AIDS: The most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics in 30 years!!!

[Harry Vest]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

except that this isn't true.

[q]Your generation was sluttier
posted by agnostic @ 6/17/2008 12:25:00 AM
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I am sick of hearing Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers complain about a perceived cultural decline among the younger generations. For a variety of measures, things started to go bad already by the 1950s, became obscene during the 1960s and '70s, and plateaued some time during the 1980s. Since roughly 1990, however, things have gotten steadily better. This series will catalog such a trend for measures typically given in support of the declinist hypothesis: we begin with sexual behavior, and will eventually cover violent crime, divorce, narcissism, the arts, and whatever other examples I come across or that readers suggest in the comments. The hope is that the series will prevent the real-world picture from disappearing down the Memory Hole, as every generation thinks that patterns among its usurpers spell doom, regardless of what the data show.

Importantly, I am more interested in the slope or derivative of an indicator at some point in time, and less so in the value of the indicator at that point. The reason is simple: those who claim that our culture is declining, decaying, rotting, dying, and devolving are making an argument about whether some indicator is increasing or decreasing over time. What the declinists are really saying is that there are forces that cause promiscuity, say, to increase or to decrease. Therefore, even if some Bad Thing was lower in 1958 than in 2008, it may have been in a state of worsening then (increasing), and in a state of improving now (decreasing), so the underlying corrosive forces must have been stronger then and weaker now. It is the strength of these unseen "causes of decline" that I'm interested in.

Sluttiness is perhaps the most frequently given example of how far kids these days have fallen -- fallen, that is, from the zenith of innocence embodied by fucking your gf in the back of your car at Make-out Point (or the drive-in theater), round-robin pairing off during the sexual revolution, and the barely-covers-you costumes of the disco era and its spillover into the nightclub scene of the 1980s. Although there are not national probability samples (as opposed to convenience samples) going back decades for the entire diversity of perversions, indicators of sexual misbehavior correlate with each other, so we may need to rely on a proxy indicator if data are lacking for another.

The most straightforward indicator of sluttiness is simply the percentage of people who have had a "high" number of partners for their age. Since the declinists target the younger generations, let's look at the percentage of high schoolers who have had 4 or more sexual partners. Here are the data from the representative National Youth Risk Behavior Survey. From 1991 to 2007, this percentage has decreased. This is the strongest argument against the declinist hypothesis.

I could not find a good national probability sample that included a straightforward measure of sluttiness before 1991, but we can look at some proxies. The percentage of adolescents who have ever had sex is one: if you haven't had sex ever, you can't have had multiple partners, and earlier age of first intercourse is correlated with having more partners (that is not a tautology). The YRBS data above show that this indicator too has been decreasing from 1991 to 2007. Before then, we turn to a different dataset, although it is also national and representative: the National Survey of Family Growth. According to the CDC's summary:

[q]Proportions were calculated for adolescent women in each year of age from 15 through 19 who reported having had premarital sexual intercourse by March 1 in 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1988. For all ages combined for each of these periods, the proportion of adolescent women who reported having had premarital sexual intercourse increased steadily (from 28.6% in 1970 to 51.5% in 1988 (Table 1)).[/q]

The 1988 figure of 51.5% is nearly the same as the 1991 figure of 50.8% from the YRBS data (see here, where the data are broken down by male vs. female). Thus, at least as far back as 1970 (and probably earlier), the fraction of teenagers who had had sex was already increasing, it peaked around 1990, and has been decreasing ever since.

We can also look at the spread of sexually transmitted diseases that are very common and have been around long enough for there to be decades of relevant data. First we look at gonorrhea. This table of gonorrhea rates by year shows that it increased from 1941 to 1946, decreased until 1957, increased until 1975, and decreased until 1997, leveling off thereafter. The main trends that emerge are a 20-year period of increase from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, and a 20-year period of decrease from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.

A widespread campaign to treat gonorrhea began when the rate started to decrease, so some of the decreasing trend may be due to better medicine, but combined with the data on number of partners and virginity, some of it must also be due to lower promiscuity. In any case, the data do suggest an increasing trend in promiscuity starting in the late 1950s and lasting at least until the mid-1970s.

Next we look at type 2 herpes. Its prevalence has been decreasing since some time in the late 1990s, especially among adolescents (free full text here, popular journalism write-up here). It had been increasing at least from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Because herpes is not treatable like gonorrhea is, it must be that more responsible sexual behavior has curbed its spread, again in particular among adolescents.

Taken together, these various indicators -- what percentage of teenagers have had "many" partners, what percentage has ever had sex, and what percentage has a common STD -- all argue for a period of cultural decline starting in the 1960s, perhaps as early as the late 1950s, which lasted until about 1990. Since then, however, our culture has been in a state of progress regarding teenage sluttiness. Thus, if any age cohort gets to brag about improving sexual mores, it is those born about 1975 or after.

Finally, note that the average female's appearance tells us nothing about the actual level or rate of increase/decrease in sluttiness. Because this is what most older people use to support the declinist hypothesis -- "young girls didn't used to wear thongs or jeans that low-cut when I was a boy!" -- it's worth emphasizing. Note also that more salacious dance practices among youngsters don't tell us anything real either, something I pointed out with a field study on my personal blog. Girls these days may give you a standing lapdance on the dancefloor, but -- although the male receiver may wish otherwise -- this doesn't mean she is going to fuck you. One plausible reason for the disconnect between appearance and reality is that appearances are largely driven by fashion, which changes for its own sake, rather than reflect underlying changes in preferences or behavior.

Post-script

While oral sex is not worth looking at as a measure of sluttiness compared to intercourse-related indicators, it's worth mentioning that there is no "oral sex epidemic," as Oprah phrased it in a typically anti-male way. (The guys would refer to it as the "efflorescence of oral sex.") Nor is oral sex being substituted for intercourse, another worry in the mind of the declinists. Read the free pdf of the study here, or if you're lazy, a Newsweek editorial summarizing it. As is usual in these cases, the only thing that is epidemic here is a fear of an epidemic[/q]

Interesting article. Hmmm. I'm inclined, on a gut level, to totally disagree with it...but on the other hand will do some more research into it. Could prove interesting. Thanks.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by Dalton

I for one am deeply saddened that the US Government gave AIDS freely to the blacks and the gays, but they aren't stepping up to give aid to the poor white farmers effected by the recent flooding in the mid west.

you ever heard of farm subsidies?

[Dalton]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

you ever heard of farm subsidies?

No. Would you elaborate? Start at the beginning, please.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by Dalton

No. Would you elaborate? Start at the beginning, please.

because less populated states are overrepresented in the Senate, they get gobs of money from Congress. these states get an average of $16bn a year in handouts.

[Dalton]

which states?

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by Dalton

which states?

the big 'uns. flat, square, lots of Road House fans.

[deep]

easy there,
those fine states are the ones that made Obama the nominee




and Dalton is right
along with Rev Wright
the Government has given more aids to blacks and gays than us "white folk".

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by deep

easy there,
those fine states are the ones that made Obama the nominee

and both he and Hill-Hill did the expected thing and pandered by both voting for the most recent set of pornographic farm subsidies.

and Dalton is right
along with Rev Wright
the Government has given more aids to blacks and gays than us "white folk".

what are you trying to accomplish with this post?

[deep]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

what are you trying to accomplish with this post?

It is more or less the same thing Dalton posted

I thought maybe you missed

Martha obviously got it.

[CTU2fan]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

the big 'uns. flat, square, lots of Road House fans.

And sheep. Lots of sheep. Scared ones.

And I'd like to know what Harry's agenda is here. Because to be fair he ought to be posting threads telling us we can eat raw chicken and kiss our pet turtles because hell we probably won't get salmonella and chances are even if we do it won't be fatal. Because if somebody tells you not to eat raw chicken because you'll get salmonella they're lying to you.

So what's the angle here? Or can I take it at face value...namely that the effect of HIV has been overstated because the threat to Western straight male non-drug users is minimal and everybody else just doesn't matter quite as much?

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by deep

It is more or less the same thing Dalton posted

I thought maybe you missed

Martha obviously got it.

maybe if you'd use your keen and often skillful sense of irony on someone other than Obama, i'd know how to better take your comments.

[martha]

Originally Posted by deep

It is more or less the same thing Dalton posted

It's less. Because Dalton made a joke, and you made a dig.

[deep]

really ?


Irvine seemed to miss his joke completely

so I just restated it.

because it seemed that Irvine was referring to Government aid given to these mid-Western states

because he thought Dalton was referring to the Government money spent on AIDS programs

[Irvine511]

yes, let's continue to talk about me in this thread.

[martha]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

yes, let's continue to talk about me in this thread.

You're way more interesting (and better looking) than this thread.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by martha

You're way more interesting (and better looking) than this thread.

but am i better looking than deep?

[martha]

[Irvine511]

here's one that will blow Harry's fuckin' mind!!!!


[q]More Sex is Safer Sex

In More Sex is Safer Sex Steven Landsburg famously argued (based on work by Michael Kremer) that if more people, especially more sexually conservative people, had sex the AIDS epidemic could be reduced. Landsburg wrote:

[q]Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.[/q]

In The Wisdom of Whores (see also my earlier post) Elizabeth Pisani says that such a country exists, it's Thailand, and the results of more sex were safer sex - exactly as Landsburg argued. Here's Pisani's story:

[q] Thailand used to fit the the classic 'virtuous girls, philandering boys' model. At the start of the 1990s, 57 percent of twenty-one-year-old men in Northern Thailand trooped off to the brothel to do their philandering. More than half the sex workers who soaked up their excess energy were HIV-infected....

Then...the Thai economy boomed. Girls were getting better educations than ever before...Educated girls were waiting longer before getting married, but not before having sex. By the end of the 1990s, 45 percent of girls aged 15-21 in northern Thailand admitted to having sex with boyfriends before marriage, compared to less than a tenth of that in a nationwide survey in 1993.

...So at the end of the decade, we have a lot more premarital sex and not all that much condom use with girlfriends. But now that these young, cash-strapped guys can have sex without paying, they've stopped handing over cash for sex. By the end of the 1990s, only 7 percent of young men were paying for sex, and HIV prevalence in sex workers had come down too.

....In short, more women having premarital sex equals less HIV.[/q]

Pisani cites neither Landsburg nor Kremer so I believe her account is independent. Note that Pisani also credits Thailand's successful condom program[/q]

[deep]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

but am i better looking than deep?

one day

we will have to do a walk off

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by deep

one day

we will have to do a walk off

bring. it. on.