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As Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has pointed out, “In America everyone is entitled to their own opinion. However, everyone is NOT entitled to their own facts.”
We know that Mr. Trump has a, um, complicated relationship with the truth. When it comes to sex he’s not alone. People believe the scariest, meanest things about sexuality, as if it’s somehow comforting to hear that sex is bad for you, dangerous to others, and so powerful that civilization is just about to collapse under the selfish urgency of sexual desire.
But there are things about sex that are known—not just felt, not preferred, not imagined or opined on. Scientists measure them. Government statisticians collect and report them. They’re called facts.
So here are some facts, Mr. Trump, of which you should be aware when formulating policy. You especially need to know these facts when your advisers and allies urge you to try control everyone else’s sexuality.
* FACT: Comprehensive sex education reduces teen pregnancy (and therefore teen abortion) and teen STDs.
True, many people are uncomfortable acknowledging teen sexuality. It’s fine for such people to say so—without denying the science that the more accurate information teens have, the more responsibly they behave.
* FACT: One-third of American women get an abortion during their lifetime.
People who get abortions aren’t simply teens who regret their drunken escapades, heroin-addicted prostitutes, or women who casually decide to end a pregnancy because their waistline is expanding. The majority of women who get abortions are already mothers.
Anti-choice activists would show more integrity if they admitted that they were attempting to criminalize an incredibly common procedure—which, by the way, is statistically safer than childbirth.
* FACT: Children who grow up with two parents of the same gender have the same mental health and educational outcomes as children with parents of different genders, when families are matched for income.
True, many people think it’s creepy that gay people couple up, even creepier that they raise kids, and super creepy that kids think their household is normal. Such people don’t feel free to say so in public anymore, making the whole subject even more complicated for them. Nevertheless, people can feel gay childrearing is creepy without claiming they “know” that gay parents are dangerous for kids.
In twenty years, there will be so many gardeners, astronauts, and kindergarten teachers raised in gay households that almost no one will make a fuss.
* FACT: There is no rape epidemic on college campuses or anywhere else in America.
True, there’s too damn much rape in this country. But according to the FBI, the rate of rape is decreasing, not increasing. Yes, rape is under-reported, but it was more under-reported ten and twenty years ago than it is now.
The “1-in-5 college women are sexually assaulted” statistic so often cited is the result of a sloppy study using terrible methodology. Instead of asking women “have you been sexually assaulted,” the questionnaire asked about their experiences. The researcher then decided what to code as sexual assault, including unwanted kissing. Unwanted kissing is definitely gross, but grouping it together with rape isn’t good science, and it trivializes rape.
In the Congo today, hungry, enraged, and crazy-high soldiers rape women and girls as an instrument of war. One in five women in the Congo has been raped. To imagine that Ohio State or Harvard are as dangerous as war-time Congo is not only a bizarre fantasy, it does nothing to reduce actual sexual violence in America or anywhere else.
American activists who say the actual numbers don’t matter, as long as they attract attention to the very real problem of rape are hurting, not helping this important cause.
* FACT: Strip clubs and swing clubs do not reduce property values in their neighborhoods.
In city after city, anti-club activists have claimed that clubs attract crime and reduce property values. And in city after city, police departments—whose job it is to track these things—have failed to document this. Of course, if you force clubs to operate in the most dangerous, industrial parts of town, you can notice all the crime surrounding clubs. But if you compare bad neighborhoods with clubs and bad neighborhoods without clubs, the crime profile is the same. That’s also true for good neighborhoods with and without clubs—same crime profile.
You can be against clubs without making up stories about the “inevitable” effects of them. Any activist claiming to be “moral” should be honest.
* FACT: Adults convicted of sexually exploiting children have a substantially lower rate of re-offending than adults convicted of armed robbery, arson, or violent assault.
No one is more loathed than an adult who sexualizes a child. But people are free to loathe without inventing stories about how molesters pose a lifelong threat to every child on earth. The rate at which child molesters can actually grow beyond their previous bad choices is actually quite impressive. Many could even become productive members of society—if they weren’t forced to live under freeway overpasses and homeless encampments on the edge of town.
* FACT: The overwhelming majority of internet pornography is not violent, and depicts consensual sex.
There’s a simple reason for this: of the 60 million Americans who regularly watch porn, most of them want porn that depicts consensual rather than violent sex. Activists who claim that most porn is violent are saying that most people who watch porn want to watch violence. That’s a bizarre assertion, since porn watchers are our husbands, sons, brothers, and friends.
Activists are free to hate porn—to hate the masturbation that accompanies it, to hate the range of sexual choices depicted, to hate the reality that so many marriages include inadequate sexual lives.
But every activist needs to answer a simple question: of the men in your life, which ones do you believe prefer porn that shows violence to porn that shows pleasure and consent?
