Annals of Sociology: Red sex, Blue sex
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
That seems to suggest that once peer-pressure starts working for the effort in the general population, there is a corresponding rise in hypocrisy as a sort of peer-pressure-release valve, and that can even undermine the committed core.
This effect might be generalizable to other moral-suasion campaigns. This deserves studies and articles all by itself.
It's possible to do something dangerous, responsibly. Not that sex is terribly dangerous.
For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong. [pg 3]”
The problem with teen sex is that too many wield this power far too lightly. Like a child who's just found its father's gun, they don't really understand the ramifications of what they're doing or the risk that they are taking.
"Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion."
There's the answer right there. If the families and communities treat teenage pregnancy as a (relative) non-event, then there are no ramifications to getting pregnant. They "understand the ramifications" and "the risk of what they are doing" to be relatively low. By encouraging abstinence and not making it hard on those who don't practice abstinence, it's sending a message that sex isn't that big of a deal.
A similar argument has been used to explain why religious groups that oppose having children die out fairly quickly. But in the case of American politics, those making the argument assume that the American two-party system will still exist in the timeframe 30-100 years, and further that abortion will still be the primary political topic in a generation or three. The last assumption is ridiculous. And we haven't even considered that new generations often discard important values from the old.
I linked to this mainly because I find it interesting, not because I believe it.
The author doesn't know those groups very well. They're getting pregnant because they want to get pregnant and have kids. Different sex ed won't change that.
So I know these groups pretty well.
None of them, not a single one, wanted to get pregnant and have kids at age 16. Have sex, certainly, have irresponsible unprotected sex even, but getting pregnant was not something anyone wanted. Maybe in five or ten years, but in high school, none.
For some, having a kid got them out of the high school that they didn't want to be in anyway. (Or, junior high in some cases.) In other cases, it let them say "I'm an adult" and others thought "my kid will have to love me".
Some waited until after high school, or at least the spring of their senior year.
The more interesting thing is the reporting on this matter itself. There's a constant stream of urban liberal editorials/articles on red state teen pregnancies. I think it's because at some level liberals are freaked out about being out-bred by such a wide margin. This is why the self-congratulatory and "chastising the hicks" bits are so necessary.
This is why Palin and her family freaks out a lot of liberal women SOO badly. She's a stark reminder of their infertility.
I'm sure it's complicated by mobility: people move from red to blue and vice versa to find people with matching tendencies. But I doubt that's enough to matter.
Where there are strong knowledge-based economies, there's a need to delay childbearing until one has the necessary education to be economically competitive. This results in low fertility rates, and it also results in high education levels. High education correlates with a liberal political orientation. Therefore, liberal political orientation correlates with delayed childbearing and lower fertility.
or:
Where there are large numbers of skilled immigrants, people tend to lean liberal, as the cultural melting pot "desensitizes" them to new ideas. This exchange of ideas also spurs a bustling idea marketplace and healthy startup economy. This, in turn, results in higher levels of income inequality, which means that people have a large incentive to play the lottery and delay childbearing until they've had their shot at the big bucks. Therefore, liberal political orientation correlates with delayed childbearing and lower fertility.
or:
Smarter people tend to be educated. Educated people tend to be liberals. Smarter people also tend not to get pregnant accidentally. Therefore, liberal political orientation correlates with delayed childbearing and lower fertility.
Uh, no.
I'm not a woman, but the women I know who are freaked out by Palin (and ALL the women I know are in fact freaked out by Palin, since you brought her up) are freaked out because they feel she's an incompetent, hypocritical buffoon dressed up in $150,000 designer clothes that Republican donors unknowingly bought.
And they hate her policy proposals - the policies they are able to parse out of her almost incomprehensible verbal wanderings.
> dressed up in $150,000 designer clothes
I'm sure Obama used his own money for the make-up artist before the debates and also paid for the backdrops used for his convention speech. Newsflash: the parties spend money on TV appearances.
Note: I do not like Palin or McCain. I only find the reaction to them intriguing.
People in New York have fewer children because:
1. We marry a lot later. This is one of the few cities in the world where it's not stigmatized to be over 30 and unmarried.
2. The housing situation is, indeed, shitty. It's not as bad as you say, with the condemnation to suburbs that you depict as inexorable, but having kids will accelerate the outright theft of your savings by the property-owning class.
There's a constant stream of urban liberal editorials/articles on red state teen pregnancies. I think it's because at some level liberals are freaked out about being out-bred by such a wide margin.
This "constant stream" of articles exists for a reason. Religious conservatives are trying to push their social model on us. We're pointing out that it doesn't work well even on its home turf. This isn't about "chastising the hicks". The victims of the red-state family breakdowns are, obviously, people in the red states.
This is why Palin and her family freaks out a lot of liberal women SOO badly. She's a stark reminder of their infertility.
Although I'm a man, I'll point out that Palin scares anyone with a brain. This has nothing to do with fertility. 1. She has an extremely narrow-minded view, which is completely inappropriate for someone running for high public office. 2. She stands for everything that is consumptive ("drill, baby, drill"), self-indulgent, mean-spirited, wrong and stupid about this country. 3. Although she was picked to rally middle-of-the-road women, she failed completely at that... but is great at stoking the lowest common denominator bottom-feeders, as the people who show up at Palin rallies (racists, paranoids) are loathsome.
New Yorkers don't despise people who choose to have large families. We despise those who do so irresponsibly, and we despise the very rich who have large families to show off (a Manhattan/Boston phenomenon) their means, such as Mitt Romney, because of their effect on housing prices... but we don't have a knee-jerk animosity toward people in general who choose to have four or five kids.