Mark Silk has proposed in Unsecular Media that journalists operate with a limited series of topoi and that these are borrowed from religion. Silk thus claims when journalists write about religion, they do so in a way that ultimately supports religious values. In this study, I apply topic analysis to recent news coverage of Jesse Jackson’s marital infidelity to determine the extent to which the ...

Sunni Islam has no supreme legal authority and disagreement by doctors of Islamic law over all issues not clarified by Islamic law is physiological. This is the case with Medically Assisted Reproduction: after an initially critical attitude, tolerance, limited exclusively to homologous practices, is spreading, whilst recourse to heterologous practices is considered on a par with adultery or for...

Premarital precursors of infidelity were evaluated in a sample of 72 couples (N = 144) who were taking part in a longitudinal study of marriage. Premarital self-report and observational data were compared for couples who experienced infidelity and those who did not experience infidelity in the first years of marriage. Couples in which the male engaged in marital infidelity were characterized, p...

We review the relationship between polygyny and HIV and identify a positive individual-level correlation, and a negative ecological correlation. We subsequently examine two mechanisms that contribute to the individual-level correlation. First, we find that men in polygynous marriages have more extramarital sex than men in monogamous unions (both in terms of self reports and in terms of spousal ...

A survey of market women was conducted in Benin City. These women are vulnerable to HIV/AIDS and STD infections since their trading activities involve long-distance travelling away from families and sexual exposure to strangers. The questionnaire included questions on socioeconomic background, sexual and health behaviour. Results indicate that there is a high level of sexual networking, especia...

CONTEXT Gender inequality is a long-recognized driver of the HIV epidemic. However, few studies have investigated the association between gender-based power and HIV risk in India, which has the world's third largest HIV epidemic. METHODS Population-based data collected in 2003 from 3,385 couples residing in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, North India, were used to examine associations between ...

Parenting behavior may respond flexibly to environmental risk to help prepare children for the environment they can expect to face as adults. In hazardous environments where child outcomes are unpredictable, unresponsive parenting could be adaptive. Child development associated with parenting practices, in turn, may influence cultural patterns related to insecurity and aggression (which we call...