Bettina Arndt (who, incidentally, has been married twice herself) comes out with a rather conservative take on the question of the role model effect of Julia Gillard being in a de facto relationship. I agree with all of it. Some extracts:
It's fine for Gillard - a 48-year-old woman - to live with her bloke. Yet as a popular role model for women, her lifestyle choice may influence other women into making big mistakes about their lives.
Cohabitation produces two groups of losers among women and children. Most women want to have children - Gillard is an exception - and some miss out after wasting their primary reproductive years in a succession of live-in relationships which look hopeful but go nowhere, leaving them childless and partnerless as they hit 40….
While the de facto lifestyle leads some women to miss out on having children, others are taking the risk of becoming parents despite these unstable relationships. A growing proportion of children is now born to de facto couples - up from less than 3 per cent in 1975 to 12 per cent in 2000, according to data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey.
It is often assumed these children will provide the glue to keep de facto relationships together, but sadly this is not so. David de Vaus, a sociology professor from La Trobe University, found cohabiting couples who have children are more like to break up than married parents, increasing their risk of the negative impacts of family breakdown.
She then makes this good point:
Yes, I used to like that about John Howard. We all knew Paul Keating was personally conservative on the matter of gay marriage, for example, but he was politically constrained from saying it out loud. No such problem for John Howard.Politicians today rarely question social trends, even when all the evidence is they are having negative social consequences. John Howard was the rare exception, when he went into bat for a child's rights to a father in the debate over single mothers and IVF.
As for Julia: I think it is fair to say that very few people would take her relationship status as a reason for not voting for her. However, it should be no shock, and a matter of social benefit, if she did marry her partner now or soon after winning an election. I mean, she would be simply following a pattern that many others have, and I don’t see that it should be seen as a betrayal of feminist principles. The fact that it would annoy some feminists is just an added benefit as far as I am concerned.
4 comments:
what a bloody long bow to draw. one of the stupidest things I ever read. who are these morons who take their cues from celebrities on whether to marry or not? they shouldn't be encouraged to breed in the first place so all's well that ends well. And more to the point, perhaps these relationships don't do so well because of self-selection effects - people inclined to postpone marriage aren't serious about the whole thing anyway. this article really shows up the intellectual uselessness of pop sociologists and psychologists
Jason
The self selection thing may well be true, but isn't it possible that undergoing the process of marrying may well have the effect of making them take their relationship more seriously? In fact, isn't that the "conservative argument" for gay marriage, which I think you agree with?
If you think gay marriage will make a cultural change towards longer relationships amongst gay couples, you presumably would think marriage may work on individual straight couples too. (I personally don't think it will work on gay men because of their general attitude to sex, as was discussed at Andrew Norton's blog recently.)
Anyway, if it was up to me, not being of any particularly libertarian persuasion, I would be happy for government policy to encourage marriage, especially by those having children, by still giving that legal status some advantages over de facto relationships.
With no fault divorce (with which I have no issue) there is very rarely a reason why couples cannot marry civilly to get the potential benefits of that status.
I know this is not going to happen, partly due to government self interest in reducing social security benefits for those who cohabit, and partly for the whole modern sense of entitlement and political correctness by which no one is supposed to hold a view as to what sort of relationship it is appropriate for government to encourage.
So, about the only sliver of hope I can have that a Labor government in particular will encourage marriage is by the example of its leadership. Such example probably does influence some people in subtle ways, and it's too intellectually elitist, and dismissive of the subtleties of cultural influences generally, to say that such people are dumb.
umm steve hetetrosexual couples already have the *option* to get married if they are sufficiently committed. gays don't. that's the whole point of the gay marriage debate.
if despite having this option, they still don't do so, then the self selection issue kicks in. it would then make sense that those who aren't really committed, accidentally or erroneously having a child might push things over the edge.
it would also make sense that those hetero couples who don't intend to have children will self-select not to opt into marriage.
so Arndt's article is just dopey on two counts
1) failing to distinguish causation from correlation
2) assuming that there is some statistically significant proportion of the population that take their marriage cues from sitting Prime Ministers. I mean gimme a break!
with gays, they don't currently have this option. those who are straight acting aren't being accepted into the institution despite being straight acting. they may better give vent to their straight acting tendencies if they were. I think this may account for the straight acting effects of allowing marriage to straight acting gays.
The fact that Gillard has decided not to have kids is indeed a reason I think even the very conservative will not get so uptight about her relationship status. Conservatives do think marriage is very much to do with procreation, after all.
I think that smart people with their own firm social views tend to underestimate cultural influences on others. (I've told the Pulp Fiction and drugs story before; I won't repeat it.)
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