I realize Ross’ defense of circumcision in response to Andrew Sullivan’s most recent attack on the practice is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but to the extent that it’s serious, it’s not all that cogent. First, there’s the aesthetics. I’ve heard preferences in both directions here, but frankly, I’m not sure why this should cut in either direction […]

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I was just chatting with an old friend about attitudes toward marriage and children. I’ve always understood the desire for these things (to borrow a bit of philosophy jargon) in the de re, but not the de dicto sense. That is, I understand full well being crazy about a specific person with whom you’d like […]

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CEI’s Eli Lehrer weighs in on the lawsuit against eHarmony, the just-for-straights dating site which claims its elaborate matchmaking algorithm just wasn’t designed with gay couples in mind. He writes: It strikes me that there’s an even broader point: A great many of the costs of discrimination exist because it takes place in the physical […]

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Dave Weigel spots a… telling line in Michael Medved’s prose aneurysm in response to a new California policy of allowing conjugal visits between gay inmates an their partners: Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism. Close the newspaper and just […]

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Jesse Walker and Laure both flag a New York Times story reporting (apropos of last week’s post) on how amateur porn is doing to the porn industry what folks have long predicted (whether inaccurately or prematurely remains to be seen) blogs would do to punditry: Displacing the professional product with vast amounts of amateur substitutes […]

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Tyler Cowen muses: [R]aising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, yet few of us choose life partners on that basis. The film [Knocked Up] suggests that a random allocation might be better than selecting a partner on the grounds of smarts, common interests, attractiveness, how good he or she makes […]

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Naomi Wolf’s ridiculous, blissfully data-free piece on how teh pr0n is leaving guys uninterested in actual sex with real women has already come in for a well–deserved bludgeoning, but a couple more points worth making. First, the idea that guys are opting for unrealistic fantasy-women over the genuine article seems to run counter to the […]

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There’s plenty of glib, paint-by-numbers conservative fnord-phrases in this Kay Hymowitz piece on artificial insemination—”pretending nature doesn’t exist” and other such vacuities—but conspicuous by its absence is that pro-lifer favorite “life unworthy of life.” I say this because for all Hymowitz’s criticism of policies that enable small numbers of single women to bear children via […]

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Garance Franke-Ruta provoked a spectacular display of progressive unity a few weeks back when she suggested, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, that the age of consent for women participating in porn be raised to 21. Basically everyone agreed that this was a horrendous idea that both infantilized women and—since even Garance agreed […]

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I’d meant to say something earlier about this odd article in the weekend’s New York Times about how some people generally supportive of abortion rights are voicing discomfort about the combination of abortion with genetic testing as a mechanism of filtering out fetuses with serious congenital defects or disabilities. But the article is awfully vague […]

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