Annals of Sociology: Red sex, Blue sex

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_talbot

by marvin • 18 years ago

30 27 18 years ago

TweedHeads• 18 years ago

Everything annal has my approval!

randrews4• 18 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks both sides are wrong? Not having sex because god doesn't want you to is sort of insane, but not having sex because you won't get into a good college if you do is equally bad.

It's possible to do something dangerous, responsibly. Not that sex is terribly dangerous.

Herring2• 18 years ago

for the 2nd group, that's unprotected sex...

For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong. [pg 3]”

randrews4• 18 years ago

Hmm, fair enough. Still, you combine that with people telling you that condoms don't protect you from anything, and you get a bunch of people terrified of sex.

MaysonL• 18 years ago

"There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.” Norman Mailer

noonespecial• 18 years ago

Good one. Apart from killing, sex is the most powerful biological thing a human can do. Like killing, it shapes and changes the genome (and the community) far beyond the creature that actually commits the act.

The problem with teen sex is that too many wield this power far too lightly. Like a child who's just found its father's gun, they don't really understand the ramifications of what they're doing or the risk that they are taking.

helveticaman2• 18 years ago

As a virgin and Stanford student, I can tell you it's pretty hard to get into a good college if you're trying to get laid in high school. I mean, it's not impossible, but...the opportunity cost is very real. It sucks, but that's part of the price I had to pay.

ivankirigin2• 18 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_effect

marvin• 18 years ago

The Roe hypothesis is false.

A similar argument has been used to explain why religious groups that oppose having children die out fairly quickly. But in the case of American politics, those making the argument assume that the American two-party system will still exist in the timeframe 30-100 years, and further that abortion will still be the primary political topic in a generation or three. The last assumption is ridiculous. And we haven't even considered that new generations often discard important values from the old.

ivankirigin2• 18 years ago

There are certainly lots of assumptions, but it might be valid for the first generation that has already passed. This is borne out in population growth numbers by state.

I linked to this mainly because I find it interesting, not because I believe it.

kingkongrevenge3• 18 years ago

You can go on about sex education and religion all you want but I think it all boils down to cost of living. Red staters can get very cheap but decent housing and support a reasonable standard of living from labor that doesn't require a phd. So they have more babies at all ages, because it's not as big a deal out there. A baby in New York will condemn you to a life in the suburbs, cutting years off your absolutely necessary $20 martini nights at the club.

The more interesting thing is the reporting on this matter itself. There's a constant stream of urban liberal editorials/articles on red state teen pregnancies. I think it's because at some level liberals are freaked out about being out-bred by such a wide margin. This is why the self-congratulatory and "chastising the hicks" bits are so necessary.

This is why Palin and her family freaks out a lot of liberal women SOO badly. She's a stark reminder of their infertility.

randrews4• 18 years ago

I wonder if it's really that "liberal women" are infertile, or that having children makes you more conservative?

kingkongrevenge3• 18 years ago

I would argue the latter. Where it's cheap to form a household and have kids, people are conservative. This is true all over the country in culturally disparate regions. There are barely any exceptions.

I'm sure it's complicated by mobility: people move from red to blue and vice versa to find people with matching tendencies. But I doubt that's enough to matter.

logjam• 18 years ago

> This is why Palin and her family freaks out a lot of liberal women SOO badly. She's a stark reminder of their infertility.

Uh, no.

I'm not a woman, but the women I know who are freaked out by Palin (and ALL the women I know are in fact freaked out by Palin, since you brought her up) are freaked out because they feel she's an incompetent, hypocritical buffoon dressed up in $150,000 designer clothes that Republican donors unknowingly bought.

And they hate her policy proposals - the policies they are able to parse out of her almost incomprehensible verbal wanderings.

kingkongrevenge3• 18 years ago

You just described 98% of politicians at the national level. Palin is completely unremarkable. There is clearly a special, visceral reaction to her that has nothing to do with policies.

> dressed up in $150,000 designer clothes

I'm sure Obama used his own money for the make-up artist before the debates and also paid for the backdrops used for his convention speech. Newsflash: the parties spend money on TV appearances.

Note: I do not like Palin or McCain. I only find the reaction to them intriguing.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

She had enraged the entire left almost instantly. There was no analysis done, and once she had proven herself a 2nd rate intellect, the rage had turned to joy.

time_management• 18 years ago

A baby in New York will condemn you to a life in the suburbs, cutting years off your absolutely necessary $20 martini nights at the club.

People in New York have fewer children because:

1. We marry a lot later. This is one of the few cities in the world where it's not stigmatized to be over 30 and unmarried.

2. The housing situation is, indeed, shitty. It's not as bad as you say, with the condemnation to suburbs that you depict as inexorable, but having kids will accelerate the outright theft of your savings by the property-owning class.

There's a constant stream of urban liberal editorials/articles on red state teen pregnancies. I think it's because at some level liberals are freaked out about being out-bred by such a wide margin.

This "constant stream" of articles exists for a reason. Religious conservatives are trying to push their social model on us. We're pointing out that it doesn't work well even on its home turf. This isn't about "chastising the hicks". The victims of the red-state family breakdowns are, obviously, people in the red states.

This is why Palin and her family freaks out a lot of liberal women SOO badly. She's a stark reminder of their infertility.

Although I'm a man, I'll point out that Palin scares anyone with a brain. This has nothing to do with fertility. 1. She has an extremely narrow-minded view, which is completely inappropriate for someone running for high public office. 2. She stands for everything that is consumptive ("drill, baby, drill"), self-indulgent, mean-spirited, wrong and stupid about this country. 3. Although she was picked to rally middle-of-the-road women, she failed completely at that... but is great at stoking the lowest common denominator bottom-feeders, as the people who show up at Palin rallies (racists, paranoids) are loathsome.

New Yorkers don't despise people who choose to have large families. We despise those who do so irresponsibly, and we despise the very rich who have large families to show off (a Manhattan/Boston phenomenon) their means, such as Mitt Romney, because of their effect on housing prices... but we don't have a knee-jerk animosity toward people in general who choose to have four or five kids.

gojomo• 18 years ago

The most interesting paragraph to me:

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

That seems to suggest that once peer-pressure starts working for the effort in the general population, there is a corresponding rise in hypocrisy as a sort of peer-pressure-release valve, and that can even undermine the committed core.

This effect might be generalizable to other moral-suasion campaigns. This deserves studies and articles all by itself.

anamax2• 18 years ago

The author thinks that the correct sex ed would reduce the teen pregnancy rates in those groups.

The author doesn't know those groups very well. They're getting pregnant because they want to get pregnant and have kids. Different sex ed won't change that.

randrews4• 18 years ago

I grew up in Texas, reddest of the red states, and a lot of my friends did abstinence pledges. Most were Christian Evangelicals to one degree or another (they even evangelized to me, though god only knows why. I wasn't really liberal at all back then).

So I know these groups pretty well.

None of them, not a single one, wanted to get pregnant and have kids at age 16. Have sex, certainly, have irresponsible unprotected sex even, but getting pregnant was not something anyone wanted. Maybe in five or ten years, but in high school, none.

anamax2• 18 years ago

I grew up with these groups too, albeit not in Texas but in the midwest and rural CA (and then some in the underbelly of Silicon Valley).

For some, having a kid got them out of the high school that they didn't want to be in anyway. (Or, junior high in some cases.) In other cases, it let them say "I'm an adult" and others thought "my kid will have to love me".

Some waited until after high school, or at least the spring of their senior year.

Annals of Sociology: Red sex, Blue sex

Related Stories