Archive for the 'Sex' Category

Rush to Judgment

rushRush Limbaugh is under fire for responding in trademark fashion to the congressional testimony of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, who wants you to pay for her contraception. If the rest of us are to share in the costs of Ms. Fluke’s sex life, says Rush, we should also share in the benefits, via the magic of online video. For this, Rush is accused of denying Ms. Fluke her due respect.

But while Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position — which is what’s at issue here — deserves none whatseover. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty. I expect there are respectable arguments for subsidizing contraception (though I am skeptical that there are arguments sufficiently respectable to win me over), but Ms. Fluke made no such argument. All she said, in effect, was that she and others want contraception and they don’t want to pay for it.

To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.

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Bars Versus Churches

Tyler Cowen asks: What variable best predicts your number of sex partners? My answer, which I stand by, was that it’s the same variable that best predicts your number of tennis partners, your number of checkers partners, and your number of visits to Disneyland — namely preferences. But Jason Malloy of Gene Expression steps in with something a little more empirically verifiable. Drawing on data from the respected General Social Survey, he’s correlated number of partners with everything from patriotism to empathy to “ever been punched” (all self-reported), and has invited me to share his results with you. Number of sex partners (also self-reported) is defined as number of partners since your 18th birthday. Jason’s calculations are restricted to heterosexual couplings. A negative number means that that a high response to the variable predicts fewer sex partners and a positive number means that a high response predicts more.

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The Python Misinterpreter

moresexI once wrote a book called More Sex is Safer Sex”. If you’re wondering what that means, you can read the essence of the argument in Chapter 12 of The Big Questions and/or watch me explain it on video.

Python programmer Jack Trainor has posted a simulation that he believes is somehow relevant to this argument. (Comments on his post are here.) I’d thought this was too nonsensical to respond to, but more than one reader has asked for a response, so here goes: Except for the fact that his code runs, Trainor’s managed to get this argument wrong in every possible way. He’s misstated the assumptions, he’s misstated the logic, and he’s misstated the conclusions.

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