Ben Domenech's daily newsletter features commentary on politics, culture, and foreign policy, plus important articles you shouldn't miss from around the web.
Reflecting on more than 25 years of practice, therapist Andrew Sofin recently observed:
Smartphones have caused more upheaval than anything I’ve seen in my career. We’ve normalized them being intrusive and taking precedence when people are lying in bed, playing Wordle or scrolling through TikTok rather than talking to each other.
How prevalent is excessive smartphone usage in marriage? Do all marriages suffer from phone addiction equally? What is the link between smartphones and marital quality? We take up these and other questions here.
The Demographics of Phone Distraction
More than one-third of married Americans (37%) say that their spouse is often on the phone or some kind of screen when they would prefer to talk or do something together as a couple, according to a new Institute of Family Studies/Wheatley Institute survey of 2,000 married couples ages 18 to 55. The phone problem is even worse among lower-income couples, with 44% indicating that their spouse is distracted by phones while they desire quality time together, compared with 31% of higher-income couples.
Younger couples are more likely to be distracted by their phone at home. A full 44% of married adults under age 35 say that their spouse is on the phone too much, compared with 34% of those aged 35-55. In addition, married adults without a college degree are more likely than college-educated adults to report that their spouse is distracted by their phone (39% vs. 34%). Meanwhile, husbands and wives are just as likely to feel left out because of their spouses’ overuse of a smart phone. Liberals and conservatives are equally affected, as are those who attend church regularly and those who do not.
Smartphones and Marital Quality
Excessive phone usage by a spouse leads to general frustrations, but it also is linked to more serious marital issues. In fact, couples who deal with excessive phone use are less happy about their marriage than others. Only about 6 in 10 married adults whose spouse is often on the phone (59%) say they are “very happy” with their marriage, compared with 81% of those who don’t struggle with this issue. More so, 1 in 5 married adults (21%) with a spouse that overuses a phone say they are not happy with their marriage, compared with only 8% of couples who do not report a phone issue.
Moreover, excessive phone usage is linked to greater worries about divorce. About a quarter of couples who lack control over their phones (26%) say their marriages may end in a divorce in the near or distant future. Among couples without a phone issue, only 7% say they are pessimistic about their marriage.
The link between smartphones and relationship quality remains significant in a multivariate model controlling for a range of factors such as age, gender, race, education, income, and whether couples have children. Holding all these factors constant, couples who experience phone distractions are about 70% less likely than other couples to be very happy with their marriage. Moreover, the odds of a future divorce perceived by these couples is four times higher than it is among couples who do not have a phone problem.
Two things may be contributing to lower marital satisfaction among couples who have a phone problem: less sex and fewer date nights. Fewer than half of these couples (44%) have sex once a week or more often, and about 1 in 5 of these couples (23%) report that either they haven’t had sex at all in the past 12 months (11%) or only once or twice (12%). In contrast, the couples with greater control over their phones are more likely to report more frequent sex.
Regular date nights are linked to happier marriages. Couples where one spouse is often on the phone, however, are less likely to go on dates. Nearly 6 in 10 of these couples (58%) say that they either do not have date nights or only have a date night a few times a year, compared to 48% of couples who do not have a phone problem.
As our culture war rumbles on, there are hordes of denialists at hand to reassure us that it either “doesn’t exist”, or that it is a mere “distraction”. Labour MP Ben Bradshaw warns us that we need “to resist the Tory culture war”, as though it had been concocted by the very party that has presided over its worst excesses. Writing in The Scotsman, Joyce McMillian claims that the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is “being used as a culture-war distraction”. Times columnist Matthew Parris insists that the “Why-Oh-Why War with Woke” is “not a real culture war”, and if we “stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, it will finally go away”.
Wishful thinking only explains so much. A cynic might take the view that all this talk of “distraction” is a way to minimise the significance of the culture war, a tactic likely to appeal to those who support the creeping authoritarianism of our times. But perhaps the better explanation is that culture warriors have been so successful in misleading the public when it comes to their methods and objectives. The claim that the culture war is a “distraction” is, in other words, a distraction.
This is not to deny that some tabloid “woke-gone-mad” stories are frivolous. It is, of course, eminently sensible to shrug off bitter screeds about vegan sausage rolls or reports of young people tweeting about how old sitcoms are “problematic”. All conceivable opinions are available on social media if one searches long enough. Just as the devil can cite scripture for his purpose, so too a lazy tabloid columnist can quote “the Twitterati” to confect some juicy clickbait.
That said, these kinds of trivialities are often symptomatic of a much deeper cultural malaise. We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing”, but the proliferation of such measures is an authentic concern. It points to an increasingly infantilising tendency in higher education, one that accepts the dubious premise that words can be a form of violence and that adults require protection from ugly ideas. Worse still, it is related to growing demands that certain forms of speech must be curtailed by the state. Only this month, a poll by Newsweek found that 44% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 believe that “misgendering” should result in criminal prosecution.
Such developments are anything but a distraction. What has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement is rooted in the postmodernist belief that our understanding of reality is entirely constructed through language, and therefore censorship by the state, big tech or mob pressure is fully justified. In addition, this group maintains that society operates according to invisible power structures that perpetuate inequality, and that these can only be redressed through an obsessive focus on group identity and the implementation of present discrimination to resolve past discrimination. This is why the most accurate synonym for woke is “anti-liberal”.
When James Davison Hunter popularised the term “culture war” in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, he was describing tensions between religious and secular trends as well as alternative visions of the role of the family in society. He was using the term in its established sense, where any given “culture war” has clearly defined and oppositional goals (such as the Kulturkampf of the late-19th century, which saw the Catholic Church resisting the secular reforms of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck). Hunter’s application of the term mapped neatly onto accepted distinctions of Right versus Left in American politics, which is perhaps why the notion of a “culture war” is still so often interpreted through this lens.
But our present culture war is not so simple. The goals are certainly oppositional, but the terms are vaguely defined and often muddied further through obfuscation. Rather than a reflection of antipathies between Right and Left, today’s culture war is a continuation of the age-old conflict between liberty and authoritarianism. John Stuart Mill opened On Liberty (1859) with an account of the “struggle between Liberty and Authority”; the only difference today is that the authoritarian impulse has been repackaged as “progressive”. This would help explain why a YouGov poll last week found that 24% of Labour voters believe that banks ought to be allowed to remove customers for their political views.
The real issue is that actors and writers want fair residual payments from the streamers. In order to define what is fair the streamers will need to share how many people are actually watching their shows. And here lies the problem… My suspicion is that the streamers are refusing to share the viewership numbers NOT because they’re being cheap BUT because no one is watching AND revealing extremely low viewership would kill the stock price.
If most of these streamers are losing money in an effort to gain market share the ONLY justification for their spending is their stock price being high. Once that stock price tanks with the REAL viewership numbers the streamers will have to CUT BACK ON SPENDING. Which means… WAY LESS SHOWS will be greenlit and the budgets for those shows will be severely reduced. Which means… WAY LESS ACTING GIGS AND WRITING GIGS.
So essentially… If the actors and directors strike is successful by making the streamers release their real viewership… The strike will essentially force the streamers to hire less actors and directors. So they’re striking themselves out of work.
Schulz’s explanation reveals the Schrödinger’s Cat problem at the heart of all of this: so long as the box is closed, everything could be a hit. But if you open it and find a bunch of dead cats, a lot of people are going to be out of a job.
That sounds dangerous. But is that knowledge really so bad for us? Wouldn’t it restore, in some sense, the capitalist motivations that led to a phenomenon like Peak TV? Given that we actually have no idea how much new content is being consumed, we have to realize it’s very likely that — similarly to the syndication phenomenon — people are actually using these various apps to rewatch Friends, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Seinfeld and New Girl and a dozen other shows over and over and over again.
If opening the box means learning the truth about what viewers consume and value, and that viewership turns out to be far more invested in the types of shows Hollywood doesn’t like to make — the uncool shows where the hero wears a cowboy hat and the damsel is in distress — maybe that’s knowledge that we actually need as a step toward redirecting an industry far too comfortable spewing out loads of regurgitated crap.
Major left-of-center news outlets, including the NewYorkTimes, now recognize that a legitimate scientific and ethical debate exists over “gender-affirming care.” This is perhaps too little, too late, but it is nevertheless an important development and one that should not be taken for granted.
In Alabama, a federal judge who previously had ruled against the state in a lawsuit over its age restrictions on hormonal interventions has now ordered the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which is involved in that litigation, to disclose internal communications related to the publication of its latest, and highly controversial, Standards of Care (SOC). In addition to eliminating its chapter on ethics, including a chapter on “eunuchs” and insisting that young children can have this identity, and claiming that a systematic review of the medical literature is “not possible” despite several European countries having conducted them, WPATH also decided to eliminate all age minimums for hormones and most surgeries just days after its most recent SOC edition was published. It’s reasonable to assume that at least some of the information contained in the communications now under judicial scrutiny will be damning to WPATH, its affiliated doctors, and the American gender industry at large.
Meantime, early signs suggest that the heated partisan polarization over pediatric sex-trait modification is cooling. Democrats in Texas and Louisiana recently broke with their party to vote in favor of, respectively, SB 14 and HB 648, which mandate age restrictions on hormones and surgeries. Despite “hostile activists” making “personal, and even racist, attacks against me as an African American woman,” said a choked-up Democrat, Shawn Thierry, who represents Texas’s 146th district, in a speech she delivered in the dying minutes of the Texas House floor debate over the bill, “I have made a decision to place the safety and well-being of all young people over the comfort of political expediency.”
And perhaps most significantly of all, on July 14, a group of 18 experts from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and South Africa joined three American physicians in writing a letter criticizing the U.S. Endocrine Society for its approach to youth gender transition. This was a watershed moment in American transgender politics: the first time that international experts had publicly and directly weighed in on the U.S. debate over so-called “gender-affirming care.”
In their letter to the editor of the WallStreetJournal, titled “Youth Gender Medicine is Pushed Without Evidence,” the international experts pointed out that the Endocrine Society’s new president, physician Stephen Hammes, had made false claims about the evidence base for child sex-trait modification and the likelihood of suicide when these procedures are not made available to teenagers who want them. Even more embarrassingly, Hammes’s statements, made in response to an op-ed by the organization Do No Harm, contradicted the Endocrine Society’s own clinical practice guideline.
The letter is significant for a number of reasons, not least of which that it can—and should—be used in litigation to demonstrate that what U.S. “gender-affirming” doctors say about “settled science” and a strong consensus among experts is simply false. There is, in fact, disagreement about how to help children and adolescents who feel alienated from their bodies and reject their sex. Indeed, outside of North America, these debates seem to be moving gradually in the direction of skepticism that a justification for early physical intervention exists. “[M]ore and more European countries and international professional organizations,” the letter’s signatories write, “now recommend psychotherapy rather than hormones and surgeries as the first line of treatment for gender-dysphoric youth.”
“But journalists thrive on not knowing exactly what the future holds. That's part of the excitement. Something interesting, something important, will happen somewhere, as sure as God made sour apples, and a good aggressive newspaper will become part of that something.”
