Wow! There are 21 graphs that detail the same-sex marriage case along with public opinion and the Supreme Court. You can even play around with the data. Really fascinating.
The Problems of Love from Sartre and Beauvoir to Irigaray
Explaining Privilege in Comic Form
Toby Morris made a brief comic explaining privilege. A snippet is below: 
Check out the whole thing here.
How Sexual Equality can Lead to Income Inequality
I mentioned a study about how your hometown can affect whether you get married early or not.
Another study about how sexual equality can lead to income inequality. With both genders more likely to marry within the same educational bracket, they make more money, but by doing so, those with less education make less. Hence the inequality. Check out the site here.
Judge Rules against Abstinence-Only Sex Education
A judge in California has ruled against abstinence-only sex education because it violated the the state law by failing to provide adequate information and instruction on sexual health and HIV prevention.
Part of the ruling reads:
Plaintiffs claim that the District approved and used a variety of “egregiously inaccurate and biased videos,” including Sex still has a Price Tag and No Apologies: The Truth about Life, Love and Sex; in 2007 it engaged an outside agency, Teen Choices, Inc., to provide instruction in intermediate school using a curriculum that was “replete with inaccurate, biased, and outdated information”; it approved another agency, the Pregnancy Care Center, to provide instruction despite the fact that its instructors did not have the required expertise in comprehensive sexual health education, and as it representative later admitted its presentation did not meet the requirements of the Act; and it adopted textbooks that failed to mention condoms or other contraception.
You can read the ruling here.
Your Hometown Affects your Chances of Marriage
NY Times has released an interactive map about where you live affects when you get married. The pattern is that the more liberal place you live, the more likely you’ll postpone marriage: 
You can check out the interactive map here, along with other interesting tidbits about the study. The state where you’re more likely to marry early? Utah. The area where you’re likely to marry late? Washington D.C.
Study: Millennials have More Relaxed Attitudes Regarding Sex, but Have Fewer Partners
According to a study, millennials these days may have casual hookups, but they have less partners than their parents did.
What other relaxed attitudes are there?
Premarital Sex
In the 1970s, 29% of Americans thought premarital sex was acceptable.
By the 1980s, 42% of Americans thought premarital sex was acceptable.
It crossed the 50% mark in 2008 and now 55% of Americans think that premarital sex is acceptable.
This is mainly from the current young generation. 47% of baby boomers think it’s acceptable, 50% of Generation Xers think it is, and 62% of late teens early 20s say that premarital sex is acceptable.
Why the drastic change? Partially because the later generations are waiting to get married. On average, the age is around 27 for women, and 29 for me. That’s approximately ten years without sex if one holds to the traditional views. Thus, the current generation has a more relaxed view of premarital sex.
Same-Sex Marriage
Same-sex relationships are also coming into their own, according to the study. Until the early 1990s, only 11% to 16% of Americans approved of such relationships. But that trajectory changed rapidly beginning in 1993, with 22% approving of gay and lesbian relationships. By 2012, 44% of the public was accepting of same-sex couples.
Once again, millennials led the way — 56% of millennials in their late teens and 20s said they had no problem with same-sex relationships. Only 26% of Gen Xers felt the same way when they were that age, as did a mere 21% of baby boomers, the researchers found.
Casual Sex
45% of millennials said they have had casual sex by their 20s (which the article defines as having sex with someone other than a significant other or spouse). Only 35% of Gen Xers did by their 20s. However, don’t assume that millennials have more sexual partners.
Teenage Sex
Americans in general have become more open to the idea of teenagers having sex — 6% of people surveyed in 2012 said they were fine with it, up from 4% in 2006. Meanwhile, they’ve become less tolerant of extramarital sex — only 1% of people accepted it in 2012, down from 4% in 1973.
The social scientist quoted in the report says that when individualism goes up, so does lax attitudes regarding sexuality.
You can read about the summary of the study here.
Posted in Casual Sex, Promiscuity, Sexuality, Studies, Values
Tagged Casual Sex, Promiscuity, Sexuality, Study
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Let’s See What’s in the News Today (May 11, 2015)
Health
- A study about standing desks shows that it increases productivity by as much as 12% as well as combat childhood obesity.
Justice
- Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson makes a case for inequalities we can live with:
Current justifications for extreme inequality of income and wealth grossly exaggerate their positive incentive effects, and underestimate their negative effects. Consider the fact that top German and Japanese executives earn far less than their counterparts in the U.S. or U.K., but their firms are just as productive. Even within the U.S., there is virtually no correlation between pay and performance for top executives. Studies show that excessive incentives for work requiring innovative thinking can actually depress productivity by focusing people’s minds on money rather than the task at hand.
Politics
- Rebecca Roache writes a controversial post: “If you’re a Conservative, I’m not your Friend.”
- Well-respected journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the death of Osama bin Laden was not an American-planned action, but a collaboration between American/Pakistani officials, and that the Pakistani government held bin Laden since 2006 for leverage with the Saudi government’s approval.
- In response, Max Fisher argues that the story doesn’t hold up because Hersh’s main source is “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.” In the end, Fisher argues that Hersh’s reporting sounds like a conspiracy theory than actual facts.
Religion
- A study from last year shows that children exposed to religion have a hard time distinguishing between fact and fiction.
Sexuality
- Most female mammals have sex when they are in heat. Humans are the exception: women can have sex anytime. Evolutionarily speaking, why is this possible? After all, female humans best get pregnant during ovulation. One study suggests that women engage in sex even during their nonfertile phase to garner investment from male partners. But if this is true, then women would be able to initiate sex more during their nonfertile (the luteal-phase) phase. The results showed that women initiate sex during the nonfertile phase, but not the fertile phase, when they see their partners’ investment lag behind their own. One drawback to this study is that the sample size was 50 heterosexual women.
- Free birth control does not make women promiscuous.
- Women’s masturbation + feminism = women’s empowerment.
- Non-monosexual females report there is no differentiation of sexual arousal if they are with men or women, whereas monosexual females do report a differentiation.
Existential Comics: Advice On How to Study Philosophy as an Amateur
Existential Comics does some fantastic comics displaying philosophical views through comics. In a recent blog post, the author gave some advice of how to study philosophy. What I found intriguing is that he never took any philosophy classes while he was in college. What I really like is this advice:
I hate the Principle of Charity. It is the worst. Not because it is bad, but because it seems to fail miserably as a rhetoric. Everyone thinks the principle is great in general. However, no one thinks that they themselves need to follow it more, no matter how much they turn everything they don’t agree with into a straw man. If you showed Glenn Beck the Wikipedia page for the Principle of Charity, he would probably say: “That’s great, I couldn’t agree more! Liberals need to be more charitable with conservative arguments. I, however, am perfectly charitable with their arguments – their arguments are just bad”. In that way it’s very similar to the Dunning-Krugar effect; in a rather self-fulfilling way, no one seems to think it applies to themselves.
So I am proposing a new principle: The Principle of Science. When first reading a philosophical text, you should read it not as the most compelling argument, but rather as though you were reading a scientific text.
He offers where to start and some websites to check out as well. I was amazed by this site that he recommended to learn Hegel.
Nebraskan Woman Sues All Homosexuals
A woman from Nebraska is calling herself the “ambassador” for plaintiffs “God and His Son, Jesus Christ.” She is suing all homosexuals on Earth for breaking “religious and moral laws.”
The docket is entered as Driskell v. Homosexuals where the “ambassador,” Sylvia Ann Driskell, 66, asks U.S. District Judge John M. Gerrard decide once and for all whether homosexuality is or isn’t a sin. No summons were issued.
One Way Streets are Bad for Everyone
An article from the Wonkblog investigates one-way streets. Some streets used to be one-way streets, but have transitioned to two-way streets. What was the effect?
In 2011, Louisville converted two one-way streets near downtown, each a little more than a mile long, back to two-way traffic. In data that they gathered over the following three years, Gilderbloom and William Riggs found that traffic collisions dropped steeply — by 36 percent on one street and 60 percent on the other — after the conversion, even as the number of cars traveling these roads increased. Crime dropped too, by about a quarter, as crime in the rest of the city was rising. Property values rose, as did business revenue and pedestrian traffic, relative to before the change and to a pair of nearby comparison streets. The city, as a result, now stands to collect higher property tax revenues along these streets, and to spend less sending first-responders to accidents there.
More than that, crashes happen less often, and the property values go up. A very interesting article.
Shaun Miller's Ideas 