Sex Lies

by digby

Frederick Clarkson writes about this report on the state of abstinence education in Texas and it isn’t pretty. They might as well let kids learn about sex in the street. They’d get better information. Virtually everything they are taught is wrong, from statistical lies to old wives tales.

I particularly liked this:

At the Austin press conference announcing the report, Wilson stated that abstinence-only programs, “often promote restrictive, even sexist gender roles and suggest that flirts are responsible for aggressive male sexual behavior.” In one passage from an abstinence only program, she observed, “women are compared to crock pots that take awhile to get warmed up, while men are like microwaves that are ready to cook at a moment’s notice.”

“While this kind of stereotyping may seem mild,” she averred, “it should be shocking to learn that abstinence-only programs often suggest – sometimes in not very subtle ways – that it’s the fault of young women if men become too sexually aggressive. One such program used in about a dozen school districts puts it this way: ‘A girl who shows a lot of skin and dresses seductively fits into one of three categories: One, she’s pretty ignorant when it comes to guys, and she has no clue what she’s doing. Two, she’s teasing her boyfriend which is extremely cruel to the poor guy! And three, she’s giving her boyfriend an open invitation saying, ‘Here I am. Come take me.'”

Plus ca change and all that rot.

It is particularly irritating in light of this:

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

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