Slashdot Mirror
Smarter Teens Have Less Sex
Tech.Luver writes "Gene Expression reports,
"Tyler Cowen quotes from a new study testing the relationship between grades and delayed sexual activity.
Last December I passed a paper along to Razib showing that high-school age adolescents with higher IQs and extremely low IQs were less likely to have had first intercourse than those with average to below average intelligence. (i.e. for males with IQs under 70, 63.3% were still virgins, for those with IQs between 70-90 only 50.2% were virgin, 58.6% were virgins with IQs between 90-110, and 70.3% with IQs over 110 were virgins)
In fact, a more detailed study from 2000 is devoted strictly to this topic, and finds the same thing: Smart Teens Don't Have Sex (or Kiss Much Either). ""
Maybe smarter kids generally just don't feel the need to lie about having sex. And extremely stupid ones don't think to lie about it. Just a thought.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
In the Victorian era, the celebrities of the time were engineers and scientists - the people who shaped the world, rather than the vapid, talentless bimbos we celebrate today. We can only hope that at some point in the future, it will once again be cool to be smart.
Man, I wish I was born in the Victorian era. Sigh.
Peter
The real question is, are some teens getting less sex because they are smart, or are they smart because they are getting less sex (for whatever reason)?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Now if I could only remember who said that...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Having thought back to my High School days, much of this sounds pretty accurate. I know there'll be many Slashdot jokes around about this, but think seriously about it for a bit. Those who threw it out there too much at High School, how many of those people who you knew are now living on crap wages, in a crap job, are unmarried, uncommitted and immature parents or single mothers struggling to keep a roof over their heads with no ability to plan for the future?
;-).
I live in the UK, but the answer in my case is all of the people I could think of scarily. I caught up with a few people from High School not long ago, and the stuff that's happened to many of the people from school who concentrated on sex and immature relationships is shocking. It's a tale of divorce, single motherhood, poverty and immaturity. These people also tend to be extremely crap at romantic and sexual relationships when they're older, as well as pretty immature. Taking one example, how many people in their late twenties think that getting married to someone you only met six months ago, divorcing that person a few years later, getting back together with an ex a few months after said divorce and having a baby with that person after only a few weeks or months of being together is mature? They still act like 15 year olds, and in some cases, worse.
As for me, I have a good job with good money, working with people who I like and get on with, I have a lovely girlfriend and I'm still as horny as hell from all that High School abstinence
Seriously though, looking around from my own personal experience, scarily, I think a whole social underclass is being created. I also think this is largely responsible for the increase in divorce, the increase in single motherhood and the inevitable problems for their children that has brought with it. Those having sex in High School generally just aren't mature enough to handle sex, and that's setting them up for life.
I'm not quite sure what grades are a good measure of. Being able to color inside the lines? Following instructions and memorizing facts? Rarely they can measure understanding and creativity, but that's highly dependent on the skill of the instructor creating the assignments.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I am a 20 year old engineering major male white college student.
I have a case of asperger's syndrome (And before anyone accuses me of being self-diagnosed, I'd not even heard of it until a therapist diagnosed me).
And, not to sound egotistical, but I like to think that I have above-average intelligence. I'm not a genius, nor a whiz at anything, nor do I have Mensa begging for me to enroll, but I do feel I have sufficient evidence to suggest I'm smarter (using a definition akin to "able to interpret, recall, and use information) than the average 20 year old.
Do I even need to add that I'm a complete virgin? I've never gotten to second base. Or first base. Hell, I didn't get up to bat. I'm not even a benchwarmer. (I just used up all my sports analogies.)
My social skills have improved since grade school, and I'm nowhere near as shy as I used to be (But then again, it's no substitute for real interaction, but spend years online and you do tend to develop a tolerance to mockery and jerks.)
But I've still never had a girlfriend. Not even close. I feel this is due to both a lack of interest, a lack of experience, well below-average social skills, and a lack of eligible bachelorettes (see: Engineering major).
Quite frankly, in my free time between classes at my college I go to the lounge, where I meet a vast number of different people. Most of the females are:
A: taken
B: incompatible with my nature (I don't mind someone having different interests and ideas than me, but SOME common ground is nice.)
C: Bat-shit crazy demons I wouldn't touch with a 39 and a half foot pole, let alone my bare hands.Many of these, in particular, I strongly suspect, are carrying a multitude of STDs, given how much they broadcast the sex they have.
On top of all this lies a series of moral dilemmas, such as giving in to carnal desires when I know the risks, the necessity of intimacy, the risks of getting caught... It just seems too complicated and risky to be worth the effort, especially outside of a relationship. (Not to mention how DISGUSTING sex is, when you REALLY think about it. I mean considering the biological processes involved. Though I'm sure this is lost "in the heat of the moment," it doesn't really make me any more disposed to seeking it out)
On the other hand, take my brother. Bless his soul for all the hard manual labor he does, and helping my father with his business so we didn't go OUT of business when he was injured, etc. But I use more brain power before 6am than he does all day. He admits proudly that he HATES to think and just acts. He's gone through girlfriends like candy and I'm sure has gotten laid more than a few times.
Ultimately, it seems to me that love and sex are purely animalistic and primal desires with little to no logic to them. Thus, those prone to analyzing their actions OVER analyze these things and have less success or less desire or both.
That, and my brother is currently out doing things. I'm on slashdot and going to go play City of Heroes in a while. That may have something to do with it, too.
As the German saying goes: "Dumm fickt gut", which roughly translates as "A stupid person is a great lay." It appears that you cannot beat experience here...