PressEthic

While I truly enjoyed The New York Times article about that crappy survey that enlightened us to Ivy League women’s true ambition as housewives, another breakthrough study was published last Friday in both The Times and The Washington Post that revealed that more than half of 15 to 19 year olds surveyed have had oral sex. The survey, published nationally, detailed other stats, including the average number of partners for the average teenager, homosexual tendencies, and one short sentence about anal sex amongst men, both gay and straight(Yet no mention of this question posed to women?) Excellent breakfast table reading if I do say so myself. My Cheerios went down much easier, let me tell you.

But as an article on Slate revealed, this just isn’t the whole study. The article spent a majority of its body detailing the shock of how much oral sex high schoolers are having. They conveniently left out a large portion of the article that dealt with pretty mind-boggling statistics about the increase in anal sex. Here’s the passage Slate quoted that most newspapers conveniently left out:

"For males, the proportion who have had anal sex with a female increases from 4.6 percent at age 15 to 34 percent at ages 22–24; for females, the proportion who have had anal sex with a male increases from 2.4 percent at age 15 to 32 percent at age 22–24. One in three women admits to having had anal sex by age 24. By ages 25 to 44, the percentages rise to 40 for men and 35 for women. And that's not counting the 3.7 percent of men aged 15 to 44 who've had anal sex with other men.”

William Saletan, the author of the hilariously titled “Ass Backwards”, claims that the media’s silence about these facts is dangerous because anal sex is actually much more dangerous than oral sex, in terms of spreading diseases and what not. Only one paper, a New Jersey publication, published the full version of the study. Should newspapers really even publish studies if they are going to leave crucial parts out? Saletan admits that parents reading the article may now broach the subject of lecturing on oral sex to their teens, when they really should be discussing anal sex, which is 50 times more dangerous in terms of contracting HIV than oral sex. A front page story detailing the dangers of anal sex, may not be respectable front page fodder for such renown publications as The Times and Post, but I guess we just haven’t gotten passed the taboo of “the back door”. Between this survey and the one on Ivy League homemakers, let’s just say either publish a survey correctly, and with the a legitimate sampling, or find something else to fill that page one spot!