Sticking with the theme of lists, although this is in part because I became involved in a rather silly discussion about strange marriages with someone recently; here’s my take on the most bizarre marriages that I’ve been able to track down.
| 10. |
26th May 1994; King of Pop, Michael Jackson marries Scientologist, Lisa Marie Presley. They divorced less than two years later. |
| 9. |
1997; Top New Zealand Athletics coach, Arthur Lydiard (aged 80) marries his student, Joelyne van der Togt (aged 32). A 48 year age gap. |
| 8. |
1994; Billionaire oil executive, J. Howard Marshall (aged 89) marries model and television personality, Anna Nicole Smith (aged 26). A mere 63 year age gap. |
| 7. |
25th August 1992; The Reverend Sun Myung Moon marries 30,000 couples, at one time, in Seoul’s Olympic Stadium. |
| 6. |
3rd January 2004; Pop Princess, Britney Spears marries childhood friend, Jason Alexander, after a night out in Las Vegas. The surprise marriage was annulled less than 55 hours after they tied the knot. |
| 5. |
May 2004; Convicted double murderer, Scott Watson marries 35 year old mother of four (by four different fathers), Coral Branch, in a wedding chapel at Auckland Prison, New Zealand. |
| 4. |
2003; Residents of Bangalore marry two donkeys (the bride called Ganga and the groom called Varuna) at the Maha Ganapathi temple in Rajajinagar, believing that this ritual will bring them rain. |
| 3. |
November 2007; P. Selvakumar, a 33 year old farm labourer, who believed he had been cursed for stoning to death two dogs, atoned for his sins by marrying a four year old stray bitch in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony, on the advice of his Astrologer. |
| 2. |
February 2006; Charles Tombe is forced to marry a Sudanese goat (subsequently named Rose), after he was caught having sex with her. He also had to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars (£25) to the goat’s owner. |
| 1. |
1975; Ronald van der Plaat forces his daughter into a mock marriage ceremony, and then subjects her to 23 years of sexual slavery. However, in 2001 he was caught, convicted and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. |
Posted by Jonathan as History, Miscellaneous at 4:56 PM EST
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Christmas / New Year often seems to be a time when the media decides to pull out various random lists. So, not wanting to break a perfectly silly tradition, and because I would suspect that any good Seductionist would be rather interested to know a little background about their favourite piece of furniture. Here is a short list, that I stumbled across quite some time back, but which might keep you amused for a minute or two, possibly more:
- In the late 1980s, soul singer Alexander O’Neal would perform some of his songs on a lavish bed which was part of his stage set. Ladies from the audience could join him for some singing-related hot fun.
- Van Gogh’s crooked bed is the main feature of one of his most celebrated paintings ‘The Bedroom at Arles‘.
- Most countries have a host of apocryphal beds in which someone famous has slept. In Scotland, it is Mary Queen of Scots, in the US, George Washington. If all the beds in which Washington slept were laid end to end and divided by nine, he would still have to have lived to a hundred and fifty three.
- In Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie’s four grandparents spend their lives in one communal bed, two at each end.
- Better known for her book The Borrowers, Mary Norton also wrote the two children’s books on which the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks was based. These stories tell of the adventures (based around a magic flying bed) of three children and their aunt’s trainee Witch neighbour, Miss Price.
- Artist Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed‘ exhibit of 1998 is one of the most notorious artworks of recent years. It is a representation of, err, her bed, complete with stains and rumples, and the detritus to be found around it (vodka bottles, condoms etc).
- The Great Bed of Ware is a huge four-poster bed found in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. According to legend, covered beds were necessary to stop sleepers being bothered by creatures (cats, creepy crawlies, etc.) falling out of the thatched roof-space above them.
- In Suite 1742 of the Fairmont Hotel, in Montreal, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged their most famous bed-in, spending eight days in bed, during which they wrote and recorded ‘Give Peace a Chance‘ with the help of Petula Clark and Timothy Leary. World peace, naturally, was achieved just moments later.
- In the mid 1950s, the artist Robert Rauschenberg created ‘Bed‘, an artwork consisting of a bed hung on a wall like a painting.
- 18th century charlatan James Graham built a ‘Temple of Health’ in London, designed to part the rich and their money. The main attraction was the 50-pounds-per-night ‘Celestial Bed‘, supposed to cure impotence or infertility. The mattress was stuffed in part with stallions’ tales and an electrical current ran through the headboard and supposedly filled the air with magnetic charges which were thought beneficial to sexual health.
- In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, ‘The Princess and the Pea‘, the girl proves herself a princess by remaining sleepless due to feeling the pea, even through twenty mattresses.
- John Denver sang of ‘Grandma’s Feather Bed‘ which was ‘nine feet high and six feet wide, soft as a downy chick / It was made from the feathers of forty eleven geese, took a whole bolt of cloth for the tick / It’d hold eight kids an’ four hound dogs and a piggy we stole from the shed / We didn’t get much sleep but we had a lot of fun on grandma’s feather bed’.
Posted by Jonathan as History, Humour, Miscellaneous at 11:29 PM EST
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Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice begins with the proposition that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” although it later transpires that it is the women in the story, who are actually desirous of rich husbands.
Anyway, the same idea in one form or another has been repeated at various times before and since. Notably by Frank Pedersen, of the University of Delaware in 1991, who suggested that people would change many aspects of their behaviour as a consequence of competition introduced by sex-ratio fluctuations; for men, this apparently would result in greater fidelity, greater commitment to a career, and increased investment in children, when women are scarce.
There has however been little or no attempt to provide any evidence for this theory until recently, when a paper ‘Driving a hard bargain: sex ratio and male marriage success in a historical US population’, was published in the journal Biology Letters by PhD candidate Thomas Pollet and Dr Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, who suggest that a man’s wealth is particularly important, if he wants to settle down, according to their study of the “marriage market”.
The researchers examined data from the American 1910 census, claiming that in this period, demographically, the United States had not settled down. And therefore the differences in sex ratios found throughout the states would enable them to compare the socioeconomic status of married and un-married males.
The study took a sample of one man in 250 from the census and assigned him a socioeconomic status score of between zero and 96, based on a scale drawn up in 1950 (which was the closest available to the census date).
Then, mathematical models predicted that when men and women are in equal supply, the men who are married will have a slightly higher socioeconomic status than unmarried men. Whilst when men and women are in unequal supply, the marriage prospects of a male pauper would be “drastically reduced”.
Here we show that if men are abundant, this will influence the market value of their desired traits, that is, women can demand more.
As the sex ratio increases, married men are predicted to need up two or three times the socioeconomic status of unmarried men.
According to the researchers, and by way of illustration, in states where the sexes were equal in number, 56% of low-status men were married by the age of 30, as opposed to 60% of high-status men. When there were 110 men for every 100 women (in Arizona, for example), the women were more choosy, and only 24% of low-status men were married by 30 compared with 46% of high-status men.
Mr Pollet said:
Thus, much about the varying ethos of male and female behaviour across populations and across time could in principle be explained with reference to the sex ratio, these questions are ripe for future investigation, but our study has clearly established the more limited fact that sex ratio fluctuations in modern humans can put one sex in the driving seat and allow them to drive a hard bargain.
On the other hand, the researchers could just have re-discovered that women aren’t as willing as men to live in harsh environments, since (to use the example of Arizona in 1910) conditions would have been rather more desert-like than today (especially without air-conditioning), and most likely full of prospectors, and miners (who are statistically more likely to be men) trying to find the next gold rush, rather than marry a woman.
The study also assumes that marriage is the ultimate ideal for a man, and confuses being rich with having social status. These factors may turn out to be small limitations, but it seems to me that the study would be comparing the marriage prospects of New York bankers from rich families with the more modest livelihood of a Cowboy, or the unpredictable career of a Prospector / Miner.
It also appears to me, that wealth aside, many of the professions a less well off man might choose for his career could expose him to risks that would shorten his life expectancy considerably. I.e., if he doesn’t live long enough to hit 30, because he’s killed in a mine collapse, shot by Red Indians or crippled in some sort of riding accident, then his chances of getting married automatically go to zero.
A better way to examine the American Census data, especially since American Censuses are not subject to a 100-year closure period, as in the UK, could be to compare the 1910 census with the 1920 census and the 1930 census. The 1920’s were a period of great prosperity for America, whereas 1930 would be a year after the start of America’s great depression. So, comparing these periods of time would seem (to me) to give a rather truer picture of whether of not relative prosperity changes a man’s probability of marriage.
Posted by Jonathan as History, Sociobiology at 6:15 PM EST
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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have linked the clinical diagnosis of alcohol dependence and conduct disorder among 18 - 25 year olds with having a high number of sex partners, according to a study published in the December issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
Stating the obvious, first author Patricia Cavazos-Rehg, Ph.D., research instructor at the Washington University Department of Psychiatry said:
Some participants in the study reported 50 or 100 partners, and research shows — and common sense tells you — that the more sex partners you have, the more likely you’ll encounter someone with an STD, chances also increase for unintended pregnancies and other health complications.
Alcohol dependence was defined as an excessive use of alcohol, harmful to physical and mental health; Similar to binge drinking commonly found in adolescents and young adults. While Conduct disorder was classed as a disruptive disorder, like ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder.
Cavazos-Rehg said:
To my knowledge, most research in young adults has used a standard of ‘up to six’ sex partners when examining risk. But the average number of partners for the people in this study was 9.26.
So, the academics quickly revised their experimental definition of “high risk” upwards to ten partners, and unsurprisingly, they discovered a link between alcohol and sex. Reporting that, of people in the study who the researchers had classed as alcohol dependent, 45% reported having 10 or more sexual partners, and additionally, 37% of people with a conduct disorder diagnosis had at least 10 partners.
The researchers also conducted personal interviews with 601 unmarried people, all 18 to 25 years old, who were related to alcohol-dependent individuals that participated in the national Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), an ongoing project involving interviews and DNA samples from more than 10,000 individuals.
Dr. Cavazos-Rehg, continuing to point out the blatantly obvious (and now revealing a somewhat puritanical anti-sex stance) said:
We categorized these subjects according to three levels of alcohol involvement — non-dependent, problem drinking and alcohol dependent — and demonstrated how a stepwise increase from non-dependence to problematic alcohol use to alcohol dependence is associated with a higher number of sexual partners, we found that 22 percent of the non-dependent people had 10 or more partners, compared to 31 percent of problem drinkers and 45 percent of those who were alcohol dependent.
We also found a risk [?] for a high number of sexual partners among persons with conduct disorder, independent of their level of alcohol involvement. In addition, individuals with co-occurring alcohol dependence and conduct disorder are at even greater risk [??] of multiple sex partnerships.
Unfortunately, the rather too strait-laced researchers seem to have forgotten that many people actually enjoy sex, and thus their results seem to imply that for someone looking to increase their “risk” of having more sex, they should drink more alcoholic beverages, and try to develop a conduct disorder.
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 12:44 PM EST
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Having sex at a very early age has long been linked to a plethora of health and psychological problems, such as increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases, feelings of guilt and shame, through to an increased risk of cancer.
But now, a new study by researchers at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute’s HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies suggests that those who have sex later, especially men, seem to experience more sexual dysfunction in later life.
The study, which will appear in the January 2008 issue of the American Journal of Public Health claims that waiting too long to have sex may carry its own risks.
Those who lose their virginity at a late age (around 21 to 23 years old) tend to be more likely to experience sexual dysfunction problems later in life. More specifically, the study seems to indicate that men who lost their virginity in their 20s appeared to have more of a tendency to experience sexual problems such as difficulty becoming aroused and reaching orgasm. The researchers also noted that similar tendencies tended to be present in men who had lost their virginity comparatively early, and pointed out that there is not enough evidence to claim that waiting to have sex leads to sexual dysfunction, and further research is needed to determine if a causal interpretation can be made.
The study looked at data from the 1996 National Sexual Health Survey, conducted by the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) at the University of California, San Francisco. This survey also showed that men and women who lost their virginity in their early teens had more problems; this group was more likely to choose risky sexual partners, to contract sexually transmitted diseases, and to have sex while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Looking at this information another way, perhaps the reason that people delay having sex to a late age is because of existing problems; such as unrealistic expectations about sex, avoidance of intimacy, avoidance of the opposite sex, lack of hygiene, low self-esteem, extreme shyness or possibly even more severe problems like Agoraphobia etc. These reasons and a host of others could make it much harder for someone to meet a partner, develop an emotional connection with them, and then have sex with them. Thus, the fact that they had sex later would not be the cause of the problem, but part of a larger behaviour pattern. So, there may simply be factors common to both late sexual debut, and the onset of sexual dysfunction.
Correlation does not imply causation, and thus it would be silly to suggest that teenage boys should employ a prostitute, in the hope of preventing a late first sexual experience and thereby avoiding later sexual problems.
It should also be noted that society imposes different cultural ideals on men to women. So, females would typically be told that “Good girls” don’t have (or enjoy) sex until marriage, which might cause them to shut down sexually. While males would typically be told that “Real men” should fuck as much and as often as possible, which could put them under undue pressure to perform.
Both are mindsets which could ultimately lead to sexual problems.
Posted by Jonathan as Psychology, Sociology at 3:34 PM EST
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We have previously noted that the media regularly portrays pernicious images of perfection to the public, suggesting that everyone should look perfect all the time; while it should be quite obvious to anyone who gives the matter more than a few seconds of thought that logically, everyone cannot be above average.
It’s therefore shocking, but by no means surprising, that the government’s expert advisers on illicit drugs recently cautioned raised a note of caution concerning the increasing use of anabolic steroids by boys as young as 12.
Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’ technical committee said:
tens of thousands of people [were] using steroids to improve the results of raining regimes to make themselves look more muscular.
The committee also heard that Steroid users, rather than Heroin injectors, were now the main clients of needle exchanges.
Advisory Council chairman Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, said:
Those who use anabolic steroids were often oblivious of the risks, which included acne, breast enlargement, sterility, liver tumours and hepatitis. [anabolic steroids] can also make the testicles wither - which is probably not what the users want.
The latest figures showed that 200,000 people in Britain have tried anabolic steroids, with 42,000 claiming to have used them in the last year, and 20,000 in the previous month.
Lord Victor Adebowale, (chief executive of the drugs charity Turning Point) said:
elite athletes know what they are doing using steroids, but their increasing use by boys as young as 12 and 13 is extremely worrying. They do it because they want to be in boy bands and get girls.
Posted by Jonathan as Biochemistry, Sociology at 10:47 PM EST
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