The moral case for sex before marriage

 

Condemning premarital sex and promoting abstinence are not working. Lasting, loving relationships are made through intimacy

• 
• • Jill Filipovic
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 September 2012 13.30 BST

Jill Filipovic: 'People who marry early and/or hold traditional views on marriage and gender tend to have higher divorce rates and unhappier marriages.' Photograph: Corbis

Americans love to tout the value of waiting until marriage to have sex. We teach abstinence-only education in schools across the country, and even comprehensive sex-ed programs often point out that "abstinence is best." Pop stars from Britney Spears to Jessica Simpson, to the Jonas Brothers, to Miley Cyrus, to Justin Bieber routinely assert that they're waiting 'til marriage – putting them into the Good Role Model category (at least, until someone leaks a sex tape). There's a booming "purity industry", complete with jewelry, elaborate events, books, t-shirts and DVDs.

Our state and federal tax dollars have long been spent promoting "chastity". While conservative commentators are happy to assert that waiting until marriage is the best choice for everyone and people who don't wait aren't doing marriage "the right way", sex-positive liberals hesitate to say that having sex before marriage is an equally valid – if not better – choice for nearly everyone.

So here it goes: having sex before marriage is the best choice for nearly everyone.

How do I know? Well, first of all, nearly everyone has sex before marriage – 95% of Americans don't wait until their wedding night. And that's a longstanding American value. Even among folks in my grandparents' generation, nine out of ten of them had sex before they wed.

Of course, just because lots of people do a thing doesn't mean it's a good thing. But sex is. In terms of happiness, sex is better than money, and having sex once a week instead of once a month is the "happiness equivalent" of an extra $50,000 a year. People with active sex lives live longer. Sex releases stress, boosts immunities, helps you sleep and is heart-healthy.

Sex is good whether you're married or not, and certainly folks who wait until marriage can have a lot of sex once they tie the knot. But waiting until marriage often means both early marriage and conservative views on marriage and gender – and people who marry early and/or hold traditional views on marriage and gender tend to have higher divorce rates and unhappier marriages. We know that, on the other hand, there are lots of benefits to marrying later and to gender-egalitarian marriages. Couples who both work outside the home and also share housework duties have more sex. Financially independent, college-educated women who marry later in life have extremely low divorce rates.

It turns out that feminist values – not "traditional" ones – lead to the most stable marriages. And feminist views plus later marriage typically equals premarital sex.

Most adult human beings naturally desire sex. And despite the rightwing emphasis on concepts like "purity", having sex does not actually make you a dirty or "impure" person. On the contrary, sex is like most other pleasurable things in life – you can have sex in ways that are fulfilling, fun, good and generous, or you can have sex in ways that are harmful, bad and dangerous. Marriage is not, and has never been, a way to protect against the harmful, bad and dangerous potential of sex (just read the Bible if you want a few examples). Instead of fooling ourselves into thinking that waiting until marriage makes sex "good", we should focus on how ethical, responsible sexual practices – taking precautions to protect the physical and mental health of yourself and your partner; having sex that is fully consensual and focused on mutual pleasure – are part of being an ethical, responsible human being.

Sexual morality isn't about how long you wait. It's about how you treat yourself and the people you're with.

Sex, of course, isn't all ponies and rainbows. The United States has one of the highest unintended pregnancy rates in the world. We have one of the highest abortion rates. We have one of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections. But our problem with sex isn't that we're having it before marriage; it's that we've cast it as shameful and dirty. And when our collective cultural consciousness says that sex is shameful and dirty, we don't have the incentive – or the tools– to plan for sex, to see it as a positive responsibility and to make healthy sexual choices.

We're obsessed with sex on television, in music and in advertisements, but we somehow lack the ability to talk about sex as a positive, moral, pleasure-affirming choice that, like any other adult decision, comes with a set of responsibilities. And when government money is going toward telling people to just wait until marriage, we are literally funding an idea that has never worked in all of human history, instead of supporting tried-and-true policies that could mitigate the harm of a sex-obsessed, but pleasure-starved, culture.

If waiting until marriage were simply an individual choice with no political consequences or backdrop – if it were as arbitrary a marker as waiting until the third date, waiting until you knew your partner's middle name or waiting until she wore really awesome high heels – it wouldn't be a problem. And personally, I don't really care when you, as an individual, choose to have sex. As long as you feel ready and it's consensual, I say you do you. But "waiting until marriage" as a cultural phenomenon – albeit one that isn't actually happening for nearly everyone in the western world – has some nasty views about women and sex lurking behind it. Using "purity" as shorthand for "doesn't have sex" by definition means that people, and mostly women, who have sex before marriage are impure, dirty or tainted. As Jessica Valenti says in her book The Purity Myth:

"While boys are taught that the things that make them men – good men – are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs."

It's all the more troubling when those beliefs are federally funded.

From a more practical standpoint, not everyone is going to get married, or even legallycan get married. The instruction to wait forever to experience a fundamental human pleasure is pointless and cruel. And while the old adage tells women that men won't buy the cow if they can get the milk for free, if I'm buying a cow, you can bet I'm going to make sure the milk is to my liking. But our cultural view of premarital sex as morally tainted makes it harder for couples to engage in real talks about their sexual needs and desires before marrying, the same way they would talk about their religious values, how many kids they want or whether the wedding cake will be chocolate or vanilla.

Sexually frustrated marriages are both miserable and common – the inboxes of advice columnists from Dan Savage to Dear Prudie are filled with letters from couples with mismatched sex drives and bad sex lives. We'd be a lot better-off if we recognized that sex is incredibly important to a lot of people, and, for most couples, sexual compatibility is necessary for a great marriage. You really can't tell if you're sexually compatible unless you have sex. The insistence that premarital sex is dirty or perverse makes it a whole lot harder to have necessary conversations. And a worldview that positions sex as shameful and bad also isn't going to evaporate on your wedding night.

Purity peddlers construct a false universe where there are pure virgins who wait until marriage, and then there are slutty whores who are going home with different men every night of the week. The truth is that most adults will have a great many importantrelationships in their lives – some of those relationships will be romantic, and some of those will be sexual. That's a good thing: our relationships with other people, sexual or not, are how we grow, evolve and learn about ourselves. They're how we figure out what love is, what we like physically and emotionally, and how to negotiate our own needs with someone else's. Despite the claims of the wait-till-marriage camp, waiting to have sex won't protect you from heartache, frustration or love lost. But a variety of fulfilling relationships, sexual and not, will make you a more well-rounded, compassionate and self-assured person.

My point isn't that everyone should have sex before marriage – people should determine for themselves when they are ready to have sex. For the vast majority of people, that's going to be before they're married. Making that choice isn't a moral failing. On the contrary, it's often a great, healthy, overwhelmingly positive choice. Whenever you choose to have sex, the cultural message that waiting until marriage is the best choice is simply wrong. And it's wrong for almost everyone.

India's FDI Reforms - A risky strategy, born of panic

SIDDHARTH VARADARAJAN

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TOPICS

macro economicsinflation and deflation
investments
politicsnational politics

Building ‘capitalism with Indian characteristics’ means decisions cannot ignore concerns of voters and communities

As the economy slows down and the rupee wilts, Manmohan Singh has bitten the ‘reforms’ bullet with both eyes on the credit rating agencies whose negative reports have done much to dampen the ‘animal spirits’ of investors, foreign and native.

Last November, when the Congress party made a push to introduce foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail, protests in Parliament forced the government to back off. Pranab Mukherjee, who was Union Finance Minister at the time, said the FDI plan was being put on hold until a political consensus emerges.

I asked a senior member of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet what had changed between November 2011 and September 2012. There is still no consensus on FDI in retail, yet a decision has been taken to go full steam ahead. “What has changed is the value of the rupee,” the Minister replied. Every rupee that the dollar gains adds Rs 8,000 crore to India’s annualised oil import bill. “Of course, Manmohan admitted to us that not even one dollar may flow into retail or airlines right now”, he said. But this decision to open the sector and raise diesel prices has to be taken in order to stop the rupee from going into free fall.

SELF-SERVING AND DECEPTIVE

Signalling is not an unknown tactic, both in economics and in war. Signals can radiate strength and resolve, but they can also connote weakness. How will those whose ‘animal spirits’ are being propitiated look at the petard the UPA has just pinned upon the door of small retail across India? Dr. Singh must not be fooled by the applause he has garnered from editorialists, TV anchors and corporate leaders for being “tough” and “decisive”. These perfumed words may wash the stain of the Washington Post’s ink on his hands — a recent article in the American paper about his indecisiveness seems to have particularly stung the PMO — but they are self-serving and deceptive. From their vantage point in the White House or on Wall Street, the champions of American finance and enterprise see an Indian Prime Minister who is not tough but vulnerable: a man who believes the only way he can revive the economy and save the rupee is by doing what it takes to pull in foreign institutional investors and even hot money.

There is no doubt that foreign capital inflows, including FII monies, have played a big role in India’s success story over the past decade. But the problem with the Manmohan Singh strategy today is three-fold. First, it leaves untouched the very structural imbalances in the Indian economy that are responsible for the onset of the slowdown and, worse, stagflation. Second, by pinning all hopes on the revival of foreign inflows, those imbalances will most likely get exacerbated. Today, instead of being used for productive investment, capital is getting locked up in property, gold and other ‘safe’ outlets. A revival of the Sensex on the back of renewed FII interest may breathe some life into the stock market. But the risk is that this may trigger speculative demand and have no impact on the real economy. The third problem with the Prime Minister’s current approach is that the appetite of finance capital will not be sated so easily. One concession must necessarily beget another in order for the foreign investor to keep the faith in the India story.

A few weeks ago, we were told that the dilution and postponement of the General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR) on tax — an important initiative taken by Mr. Mukherjee in the last budget — is necessary so as not to scare off investment. The same reason was cited to argue against the ‘Mauritius route’ of inbound investment being shut down. Today it is said that the bait of FDI in retail must be thrown to the rating agencies, or else the rupee will sink. Sure, the rupee has recovered against the dollar by around Rs 1.50 in the past few days but what happens if and when these gains get eroded again by structural factors? Foreign investors will demand more liberalised norms for entry into banking, insurance and pension funds. They will demand a friendlier patent regime for drugs so that generics can be blocked in the name of “incremental innovation.” They will rail against the ‘wasteful’ subsidies on food and employment going to India’s poor.

MISMANAGEMENT

The slowdown of the Indian economy today is essentially due to manufacturing. This, in turn, is largely the product of poor governance and mismanagement by the Central and State governments and their systematic neglect of basic infrastructure like roads and power over a long period of time. It is also the product of corruption and rent-seeking. The sub-optimal utilisation of the railways and coastal shipping — under the influence of one private lobby or another — raises the cost of long-haul cargo and increases the inflationary impact of any diesel price hike. Thanks to poor monitoring of contractor works, road projects remain unfinished for years on end, even after the land acquisition process is over. Industry is plagued by chronic electricity shortages even as would-be power producers find it more profitable to squat on their allocated coal or gas blocks.

Why is it that the Prime Minister didn’t think about being tough and decisive when it came to allocating coal blocks through a transparent auction? Why weren’t such auctions seen as a way of plugging the fiscal deficit? And we haven’t even begun talking about the allocation of bauxite, iron ore, granite, sand and water. How much revenue is the state continuing to forego by not charging proper prices from the businessmen lucky enough to land concessions for these resources?

The other structural problem the Indian economy faces is the mismatch between a national political culture that is democratic and a model of resource allocation that resents dissent. All those who are busy denouncing Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee for her decision to withdraw support to the UPA should remember that India is perhaps the only country in the world to have established universal adult franchise and a mature parliamentary system well before it turned to building capitalism in earnest. In virtually every other country, capitalist industrialisation came first and democracy followed, or the two developed side by side. If we are to build ‘capitalism with Indian characteristics,’ this requires a reimagining of the economic decision-making process. This means decisions cannot be taken in a peremptory, top-down manner, ignoring the views and concerns of voters and communities whose land, resources and labour industry needs to utilise.

At the event to relaunch Frontline magazine on Thursday, the noted economist, Prabhat Patnaik, spoke of the social contract of fraternity which lay at the base of the freedom struggle and of the Indian state which emerged. Springing from this are five universal rights which he said were non-negotiable: the right to food, employment at a living wage, education in good quality neighbourhood schools, healthcare and pension security for the elderly and disabled. None of these rights can be realised by granting concessions and subsidies to the corporate sector.

It is the failure of the system to deliver these basic rights that lies at the root of the current crisis in Indian political economy. And the current political crisis is also a reflection of the same deficit.

LAUDABLE

On Friday, Ms Banerjee delivered on her threat to withdraw support to the UPA. She deserves applause, if only for being one of the few politicians to stick to her stand even at the cost of surrendering her share of power in Delhi. Her other faults need not detain us today — most notably her intolerance. Nor should too much time be spent wondering whether the UPA government will survive her departure. It will survive, and do so handsomely, thanks to the outside support it receives and will continue to receive from the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. The Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is in no position to face a snap poll, whatever L.K. Advani may say or want, nor is the Left. In the weeks and months ahead, there will be skirmishes in the Lok Sabha and some moments of tension too. But Dr. Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi — who have proved to be superb tacticians — will survive the bumpy journey to 2014.

What happens after that, of course, is anyone’s guess. It is one thing to master the tactics of survival on the battlefield, and quite another to have a strategy that can win a war. No Congress minister sees the party winning more than 150 seats if general elections were to be held today. Dr. Singh hopes to compensate for this dwindling public support by courting investors. This constituency, of course, is happy to be courted. Whether they deliver what the Prime Minister wants is the 272 seat question.

Tuition fees: Nick Clegg should come clean about what really happened

The Lib Dem leader campaigned on a promise to abolish tuition fees but confidential papers show he had no such intention

• 
• • Rob Wilson
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 September 2012 15.15 BST

Nick Clegg speaking at Oxford Brookes University before the 2010 general election. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Nick Clegg has gone through some of the biggest highs and lows of any politician in recent years. During the 2010 general election campaign he was briefly as popular as wartime leader Winston Churchill and commentators talked about his "Obama-esque" poll ratings. For a short time Clegg and his inner circle thought seriously about the prospect of becoming prime minister in a Lib-Lab pact, having (they hoped) received a higher percentage of the general election vote than Labour.

It was a serious possibility, given that Labour was pushed into third place in a number of polls and the Liberal Democrats hoped to poll more than 100 seats. Of course it had evaporated by the end of the campaign and the Lib Dem leader was left with fewer seats, wounded pride and depression. He was devastated by the final result.

Next, the high of negotiating his party into government and himself as deputy prime minister, was rewarded with the low of a dramatic drop-off in the Lib Dem poll rating. Part of the reason was what was considered "the party's treachery" over tuition fees.

The Lib Dems had gone into the election promising to abolish tuition fees over two parliaments, while the two big parties had kicked the ball into the long grass through the Brown review, while privately recognising an increase in fees was highly likely. The party targeted university campuses with their campaign to abolish fees and its MPs and Clegg signed the NUS pledge not to vote for a rise in parliament. Clegg even made a direct appeal to students through a video, again making a promise to students about his party's intentions.

What students and potential voters did not know is that months before the general election David Laws, Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander and Clegg had met in secret as part of their preparations and decided that the abolition of tuition fees was not a priority for the party. This senior group had for some time been taking seriously the likelihood of a hung parliament and were meticulous in their preparations. In making their plans, the Lib Dems knew with certainty they would not be in government alone.

Thanks to confidential Liberal Democrat papers passed to me as part of my research for my book Five Days to Power, the evolution on the party's negotiating position is clear. By March 2010 the party had come to the clear position that the Lib Dems would not waste political capital pushing for the abolition of tuition fees. It was clear and unambiguous. This was a totemic party policy and it was to be ruthlessly sacrificed without any attempt to salvage it. The document said: "On tuition fees we should seek agreement on part-time students and leave the rest. We will have clear yellow water with the other [parties] on raising the tuition fee cap, so let us not cause ourselves more headaches."

With these words the full extent of the Lib Dem political calculation being made becomes clear. The party would gain its benefit from its public position vis-a-vis the other parties, but privately fighting for their key general election pledge was always a non-starter. Even more than two years later, I still find the level of cynicism involved quite shocking. The party's MPs and candidates were not told of the strategy.

So Clegg's apology this week is welcome. He is right, he should not have made the promises he did on tuition fees – they were unaffordable and he knew that. He is right his party had become irresponsible in opposition, making promises it knew it could never honour. The Lib Dems were well known for saying one thing is one area and the opposite in another and that culture had seeped into the party's DNA, hence its "treachery" on fees. But the Lib Dem leadership should not try to rewrite history. What the leadership did at the 2010 general election was pretty cynical and calculated. He knew he would not fight to abolish fees but said he would. This also requires an apology to the public and probably to the Liberal Democrat party as a whole, who were not aware of the leadership's position.

It is welcome that Clegg now realises his party needs to grow up and to turn its back on being a party of perpetual opposition and frivolous chancers. But he needs to do it with the full and open recognition of past mistakes, not a selective narrative that is historically inaccurate.

Justice and security bill is designed to stop disclosure of intelligence secrets

After recent embarrassments, the government wants to ensure no intelligence information emerges in civil court hearings again

• Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Cobain
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 September 2012 14.38 BST

The government has tried to assuage opponents by keeping the relatively liberal Ken Clarke in charge of the bill. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

The justice and security bill is the direct result of evidence that emerged in court supporting allegations that MI5 and MI6 knew about the torture or inhuman and degrading treatment meted out by the CIA to terror suspects, including British citizens and residents, notably Binyam Mohamed.

The high court, later backed by senior judges in the court of appeal, ruled that information the CIA had passed to MI5 and MI6 should be disclosed. Washington was furious. The British government, and in particular David Miliband, the foreign secretary at the time, was deeply embarrassed.

There was a danger of further incriminating evidence emerging in court as UK citizens and residents who were held at Guantánamo Bay demanded compensation. To avoid disclosing what MI5 and MI6 may have known about the secret transfer of the detainees to the US military prison on Cuba and about their treatment, the government offered them expensive out-of-court settlements.

Under pressure from the security and intelligence agencies – and the US – the coalition government decided to introduce a statute designed to prevent any intelligence information from being disclosed in civil court hearings ever again.

The government argues that the bill would allow more intelligence information to be heard in court than hitherto, even though it would be heard in secret. A judge would decide whether the information should be kept secret. The bill's critics say that the way it is drafted means it would be extremely difficult for a judge to challenge any minister's claim that information should be kept secret on grounds of national security. The fact that a hearing would be held in secret could itself be kept secret.

Critics say the bill represents a creeping move towards more and more secret courts, based on the model of the special immigration appeals commission, where any evidence can be withheld from a defendant and his or her lawyers. Evidence of British collusion in the abuse and rendition of terror suspects to places where they risked being tortured – including evidence of MI6's role in the rendition in 2004 of two Libyan dissidents into the hands of Muammar Gaddafi's secret police in Tripoli – might never have seen the light of day had the bill been in place.

The government has tried to assuage opponents by keeping the role of steering the bill through parliament in the hands of the relatively liberal former justice secretary Ken Clarke, rather than his successor, Chris Grayling. Liberal Democrat ministers have sought credit for excluding inquests from the bill, an element of the original draft that had provoked strong opposition from armed forces families and the British Legion.

But senior Liberal Democrats have not all been persuaded and will express their concern about the bill at their conference in Brighton this month. A motion says the bill's proposals for "closed material procedures", as they are called, form no part either of the Liberal Democrat or Conservative manifestos in 2010, or the coalition agreement.

Alzheimer's could be due to junk food

There is evidence that poor diet is one cause of Alzheimer's. If ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, this is it

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 September 2012 20.30 BST

Because regulation is light, the industry can kill off the only effective system for telling us how much fat, sugar and salt food contains. Photograph: Brownstock Inc/Alamy

When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies who appear to delight in other people's problems.

When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it may be driven by similar forms of addiction.

I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.

But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.

New Scientist carried this story on its cover on 1 September; since then I've been sitting in the library, trying to discover whether it stands up. I've now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I've tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. Though the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.

About 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease worldwide; current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050. But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain's impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the United States, the percentage of the population with type 2 diabetes, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years. If Alzheimer's, or "type 3 diabetes", goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.

Insulin is the hormone that prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Type 2 diabetes is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs that would usually take up the glucose.

The association between Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this form of dementia than the general population. There are also associations between Alzheimer's and obesity and Alzheimer's and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies).

Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer's was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease. They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer's patients were much lower than those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.

Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival.

Experiments conducted since then seem to support the link between diet and dementia, and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another. I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you're interested, please follow the links on my website).

Plenty of research still needs to be done. But, if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer's disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, seem to be incapable of responding.

In this country, as in many others, the government's answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation's diet to food and drink companies – a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business.

A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.

We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer's disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It's not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies – both those who mock people for their pathology and those who spread the pathology by peddling a lethal diet.

Having 10 ex-lovers is the ideal number

By Cristina Odone

8:44PM BST 06 Sep 2012

It’s a crucial scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and for my money ranks with Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Hugh Grant’s character, looking like the uncomfortable, repressed Englishman he is, fidgets and squirms at a table in a café as the upfront American he’s fallen for, played by Andie MacDowell, merrily lists her previous lovers.

There were various rolls in the hay (she was a country girl). One paramour had a hairy back. Another was a “shock”. There was a “disappointing” one and another, “who broke my heart”. Number 22 kept falling asleep (“that was my first year in England”). Number 27 was a mistake (“he kept screaming”); 28 was Spencer; 29, his father; 32 was lovely… and then there is the man she is about to marry.

That’s 33 lovers. “Not as many as Madonna,” she points out. But a great deal more than anyone should admit to – at least to a prospective partner. This is not my prudish hunch, but the very scientific finding of SeekingArrangement.com. The dating website asked 1,000 clients to name the perfect number of ex-lovers anyone should have, and the answer, from both males and females, was 10. Any more, claim the respondents to the survey, would be promiscuous; any less would betray an inexperienced fumbler, or a repressed loner.

So 10 it is, and I can see why. Nine lovers will have ironed out a person’s little idiosyncrasies, like popping in his mouth guard (“so I don’t forget”) before the first fumble. By number 10, she will have learned not to offer a running commentary during rumpy-pumpy. After 10 lovers, paranoia about one’s naked body disappears, and chatting to the opposite sex no longer unnerves. With any luck, out of 10 lovers, at least one will be great and inspire confidence in oneself – and thus in relationships.

By the tenth “friend”, even the most overprotective parents won’t pose questions like “are your intentions honourable?”. By then, too, nosy friends will have stopped studying each new candidate for sinister perversions or bunny-boiling tendencies. Ten previous lovers suggests a person is neither a commitment-phobe nor a desperado ready to hitch up with the first person who’ll have them. 

If 10 has been deemed a good rule of thumb when it comes to admitting to past lovers, I should point out that some of us would rather die than discuss (let alone list) our exes with our present partner. It was a lesson that girls learnt at finishing school, like getting out of a sports car without showing too much leg. Bad girls did, and talked about it; good girls did, and kept mum. These charm schools did not wish to promote goody-goody Victorian morality, they just wanted to maximise students’ chances of bagging an eligible bachelor: numerous exes would intimidate, but secrets would titillate the chinless wonder with a country pile but without a clue.

Mary Killen, The Spectator’s agony aunt and queen of etiquette, thoroughly approves of such discretion. “Who wants their friends or strangers imagining them having 10, or any number, of couplings? Mystery is always best. Once graphic details, or even numbers, have been spelt out, they can never be forgotten.”

True, but in today’s confessional culture, reticence is worse than a hairy back. Health and safety are as much a part of sexual etiquette as they are of employment regulations. With the rise of internet dating, sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia and chilling reports of jealous rows ending in murder, a secret past is a turn-off.

Suddenly, making inquiries about a suitor’s romantic history is part of every courtship, as awkward but unavoidable as the moment when the bill arrives, and you don’t know whether to reach for your purse: are you going Dutch or do you risk offending him by intimating that he can’t afford to keep you in style?

“How many have you had?” is no longer a lubricious question but a legitimate one. Some men, of course, don’t need this excuse to divulge how many notches they’ve chalked up on their bedposts. Casanova, the notorious 18th-century ladies’ man, boasted more than 200 conquests. Mozart’s Don Juan turned his long catalogue of seductions into a delightful aria. And Warren Beatty’s biography claims that the Hollywood heart-throb managed to bed 12,775 women. More recently, we’ve had the 69-year-old Tony Blackburn admitting to 500 women, while Bill Roache – Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow – claims to have had over a thousand.

In comparison, Nick Clegg, who famously confessed to having slept with “no more than 30” women, sounds positively virginal – if not a little “vulgar”, as Matt Warren, editor of The Lady, puts it. “Going public with the number of lovers you’ve had is unforgivable.”

Especially, I’d venture, if you’re a politician. I can no more dissociate Clegg from his 30 lovers than Gladstone from his prostitutes, or Berlusconi from his glamour models. Knowing about the Deputy PM’s bunga-bunga past dents his dignity. Frisky Nick is a lot less authoritative than devoted (if henpecked) father-figure Nick.

Clegg’s full disclosure did prompt many a dinner-party game among Westminster-watchers: which MP has had the most lovers? (Readers’ answers welcome.) Some argue that a “colourful” past is a plus in parliamentarians, showing that they have a wide variety of experience.

Indeed, the liaisons of such MPs as Alan Clark, Jonathan Aitken and Mike Hancock (who fell for an alleged Russian spy) – to name just a few – are well documented. Flesh-peddling is part of the job, after all; and a scattergun approach to frolicking is, perhaps, understandable, given that Westminster allows all the emotional intimacy of a Moonie marriage ceremony. Others counter that politicians who have over-extended themselves on the sexual front in the past become more vulnerable to humiliation (or blackmail) should a bitter and twisted ex decide to wreak revenge.

For even among phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons, jealousy of the ex should not be underestimated. This cuts both ways. I know couples who are so insistent about keeping their sexual past a no-go area that their current partner suspects a former lover in every friend and at every party. All encounters have the potential for sulks, inquisitions and rows.

On the other hand, admission of a particular number of exes can lead to questions about dates, names and – yikes – rankings. For these obsessives, there is no right number of ex-lovers: 10 is as intolerable as 1,000, and as offensive as “mind your own business”.

Perhaps it is best to accept Matt Warren’s advice, which is that “there should be no upper or lower limit to the number of lovers one can admit to; that would be too prescriptive. The essential thing is the state of your current relationship. And if your partner does ask, bear in mind how the information you share will affect them.”

In other words, lie.

You can't dance to atheism

Any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and its myths

'In America the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.' Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

I finished the series of articles I wrote on Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolutionwith a definition – a religion is a philosophy that makes you dance. It pleased me because the book itself can be read as a history of how philosophy grew from dance. But is it any use?

The great difficulty of definitions like mine is that they leave the content of religions entirely to one side. We are still enough of the heirs of Christendom to feel that religions must involve doctrines, heresies, and a commitment to supernatural realism. The trouble is that a definition with doctrines, heresies, and supernaturalism fits many varieties of atheism just as well. You will object that atheism bans, by definition, any belief in the supernatural. Yet almost all sophisticated religions ban at an intellectual level all kinds of belief which sustain them in practice. Buddhists worship; Muslims have idols. "Theological incorrectness" is found wherever you look for it.

And atheism can be just as theologically incorrect: today's paper told me that: "our bodies are built and controlled by far fewer genes than scientists had expected". The metaphors of "building" and "controlling" have here taken a concrete form that makes them palpably untrue. Genes don't do either thing. It seems to me that a belief in tiny invisible all-controlling entities is precisely a belief in the supernatural, yet that is the form in which entirely naturalistic genetics is widely understood in our culture. Religion can't really be about doctrine and heresy either, because these concepts don't make sense in pre-literate cultures. You can even ask whether the concept of "supernaturalism" makes any sense in most of the world without a developed idea of scientific naturalism, and scientific laws, that would stand for its opposite.

The serious weakness of my definition is that philosophy itself is a very late development and not one that has really caught on. As Bertrand Russell observed, many people would rather die than think, and most do. So maybe it would be better to say that religion is a myth that you can dance to. This is useful because it suggests that atheism is not a religion as you can't dance to it. There's no shortage of atheist myths – in the sense of historically incorrect statements which are believed for their moral value and because it's thought that society will fall apart if they're abandoned. The comments here are full of them. But they are no longer danceable.

There aren't any overwhelming and inspiring collective atheist rituals. I don't mean that these can't exist. Olof Palme's funeral procession was one unforgettable example. But they don't exist today. Possibly, the London demonstration against Pope Benedict would qualify but in terms of numbers it was wholly insignificant compared with the crowds that he drew, or that flock to church every Sunday.

Against this point the committed atheist replies exactly as a liberal protestant would have done 20 years ago: bums on pews don't matter; he or she is in the business of truth, not numbers, and the truth must in the course of time prevail. I don't believe this. I don't believe it in either case. Individualism without some myth of the collective is quite powerless. This is clearly illustrated by the Tea Party in America where the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.

If I'm right, then liberal, individualistic atheism is impossible as an organising principle of society because any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and it needs its myths. A philosophy will grow around it in due course. Now perhaps you can have, at least on a small scale, a society committed to the principles of rational and tolerant disagreement and the sovereignty of reason. But what you end up with then isn't some rational Athens of the mind. It's Glastonbury.