Promiscuous Teens Earn Barely Lower Grades

It's all in how you present a subject. A recent study currently making its way through reportage shows a slight negative correlation between number of sex partners and GPA in high school. The headlines depend on who you read. Some headlines (linked to the articles) for example: Survey: Sex affects grades and Teen sex doesn't cause bad grades and Teen Sex Not Always Bad for Grades all cite the same study presented to the American Sociological Association in Atlanta yesterday. The American Family Council declared that the study confirms the negative link between teenage sexuality and academic performance. It really doesn't. There was no academic difference between abstinent kids and those who have committed relationships including sex. But girls in the promiscuous hook-up crowd earned GPA's of 0.16 points less than virgins. That's about 1/3 of the way between an A and an A-. Horrors. But everyone knows that the adolescent emotional problems that lead to promiscuity also tend to lead to bad grades. But that's just folk wisdom; common sense. Now there is an Actual Study to confirm the correlation. It's a pity that none of the coverage I've found links to the study itself.

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Mark Tiedemann Interview – Parts IV and V

This is a continuation of my interview of Mark Tiedemann, who is both an established science fiction writer and an author here at Dangerous Intersection. In the first video in this post, Part IV, Mark discusses science, religion and morality. In the second video in this post, Part V, he discusses sex. I had an extensive discussion with Mark, and I will actually have one more post featuring video of our conversation. I expect that those will be published tomorrow night.

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Family values

At Salon.com, Amy Benfer has roasted Bristol and Levi with an article beginning with this paragraph worthy of bronzing (the entire article constitutes a clinic on how to write, IMO):

She has been a (perhaps unwitting) symbol of her mother's ultimate pro-life commitment; he cut off his mullet and agreed to wear a suit for the Republican Convention. She spent her first year postpartum making bank telling other young women not to even think of having sex; he was dubbed "Sex on Skates" by New York magazine and stripped down to his skivvies for cash. But perhaps, like the boy who pulls your pigtail on the playground, all those differences and petty squabbles were a sign of true love; according to this week's Us Weekly magazine, it was all just a prelude to a big white Alaskan wedding: Bristol Palin, abstinence educator, and Levi Johnston, Playgirl model, have announced their (second) engagement.
I am pleased that, so far today, I have kept to my pledge to avoid discussing Sarah Palin on this site. Ooops.

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Mel Gibson and the Problem of Public Privacy

So Mel Gibson has been exposed (once again) as an intolerant, sexist, abusive person. A recording of a phone conversation with his former girlfriend is now Out There on the internet and one can listen to Mel spill molten verbiage into her earpiece while she calmly refutes his charges. All I can wonder is, So what? What business is this of ours? This is private stuff. People lose control. Between each other, with strangers, but more often with those closest, people have moments when the mouth ill-advisedly opens and vileness falls out. The question is, does this define us? Are we, in fact, only to be defined by our worst moments? That would seem to be the case for people like Gibson. The reason, I think, is that for most of us, the Mel Gibsons of the world have no business having shitty days and acting like this. For most of us, there is just cause for having these kinds of days and attitudes, because for most of us the world is not our oyster and we do not have the luxury of squandering time, friends, and money. Mel Gibson is wealthy and famous and, at one time, admired. He ate at the best restaurants, appeared on television, gave interviews, has his picture on the covers of magazines. Is seen with other people, regularly, who fall into that category of Those Who Have It Made.

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Is that a gun in your pocket or do you really dig my Neocon fundamentalist tea party ideas?

How is it that so many Republican men find Sarah Palin credible when she claims that we can drill our way out of the energy crisis? There simply isn’t that much oil in Alaska—anyone with a small bit of curiosity can do the math and find out that Alaska has only six months of oil to offer the rest of America. It gets much worse, of course. Republican men tend to love fact-less, self-contradictory female Republican politicians and commentators (including more than a few at FOX), especially those that push their sexuality hard based on the manner in which they dress and act. And consider the recent reactions of conservative pundits regarding the issue of whether Sarah Palin had breast implants. This anomaly leads to my question: Do Republican men really and truly think that the current crop of female Republican politicians/commentators are offering ideas that work, or are they confusing sexual arousal for patriotic fervor or intellectual inspiration? Consider that “misattribution of arousal” is well-established through numerous experiments. In 1962, psychologists Schacter and Singer told participants that the psychologists were studying the effect of vitamin injection on visual skills. This was prior to modern day ethics restrictions, and many of the students were secretly given injections of adrenaline or a placebo (to control for the effect of sticking a needle in one’s arm). Strong emotional reactions to subsequent stimuli (a “nosy” and “offensive” questionnaire) were strongest in participants who had been given the adrenaline but told that it was only vitamins and that it would have no effect on them. They misattributed their chemically-enhanced emotions to the questionnaire, whereas those who told that they were receiving the injection of a stimulant (and those receiving the placebo) did not misattribute their emotions. Here is a succinct description of the phenomenon of misattribution of arousal. (and see here). republican-babes What follows is an excerpt from Social Psychology and Human Nature, by Roy F. Baumeister and Brad Bushman (2007) (p. 187):

The intriguing thing about the Schachter-Singer theory is that it allows for arousals to be mislabeled or relabeled. That is, an arousal may arise for one reason but get another label, thereby producing a different reaction. For example, someone may not realize that what he or she is drinking has caffeine (e.g., if you think that you have decaffeinated tea when in reality it has caffeine . . .) it may create an arousal state. If something frustrating happens, someone who has this extra, unexplained arousal may get much angrier than he or she would otherwise. This process is called excitation transfer . . . The arousal from the first event (drinking caffeinated tea) transfers to the second event (frustration).
Consider that large numbers of conservative/fundamentalist men are not comfortable acknowledging the sexual arousal they feel when they see images of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter or Michelle Bachman. Therefore (as my hunch goes), when they experience intense sexual arousal that they are not comfortable acknowledging (when they “dissociate” these toxic thoughts of “inappropriate” sexual attractiveness), they are left without any obvious explanation for their increased arousal. They are thus ripe for misattribution. They are easily self-fooled that they are feeling passionate about their country or fearful about Middle Eastern “terrorists.” Whatever it is that these vapid/deceitful Republican babes are uttering, it must be true too. “Why else would my blood flow thusly whenever I hear Sarah Palin give a talk?” Why, indeed?

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