Divorce and remarriage – what some family experts call "serial marriages" and others describe as “throwaway marriages” – have become part of the fabric of American society and are spreading fast. Today, 21 per cent of all US married couples have divorce somewhere in the background of one partner or another or both.
Divorces are becoming so common that the senior demographer of the Census Bureau's population division has estimated that among today's 30-year-old wives, 1 out of every 3 marriages has been or will be dissolved by divorce. In fact, unless something is done to curb the causes of divorce, more than 40 per cent of all marriages may end in dissolution. At present, it is estimated that 1 marriage out of 4 ends in divorce. And in 80 per cent of the cases, both partners will remarry.
One factor in the sudden rise in the divorce rate during the past few years is a lag in marriages.
This epidemic of divorce is bringing enormous economic and social change to the United States. Lawyers by the thousands across the US are finding the divorce court an ever more profitable place of business. Such lawyers charge anywhere from $ 350 for representing both partners in an uncontested case to $ 5,000 or more for each partner in a contested case. Years may be needed to pay off the resulting debt.
When a divorce is granted, the former partners become two households. And, according to one estimate, the two can look forward to a 25 per cent reduction in the standard of living they maintained as a couple. For the man, divorce can mean months, even years, of alimony and child-support payments —though most men eventually fall behind in these payments. For the woman, divorce may mean finding a job for a pay which often averages only three fifths of that of a man.
More than 10 million children are now living with only one parent and 2 out of 3 of these are the product of divorce or separation.
Broken homes, where diminished parental guidance and discipline are a strong possibility, are often cited as a factor in the nation's rising juvenile delinquency, which climbed by 144 per cent from 1999 to 2001 as measured by arrests.
Family counselors acknowledge, however, that divorce is only one factor contributing to juvenile delinquency and that most delinquents come from homes with both parents still living together.
Even sharper questions are being raised about the impact of rising divorce rates on the family as a basic institution of society. Traditional-minded Americans view the divorce phenomenon as bleakly as they do the tendency of many people to live together without marriage vows. To traditionalists—including many younger Americans—marriage is still monogamy, binding together husband and wife "till death us do part"
But others take a more tolerant view of divorce as an inevitable byproduct of many external factors—including the women's rights drive, the so-called sexual revolution, the strains of urban living and the decline of religion as an inhibiting force. Furthermore, it is pointed out, the high rate of remarriage after divorce might be a sign of the continuing strength of marriage and family.
However much moral judgments differ, it is broadly conceded that divorce is moving toward the status of "normal" in the thinking of Americans. In a poll conducted recently 60 per cent of the women interviewed said they regard divorce as an acceptable solution for marriage failure, while only 20 per cent said they did not. Shirley W., who directed the poll, noted: "Marriage may march on, but many marriages do not, and divorce is now accepted by a 3-to-l margin as a solution for an unsuccessful marriage."
Can the divorce explosion be curbed?
Because the incidence of divorce is especially high among persons in their teens, some sociologists see hope in the fact that a growing proportion of first-time marriages are occurring at later ages. The percentage of women who remain single until they are 20 to 24 years old increased by two fifths between 1998 and 2000, according to the Census Bureau.
Yet increased maturity at marriage so far has not curbed the divorce explosion as hoped. Instead, counselors find that today's brides and grooms enter marriage in more skeptical frames of mind than their predecessors did, and are more willing to call it quits. Young wives who are contributing to the family income are asserting a new independence in marriage, which causes friction in many instances.
Many States are making divorce easier. Already, 23 States have adopted some form of "no-fault divorce," making it possible for couples to split without the necessity for one partner to be saddled with the legal blame. To avoid breakups, more and more couples are seeking the help of ministers, physicians, marriage counselors and sex therapists. Often, however, couples delay seeking help until it is too late to save the marriage.
Some authorities say the best way to curb the rising divorce rate is to do a better job of preparing young people for marriage before the ceremony. Some educators feel that high schools should require students to take courses on marriage and family matters. The Oregon State legislature considered a bill to require premarital counseling before the issuance of a wedding license. And the Massachusetts legislature recently debated a proposal allowing couples to sign contracts spelling out the terms of their marriage.
At the same time, some counselors take the position that not all marriages are worth saving and that more attention needs to be paid to helping the couples in failed marriages to part with minimum complications. Along that line, the University of Wisconsin at its extension social-services center is offering a course on the emotional, financial and legal problems during and after divorce. But it will be a long time, say social scientists, before Americans find a way to reduce divorce rates—or to cope satisfactorily with the strains that divorce represents in family life.
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TEXT 18. ADULTERY: A NEW FUROR
OVER AN OLD SIN
It was familiar Washington story, of a powerful man brought down by a woman. But although human nature doesn’t change very quickly, even in Washington, society does, sometimes in ways that can surprise even the best pollsters. When political consultant Dick Morris fell last month to a tabloid story about his yearlong affair with $200-anhour call girl Sherry Rowlands, the crash shook the capital’s notion of what constitutes a proper sex scandal, and shed new light on America’s changing attitudes toward adultery in the not-so-naughty ’90s.
One of the biggest surprises came in the public reaction, not toward Morris but his wife, Connecticut lawyer Eileen McGann. McGann did what wives have almost always done in such situations, which was to announce that she was sticking with her husband, and erect a shield of privacy to deflect more detailed questions. But what was widely regarded as the decent and considerate thing to do in years past now struck many American women as letting down the side in the gender wars. For the first time, McGann explains her reactions and reasons in an exclusive interview with Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift.
The Morris scandal also illuminates a shift in how many Americans view issues of marriage and fidelity. In carnal terms, it was hardly the most lurid of affairs, despite reports that Morris had enlivened his hours with Rowlands by sucking on her toes. There were no reports of orgies, no drunken scenes (Morris, in fact, deserves at least a shred of credit for passing up the favorite defense of the pre-baby-boom scoundrels, that he was driven to his shocking escapades by alcoholism). Rowlands was, at 37, only 11 years younger than he. But in the eyes of many women, Morris did something worse than frolic with a bimbo – he carried on a long-term relationship with another woman that went beyond sex into the realm of intimacy. He fell afoul of the new understanding of adultery, that it is a sin of the heart and mind as much as – or even more than – the body. Earlier this year, as it happens, a New Jersey man sued his wife for divorce, alleging that her racy computer messages to a man she had never actually met amounted to a adultery. A judge didn’t see it that way, but eventually the law may catch up to the common wisdom of marriage counselors, newspaper advice columnists – and prostitutes – that sometimes adultery is not just about sex.
Naturally, sometimes it really is just about sex. But most affairs, says Atlanta psychiatrist Dr. Frank Pittman, the author of a book on infidelity, “are conducted primarily on the telephone rather than in bed. Affairs aren’t as intensely sexual as you’d think. It’s not like in the movies”. The essence of an affair, Pittman says, is in “establishing a secret intimacy with someone”- a secret that, necessarily, must be defended with dishonesty. Infidelity, he writes, isn’t about “whom you lie with. It’s whom you lie to.” This is an important point. To think of infidelity mainly in terms of sex is actually the first step toward rationalizing it. This view – infidelity equals sex equals liberation – had a considerable following among young Americans a generation ago, as Bill Bennett and Bob Dole frequently remind their audiences. In 1974 the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago surveyed attitudes toward extramarital sex. The view that adultery was “always wrong” won majorities in every age group, but the margin was smallest among 18- to 29-year-olds: just 59 percent agreed with the proposition.
But since then attitudes have undergone a remarkable shift. Twenty years later this same cohort, now in their 40s, condemned adultery by a much more resounding 74 percent. And people now in their 20s, who may have seen in their own families what happens when couples take adultery too lightly, show up in this survey as statistically the most sexually conservative group in America, tied with people in their 60s in their overwhelming rejection of marital infidelity. “The great experiment of my generation was that people tried to abolish jealousy,” says Erica Jong, the siren of sexual liberation in the 1970s, now older (54) and, she believes, wiser. “It never worked. The desire to be monogamous is more pragmatic than ethical … We renounced the idea of sexual freedom because it doesn’t work.”
There are two interesting qualifications to this trend of the ‘90s.
One is that some of the same people who condemn extramarital sex do not necessarily think it should disqualify someone for high office. A Newsweek Poll last week found that of five hypothetical shortcomings one could imagine a politician being guilty of (including taking drugs and cheating on income taxes), an extramarital affair was the least likely to cause people to vote against the offender; only 35 percent considered it a reason to choose someone else. The high-water mark of recent public disgust with official philandering was probably reached in the 1995 vote to expel Sen. Bob Packwood, though his sins apparently involved more sexual harassment than actual sex. The continued success of Bill Clinton, who still faces a sexual-harassment suit by a former Arkansas state employee, is a better illustration of the current public mood. “There is a fair amount of forgiveness,” observes Suzanne Garment, who has written a book on Washington scandals, “partly because the scandals are so numerous.” Three decades of increasingly lurid revelations about the antics of men in high places has apparently persuaded voters to look elsewhere for role models.
The second point is that although more Americans say they reject adultery, there is no reliable evidence that there’s any less of it going on. In fact, reliable statistics are practically nonexistent before 1988 because most surveys on intimate matters had tended to be flawed, often wildly so. Figures for the percentage of Americans who have ever had an affair range as high as 66 percent for men (from a study by author Shere Hite, using a questionnaire printed in Penthouse and other adult magazines) and 54 percent for women (a readers’ survey by Cosmopolitan magazine). The 1994 NORC survey, which used more reliable sampling techniques, found that 21.2 percent of men and 11 percent of women admitted being unfaithful to their spouses at least once in their lives. Within the past 12 months, 3.6 percent of men and only 1.3 percent of women reported an infidelity.
These figures haven’t changed much since 1988. Marriage counselors haven’t detected any general upsurge in morality, although there does seem to be more interest in not getting caught. Family therapist Jean Hollands reports that in Silicon Valley, where she practices, for a man to be caught with a female colleague or hooker “is not a sign of virility anymore, but a sign of stupidity.” In Chicago, psychiatrist Jennifer Knopf sees a “renewed commitment to conservatism and family values” among her patients, adding: “I’m seeing less of the kind of affairs or flings that are wild and unpredictable and who cares. They’re appearing to be more thoughtful. If there is such a thing.”
Knopf and other authorities also believe there’s a new calculus that affects people’s decisions on whether to stay with a partner after an infidelity. Couples who might once have been quick to divorce are now having second thoughts, for the oldest of reasons – they think it’s better for the children if they stay together. Even when there are no children, Knopf says, “people are trying to weather it more now. They know what it’s like to be out there and single,” in a world rife with both germs and creeps. Sexual betrayal is painful, but divorce is also painful, Knopf tells her clients, recommending a monthlong cooling-off period after the first discovery of infidelity. There’s another significant trend at work. While older women today are much less likely to have had affairs than men the same age, among women in their 20s the pattern is reversed: in this age group women are more likely to stray than the men. Anecdotally, therapists say that adultery among women seems to be increasing, which many regard as an unintended consequence of the women’s movement. “Sex roles are changing as women have asserted their right to sexuality and sexual pleasure,” says Eli Coleman, director of the human-sexuality program at the University of Minnesota Medical School. A more prosaic explanation is offered by Marlene Casino, a psychiatrist in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates. “I think it’s because more women are in the work force now,” she says. “They have more access to men.” Along with equal employment has come equal opportunity to screw up one’s life.
The new field of evolutionary biology purports to offer a scientific explanation of why men stray: it enhances their evolutionary impact. Males can leave more offspring by mating with many different females. Human females, on the other hand, can conceive only about once a year, and have less to gain, in evolutionary terms, from promiscuity. But complete fidelity might not be to women’s biological advantages, either. It’s a cruel world out there, and a male who is bigger, stronger, richer or just gets on TV more often can offer selective advantage to the offspring of a female lucky enough to run into him at a dinner party. “Women around the world gravitate toward men who have status, money, class and rank,” says Helen Fisher, who has written extensively on human sexuality.
What’s more, men who accumulate status, money, class and rank show an increase in the male hormone testosterone – which may be why Washington was regarded as a sinkhole of immorality even in the 19th century. The sexual temptations open to famous, powerful men like Jack Kennedy or even Dick Morris are literally beyond the ability of science to comprehend, says Bernie Zilbergeld, author of “New Male Sexuality”. “My guess is that they have high testosterone levels and are risk takers…high-energy, seductive people surrounded by groupies. Their marriages resemble nothing we understand."
And it’s not just in Washington. The business world has, to a great degree, assumed the power and allure that seem to be flowing away from the nation’s capital. For every lonely Iowa housewife who has a guiltless fling with a ruggedly handsome itinerant photographer, there are hundreds of women who experience adultery the way it’s depicted in the new movie “The First Wives Club”: they’re ditched by sleazy husbands who take up with the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker when they strike it rich.
Technology is perhaps the newest factor for fidelity to contend with; it has facilitated adultery in some ways, but also complicated it. A spouse who doesn’t answer his pocket phone when his wife calls raises the suspicion that he has taken his pants off. The listing of numbers called on cell-phone bills has been the undoing of more than one adulterer. The online chat room may open up the way to a furtive hotel room.
But human passion and jealousy have been strangely unaffected by advances in microchips. A Newsweek unscientific sampling of three affairs that would up in the hands of therapists shows that people are still being caught in the same old ways: by private detectives, by phone bills or notes left in pockets, and by the classic mistake, confiding in a friend. And the consequences remain very much the same. The betrayed spouse blames herself for her gullibility, is overwhelmed by rage, fantasizes about murdering her rival. “While the affair is going on, your world seems crazy and things don’t make sense, but you don’t pick up on it,” says a woman who wants to be called “Stephanie,” who lives in Washington although her husband is not in government. He had been carrying on a four-year romance with his secretary, and when she found out she ordered him out of her house; they have been separated for 18 months now. Her reaction? “I fantasized stripping her naked, taking her clothes and leaving her in the rush-hour streets of Washington.”
The time between a spouse’s discovery of an adultery and an angry confrontation can range from weeks to approximately zero. “He was getting his hair cut and I called him immediately and said, ‘I know your dirty little secret. So you better get home now’,” says another woman, who is actually a highly educated scientist, but whacked her husband right in the chops as soon as he walked through the door, just like Roseanne would have. This happened several years ago, when she discovered that her husband had been playing around with his 24-year-old jogging partner. They had been married for 10 years and had three young children. “It was very scary. I used to think terrible thoughts. I live near a park with a running path. I used to think, ‘If I see them running by the road, I’m going to turn the wheel, run them over and kill them’.”
It might seem, from those accounts, that there is something to be said for the institution of prostitution – if nothing else, the wife is unlikely to run into her husband’s hooker at a PTA meeting. Men sometimes use just this justification, says Baltimore-area psychologist Shirley Glass: “The man believes ‘If I pay for it I have no obligation and it won’t hurt the marriage.’ But I doubt the wife would see it as a favor. Most of my patients who engage in this do it compulsively and have a lot of shame about it.” “A prostitute shows a woman there’s something wrong with her husband,” agrees University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz. “An affair suggests that maybe something’s wrong with herself.”
California therapist Marty Klein identifies six different kinds of infidelity. In three of these, the person who strays is seeking something: better sex, the feeling of being attractive and desirable, or the kind of respect and admiration that wives may find it hard to give their husbands after watching them fall asleep in front of reruns of “McHale’s Navy” for the last 20 years. Some people start affairs for no other reason than that they’re angry at their own spouse, and some people just have a habit of winding up in strangers’ beds, generally with a bad hangover and not much memory of what went before. And sometimes a person will glom on to an outsider as a soulmate, a piece of his or her destiny, and begin a relationship that is just like an affair, except they may never actually get to bed.
In only one of these instances, in fact, is sex the primary goal of the relationship, and that’s not surprising, says British sociologist Annette Lawson, who has written on adultery. It is no longer acceptable for men to feel they own their women’s bodies, she says, so the commodity exchanged in romance is no longer sex, but intimacy. Today the deepest betrayal is not of the flesh but of the heart.
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TEXT 19. THE MONSTER CHILDREN
A friend of mine told me this story several years ago and it’s a true one. He said he bought a baby rabbit one spring and built a hutch for it out behind his house. At first, when the rabbit was little and cute, he spent a lot of time watching it, but after a while he would just toss the lettuce and carrots in the cage without really looking. One day, in the fall, a visitor caught sight of the rabbit and screamed, so for the first time in months, my friend came to look. The animal's two front teeth had grown into fangs, and curved out of its mouth like elephant tusks, to the point where they had begun to cut into the rabbit's own neck. I still have dreams about that rabbit and they're more frightening than any my mind can construct about tigers or snakes. You expect those animals to be sinister and threatening, after all. No villain is more frightening than the one you had supposed to be your friend.
I saw a new movie last week in which a man tries to stab a 5-year-old boy to death and when he raised his knife over the boy's throat, the audience cheered. This movie had to do with demonic possession, and once again the devil was personified by a child.
The idea of a parent killing a child is not new. In fairy tales and legends, and even in the Bible, there are stepmothers who send children out into the woods, fathers who lead sons to mountaintops to sacrifice them. What has changed is that parental violence no longer seems to be a source of guilt and shame—and its objects are no longer depicted as innocents.
Parents who stood, proud and hopeful, at the hospital windows twenty years ago, making plans for sleeping, soft-skinned infants, could hardly have bargained for Quaaludes and David Bowie for daughters and sons who would live inside stereo headphones or sit, silent, at the dinner table, opening their mouths only to eat, or to say "Do you know how much I hate you?"
What has happened to the children—not to all of them, but to a large number—must seem, to their parents, almost like the fairy tales where elves steal the real, good infant and substitute a changeling. I suppose the parents of these changeling children must be frightened, to be harboring strangers—enemies, almost—under their roofs, feeding them, putting the sequined T shirts3 on their backs, and receiving not the gratitude or respect they gave their parents but condescension and contempt and maybe pity. Sometimes the children do not even seem quite human: it’s difficult to picture the toughest, coolest ones crying, hard to believe they were ever babies.
The result of this is a growing antichild sentiment that makes me sad. I read in a woman's magazine the results of a poll in which 10,000 mothers were asked whether they would again choose to have children. Seventy per cent said they would not Newspapers play up stories of youth gangs and violence while the public clamors for a "tighter rein." Even the children we choose as our movie and television stars are appealing, almost, for their very sinisterness.
A lot of parents now even seem to be turning on their own children. My mother tells me that when she goes to a party there is always talk of the children—but something has changed. Once the parents used to boast. Now they commiserate and exchange examples of their own sons' and daughters' awfulness. There was the case of the father who shot and killed his "uncontrollable" son, was tried for the crime and set free.
That's the large and frightening question troubling the parents who view their children as monstrous strangers. And what is so appealing, I think, about these demonic-possession movies is that they suggest some spontaneously generated, innate evil in the children, something completely out of the parents' control. Fault lies with the Devil, or the drugs, or the music, or the false guru, or what is referred to as "the world we live in," and not with the parents themselves.
No doubt there are good and loving and conscientious people among the parents of the "bad" children, and that no parent should take full blame for what his child does. But the notion that a parent has no control over determining the kind of person his child will be seems to me dangerous. It lets parents off the hook too easily.
If children are worse now than they used to be, it isn't that parents are necessarily more inept than earlier generations were. But if they've done something wrong they are less likely to get away with it than they once were, in the days when children's demons, though no less present were less visible.
The reasons why a child "goes bad" are complicated, for sure. But when there is a monster child, who appears determined to be as uncute, as unlovable as possible, and his parents turn on him, I wonder if that suggests something about the quality of their love. It doesn't seem far, really, from the quality of feeling evidenced by the purchasers of baby rabbits who stop visiting the hutch after the animal outgrows the Easter basket. No wonder, the fangs begin to sprout.
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NOTES:
1. Quaaludes and David Bowie – the names of children's characters in films;
2. changeling – ребенок, подкинутый эльфами взамен похищенного, подменное дитя;
3. guru = gooroo – a personal religious teacher and spiritual guide in Hinduism.
TEXT 20. COLLAPSE OF THE FATHER'S AUTHORITY
To understand why authority in this country is under such vehement attack, one must look to American fathers. Just as the ineptitude, moral collapse, and failure of nerve of the French aristocracy paved the way for the great Revolution of 1789, so the loss of a distinct role for the fathers has much to do with today's rebellion of the young. If some modern boys engage in rampages, I believe we can trace it to the virtual abdication of their dads from any sort of clear-cut position in the family.
The present situation is the logical result of developments that began in the 19th century. In the past 70 years, women have achieved biological and technological liberation. The advent of contraception, while it did not greatly reduce the actual number of children reared to maturity (which was formerly decreased by miscarriage, stillbirth, and childhood diseases), did put an end to the incessant pregnancies that had drained women's time and energy. And with the general economic prosperity resulting from technological progress, women in the upper classes became able to lead lives of ceremonial futility. In the early years of the 20th century, the popular notion of normal life was that of man doing the productive work, while woman was an ornamental consumer.
This notion never quite matched reality, certainly not among the working classes, but it dominated the imagination of the well-to-do European and American bourgeoisie until World War Two. Eventually, though, women became dissatisfied with their empty existences. The War presented an opportunity to become more active. Many wives and mothers went to work. Others became socially concerned, vigorously involving themselves in reformist and humane activities—the PTA, the League of Women Voters, local women's clubs, charities, and the like. The socially active housewife was able to be as busy as her husband, but her activity sprang from interest rather than necessity. As a result her commitment was exciting, dramatic, but not necessarily enduring. If politics palled, she might turn to gardening.
As for the father, at the opening of this era he usually believed that his work was vitally important, because without him the family could not survive. "I have to take care of them," the middle-class father proudly told himself. "I am responsible. They are weak. Without me, they would perish."
Sometimes, after a husband died, a woman might go to work and be more a financial success than her man had been. In fact, wealth has slowly been accumulating in the hands of women so that today, as a class, they possess more riches than ever before (though, unquestionably, economic power is still a male province). But the fiction of the indispensable father continued to be generally believed. Again, World War Two marked the watershed for this notion. The women who stayed at home had proved their self-sufficiency. The men who had gone forth to conquer fascism came back with a great longing for peace and comfort. The American man, having lived through the Depression and the War, settled with a sigh into the barrackslike suburban developments that mushroomed around the big cities. His life was no longer ruled by necessity but the wish for ever greater comfort. It’s purpose seemed directed toward acquiring superfluous adornments,7 rather than essentials. It’s easy to achieve self-respect—and with it the respect of others, which comes from the inner security they feel one possesses—if one's work provides his wife and children with the necessities of life. But when men were not working for survival and were not after real, intrinsic achievements (such as are inherent, for example, in scientific discovery), or at least after power, but merely after luxury, only their business prevented them from realizing how devoid of true meaning their lives had become.
In these affluent families, the father often describes his work as a rat-race. Indeed, the successful businessman scurries through a maze of politics, spurred on by a yearning for such rewards as profit sharing, pension plans, bonuses, annuities. His work often seems pointless to him, as he is shifted from one position to another with little say about his destiny. And if he listens to social critics inveighing against environmental pollution, cultivation of artificial needs, dollar imperialism war profiteering, and related evils, he may begin to suspect the worth of his activities and, with it, his own value.
The effect of these changes in parental attitudes on the children has been drastic. The small child recognizes only what he sees. What he is told has much less of an impact on him. He sees his mother working around the house, for him. He is told only that his father also works for his well-being; he does not see it. In the suburban family, when the father commutes to work, he has to leave early and he comes home when the child is about to be put to bed. More often than not, he sees his father watching TV, hiding behind his paper, maybe taking what to the father is a well-deserved nap but to the boy seems like sheer idleness. Even if the middle-class father takes his son to his place of work some 20 or 30 miles away, it's such a different world from the child's life at home that he cannot bring the two together. And what he sees there of the father's work he cannot comprehend. How can talking on the telephone—which from his experience at home he knows is done mainly to order goodies or for fun—or into a machine secure the family's well-being? Thus, the boy's experience can hardly dispel the notion that his father is not up to much. The father's work remains unseen and seems unreal, while the mother's activities are very visible, hence real. Since he does not see him do important things, the child comes to doubt the legitimacy of the father's authority and may grow up to doubt the legitimacy of all authority.
Now, the mother, who traditionally is the one who nurtures the child, becomes ever more the carrier of authority. If for no other reason than that she is with the child during the father's working hours, the mother becomes the disciplinarian, the value giver, who tells the child all day long what does and what does not. In short, mother knows best, and father next to nothing.
Even though the father doesn't think much of his work, he expects the son to follow in his dreary footsteps. The child is sent to the best grammar school, not to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, not to develop his mind, not to understand himself better but to make good marks and to pass examinations so that he can get into the best high school. There he is pushed to compete for the highest grades, so that he can go to a famous college, often not because he can get a better education there but because going to a school with a big name adds to the prestige of the parents. And college is merely a means to an end— admission to graduate school. Graduate work in turn furnishes the "union card", enabling him to get a good job with a big corporation, where he can work until he finally retires on a good pension and then waits to die. Given this picture of the world of education and work is it any wonder that many young people scornfully reject it?
Each child, growing up in a family, must choose a parent to emulate. But a son cannot emulate his father's great abilities as a worker if that father seems a little man at home, meekly taking out the garbage or mowing the lawn according to a schedule devised by his wife. The process of becoming a person by emulation is enormously important, because the child doesn't copy just external mannerisms; he tries—as far as his understanding will let him—to think and feel like the chosen parent. For boys in today's suburban society, many fathers offer little with which to identify. The problem is not created by the father's absence due to commuting and the long executive workday—sailors and men at war have been good objects for identification though absent from the home for months and years. The problem arises because the image of the father, in the eyes of the mother and others, has been downgraded.
In order not to have to identify with a superfluous father, many boys try to solve the problem by identifying with their mothers. But while this solves one problem, it creates another, not for the boys' self-respect as human beings but for their self-respect as males. This emulation of the mother is not, by the way, manifested only in long hair or unisex clothing, which are merely matters of fashion. Boys tend to adopt the consumer mentality, like their mothers, rather than their fathers' producer mentality. A mother's role is also more attractive because she is often the more cultured member of the household. She is apt to be more liberally educated, more aware of the arts than her practical husband. On the Continent, culture is a male prerogative, and this at least has slowed down the attrition of the father's dominance in the European household.
In the activities of middle-class American college men, I see a repetition of the behavior patterns of their socially conscious mothers. These boys work for a cause with emotional fervor, rather than with the approach that business or technical activities require. Accomplishment in business—indeed, in politics—demands devotion to logic, long-range planning, practicality, willingness to compromise, acceptance of routine and drudgery. These qualities, indispensable to productive work, are repellent to many young men. They engage passionately in a controversy but are ready to withdraw from it the moment it becomes boring or tedious.
For a child to form his personality out of interacting masculine and feminine images, the two must be truly different. Today, the mother is both nurturing and demanding, while the father often is neither. The child is not offered the example of one person representing the principle of pleasure and the other person the principle of duty. Out of this confusion, the child develops a conscience, which tells him, "You have a duty to enjoy life." Thus, there are young people who feel that work ought to be all fun and who look on nine-to-five drudgery as somehow immoral. They often try to drop out of the world of work and careers.
The trend described in today's middle-class family is that the loss of attractiveness and distinctness in the father's role impedes the satisfactory working out of this process. What can be done about this situation? Obviously, we can't turn back the economic or technological clocks. But ideas as much as tangible necessities have caused the decline of the father. We must renew our appreciation of the polarity of the sexes and be enriched by the inner tensions it creates. While we do sympathize with liberated women to a degree, we don't think they should make it their goal to become as much like men as possible or to change the image of men. They should concentrate on finding themselves as women.
Males cannot expect women to find roles for us that are suitably masculine; we have to do this ourselves. The new masculine, heroic ideal may possibly focus on discovery. All through recorded history, the discoverer has been a man. The astronauts who set foot on the moon, and also those who managed to return their crippled spaceship, fired the imagination of the entire world. A new masculine pride can come from discoveries of the mind, from the brain, not from brawn. Our cities need to be rethought and rebuilt, the very pattern of our lives will have to be reshaped so that men will again be able to derive pride from what they are doing on this earth, maybe even beyond it. The problems, and possibilities are immense.
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NOTES:
1. the PTA – the Parent- Teacher Association;
2. World War Two marked the water shed for this notion – World WarTwo changed the understanding of this concept;
3. inveighing – protesting strongly.
TEXT 21. WHAT'S HAPPENING TO AMERICAN MORALITY?
On a typical Monday night in, a television network aired three shows about police activities. Social problems included a married couple separated on Christmas Eve; a drunk menacing people in a bar with a broken bottle; a priest killed in a church; a drunken driver; a stripper; a Peeping Tom; six other killings; and more than a half-dozen woundings.
That is only a small sample of the public's increasing exposure to themes of sex, violence, and candor undreamed of 10 or 15 years ago. Prof. Daniel F., chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, reports:
"Our society and this 'openness' have created adjustment problems for the individual. There are fewer of these problems when a society has widely accepted standards for morals and manners. Today, we don't have such a situation. This is a burden on the individual who, more than ever before, must make his or her own decisions as to what is right or wrong."
Studies on American life styles and living show a minimum of 10 million Americans have alcohol-connected problems. More than 1.1 million youths between the ages of 12 and 17 have "serious alcohol-abuse problems", according to a federal finding of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
There are some 40 million handguns in America, according to the Police Foundation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says that the chance of being victimized by violent crime has increased more than 50 per cent in the last 10 years.
For one thing, morals are described as having been drastically affected by political scandals at the national, state and local levels. Furthermore, social analysts point to a steady progression of life-changing landmarks: the automobile, the radio and, perhaps most significant of all, television. More and more, critics weigh the effects of the television tube on lives and attitudes of 210 million Americans.
Prof. F., for instance, cites "bombardment by the media" in programming and advertising that "pander to the public's taste for pleasure" as a major problem confronting US society today.
Researchers have found that by the time an American child reaches 18, he has spent 20,000 hours before the TV set—more than he does in the classroom. What children in the 98 per cent of American households owning television sets see is wholesale assaults on traditional values: extensive drug and alcohol use and abuse, violence, sex, greed and gambling.
The morning and afternoon "soap operas" continue to mirror a version of the "typical" American life style that includes abortion, premarital sex, extramarital relationships, blackmail, murder, drugs, wiretapping and embezzlement.
Violence is so much a part of television's simulated "real life", studies have shown, that it may occur five to nine times an hour in "prime time", and as often as 30 times an hour during Saturday morning and after-school cartoons. In studying the responses of 120 boys from 5 to 14 years old, researchers found clear evidence that "heavy TV watchers" were no longer shocked or horrified by violence.
While television—the medium which singly can reach more people at one time than any other—gets much of the blame for promoting the open-ended view of morality,- it is not the only target of critics.
Book and magazine publishing, records and recording stars are all linked to radical change in modern society's moral attitudes. Newspapers are accused of glorifying youthful rebellion, as well as playing up violent activities in society.
All of this, sociologists and psychiatrists point out, is solid evidence of big shifts in public acceptance of permissiveness.
(3070)
TEXT 22. DEFINING THE RIGHT TO DIE
U.S. courts open the way to physician-assisted suicide. Doctors must figure out what that means.
Dr. Bry Benjamin will never forget the first time he helped a patient commit suicide. It was more than a quarter – century ago. An elderly couple came to his office, husband and wife, both terminally ill and in terrible agony with cancer. “They told me they would like a supply of pills on hand just in case,” recalls the 71-year-old New York City internist. The law forbade him to agree; his conscience dictated otherwise. In the end, his conscience won, but Benjamin had to wrestle with this ethical dilemma alone. At the time, doctors didn’t even whisper among themselves about assisted suicide, much less debate it in medical journals.
Suddenly doctors in the U.S. are talking about little else. In a decision that took legal scholars and medical ethicists by surprise last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a New York State law that prohibited physicians from helping their patients die. It’s already legal for doctors to withhold or withdraw treatment at a patient’s request. Now, as long as a patient is in the final stages of a terminal disease, mentally competent and able to take a lethal dose of medicine on his or her own, the state can’t bar a doctor from prescribing that dose.
Taken alone, the three-judge panel’s decision would be important enough, but it comes after a similar ruling last month by the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco, also one of America’s most influential appeals courts. Unless the Supreme Court reverses both decisions – and there’s no guarantee it will even hear the cases – the laws against physician-assisted suicide now on the books in a majority of states may be on their way out. “In the past 30 days there have been more developments in this field than there have been in the previous 20 years,” says University of Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar.
If so, it means the law is finally catching up to what some U.S. physicians have been quietly doing all along. In a survey of Oregon doctors published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year, 60% said they should be able to help some terminal patients die, and 7% admitted to having done so. The actual number, say ethicists, may be much higher.
Yet because the practice has been carried out in private, the medical establishment has yet to develop a consensus on how and when to help a patient die. Until now, explains Leslie Pickering Francis, a professor of law at the University of Utah, “patients who are sophisticated enough to want the aid and physicians who are sympathetic enough to want to give it often do it in such a way that the intent and the knowledge are left deliberately ambiguous.” Only a few, like Dr. Jack Kevorkian, have defied this conspiracy of silence.
But now that legal prohibitions against assisted suicide may be crumbling, doctors all over the U.S. could soon be as up front as Kevorkian – a prospect that has always disturbed many of them. For one thing, doctors may become more vulnerable to lawsuits because they will suddenly be open to scrutiny by family members and attorneys. If health professionals are going to be held accountable, says Dr. Howard Grossman, one of the three doctors who successfully challenged the New York law, “there must be clear guidelines of what constitutes a terminally ill patient.”
Many physicians also fear that making the practice legal will lead to ill – considered decisions to terminate life. Some doctors believe – though have not proved – that a 1993 Dutch decision to legalize euthanasia has resulted in some cases of mercy killing without the patient’s explicit consent. Clinical depression can often be the reason behind a terminal patient’s death wish; so can unremitting, intense pain. Says Dr. William Wood, clinical director of the Winship Cancer Center at Emory University in Atlanta: “If treat their depression and we treat their pain, I’ve never had a patient who wanted to die.” Even those who believe assisted suicide is ethically sound agree that it should not be undertaken lightly. Benjamin, whose car sports a bumper sticker reading GOOD LIFE, GOOD DEATH, gets one or two requests a month for help in dying but talks most of his patients out of it. Says he: “You don’t want to give pills to someone you think decided to commit suicide on Tuesday and on Wednesday would have changed his mind.”
Is that a good argument for keeping the practice illegal? No, says Grossman: “It’s incredibly arrogant to say nobody’s going to be careful so we shouldn’t let patients make this decision for themselves.” What doctors do need is a set of standards that make clear the role a physician should play in letting a patient go. How imminent should death be? How do physicians make sure a patient is mentally competent and really wants to die? What alternatives should be suggested? What sort of counseling is appropriate? The American Medical Association presently frowns upon doctors who participate in patient suicide. Now it has announced plans to revisit the matter.
(4230)
TEXT 23. VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS. NOW, A CRACKDOWN
At long last, the nation's public schools are moving on the problems of defiant - sometimes dangerous - youngsters who keep others from learning. It's happening coast to coast.
Under growing public pressure, communities across the US are mounting a fresh attack against disorders that are disrupting classes or threatening life in thousands of public schools. In one district after another, parents, teachers, and now students themselves are demanding—and often getting—firm enforceable rules.
The North Carolina legislature has passed a law making it a crime for students to fight, to provoke violence by gestures or words, or to ignore an order to leave the building—in short to do anything which "disrupts, disturbs or interferes with the teaching of students in any public or private educational institution." Maximum penalty: six months in jail and a $500 fine.
In San Francisco, a new policy requires automatic suspension of any youngster carrying a weapon—even a first grader with a knife— because of armed attacks in schools. Uniformed hall guards, which had been dropped because of funding problems, had to be rehired quickly when disorders multiplied.
Two fatal shootings persuaded the Detroit board of education, after long debate, to allow armed police patrols in and around troubled schools.
Chicago is spending nearly 3 million dollars on school security after an elementary-school pupil shot a principal to death and 1,300 verbal and physical assaults on teachers were reported. In Pittsburgh, federal funds are being used to expand the school guard force to 185 men. New York City's school board is planning to spend 10 million dollars on school guards, special aides and expensive security equipment
Despite worries about turning schools into armed camps, most parents and teachers say that the crackdown is long overdue. The National Association of School Security Directors reports 8,568 rapes and other sex offences, 11, 160 armed robberies, 256,000 burglaries, and 189, 332 "major assaults" in schools in 1999. Various kinds of school crime have increased 58 to 117 per cent since 1997 and only about 1 out of 20 incidents is reported to police.
For the last six years, parents repeatedly have ranked lack of discipline as the No. 1 problem in public schools, according to Gallup polls.
Many teachers must work in a state of fear and be subjected to continuing assaults, harassment, intimidation and insults. The scholastic crime wave is spreading all over the country—both in urban and suburban areas. Recent drug crackdowns at well-to-do high schools brought out unruly crowds of students who broke windows and pelted teachers and police with missiles ranging from rocks to apple cores.
Children of the most highly educated parents were the worst drug abusers. And in California a recent study found that more twelfth graders had tried marijuana than had smoked tobacco.
Parents, students, teachers and administrators all blame each other for failing to meet the problem sooner. Citizens accuse educators of being too idealistic to deal firmly with disruptive children—or too afraid. Many teachers admit chronic fear, but insist it is justified.
Unruliness begins at home, teachers insist, arising sometimes from permissiveness of parents or perhaps from hostility or indifference. And school officials say the parents who demand stricter measures against everybody else's children are the first to accuse teachers of unfairness when their own offspring are involved.
Lawsuits against educators accused of violating students' rights have multiplied. Now school officials are worried about new challenges that might be spurred by recent US Supreme Court decisions upholding the right of children suspended from school to demand due-process hearings and to sue for damages.
Officials will be less likely to resort to suspensions because now they will have to confront the student and give him a chance to defend himself, knowing that the courts can get involved.
In response to desperate pleas from teachers and parents, school boards in some districts have reinstated wooden paddles or have given educators a freer hand in using them. Only a handful of States and a few of the nation's biggest cities ban spanking outright. But even teachers who want to have the threat of the rod may be reluctant to use it for fear of physical or legal retaliation. The trick, according to many teachers, is knowing which students you can boss around and which ones have to be handled more delicately to avoid a confrontation that will destroy the teacher's authority.
Many believe that pressure to keep slow-witted or rebellious youngsters from dropping out has aggravated the discipline problem. The National Commission on the Reform of Secondary Education has urged lowering the mandatory-attendance age to 14 and providing jobs, so frustrated young people can get out and go to work. Compulsory enrolment does not work anyway, the Commission, argues, because, "in many of the large city high schools, fewer than half the enrolled students attend regularly."
Not only is truancy rising but harried educators have been throwing troublesome students out of school at what some experts consider an alarming rate. A new federal study encompassing half the nation's schoolchildren shows 930,000 suspensions and 37,000 expulsions in one year. Critics say it is not only unfair but dangerous to put so many angry and undereducated young people out on the streets, especially with jobs so hard to find today. One educator said: "We could be creating a social H-bomb."
When violence goes unchecked, it can plunge a school or even an entire district into a` downward spiral. Aspects of education are suffering because principals spend more than 20 per cent of their time on discipline—three times as much as they ought to.
However, some communities report at least limited success in dealing with hard-core troublemakers—either through stern measures or by paying special attention to their problems. A junior-high-school teacher in New York City recalls: "Last year, our school was a hell hole. A few teachers got physically hurt, but no punishments were really handed out because of fear. The board of education quieted it down so the news didn't get out." Finally, he says, parents let it be known they wanted disrupters dealt with, and some students who were caught marking up the school were quickly suspended. After that, the teacher reports, "the rest of the kids finally realised that the school meant business, so they cut it out."
Other districts are setting up special schools or classes for unruly children, despite occasional complaints of "exile" and "segregation". The idea, proponents insist, is to help kids who regard the traditional curriculum as useless or frustrating instead of just throwing them out. They are taught a wide range of skills from art to auto mechanics under a less rigid class schedule with more private attention.
At New Rochelle High School outside New York City, disruptive youths attend evening classes along with bright students who are taking extra courses and jobholders who work during the day. This extended-day program is not a traditional night school, but a bona fide portion of the day. Even without big changes in procedure, occasional success stories in unlikely places show that the discipline problem is far from hopeless. And often good teachers are the key. In Los Angeles, for example, Le Conte Junior High School sits in a neighbourhood that is studded with "nudie" bars and has a transient enrolment of 1,670 students—more than one third of them immigrants from 53 different countries. But there are no security guards and virtually no discipline problems, because many of the teachers are outstanding.
More and more schools are trying to encourage self-discipline by easing what students call "Mickey Mouse" restrictions. Officials estimate, for instance, that one third of the nation's high schools now allow student smoking. Another example: High schools in Birmingham, Ala., are allowing students 20 absences a year without explanation or excuses from parents. Attendance rose after the experiment began.
What it all adds up to is this: parents want more structure, and students do, too. There is always a minority that feels any rule is bad. But more and more are realising the need—in school and in society— for rules.
(7070)
NOTES:
crackdown - an act of taking positive disciplinary action (мepы noбopьбe c чeм-л.);
bona fide ['bounэ 'faidi] - лam. in good faith without fraud or deceit;
"Mickey Mouse" restrictions - зд. mild disciplinary restrictionsapplicable to minor offences.
TEXT 24. DEATH IN A DUMPSTER