifestyle differences", "not appreciated", "needs not met".

We the readers do not have access to Braver's survey data, but considering that multiple causes for a divorce could be listed, it would be interesting to see where the overlaps occur. It is possible that, for instance, the "touch-feely" reasons are often accompanied by at least one more-substantive reason like chemical dependency or frequent conflict. However, Braver appears to have the integrity to have let us known if this were obviously the case.

Taken at face value, the survey shows that either the common belief that women only initiate divorce for really good reasons is far from the reality, or the standard of what constitutes a "really good reason" has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Conservative commentators have almost certainly fallen victim to the first delusion; however, the latter explanation appears to account for the behavior among women in the broader society. As Braver writes:

There is no question that the women's movement has made fundamental positive changes in the opportunities and equality available to both women and men. I agree with most informed observers that the loosening of sex roles has increased opportunity and flexibility and widened the options offered to men as well as women, and improved the quality of lives of all members of the family. This is why I have always been a supporter of the women's movement. Despite these unmistakable benefits, according to influential author Shere Hite in her book, The Hite Report on the Family: Growing Up Under Patriarchy, the women's movement also contended that the traditional nuclear family was "an essentially repressive one" . . . .

As David Popenoe writes: "If men in families can't be reformed, the argument goes, let's throw them out. This perspective typically envisions the nuclear family . . . as a 'patriarchal invention'" . . . .

As these views took hold of the thinking of mainstream society, they undoubtedly also contributed to women's current level of dissatisfaction in marriage. Men have had their consciousness raised as well: men today are performing their roles as fathers and husbands somewhat, but not dramatically, better than in the sixties. But wives' standard of acceptance of husbands' behavior has changed far faster than most husbands' behavior. As women have raised their consciousness, their degree of tolerance for unrewarding marriages or for their husbands' behavior and shortcomings has correspondingly decreased.

* This study, cited in an endnote, is slightly problematic because the numbers given -- 56% of divorces among childless couples are initiated by women while 65% among couples with children are initiated by women -- doesn't combine to get anywhere close to the two-thirds number, unless almost no divorces occur among childless couples. Which would be a pretty depressing commentary on parenthood.

Sanford Braver on the Economics of Divorce

On Wapiti's recommendation, I checked out Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths, by Sanford Braver, a psychology professor at Arizona State University. The book examines a number of ways in which family law is heavily biased against fathers, and I hope to review the book in more detail in coming posts; however, the particular data that interested me were those dealing with the economics of divorce.

Chapter four of Divorced Dads deals with the way post-divorce standards of living are calculated. Braver explains that standards of living are calculated as ratios to the poverty level income for a family of a particular composition, and provides the following vignette:

[L]et's make up a hypothetical but typical family and see how divorce might affect their standard of living (the calculations are summarized in Table 4.1 [shown]). Since our sample became divorced in 1987, we will be using 1987 figures throughout the chapter. Later, we'll report the computations on our real families.

Let's assume that Rachel and Jeff have two children. Before divorce, he earned $31,000, while she earned $16,733. Their combined family income was therefore $47,733, 4.14 times the poverty level, giving them an income-to-needs ratio of $4.14 ($47,733 divided by $11.519). they divorce, and Rachel gets custody of the two children. Suppose that after the divorce, Jeff pays $500 per month, or $6000 annually in child support, and Rachel increases her work hours (as most mothers in our sample in fact do) and now earns $20,000. Her combined income including child support she receives is $26,000. Hers is now a one-parent/two-child household; the poverty level for this sort of family is $9,151.

For Rachel's standard of living to remain the same, exactly 4.14 times the poverty level, she would have needed to take in $37,885 ($9,151 x 4.14) in total, in salary and child support. Instead, her income-to-needs ratio is now only 2.84 $26,000 divided by $9,151). So her standard of living is now only 69 percent of what it was (2.84, the post-divorce income-to-needs ratio divided by 4.14, the pre-divorce income to needs ratio); it has declined 31 percent. (If the ratio of post-divorce divided by pre-divorce standard of living is less than 100 percent. (If the ratio of post-divorce divided by pre-divorce standard of living is less that 100 percent, subtract the number from 100 percent to get the percent drop or decline.* If the ratio of post-divorce divided by pre-divorce standard of living is more than 100 percent, subtract 100 percent from the number to get the percent gain.)

Jeff's is now considered a single adult/no children household; the poverty level for him is $5,909. For Jeff's standard of living to stay the same, again exactly at 4.14 times the poverty level, he would need to have $24,463 ($5909 x 4.14) left in income after paying child support. Instead, he actually has a little more, $25,000, left. His income-to-needs ratio is now 4.23 $25,000 divided by $5,909). His standard of living is now 102 percent (4.23 divided by 4.14) of what it was before the divorce, a gain of 2 percent.

Table 4.1: Figuring Rachel & Jeff's Post-Divorce Changes in Standard of Living

	Jeff	Rachel	Combined
Pre-Divorce Salary	$31,000	$61,733	$47,733
Pre-Divorce Needs			$11,519
Pre-Divorce Income-to-Needs Ratio			4.14
Post-Divorce Salary	$31000	$20,000
Child-Support	($6000)	$6000
Total Income after Child Support Paid	$25,000	$26,000
Post-Divorce Needs	$5,909	$9,151
Post-Divorce Income-to-Needs Ratio	4.23	2.84
Post-Divorce/Pre-Divorce	102%	69%
Gain/Loss	2%	-102%

Although this method seems fairly straightforward in figuring outhow divorce might affect standards of living, I came to recognize that the method used by Weitzman, and sometimes others (including us) in calculating the "needs adjusted income" was highly misleading and seriously inaccurate for several reasons, which I'll describe in detail next.

Braver goes on to enumerate the difficulties with these calculations:

• Taxes: Custodial parents enjoy multiple tax advantages that non-custodial parents do not.

  • Dad pays taxes on the child support; Mom does not.

  • Mom gets a tax credit for any child care expenses; Dad does not, even when he must make childcare expenditure during visitation periods.

  • Mom's taxes are calculated from the tables for a "head of household"; Dad's taxes are calculated from the much-higher "single" tables.

  • Mom takes the exemptions and credits for household members; Dad does not. (I should add here that this can be, or used to be, negotiated.)

  • Mom's income-to-family-size ratio might make her eligible for the EITC.

• Expense Allocation: The needs ratios shown assume that the custodial parent alone spends money on the children, but in fact non-custodial parents almost always make contributions beyond child-support awards.

  • Two-thirds of Dads report buying clothes for their children.

  • Dad bears the visitation expenses. Not just travel expenses, but all the food, recreation, and child-care during visitation periods, during which he is paying twice for the children's upkeep. (This particular injustice was so egregious that child-support tables were recalculated in 1996 to reflect visitation. But the studies of the 1980s that purported to show female post-divorce immiseration did not.)

Braver recalculates the post-divorce standards of living for his typical family after correcting for these factors, and finds that Jeff now suffers a 15 percent drop in his standard of living, while Rachel suffers only a 5 percent drop. But Braver doesn't end here. He enumerates several other expenses that non-custodial parents must endure:

• Notwithstanding his titular "single" status, Dad must still maintain a residence of sufficient size to accommodate his children during visitation.

• Dad has no say about where Mom chooses to take the children. If she moves out-of-state, or even out of the country, Dad still bears the transportation expenses for visitation.

• Dad's are often ordered to pay medical and dental expenses and insurance as part of the divorce decree, independent of child-support awards.

• Dad usually moves out. Thus Dad must pay for all expenses of setting up a new household. On top of which, he must typically acquire new housing at a much higher price than that which Mom continues to enjoy at the old residence.

Braver brings these revised criteria to his own study with more recent data. He finds that the medium-term economic impact of divorce appears to be evenly distributed between men and women. But he adds an important caveat about the longer term impact:

There are at least two reasons to believe that the earlier we study the economic impact, the more disproportionately disadvantageous to mothers it will appear. Put another way, the longer we wait before assessing teh impact of the divorce, the less it will appear that mothers are disadvantaged. The first reason is that as time goes on, women will progressively upgrade or rehabilitate their education or job skills, earn promotions, and work more hours (as the children age), all of which will help them earn more.

The second factor is remarriage. Statistics show that 75 percent of women and 80 percent of men will remarry, the vast majority within seven years after the divorce. When a woman remarries, she tends to marry someonen who brings substantial income, but relatively few expenses. When a man remarries, however, he tends to marry someone who brings expenses proportinately greater than income. Duncan and Hoffman found that five years after divorce, even the minorithy of women who had not remarried had risen from a 30 percent declind to within six percent of their pre-divorce standard of living, due to their enhanced salary, while those who had remarried now had a living stnadard 25 percent higher than in the year before their divorce.** And Randal Day and Stephen Bahr found that males who remarried suffered a 3 percent decline in per capita family income (compared to their predivorce levels) whiole females experienced a 14 percent increase.

* Braver belabors what appears to be pretty elementary math because this was exactly how Weitzman screwed up her study. As she later admitted (and blamed a grad student for), her "74 percent decline" in a woman's living standards was actually a 26 percent decline.

** My impression is that these values were calculated using the methods of Table 4.1. Using Braver's revised criteria, I would assume that the disparity would be even more dramatic.

Updated and Bumped: the facts on the economics of divorce.

A long standing factoid about the economics of divorce is that it improves a man's standard of living while diminishing a woman's. I first heard this 20+ years ago and took it at face value, but it is hard to square with the anecdotes of men immiserated by child support and alimony orders.

Can anyone point me to any studies that address this question either way?

In the comments, Wapiti points to Christopher Rapp's article that recounts the history behind the factoid. The original claim was made in 1985 by Lenore Weitzman in her book The Divorce Revolution. She subsequently conceded that she had made mathematical errors that exaggerated the disparity, but a more fundamental problem was that her data was drawn from a small sample of divorced couples in Los Angeles. A more representative sample by Atlee Stroup, published in 1994 (exerpted here, sort of), showed that both male and female standard of living declined after divorce, although the standard of living of women declined more, especially in poor households. However, Rapp's article goes on to quote Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power, to the effect that none of the studies adequately account for the expenses that men have to bear in the wake of a divorce.