Sex educator Julie Sunday offers the following pithy summary of an analysis by Professors Kathrin Stanger-Hall and David Hall of state sex-education policies and rates of teen pregnancy and birth.

Sex education matters, yes, but access to services is more important. Teens do not have sex for the purpose of avoiding pregnancy--they have sex because sex is fun. If adults and policymakers want teenagers to use birth control, they will--but we have to teach them how to use it and help them figure out how to get it instead of erecting [heh] insurmountable barriers to keep them from avoiding pregnancy and spreading STIs.

Teen sexuality is like the Titanic--the ship is definitely going down. We can either play music and pretend we're not sinking or provide life jackets and get the people off the ship already. Considering that the House's recent budget proposal included renewed funding for the terrible, horrible, no good very bad Community Based Abstinence Education program (Read: federal government gives money to religious organizations to provide "education" in public schools and make cheesy PSAs), this country is still letting the ship sink without enough lifeboats for everyone.

Source: How to Have Sex in Texas

It's an interesting, sort of back-handed twist on the Titanic metaphor but I think that's about right.  The idea, incidentally, isn't to make birth control and sex safety materials available so that teenagers (or anyone else) will have sex, it's so that those materials will be available if or when they do.

In a news roundup Jos quipped

The gay and lesbian community of Minnesota apologizes to recently resigned Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch for ruining the institution of marriage and causing her to commit adultery.

Source: Feministing

Ouch!

Meanwhile life goes on:

Photo via LA Times

Photo "Adelaide Zombie Walk 'Shotgun Wedding'" by Flickr user badjonni. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Now here's a topic you don't hear (nominally) anti-trafficking religious conservatives and neoconservative feminists talk much about -- forced marriage right here in the United States.* Anyway, Pamela Haag mentions a class of human beings you're not likely to see on milk cartons any time soon... but really should be looked for. (Emphasis mine.)

One morning three years ago, [the Tahirih Justice Center] received a call from a family attorney who was struggling to help a teenage girl. She was a U.S. citizen whose south Asian-born parents threatened to beat her into submitting to a forced marriage. She’d taken the “courageous step of running away to a domestic violence shelter,” Tahirih writes in a new research report. “The shelter gave her temporary refuge, but was unsure how long they could keep her there. Her parents were threatening to sue the shelter, her attorney, and anyone else who tried to help her.” In the end, the girl was returned to her parents after children’s protective services declined to get involved, seeing it as a “cultural issue.” Tahirih doesn’t know what happened to the girl after that.

But her story and an increasing number like hers was “a definite catalyst,” says Heather Heiman, a Senior Attorney at Tahirih, to turn their attention to the “serious but hidden” problem of forced marriage in the U.S.—marriages that occur “without the full and free consent of one or both parties.”

As part of their new Forced Marriage Initiative, Tahirih conducted a national survey this summer of community organizations and leaders who may have encountered forced marriages, to get a sense of the problem. Over 500 agencies in 47 states responded.

Through this and other work Tahirih has identified 3,000 known and suspected cases in just the last two years.  And that’s likely the tip of the iceberg. Two out of three respondents on their survey felt that there were forced marriage cases not being identified in the populations they work with.

Source: Big Think

Just to be clear we shouldn't assume that women from alt-cultures who seem to be coerced from our perspective would agree with our assessment. And living as we do in a nominally civilized culture where "shotgun weddings" are still remembered by older but still-living generations we shouldn't assume it's only and always an issue alt-cultures in America. But the girl in the opening paragraph, above, definitely didn't want to be part of it and as best we know her parents jacked her into it anyway. And I think it's safe to say most of the 3,000 names collected by the Tahirih Justice Center fall in the same unambiguous category.

* My guess is ultra-conservative religious groups oppose anything to do with trafficking of commercial sex workers but don't give a living fuck about forced marriage because, hey, if it ends in marriage then all's well that ends well. Meanwhile anti-trafficking nominal feminists, who've effectively sold themselves to religious-right and neocon funding sources, don't care to rock the boat.  It's still human trafficking though, and it's still sex trafficking.

So even if you only read USA Today you may have heard about yet another variation of the how-often-men-think-of-sleep study. Where (naturally, it's always strongly implied) almost all men think about sex more often than almost all women do. Lassoing popular press accounts and bringing them back to earth, Emily Nagoski passes along the following five points.

My favorite part is on page two of the Psychology Today article, where Brian talks about problems in the media’s coverage of the study, which parallels my thinking on mainstream journalism reporting science:

1. Writers were either confused or deliberately choosing the more extreme, less representative central tendency (the mean rather than the median) to report.

2. Writers emphasized the central tendency, to the exclusion of standard deviation, when one of the most compelling results of the study was the wide variability among subjects.

3. Writers also emphasized the sex part, paying inadequate attention to the fact that thoughts about sleep and food were as frequent as thoughts about sex.

4. Writers emphasized population-level differences between men and women, neglecting to clarify that there was lots of overlap so that, even though the men on average reported more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep), many of the individual women had more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep) than many of the individual men.

5. Writers generalized the results to All People, rather than recognizing the delimitations of the population studied: college students, who are likely to be WEIRD.

What can we really conclude about frequency of thoughts about sex? We think about sex about as often as we think about food and sex, and we vary a great deal from each other in all three topics.

Source: Emily Nagoski :: sex nerd ::

Perfect.  Nagoski says the actual paper's legit (within its constraints) and I'm inclined to agree.

Other than that I've got one question and one observation.  First of all, why do I remember reading about an almost identical study a year or so ago (same basic shape: men think about sex more, but also think more about food and sleep.)  Is this one a new study or is the old one just making the rounds again?

Second, I'm not sure who mentioned it last week, but someone referring to this same study pointed out that men don't actually think about sex every seven minutes.  As I said I can't find the original source but I got that similar link via Em & Lo.

Anyway, bottom line.  The study shows that men tend to think about bodily functions more often than women do; there's considerable overlap not only within sexes but between them.  As always, good to know.