My babies! I’m so happy! It’s springtime. Love is in the air. And today’s links are 
Has Virginity Lost Its Virtue? Relationship Stigma Associated With Being a Sexually Inexperienced Adult via DrZhana. I think the sex-positive community needs to talk more about the stigmatization of non-sex.
Via Peter Neiger: “With sex at least twice a week, 82 percent of 35-to-39-year-old women conceive within a year, compared with 86 percent of 27-to-34-year-olds. (The fertility of women in their late 20s and early 30s was almost identical—news in and of itself.)”
Microbes can play games with the mind
If you’re curious about why innovation is my boyfriend (via another one of my boyfriends).
?Polyamory Made My Marriage Better—and It Might Make My Divorce Better, Too
Poly people tend to view divorce in a less binary way than mainstream culture does. Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who studies polyamory, has written about how, in contrast to a dominant worldview in which a “successful” relationship is one which is “the two people involved remain together at all costs,” polyamorists have a broader and more flexible take on the demise of relationships. “Poly people,” she writes, “ultimately define their relationships as both voluntary and utilitarian, in that they are designed to meet participants’ needs.” We understand that the relationship might have to change when needs change. One of the people Sheff interviewed called this “moving apart without blame.” Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow, with her “conscious uncoupling,” was onto something after all.
In this regard, monogamous couples could stand to learn a thing or two from those of us forging an alternative path. For Rob and me, our guess is that having spent the last few years living poly will actually make dissolving the husband-and-wife phase of our relationship a lot gentler than if we hadn’t taken that left turn at Sexytown.
Disappointing, to say the least:
Since I started researching conservatism and then libertarianism, I’ve just found that they make a lot of points that as a social scientist I have to agree, “Oh, that’s a good point.”
The overriding importance of family stability, if you’re raising kids with incredible family stability, they just come out better. In fact they’re much more likely to rise economically than if they’re raised with any sort of family instability. So I think I’m more conservative about family arrangements, precisely because of these second- and third-level effects. Let’s see, what else? I haven’t really changed my views of drugs, I still am pretty pro?legalization and decriminalization.
I guess in a way I’ve become more libertarian, but with a real sense of respect for what social conservatives say about family stability.
-My man Jon Haidt in a conversation with Tyler Cowen via Mercatus. I think Haidt has a point about liberals giving short-shrift to the importance of stability. However, it’s not AT ALL clear that conservative values lead to greater family stability in practice. Let’s look at one of the biggest, most common disruptors of family stability: Divorce. Early marriage is a conservative value that actually demonstrably increases divorce rates. In fact liberals tend to marry later and have longer marriages. There is no evidence to suggest non-monogamy could lower divorce rates because it hasn’t been studied, but it stands to reason that it could. I think the focus needs to be on stable families, not necessarily what those families look like.
This is a Trump thinkpiece worth reading.
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