These kind of articles are always fun because we can point and laugh at the hypocritical religious conservatives who advocate one thing for us an then do another thing in their own private lives.
A new study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, produced by researchers from Canadian Universities, found American states that identify as more religious and conservative are also more apt to search for sex online. Of course, the study makes a point of separating the religiously conservative from the politically conservative. The latter is more likely to look for sex specific terms, such as “gay sex, free porn and xxx,” whereas those that consider themselves religious were looking for generalized sex terms that could’ve theoretically fallen under the “health and wellness” category.
In heavily religious states, abstinence is often pushed as the only safe sex, with very little to offer in the way of sexual education. Unfortunately, that leaves a growing number of people with questions about sex but no answers. Enter Google: the best way to find an answer to personal, possibly embarrassing questions without calling attention to yourself. So of course the study finds that religious communities have a higher percentage of sex-related searches. That’s what happens when you can’t find it elsewhere.
What’s interesting here, though, is that the study isn’t necessarily showing that religiously conservative communities watch more online porn. What they’re actually showing is that these communities are more likely to use online search engines to look for answers about human sexuality. And their hypothesis for why this is the case is because people in these communities have difficulty getting answers from the people in their lives.
If this is correct, then the real effect of abstinence-only education is to push kids into looking for answers online, and we all know what happens when you ask Google a question about sex: you are offered portals into pornography.
Not to bash porn, but it’s not the best answer to questions about, say, ovulation or birth control.
That’s not quite what that The Daily Beast headline promised, but the Christian right-wingers aren’t protecting their sons and daughters by pushing them to get their answers from the porn industry.
Cue XKCD cartoon: SOMETHING is WRONG on the INTERNET!
Something about that “easy” setting: I was out door knocking for the MN House Dems yesterday and I had a man very earnestly tell me that he was living “bare bones” on $200K/yr. “I just don’t know how people can raise a family on only $100,000 a year,” he also said. SMH.
Fascists love their enablers as dumb and ignorant as they can get them.
Chalk it up to play #32,485 of the American Fascist Party.
The cognitive dissonance about sex in states that now parade themselves as religiously and politically conservative is fascinating to watch. My first clue of this came when I was in high school. The only sex education my high school provided was a film about venereal diseases in biology class, obviously intended to scare kids into abstinence by the way it was pitched. It was in a chapter section about infectious diseases and their control. In a school system that had segregated high schools, not just racial segregation; there was a boys high school and a girls high school. In South Carolina, a state that did not require VD blood test screening for a marriage license at a time when that was considered best practices for disease control. And, oh yes, the non-coeducational high school system resulted in the county having the highest teenaged pregnancy rate in the state, which itself had high teenaged pregnancy rates.
I bet that there’s a life’s worth of kneeling confessions and repentance out of that perfect storm of learning by doing. And enough preachers to meet the demand.
On the plus side, at least those kids know that they don’t know anything about sex and some might stumble onto valid information in their Googling.
Whereas, with the new TX history books, they won’t know that what they’ve been taught is a load of crap and therefore, aren’t too likely to seek out correct information. And if somehow they stumble upon more accurate history, more likely than not, they’ll reject it. Right along with creationism is superior to the “just a theory” evolution.