There’s a theory that has some currency among sex researchers and therapists: that, over time in monogamous relationships, women lose desire more than men do. Not much data exists; I’m aware of only one large study on this subject. But the thought is that women’s libidos need more spark in order to ignite, and so women are particularly susceptible to losing desire as they remain with the same partner. It’s an idea that runs somewhat counter to the assumption that female desire tends to depend a great deal on the depth of relationships, on intimacy.

Again, though, we’re talking about an unproven theory. And the hope is that DoubleX's Desire Lab is a chance to examine the truth of such thinking. How has desire changed for you—or has it changed at all—as long-term relationships have unfolded? How have the changes felt? And how do you explain them? Please send your responses to desirelab@slate.com. As always, your identity will remain confidential.

Tags: Desire Lab, monogamous relationships and sex drives, women and sex drives

Amanda,

Before I begin, I want to clarify something. I’m not “anti-choice.” I am anti-abortion. That might sound like semantics, but I think it’s a sign of the gulf between abortion-rights supporters and abortion foes. “Anti-choice” has a connotation of “anti-woman,” that being against abortion means you think women shouldn’t have control over their bodies. I will defend until my dying day a woman’s right to choose whether to have sex. I think the pill might have been the greatest invention of the 20th century. I’m all for passing out condoms in high schools. Adoption should be easy, and birth mothers should be able to have open or closed adoptions. Women who choose to keep their children and who need help should have access to financial assistance and other support programs that will enable them to be productive and gain employment and raise their children. I just can’t support abortion. And frankly, I can’t think of many pro-lifers I know who feel differently. Yes, there are some who think sex is strictly for marriage and procreation. But you’re not going to make any headway with them. If the pro-choice and pro-life sides are to have any hope of working together to reduce the number of abortions, which should everyone’s goal, we need to try to understand one another and stop what’s essentially name-calling. That’s why I never describe abortion-rights supporters as “pro-abortion.”

I did not intend to imply with my comment about Planned Parenthood’s “business model” that they are a for-profit company. But any organization, for-profit or not, needs to bring in enough money to cover its expenses, pay its staff, etc. And while PP might not make “most” of its money from abortions, it’s not the tiny amount that some pro-choicers claim. Since the Abby Johnson story broke, I’ve read in multiple places that her assertion that her regional Planned Parenthood is trying to increase the number of abortions to raise money must be false because abortion accounts for only 3 percent of the services PP provides. But “services provided” is misleading. In 2007, Planned Parenthood performed more than 305,000 abortions. Its website says that first-trimester abortions cost $350 to $900. For the sake of argument, let’s say that each abortion cost $350. For 305,000 abortions, that comes out to more than $100 million in revenue. In 2007, Planned Parenthood’s total revenue was $1.038 billion. Its health center revenue (which the annual report does not break down in terms of contraception vs. abortions vs. other services) was $374.7 million. Even without knowing the exact numbers, it’s apparent that abortion might account for 3 percent of services but a far bigger chunk of revenue.

As for Abby Johnson, it’s true that the restraining order casts a pall over her conversion story. But I really think we need to wait to see what comes out of the hearing next week before we judge. You write that her story has “more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese after being used for target practice” and talk about how unlikely it is that an ultrasound of an abortion procedure gave her a change of heart. Maybe that is “pat.” But if it’s not true, something made her have a change of heart. I can’t imagine that she’s some kind of pro-life activist mole who spent eight years waiting for the right moment to get her hands on confidential files. I believe that she was sincere in her pro-choice activism and that something made her change her mind. Much has been made of the fact that she converted during the Coalition for Life’s “40 Days for Life” campaign. But if the group’s activists did somehow “get to her,” how did they do it? What convinced her? I don’t understand how it ties in with taking confidential files, because the coalition is bragging about its coup. If someone from the Bryan Planned Parenthood clinic is harassed or harmed, isn’t Johnson going to be the first suspect, having left in so public a fashion? The petition for the restraining order says that Johnson told someone at the clinic that “something big” was going to happen. If, God forbid, Johnson was helping Coalition for Life plan something terrible, she should be punished accordingly, and the pro-life community should disassociate itself from her without a thought. But we just don’t know yet.

Tags: Abby Johnson, planned parenthood

Dan Halloran is the next City Council Representative for New York’s 19th district. He is a Republican. Also, he is the "First Atheling," or prince, among members of a local pagan group that worships Norse gods. "It is our hope," he explained on his now-missing website, "to reconstruct the pre-Christian religion of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European peoples, within a cultural framework and community environment." Excellent.

Halloran is the nation’s first openly pagan elected official. The Queens Tribune reported on his Theodism in September. “I believe in God,” Halloran said to calm pagan-shy voters. Fellow pagans booed; it’s Gods, Halloran! He reassured: “I honor my ancestors and cling to my Hiberno-Norse Culture’s Worldview.” The Village Voice reports extensively on neo-paganism’s sinister side, though there seems to be no evidence that Halloran himself is anything but a stand-up First Atheling. “Adherents of Theodism worship deities, the land, and ancestors, and value honor, oath-taking, family, and tribe," says California State University religious studies professor Sarah Pike. Put that way, the Republican-pagan connection seems pretty unremarkable.

Tags: 2009 election, paganism

The turning point for the Virginia governor’s race came in August, when the Washington Post published a copy of Republican Robert McDonnell’s master's thesis, in which he argued that working women were detrimental to America, among other retrograde points. McDonnell’s genius in the campaign was to instantly focus the debate on whether or not he thinks women should be able to work (which, of course, he does) and thus obscure every other way in which his policies are, in fact, retrograde and bad for women.

McDonnell quickly quashed worries about him with these two videos, one of his daughter, who had served in Iraq, and the other of women state officials who had worked for him or were appointed by him. Unlike in the attack videos made by his opponent Creigh Deeds, these women were actual people who gave their names and occupations. The point conveyed, effectively, was that of course McDonnell appreciates working women. But it’s a pretty fringe right-wing minority these days who doesn’t. Among even the most conservative Christians, the argument is over whether women should work when their children are very young, not whether they should work at all.

What got lost in all this is McDonnell’s general patriarchal approach to legislating. Many of his policies and speeches convey an attitude of needing to protect the fairer species from her worst self. Throughout his career he’s supported many variations of restrictions on abortion, covenant marriage, and no-fault divorce. In these videos, the women talk a lot about how tough he is on sexual predators and domestic violence. “He protects women,” is how his daughter puts it. These days conservative politicians seem to like having women around the office; Bush had plenty, probably more than Obama does. But it does not seem to change their views on anything substantive that would affect women outside the handful on their payroll.

Tags: McDonnell and master's thesis, McDonnell and women, McDonnell Liberty University, Robert McDonnell

I skipped my duties as a political writer and chose to watch Mad Men reruns with friends instead of the election returns last night. It didn't seem like I needed to go through the ritual to know the outcome: Whether the Democrats (and progressive issues in general) did better than expected or not, the spin would be that this is good for Republicans. It always is. And not only would the Republicans and conservative issues show better than in 2008, but that the pundits would go nuts with excitement at the idea that this represents some sort of Obama backlash, and that even if they couldn't argue that directly, they'd do it by proxy. Watching election returns was therefore like getting up to verify it's raining when you hear thunder and the crash of water on your roof.

But using an off-year election to gauge the mood of the country is like polling the contestants at a bingo hall and making the same broad conclusions. I don't make this comparison lightly. Bingo and voting in off-year elections have a great deal in common, in that both are activities mainly undertaken by often crabby old people who need ways to entertain themselves in their retirement years. Off-year elections are notorious for low turnout, and most of that is due to younger people and poorer people not voting, because both groups are less likely to know that there even is an election, much less be able to take the time off work to go vote. (Yes, you have a legal right to take time off, but that doesn't translate into a practical right.) Unsurprisingly, if white retirees and older professionals are way overrepresented at the polls, you're much more likely to get Republican winners, votes against gay marriage, and a willingness to vote for candidates who want to roll back the clock to a time when birth control was illegal.

Before drawing broad conclusions about the national mood from a few off-year elections, it's also wise to remember that local and state elections are often decided on local and state politics. As Adele Stan explains, property taxes and transportation issues had more influence on the gubernatorial elections than any kind of widespread hostility to the national Democratic party.

The main lessons of last night's election are: 1) Local politics are indeed local; 2) The reactionary elements in our society are the ones that are going to die off first; and 3) Don't draw broad conclusions from relatively minor elections. Anything else is wanking to fill airspace on the cable news.

Tags: 2009 election, demographics, Republicans

Supreme Court followers (and NPR listeners) heard an outrageous story today—that of an innocent man who spent more than two decades in prison for a murder he didn't commit before evidence of the apparent gross racism and misconduct of the police and prosecutors who put him there was uncovered. It's hard not to crave justice for this man—but what seems just for him will make justice less likely for everyone else.

Lawyers for Terry Harrison have argued that although it's long been clear that prosecutors cannot be sued for doing their job—for actually prosecuting a defendant for a crime—there is no immunity for investigative activity. Harrison claims he can sue his prosecutors for their participation in what was at best a botched investigation and at worst an outright conspiracy to arrest the wrong person for the crime. In other words, he's not suing them for prosecuting his trial, he's suing them for helping to put him in a position to be tried in the first place.

Listening to the facts—which include a star witness coached to lie and the withholding of evidence against another suspect and are soaked in racist implications—it's hard not to want some revenge for Harrison. But to allow him to sue the prosecutors in his case for investigative activity would have one simple, immediate result across the country: no more prosecutors involved in investigating crimes. If prosecutors (lawyers all) can be sued only for activity that takes place before an indictment, then they simply won't get involved before an indictment—and that's not a good thing.

The more people involved in any investigation, the more likely it is that  the truth will be uncovered and that any laziness or corruption will be revealed—or at least stymied. Taking prosecutors out of that process would leave it entirely in the hands of the police, and the trouble there isn't that the police are more corrupt or lazy than prosecutors, it's simply that far more power—too much power—will rest in far fewer hands. More people, not fewer, will be wrongfully convicted if prosecutors are forced to step back from the early stages of an investigation.

I'm a former prosecutor, and I'm sickened by what happened to Terry Harrison. That's not the system I was proud to be a part of. But the practical effects of giving him his day in court go far beyond what's obvious when you first hear his story. I hope that some justice can be found for Terry Harrison, but a win in court today won't give him back the years he's lost. It will increase the practical chance that others will continue to find themselves in his position. Sometimes justice for one is simply not justice for all.

Tags: Supreme Court

The morning after the Maine election, I know I should be taking comfort in the closeness of the vote and feeling joy at the narrow victory of a referendum on “all but marriage” in Washington state, but you know what? I can’t.

I just can’t feel good that 53 percent of the voters in Maine went out of their way to take away the rights of a minority group. And I feel just like I did in 2004 and 2008 after similar votes: I look around at the straight people in the world acting like they accept me and maybe even like me and know that half of them are lying.

The other thing that bugs? A whole lot of Mainers can smell the poutine wafting over the border from Canada, which has gay marriage, and all of them can surely see for themselves that it has caused absolutely none of the apocalyptic scenarios that the haters conjure. As with health care, Americans apparently have no interest in learning anything from other countries’ experience.

Right now, my long-dormant separatist tendencies are surging big-time. I’m looking at the map and trying to figure out which part of New York City might be most hospitable for the state of New Audre. Sisters, won’t you join me?

More on Maine's vote against gay marrriage from Emily Bazelon.

Tags: gay marriage, maine, question 1, same-sex marriage; ballot initatives

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In the new movie Precious, Clareece Precious Jones is beaten by her mother and raped so often by her father that she’s pregnant with his second child. She’s also illiterate.

I’ve spent the past three years profiling illiterate young adults, and I decided to take two of them to a preview screening. Yamilka and her brother, Alejandro, now 26 and 24, are Dominican immigrants. They’d gotten all the way to high school without learning to read. After a hearing officer ruled in 2005 that New York City had violated a federal law that’s supposed to protect them because they are students with disabilities, the siblings received a combined total of more than $250,000 in private tutoring.

Yamilka and Alejandro expected the movie to get the Hollywood treatment. And they were fine with some of that, so long as they found it generally believable. Yamilka—who was overweight and self-conscious in school—related to the way Precious sat in the back of her class in junior high. “I didn’t want people to notice me, to notice something was wrong.” When she saw Precious guessing her way through a multiple choice test, Yamilka said she had done the same thing.

Alejandro, who is dyslexic, identified a little with how Precious would slip into fantasy sequences of herself starring in a music video, or walking the red carpet. He spent more than a few classes imagining that he was flying a plane. “When you don’t have a lot of friends in school, you can do that, go somewhere else,” he joked.

But my two critics said the movie lost them once Precious transferred to an alternative school. There she magically goes from learning the alphabet to writing in a journal with the encouragement of her teacher, the beautiful and supportive Ms. Rain. Yamilka called it “crazy impossible.” Alejandro remembered the hours he spent in private tutoring, learning the sounds of the letters and eventually blending them into words. In two-and-a-half years, he progressed from a kindergarten to a 9th grade reading level. Precious got to an 8th grade level within a year and was ready to take her GED.

Precious is based on the novel Push, by the writer Sapphire. She taught illiterate adults how to read during the 1980s and '90s. I interviewed Sapphire for WNYC and told her what Yamilka and Alejandro thought about the film. She acknowledged that it’s not a real portrayal of what really went on in her classrooms. And she conceded that she never taught students with learning disabilties. But, she added,“I’ve never seen a film that is watchable that actually details the process of learning to read.” That’s why she said the filmmakers focused on the alternative school where Precious and the other students trusted one another and their teacher.

Yamilka and Alejandro each related to that. (Listen to them in this radio segment; here's my original piece from 2006 about Yamilka.) “I think the learning is more easy when you have a relationship with your teacher,” said Yamilka, who bonded with her tutors. But in the end, Alejandro said, “It’s about freaking giving the kid what they need.” That’s why they both want people to know that learning to read is much harder than it appears in Precious.

Alejandro has his own ideas for a movie. He wants to see a superhero who’s illiterate. It would be a secret, of couse, disguised by his extraordinary powers. Alejandro’s ready if Hollywood calls.

Still from Precious © 2009 Lee Daniels Entertainment. All rights reserved.

Tags: illiteracy, precious

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When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2003, the polls showed disapproval by a margin of 53 percent to 35 percent. After the ruling went into effect, legislators geared up to reverse it by amending the state constitution. But two years later, the poll numbers had flipped, and the backlash never came. That's because reversing the court's ruling was a long process, not a quick and hasty ballot initiative like the one that Maine passed in Tuesday's election. In Maine, the law passed last May and never even went into effect. In Massachusetts, by contrast, as I wrote last year:

According to state law, lawmakers had to vote twice, both chambers together and in two separate years, to reject the court's ruling. And even then, they would succeed only in getting their state constitutional amendment on the state ballot, where voters would have had one more chance to save gay marriage.

The champagne and the marriage licenses began flowing in Massachusetts in May 2004, around the time the clock started on the complicated process to overturn the gay-marriage decision. The Legislature's first vote went against same-sex marriage—though for civil unions—by a bare majority, 105 votes to 92. No supporter of gay marriage lost his or her seat in the next election, according to Yale law professor William Eskridge. Opponents got nervous. So, they started down a different road: If they gathered enough signatures to get their amendment on the ballot, they'd need only 25 percent support from the Legislature at two constitutional conventions to put it to a statewide vote.

This meant more years and more marriage licenses—10,000-plus in the state. And time proved to be gay marriage's best friend. Plenty of signatures were collected, and on its first go-round, the amendment—anti-gay marriage, pro-civil union—won 62 of 200 votes in the Legislature—enough to make it past the 50-vote threshold. But when the Legislature took up the measure again in 2007, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick lobbied hard against the amendment, and 17 lawmakers defected. To the surprise of the same-sex marriage opponents, their amendment couldn't even muster support from 25 percent of the Legislature and went down to defeat.

In Massachusetts, familiarity with same-sex marriage bred the opposite of contempt. In Maine, as in California last year, voters didn't give themselves time to get used to the new unions. Andrew Sullivan is right to take heart in the closeness of the vote (53 percent to 47 percent, it looks like) and to remind us that, "A decade ago, the marriage issue was toxic. Now it divides evenly." He also predicts that, "Soon, it will win everywhere." He's more likely to be right the fewer insta-cook ballot initiatives we have. That's the reality of direct democracy right now.

Photograph of a gay rights march in Washington, D.C. in October by Getty Images.

Tags: gay marriage, maine, question 1, same-sex marriage; ballot initatives