Germaine Greer on abstinence-ish

At the very beginning of
this show with 1970s feminist Germaine Greer (author of the Female Eunuch which I remember really liking when I was 14 or 15), she mentions a couple interesting anecdotes about young adult/late adolescent women and sexual decision-making.

1. One of her students didn't feel ready for penetrative sex, and eventually her boyfriend left her for it. She would meet men at parties to hook up with, and say "By the way, I don't do penetrative sex." and the men would just walk away. Which is a strange anecdote. The qualitative book _Hooking Up_ describes most hook-ups as not going that far, often just kissing (at least that's what they would tell the sociologist.) Meanwhile this woman's housemates all had boyfriends and were all sexually active and having penetrative sex "because it was required of them" in Greer's words, but they were less accustomed to sexual pleasure.

2. She says Sex in the City depresses her because the characters focus so much on men and sex.


Just anecdotes, but I find it fascinating from the perspective of the earlier wave of feminism and earlier feminist sexual values.

Hare-brained idea of the day

I'm a total non-biologist, but I'm just putting this idea out there.

My understanding is that a woman's sense of smell allows her to figure out who is a good immune match --- men who smell good to her have complementary immune function and she would have healthier children with them. Oral contraceptives (OCs) interfere with this function so that a woman on OCs might marry someone who isn't genetically complementary and doesn't smell good to her after she goes off them. The number of women who chose their husbands while taking oral contraceptives has increased enormously since their invention. I wonder whether this has any social or medical implications: are the children of women who met their husbands while taking OCs less healthy in some way? Are these couples more likely to get divorced?

Anyone know any research on this idea?

My high school's sex ed

This showed up in my Google alerts: My high school's sex education covered in the Daily Northwestern.

Installing WinBUGS under Mac

I'm reviewing a book on Bayesian models, and the very first thing the book says to do is install WinBUGS. I always coded by hand my Bayesian models, and maybe that's why I've only published one paper using them. So install WinBUGS on my Mac.

There's a lot out there. Three versions of BUGS: WinBUGS, OpenBUGS, and JAGS. And several windows emulators: wine, Crossover, etc.

All options require installing Xcode tools which has the following steps:
1. Put original OS X CD in, and install Xcode.
2. Go to apple developer connection website, register, download updated version of Xcode (so maybe first step wasn't necessary?) which is 1 G and took 3 hours to download, and install everything including X11 and X11SDK

Here's what I've tried so far.

1. Darwine: Theoretically easy because it comes precompiled. People claim that this works and a statistics class at Duke even had all their students do this, but I couldn't get it to work.

Nothing happens. Just get an error in the console:
err:module:DelayLoadFailureHook failed to delay load setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW
wine: Call from 0x7b831fd5 to unimplemented function setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW, aborting
wine: Unimplemented function setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW called at address 0x7b831fd5 (thread 000b), starting debugger...
couldn't load main module (2)
Unhandled exception: unimplemented function setupapi.dll.InstallHinfSectionW called in 32-bit code (0x7b832077).
Register dump:
....
err:module:attach_process_dlls "gdi32.dll" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"Z:\\Applications\\WinBUGS14\\WinBUGS14.exe" failed, status c0000005

2. Wine installed under fink. Something that looks Windows-like launches, but it's just an error box. I didn't save the message.

3. Wine installed under MacPorts had 56 dependencies and required a lot of hand intervention. I did many of the dependencies in parallel or else it would have taken even longer.

And whoo, WinBUGS actually launches, but as soon as I clicked on new to input the license key, it crashed with this error:

[Macintosh:~] janet% wine /Applications/WinBUGS14/WinBUGS14.exe
fixme:keyboard:RegisterHotKey (0x10026,13,0x00000002,3): stub
fixme:ole:GetHGlobalFromILockBytes cbSize is 13824
err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {0003000a-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} not registered
err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {0003000a-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} not registered
err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object {0003000a-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} could be created for context 0x3
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 152 (RENDER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
Serial number of failed request: 7133
Current serial number in output stream: 8517

3b. Then within the MacPort wine I tried running OpenBUGS rather than WinBUGS, and the same thing happened.

[Macintosh:~] janet% wine /Applications/OpenBUGS/winbugs.exe
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 152 (RENDER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
Serial number of failed request: 1812
Current serial number in output stream: 2302

5. JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) installs perfectly in less than 5 minutes and even has a manual. But it says that it doesn't do everything that WinBUGS does, though it really wishes it did.

6. Crossover allows downloads of trial copies that work for 30 days but cost $50 to educational users after that. As with Darwine and Wine, people claim to have gotten it working with BUGS, but the company itself doesn't guarantee that it will work. And so far it does after I followed this hint.

The remaining problem is how to integrate WinBUGS with R now that the famous BRugs package has disappeared.

Is there any federal funding for comprehensive sex education?

When I use federal budget figures, I get all of them from the federal budget: I download the HHS budget and search the PDF for the programs I'm interested in, and I add up the numbers that come up in the search for "abstinence." That's how I got $204 million as the figure for abstinence-only sex education, for instance. Other media cite $176 million, but that excludes some of the funding mechanisms that go to abstinence.

I have never seen any indication that there was any federal funding at all for comprehensive sex education, so I have been continually confused by claims of the abstinence-only folks that comprehensive sex education has some big money pot dedicated to it. I figured that they were counting some portion of Title X funding as "comprehensive sex education" --- Title X is family planning, used primarily for teen pregnancy prevention. (Of course in the past several years they were required to follow the shutting the barn door after the horse escaped approach by teaching abstinence to their patients coming for pregnancy and STD tests.) But because I saw it repeated so often I thought maybe there was a grain of truth in their claims that there was federal funding for comprehensive sex education.

It turns out that as I had originally suspected the claims about federal funding for comprehensive sex education seem to be out of context, counting Title X as sex education funds even though they don't go to schools and are intended primarily to pay for reproductive health care for millions of women. (About 5 million, if I recall correctly.)

I'm disappointed by this distortion. Like many others, I agree with the goal of the abstinence movement to encourage delayed sex and fewer partners, (though it's much more complicated than just that!), and there are plenty of real balanced reasons for those goals, making it all the more disappointing that some in the movement distort budget figures and scientific research (e.g., the famous condom effectiveness.)

Parental monitoring and virginity pledges

A new op-ed about my paper written by an evangelical motivational speaker in the Christian Post and I actually agree with it. He says that parents give their children too much privacy in which to be sexually involved, and they are deluding themselves to think their children are not taking advantage of the privacy, and being lured into false complacency by their children's involvement in church activities. Definitely, parental monitoring is more important than any program that a school or church can run. As for the specifics of what parents' policies should be, it's of course up to the parents. Banning teenagers from being behind closed doors with the opposite sex is one approach, but of course far from fool-proof. Some parents would say that their teens are eventually going to be behind closed doors, and they would rather it be in their house than being somewhere else without parental back-up in case they find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.

I once met a woman raised in one of the most right-wing Chassidic groups where boys and girls never interact at all, where they are thrown out of school if they are seen together in public, where everyone in the neighborhood knows everyone else, and are certainly never allowed to be behind closed doors, and somehow she managed to have premarital sex when she was 16. Her first language was Yiddish, and her English was not terrific, so I never found out exactly how she circumvented all the controls, but she did. So it's not clear how often the op-ed writer's strategy works, and he may not know himself.

Also, his logic that it's better to keep teens from dating one person consistently because that leads to emotional ties that leads to sex assumes that teens become physically intimate only with people that they have emotional ties with. Many parents would say it's better to learn to have emotional intimacy with the opposite sex and have sex with at most one person, than to prevent emotional intimacy and risk that their child would become physically intimate with more than one person.

None of these questions have easy answers: there are positives and negatives for all parental policies, and mistakes are inevitable no matter what. But it is good to see such a frank discussion of the importance of parents and parental monitoring.

Best quote.

I am stunned at how blatantly stupid some Christian parents seem to be when it comes to sexual things. They let their kids watch all kinds of blatantly sexual images in movies and on television with little thought of how those images and messages can affect them. I know of a pastor friend who allowed his young daughter to see the movie Titanic at least 11 times. This same pastor was all worried about anything she saw that he deemed to be satanic, like Harry Potter, but not at all concerned about his 14 year old daughter learning the lessons found in a movie like Titanic. And the lessons are very simple: If you really like a boy you can let him see your boobies and he can draw pictures of your boobies, and if you really like him, you can have sex with him two days later…

Look, the chances of your teenage daughter wanting to jump on a broom and fly around the room are pretty low. But, the chances that your daughter’s boyfriend will want to touch her boobies, well… I’d give that a pretty big chance, wouldn’t you? Talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! We need to get our priorities straight.

What's wrong with the word "breasts"? I think that's a far less objectionable word choice than his.

How many teens in the US are abstinent? Nearly 500, apparently.

The Catholic News Agency has the following headline: Nearly 500 teens to mark Abstinence Day at U.S. Capitol.

There are over 300 million people in the US. I would think that they could find at least 1000 abstinent teenagers.