at Verily:

In 1960, the median age of marriage for women was 20. Today, it is 27.

While our grandmothers had no qualms about walking down the aisle in their early twenties, today anyone thinking about marriage under the age of 25 gets a lot of advice about not rushing into things. Marrying young is often seen as scary or stupid―or both.

What makes early marriage so frightening?

Part of the answer lies in that a marriage, as personal as it is, influences and is influenced by its environment. If you have a divorced co-worker, you are 55 percent more likely to get divorced than if you didn’t work alongside a divorcée. We take our cues from one another; which means that in a culture of divorce we are more cautious about marriage, and in a single society, we are more cautious about marrying young.

In her essay “‘There but for the Grace’: The Ethics of Bystanders to Divorce,” scholar M. Christian Green reflects on how divorce affects not only divorcées, but everyone else, too. But in my experience, the inverse is also true. Good marriages have a way of sharing some of their strength with the rest of us.

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with Julie Klam:

…Friendships, to many of us, are part of the fundamental infrastructure of our emotional lives, and when Klam and I spoke about the book, she made exactly this comparison when she explained why she wanted to write about friendship in the first place. Her inspiration wasn’t gang lunches or slumber parties — it was urban decay.

She came up with the idea for Friendkeeping, she says, while sitting on the George Washington Bridge contemplating the fact that she keeps hearing that the New York City bridges are all going to collapse because they’re not being cared for.

“That’s kind of the same thing with a lot of friendships,” she says, “where you don’t really put that effort in until either you’re celebrating something or something awful happens.” Friendships, like bridges, need upkeep, and as with bridges, sometimes it doesn’t happen and then you’re looking at something that can’t hold you up when you need it to. She realized, too, that it wasn’t an area that was being written about very much in a way that spoke to her experiences. She found a lot of clichés, but not a lot of insight. “Everything that I had read about friendships was always … platitudes about, you know, ‘friends are like flowers and you have to water them’ or whatever. Or the T-shirts with the koala bear and the flower and the ‘Friends are…’.”

So I put the question to her: Why is there so much writing about so many aspects of our lives — love, sex, money, family, careers — and so little about the inner workings of friendships that are so central to so many people’s lives? Maybe, Klam theorizes, it’s because friendships seem disposable and interchangeable when you look at them like an efficiency expert. “There’s some sort of thing about, like, ‘Well, if you don’t like the friend, just don’t be friends with them.’ Rather than the idea of working things out.” Working things out, as you know if you read other kinds of relationship books, is the usual ideal outcome, rather than bolting when trouble strikes.

In a way, this theory reminds me of what we talked about here earlier this week: that the very compelling fragility of friendships comes from the fact that there’s such a low barrier to exit. You don’t have to work on anything if you don’t want to. Indeed, Klam says when she wrote the book proposal, she realized that in theory, there were easy answers to all the hard questions she had about friends. “You could possibly write every question that I posed and answer it: ‘Well, just don’t be friends with them anymore.’ ‘If you don’t like their spouse, don’t hang out with them.’ So there was less of a sort of [concern for] how to work through things … just because you know you really can walk away.”

And of course, that’s what makes keeping up with your friends complicated. When I ask her what she considers the big challenge of adult friendships, she emphasizes that it’s legitimately hard to make time for them, because they’re not, you know, mandatory. And the older you get, the more things in your life are mandatory.

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I’m excerpting the relevant bit:

Lastly, what’s your favorite “conservative”/right-wing film of the year so far?

None of the usual suspects are great, frankly — I don’t like affirmative action in any of its forms, and I won’t pretend that these films are better than they are. (Feel free to cite from my past writings linked to below.) For Greater Glory was a resolutely old-fashioned historical kinda-Western drama about the Cristero War in Mexico that could imagine Henry Hathaway or John Sturges making it in the 1950s; I graded it 6/10. The documentaries U.N. Me was watchable and sometimes funny but too sloppily edited and constructed (5/10).

There are great movies out there for conservatives and religious folks to love (all these films I’ll name are among my annual Top 10), but they’re not the kinds of films like this that yourself and others ask me about. If you want a film portraying a loving Christian marriage, the best film of the year is The Planet of Snail, a South Korean documentary about a blind artist and his handicapped wife that never played outside a couple of festivals and NY/LA. The best film about fatherlessness and gratuitous grace is not Courageous but the year’s best film overall — The Kid with a Bike by Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. I said on a Christian board that I wanted to drag the Kendricks to that film and slap them upside the head with it.

For anti-liberal, anti-PC satire, Sasha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator is unbeatable in the rude-and-crude school, while Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress has a more high-toned take on the subject of virtue in a post-PC college world. Great dramas about the damage of adultery and heedless Romanticism include Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea and Romanian film Tuesday, After Christmas, but there’s no point in recommending either of these films to someone who’s gonna be offended by a boob shot or a genital glimpse.

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reports:

Deanna Medina and Ever Gutierrez of Los Angeles have been engaged for three years and have lived together for 12.

They also have three kids together, ages 17 months to 11 years.

While more of the USA’s cohabiters are childless (59% — almost 9 million — as of March, when Census counted current cohabiters), they’re not the only ones driving the rise in cohabitation. There are also 6.3 million who, like Medina and Gutierrez, have kids and make up the other 41%. About half of those have kids from a partner’s previous relationship, and half are children from the cohabiting relationship, researchers say.

“One kind of cohabitation that people have overlooked is the growing number of cohabiting young adults with children,” says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Demographers think almost all the increase in non-marital childbearing has been to cohabiting couples.”

About 63% of cohabiters have never been married, but 29% are divorced and 5% separated, according to an exclusive analysis of new Census data for USA TODAY. It also found that education is a factor.

“We’ve seen this sharp increase in cohabitation in recent years, but it’s really been those with less education that have been driving that trend,” says demographer Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, which did the analysis.

“Almost half of these cohabiters have a high school degree or less,” he says.

Research presented this week at a meeting at the National Center for Health Statistics shows similar findings. Among 5,180 women ages 18-36, most had cohabited, finds one study. But those with a college degree were “less likely to cohabit overall and more likely to get married if they do cohabit,” says lead author Sharon Sassler, a social demographer at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Of those who cohabit, more than half are in the first six months of the start of the sexual relationship, the study found. But for college-educated women, about 30% take two or more years to move in with a partner.

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in the Huffington Post; and I realize this may appear tangential for Kinship & Culture, but volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center has made me see how many of these issues, especially the incarceration rate and the need to reintegrate people who have served their time, are crucial family-values issues for the most vulnerable families. These are marriage and fatherhood issues.

…Former offenders struggle when they leave prison. Sociologists Bruce Western and Devah Prager have conducted experiments (PDF) in which they’ve sent trained testers to apply for job openings. Some were told to check the box on applications indicating that they had a criminal record. The applicants were dressed similarly, and had identical levels of experience. The results? White applicants with a criminal record were half as likely to get callbacks as applicants without a record. Blacks with a criminal record were two-thirds less likely. Former offenders earn 40 percent less than someone with a similar background and experience, but no record. And they’re far less likely to increase their income over time.

An arrest without a conviction can be devastating, too. A check in the “Have you ever been arrested?” box is a handy way for an employer to winnow down a stack of job applications. Why take the risk? In New York City, half a million people are stopped and questioned by police each year without probable cause. In some communities, nine in ten residents have been stopped. Aggressive stop-and-frisk policies have lead to thousands of arrests of people who have done nothing wrong, or have been tricked by police into committing a misdemeanor.

According to Western’s research, as of 2008 about 2.6 million children had a parent in prison or jail, and by age 17, a quarter of black children will have father who has done time. Children of incarcerated parents are more likely to be depressed, get into trouble at school, and drop out of school entirely.

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in the New York Times:

…Reflexively, the affluent, ambitious parent is always talking, pointing out, explaining: Mommy is looking for her laptop; let’s put on your rain boots; that’s a pigeon, a sand dune, skyscraper, a pomegranate. The child, in essence, exists in continuous receipt of dictation.

Things are very different elsewhere on the class spectrum. Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked him what he considered the greatest challenge on the first day of kindergarten each year. He answered, without a second’s hesitation: “Word deficit.” As it happens, in the ’80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4.

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reports:

Sometimes, after a long, stressful day, there’s nothing more comforting than crawling into bed with your significant other and falling asleep in their arms.

But what if you don’t have anyone to cuddle with in the first place? If you’re in Japan, you might think to go to a soapland or some other kind of brothel, but then you’d have to deal with all that sex when you really just want to close your eyes and rest in the warmth of another’s body.

But wait! Before you resign yourself to another lonely night of shedding tears on your Rei Ayanami dakimakura, why not stop by Soineya, Japan’s first “co-sleeping specialty shop,” where customers can pay to sleep in the arms of a beautiful girl—with no strings attached.

Soineya (literally, “sleep together shop”) opened its doors on Sept 25 in none other than Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics district, hub of otaku culture and birthplace of other eccentric establishments like maid cafés. Soineya defines itself as a “co-sleeping specialty shop,” which we’re going to denominate “cuddle cafe” because it has a better ring to it.

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blogs:

A Pennsylvania appeals court has overturned a trial court order giving custody of two children to their maternal grandparents rather than their father.  The trial court penalized the father for his past polyamorous relationship.  The case, V.C. and C.B. v. J.E.B. and C.C., is the first one I can remember using the phrase “polyamory” or discussing the practice without prejudgment.

The father, C.C., and the mother, J.E.B., never married.  The two resided with the mother’s husband, and the three had a polyamorous relationship.  In June 2007, when the children, A.B. and Z.B., were approximately two and three years old, the older child sustained a spiral fracture to her leg, prompting an abuse investigation by the New Jersey Department of Youth and Family Services.  While the investigation was pending, the children were placed with the mother’s parents.  Although the agency determined there was no abuse in about six months, the children remained with their grandparents another nine months, until September 2008. (more…)

reports:

Iranian ministers have fretted for years about a “marriage crisis” in the country.

The average age when people wed has climbed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, causing concern among officials, as well as family elders, that Iranians may stray from a traditional pious path by staying single too long.

Now a government minister says the country needs to legalize matchmaking websites to nudge Iranians to get hitched at younger ages. Mohammad Abbasi, the country’s sports and youth minister, recently said he hoped to come up with rules for what may amount to a sort of Match.com or eHarmony suited for the Islamic Republic.

“To tackle this problem, we have to find new solutions,” Abbasi said, according to Khabar Online news.

Official statistics show the average age that Iranian men marry has risen from 20 to 28 in the last three decades. Iranian women now typically become wives between 24 and 30, five years later than a decade ago, and perilously close to spinsterhood in this society. …

Some illegal websites for Iranian singles are blocked by the government, making them accessible only with technology that dodges the restrictions. Many of the sites are geared to helping Iranians find partners for sex through “temporary marriage” rather than spouses.

Also troubling to the government, divorce rates surged to a national average of 16.3% last year, jumping more than 4 percentage points. Center for Demographic Studies deputy minister Shahla Kazemipour bemoaned the figure as “an alarming development.” In Tehran, 1 in 3 marriages ended in divorce.

Scholars have tied the trends to several changes: Women were urged to have fewer children during a population crisis decades ago, causing the most dramatic drop in fertility ever seen. As the change stuck, women became more likely to pursue careers and other interests. Women also started enrolling in Iranian universities at higher rates than men.

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at RandomHouse.ca (via Andrew Sullivan):

…In fact, comparing beer commercials from the Ukraine and the U.S. led Lantolf and Bobrova to an unexpected finding that highlights differences in how Americans and Ukrainians think about people. In the Ukrainian commercials, the study notes, “people do not become friends by sharing beer; rather beer drinking occurs among individuals who are already established as friends, which entails a close and trusting relationship.” The people drinking beer together are described as druh, which Dr. Lantolf translates as being like the English concept of “best friend,” rather than tovarysch, which translates as “comrade” or “acquaintance.”

By contrast, Dr. Lantolf notes that “friend” has become a very loose term in English; we call someone we met on an airplane half an hour ago a friend. “We speculate,” he writes with Bobrova, “that these commercials, most likely unintentionally, display an aspect of the American concept of friendship as superficial and transitory.”

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blogs:

A new Bureau of Justice Statistics Report by Erica Smith and Jessica Truman shows a significant decline in the Prevalence Of Violent Crime Among Households With Children, 1993-2010. The study is based on the large-scale annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and it differs from standard victimization reports in its explicit focus on households with kids.

The figure below shows the percentage of households with children in which at least one member age 12 or older experienced nonfatal violent victimization (rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault) in the previous year. This does not necessarily mean that the children witnessed the violence or that they were even aware of it, but it does give us a pretty good sense of whether kids are living with household members (age 12 or over) who are themselves experiencing violence. And the NCVS provides the sort of high-quality nationally representative survey data that are useful in charting big-picture trends. According to the report, this rate dropped from 12.6 percent of children to 3.9 percent in the past 18 years (the blip in 2006 is due to a shift in methodology). That’s about a 69 percent decline since 1993.

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in Foreign Policy:

If the age of men has ended, nobody told Asia. True, across the continent women are obtaining degrees at higher rates — in some cases outpacing men — and bucking traditional gender roles. Yet the past few decades have brought significant setbacks as well as breakthroughs. Men’s wages are now growing faster than women’s wages in China. Japan and South Korea have famously thick glass ceilings. Men dominate demographically as well: China has an estimated 20 million to 30 million surplus men, and India is not far behind. In 2020s China and northwest India, men of marriageable age will outnumber their female counterparts by some 15 to 20 percent. Together with Albania, the two countries rank dead last in the World Economic Forum’s 2011 Global Gender Gap report’s health and survival index. The very continent on which women are pushing boundaries and excelling at higher education is also a place plagued by workplace discrimination, child brides, and sex-selective abortion. (more…)

breaks out some home truths:

…Today, I’m going to tell you why this article makes me want to stab someone with a rusty spork. …

Guess what, dude? Other people laughing at you and judging you doesn’t give you the freedom to do the same. If you’ve forgotten that whole “turn the other cheek” thing, how about trying to remember “if I have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal?” This article is so utterly devoid of love, from beginning to end, that if I weren’t a Christian it would serve as Exhibit A for why I don’t want to be one. As it is, it’s currently serving as Exhibit A for why my fellow-Christians make me want to vomit.

Most of you know a bit about my history. Drug addiction, unwed pregnancy, conversion. If EWTN made soap operas, mine would be the story to tell. But it wasn’t a soap opera. It was my life. It is my life. It is my past, who I was, what led me to who I am. It is the shifting, sandy ground that the Ogre and I built our future on. Over time we managed to shore it up and make it a solid foundation for our family, but that process was long and painful.

And you know what else? It was embarrassing. Humiliating, even. The author of this article has no idea what it’s like to be judged. Sure, he had people make fun of him for not having sex. That’s not being judged. That’s other people being stupid. I had people make legitimate judgments about the kind of person I was, judgments I had to swallow, because they were true. I had people make fun of me for being a pregnant, unwed drug addict. I had people refuse to baptize our daughter and try and keep the Ogre and I from getting married in the Church. I had people make fun of me for wanting to have a wedding when my daughter was a year and a half old, because “what’s the point?” I had members of my own family tell me they were embarrassed that I would wear a wedding dress when I didn’t deserve to wear one. Because I had already screwed up. Not, mind you, by having sex…but by having a child. …

I’m sure the author would insist that our wedding was just “one big party” because we had already had sex, because we had a child together, because we lived together.

It wasn’t. Our wedding was a sacrament. It was the moment when the Ogre and I stood before God and man and swore to give our lives to one another, until death, come what may. It was the moment when God joined our eternal souls, when we became one instead of two, when all the grace of the sacrament of marriage was poured out upon us. It was the moment that truly began our lives together, the moment that we had worked toward, the moment that gave us a foundation for all the difficult years to come. Our wedding, the actual sacrament, is the most beautiful, most cherished memory of my life. The reception, on the other hand, was horrible. It was a mess, a blur, it was disorganized, people were fighting, people drank too much, the cake got cut at the wrong time, the music was awful, and I couldn’t wait for it to end. I can look back now and laugh about that, because the party wasn’t the point. The point was the sacrament, the union of our souls.

more, and you really should read the whole thing.

Toronto Sun leads with “Same-sex couples choosing marriage”:

More Canadian same-sex couples than ever are tying the knot.

Figures from the 2011 census released Wednesday show the prevalence of same-sex couples in this country jumped 42.4% between 2006 and 2011.

There are now 64,575 same-sex families living in Canada – 43,560 of those common-law couples and 21,015 married couples.

Same-sex couples are walking down the aisle at a much higher rate than their opposite-sex counterparts, with the number of couples made up of a man and a woman increasing a modest 2.9% since 2006.

But there’s a caveat.

Census manager Marc Hamel noted the agency may have overestimated same-sex married couples in Canada by up to 4,500, possibly due to confusion over the census questions.

The issue came to light when Statistics Canada data crunchers began noticing higher rates than average of reported same-sex marriage, especially in smaller communities. …

But same-sex couples are much less likely than opposite-sex couples to have children: less than 10%, compared to almost 50%, respectively. Lesbian couples make up the large majority (80%) of same-sex couples with children.

Still, same-sex couples are a tiny portion of couples tallied by StatsCan in 2011, accounting for just 0.8% of all partnerships in Canada.

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and Ottawa Citizen goes with “Canada’s families shifting from marriage to common-law”:

The sanctity of marriage as the bedrock of the Canadian family is steadily eroding as the country’s social fabric evolves, new census data released Wednesday reveals.

Instead, although married couples are still the norm — about two thirds of families — their numbers are lagging and only increased by 3.1 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

In contrast, the number of common-law couples rose by 13.9 per cent and lone-parent families rose by eight per cent over the same period.

The shift means that common-law couples now account for 16.7 per cent of all families, and lone-parent families now represent 16.3 per cent of the total.

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at Slate:

She had grown up in a family of four sisters. She liked sewing, baking, and doing hair and makeup. She hoped one day to share these interests with a little girl whom she could dress in pink.

Simpson, a labor and delivery nurse at a hospital north of Toronto, was surprised when her first child, born in 2002, was a boy. That’s okay, she thought. The next one will be a girl.

Except it wasn’t. Two years later, she gave birth to another boy.

Desperate for a baby girl, Simpson and her husband drove four hours to a fertility clinic in Michigan. Gender selection is illegal in Canada, which is why the couple turned to the United States. They paid $800 for a procedure that sorts sperm based on the assumption that sperm carrying a Y chromosome swim faster in a protein solution than sperm with an X chromosome do.

Simpson was inseminated with the slower sperm that same day. Fifteen weeks later, she asked a colleague at the hospital to sneak in an after-hours ultrasound. The results felt like a brick landing on her stomach: another boy.

“I lay in bed and cried for weeks,” said Simpson, now 36, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy. She took a job in the operating room so she would no longer have to work with women who were giving birth to girls.

Simpson and her husband talked about getting an abortion, but she decided to continue with the pregnancy. In the meantime, she looked for a way to absolutely guarantee that her next child would be the daughter she had always dreamed about. She discovered an online community of women just like her, confiding deep-seated feelings of depression over giving birth to boys. The Web forums mentioned a technique offered in the United States that would guarantee her next baby would be a girl. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars, money Simpson and her husband did not have. Simpson waited until her third son was born. Then she began to make some phone calls.

The conventional wisdom has always been this: Given a choice, couples would prefer sons. That has certainly been the case in places like China and India, where couples have used pregnancy screening to abort female fetuses. But in the United States, a different kind of sex selection is taking place: Mothers like Simpson are using expensive reproductive procedures so they can select girls.

Just over a decade ago, some doctors saw the potential profits that could be made from women like Simpson—an untapped market of young, fertile mothers. These doctors trolled online forums, offering counseling and services. They coined the phrase “family balancing” to make sex selection more palatable. They marketed their clinics by giving away free promotional DVDs and setting up slick websites.

These fertility doctors have turned a procedure originally designed to prevent genetic diseases into a luxury purchase akin to plastic surgery. Gender selection now rakes in revenues of at least $100 million every year. The average cost of a gender selection procedure at high-profile clinics is about $18,000, and an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 procedures are performed every year. Fertility doctors foresee an explosion in sex-selection procedures on the horizon, as couples become accustomed to the idea that they can pay to beget children of the gender they prefer. …

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of the Motley Fool:

In my years as a financial advisor, I counseled many young couples regarding their financial matters. In that time, I never heard a newlywed couple say they wish they’d spent more money on their wedding. In fact, a year or two after the wedding day euphoria dissipates and couples start thinking about the rest of their lives together, most couples wished they’d spent far less cash on their big day. Let’s face it: A wedding day is just one in the long calendar of our lives.

A survey of 18,000 U.S. brides married last year found that their average wedding cost $27,000. And according to Carley Roney, co-founder of The Knot, “In 2011, 20% of U.S. couples spent more than $30,000, and 11% spent more than $40,000 on their weddings.” And that isn’t even including the honeymoon that, according to Bankrate.com, costs roughly $5,000 on average.

With financial problems cited as one of the biggest causes of divorce, draining our piggybanks on our wedding day holds massive potential for starting marriage on the wrong foot. Instead of plunking down a whopping $32,000 on average (wedding plus honeymoon), let’s see what financial options we open up by spending far less.

Let’s assume you and your spouse-to-be spend half the average amount on your big day and save the other half. Regardless of your financial goals, $16,000 is a great head start. Consider how this hypothetical savings can make an enormous dent in the six most common financial goals I heard from young couples.

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reports:

A sizable share of the U.S. organizations recruiting egg donors online don’t adhere to ethical guidelines, including failing to warn of the risks of the procedure and offering extra payment for traits like good looks, according to a U.S. study.

Women are recruited to donate eggs to fulfill a growing demand by couples seeking in-vitro fertilization (IVF), but a number of websites seeking to recruit them ignore standards set by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM).

“I would argue that there needs to be more attention from ASRM about these agencies, because you don’t want these women exploited,” said Robert Klitzman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and lead author of the study that appeared in the journal Fertility & Sterility.

Ethical standards set forth by the ASRM specify that donors should be at least 21 years old, and those between ages 18 and 20 should receive a psychiatric evaluation first.

Also, women are not to be paid for their eggs but compensated, equally, for their time. Donor traits such as college grades or previous successful donations should not result in higher payment.

But abiding by the recommendations is voluntary, and the guidelines carry no legal authority, though ASRM will sanction members who do not adhere to the guidelines. But that doesn’t cover non-member organizations.

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at Business Insider:

“You need to keep your skills fresh,” said a commenter in a recent post about the finances of parenting, referring to the concept of a mother staying at home with the kids. “In case of death or divorce.”

I didn’t argue, but I shook my head and rolled my eyes. (I do this to avoid leaving snappy replies to people’s comments. Work with me.)

I’ve long felt that combining one’s finances with a potential, or existing, partner should be approached with the same attitude as the partnership. What point is there in marrying (or otherwise vowing your eternal love) if you don’t think it has much chance of lasting?

Naturally, death is a part of life and should be considered as a possibility. But considering divorce when deciding whether a mother should stay home with her young babies, or which partner’s career should be primary, seems counterproductive. My motto is, if you’re so concerned about divorce that you don’t think you’ll make it through babyhood, perhaps you shouldn’t be having babies.

This is not to say that certain classes of people should submit entirely to their partners, letting them make decisions and more money and all the financial House Rules. What I’d propose instead is a more sensible, trusting and ultimately relationship-friendly approach to the financial decisions of partners. I’d propose being ruled more by hope than fear. (Is that a campaign slogan, or what?) Here’s what I mean.

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The survey also found that family satisfaction varies somewhat by race and ethnicity. Nine-in-ten blacks (90%) in the lower class say they are satisfied with their family lives, compared with about eight-in-ten Hispanics (83%) and whites (79%).

(link; and this paragraph was pointed out by the bloggers at The New Inquiry)

Two links today. First, “At Stadium Club, young, professional women party while others strip,” from my hometown daily:

It’s Friday evening in D.C., and three women arrive at the Stadium Club, a converted warehouse in Northeast. It is flanked by rundown brick buildings and a gritty car repair station. Rough gravel replaces sidewalks, and the street is largely deserted. Other than the club, the only sign of life is a gas station a quarter of a mile away. Stadium is like a diamond in the rough, but in the way tarnished silverware shines when placed next to plastic spoons.

The women go inside.

“I wasn’t expecting it to be this nice,” says Rashanda Robertson, 33, an Atlanta native who’s in the city for graduate school.

Tonight is her first visit to a strip club. To her left and right are clusters of women, outnumbering the men. Women in heels. Women who teach. Women who advocate as social workers. Professional women. Heterosexual women. Women just like her.

Unlike many strip clubs — which are narrow, dark and dominated by men — Stadium, with color-changing chandeliers lighting up 14,000 square feet, has become a chic hot spot for young African American women. They host bachelorette and birthday parties here, buy rounds of drinks and chitchat while other women work the pole. The club is a bucket-list item for black yuppies. It falls somewhere between Dupont Circle day parties and concerts at The Park at 14th club. …

“Sixty percent of the club on any night is women,” Redding says.

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and here’s the New York Times, “‘The Waltons’ Meets ‘Modern Family’”:

I AM now a statistic. Earlier this summer, the United States Census Bureau reported that the number of adult children living in their parents’ households had increased by 1.2 million between 2007 and 2010. Shared households accounted for 18.7 percent of all American households in 2010, up from 17 percent in 2007. Most of those children were between age 25 and 34, but I had suddenly joined their ranks at a considerably older age.

In August 2010, as my husband, Daniel Rivkin, and I approached our 50th birthdays, we were suddenly forced to move into my parents’ home in Michigan with our three teenage children and dog. Never mind that my older brother, who had lost his job the previous year, was already in residence in one of their basement bedrooms — my parents’ three-story rambling colonial home quickly accommodated us all. …

Without the emotional support of my extended family (I also have more than a dozen cousins who live in town), I don’t know how we would have readjusted. But I also found it extremely awkward initially when new friends learned of our living arrangement.

more (and I found this link at Rod Dreher’s blog, where there are more such stories–and more discontented ones!–in the comments)