Friday, February 16, 2007

Rector-Johnson? I Didn't Know She Had A Johnson

This is all kinds of creepy and ten varieties of stupid. Patrick "F" Fagan, another right-wing sex obsessive at National Review, offers the following:

Meanwhile, their non-virgin sisters who married after they had given their virginity to someone other than their husbands were all by no means doomed to divorce, but the data indicate the majority was [sic]. From Steve Nock's research on Virginia divorces, we know that roughly two thirds were initiated by the wives. Extrapolating from Rector-Johnson's research I bet most of the wives in Nock's sample did not come to their husbands as virgins, but before marriage were already used to rejection and rejecting and to moving on to another man. This is just a hypothesis and it may be proved wrong, but checking it out will make for a very interesting study.

Apart from the sheer illiteracy of this statement -- I believe Fagan means to write the "most of the wives in Nock's sample who initiated divorces," but he's not clear -- there's the utter stupidity of the paragraph. Why is only the wife's virginity relevant to the success of the marriage? Why is the identity of the spouse initiating divorce relevant to the cause of the divorce? A wife initiating the divorce could be doing so because the husband was unfaithful -- or a hundred other reasons not involving her wanting to have sex with another man (or a woman). And many an unfaithful spouse has no interest in leaving the marriage. The identity of the spouse initiating the divorce tells us nothing about why the marriage ended.

Of course, the creepy part is that Fagan is "very interested" in studying the virginity history and sex lives of married and divorced women. Beware of phone calls from heavy breathing researchers at The Heritage Foundation.

(On the other hand, National Review has seen fit to sell advertisements accompanying Fagan's article which promise "A complete and informative guide on the art of cheating to perfection" and "Learn[ing] how to have the ultimate discreet love affair." It's nice to see free market conservatism trump "family values" conservatism for a change.)

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