December 19, 2006

Kids these days: Dancing and sex

Half-Sigma comments on a recent NYT article regarding the crackdown some high school principals have initiated to curb "pornographic dancing styles" at school dances. There are two distinct but related reactions from adults in the NYT article and in the comments at HS' post:

1a) A Bayesian shock to the effect that, "I never would've expected to see kids dancing this way!"

1b) A moral argument that kids shouldn't be allowed to dance in such suggestive ways.

The kids have, in turn, responded with:

2a) If you opened your eyes and thought clearly, you wouldn't be so shocked!

2b) No one's being harmed. More, trying to stop us is futile.

I don't want to dwell long on the moral debate, but in brief, I find nothing objectionable about teenagers bumping & grinding. No one will get pregnant, get an STD, or become psychologically scarred from gyrating their body in close contact with that of another while fully clothed. Since most of the force of the moral argument hinges on the assumption that pornographic dancing will lead to sex, even if only probabilistically, the onus is on the proponents of cracking down on "freak dancing" to demonstrate that such dancing increases the risk of having sex among teenagers. Predictably, no evidence is presented to this effect, and there is good a priori reason to believe that suggestive dancing doesn't increase the risk of having sex -- which is that sexually suggestive dancing, combined with loud music, gabbing excitedly with one's friends, and perhaps some french kissing, may be enough to satiate teenagers' desire for some degree of debauchery, such that the thrill of having sex wouldn't add much more to the overall thrill value (diminishing returns). Teenagers may not be perfect rational agents, but they're smart enough to figure out that choosing a potentially high-cost activity that's expected to add little value is a dumb decision. To be more accurate, it's only the girls who need to think this way / be satiated by dancing, music, gabbing, and kissing, since their desires are the limiting factor on how much sex will take place. As many a club-hopping guy has lamented: would that risque dancing led even probabilistically toward intercourse! I'll get to whether teens actually are having more sex or not in a moment.

Playing devil's advocate for a second, though, let's say there was convincing evidence that freak dancing increased the risk for having sex. Does it follow that cracking down on such dancing would decrease the rate of sex among teens? Nope: it would remain to be shown that school dance raciness wouldn't just be displaced to some other location / activity that would lead to sex. For example, they might just meet up at the house of a kid whose parents were out of town that weekend, or behind the bleachers at school, or in the woods next to their house, or in the bathroom at Chipotle, or wherever else. Similarly, if someone weaned themselves from smoking daily by taking up a daily drink instead, the effect on their health of quitting cigarettes could well be a wash. Indeed, only adults who don't have children of their own, or who haven't reared someone else's children (e.g., by being a teacher), would honestly believe that hotheaded teenagers wouldn't find a way around a proscription against X; typically they opt for Y, a substitute for X that isn't forbidden. A plan that targeted all likely outlets of teenage sexual exploration might achieve good results, though implementing it in practice might prove difficult, and it would need to be shown that all the time, money, and effort expended in this chore wouldn't be used better in some other way. Don't think that teenagers are stupid on this matter, by the way:

“If you tell a kid to do something, they do what they want to anyway and probably do it 10 times more,” said Emily Bragdon, 16, a junior who was at the dance.

This observation could've come from the mouth of any headstrong adolescent (though the "10 times more" is surely an exaggeration).

Moving on to the empirical issue of whether or not teenagers are behaving more wantonly regarding sex, which is the basis for the Bayesian shock, a huge global survey on sexual behavior was published in The Lancet last month. Among other data, it contains longitudinal data on the prevalence of "early" sexual intercourse (defined as having intercourse before age 15). This seems an apt statistic to look at for our purposes. Here is their Figure 1, which shows what percentage of females (above) and males (below) had had sexual intercourse before age 15, examining those who were born from 1960-64 (lavender bars) vs. those born from 1980-84 (red bars). The 7 developed countries surveyed are at the far right.


Lest there be any confusion, these bars do not represent a mean or median -- we know that a small change in the mean can have pronounced effects at the tails, but these bars are the tails, i.e. those who've had sex before 15. Going backward through the "tail effect" argument, a change in the tails of size X implies a change in the mean of size much less than X (since the probability of tail values falls off proportional to the squared distance from the mean), or no change in the mean but a slight change in variance. No matter how you slice it, whatever purportedly earth-shaking shift has occurred in teenage dancing styles has evidently had little effect on having sex. "Kids these days" are not markedly more lascivious than in days of yore.

However, all this talk about kids from one generation or another during the 20th C is, in the end, a bunch of idle chatter. The most convincing evidence that adolescent homo sapiens have been engaging in sexual exploration for far longer is that adolescence is, by most definitions, the time when a person is prepared and motivated to mate and reproduce. If teenagers behaving sexually were a recent invention -- caused, no doubt, by the rising popularity of MTV -- then how to resolve the damning counterevidence that humans mature sexually at around age 13-15 (or perhaps somewhat earlier when nutrition is better)? It would be as if humans were fully capable of understanding the speech of others and of producing their own meaningful utterances by roughly age 4, but covered their ears anytime someone spoke, and refused to speak themselves, until age 10. The fact that humans are on average able to put their linguistic capacity to good use by age 4 is all the evidence one needs that this is the age at which humans have begun communicating, stretching back into our evolutionary history. Again, this empirical matter should not be confused with the moral one -- just because a bird is fully fledged at age X has no bearing pro or con on whether or not it should or ought to fly / leave the nest / etc. at age X. I only mention the evolutionary angle since some adults are apparently shocked to behold teenagers behaving the way teenagers will behave.

A further cause for debunking this example of a "kids these days" myth is that it is closely related to another such myth, a perennial favorite at 2blowhards (no offense; just an observation), that the youths of today are more exhibitionistic and/or salacious. The usual evidence is the way young people act on MySpace, YouTube, and similar websites. Apropos of the teeange dirty dancing theme, here is a (probably NSFW) video that ranks 7 of 186 in the YouTube search results for "bump grind," showing a pack of 16 year-old girls dancing provocatively (though fully clothed) in front of a mirror. If I were so inclined, I could find hundreds of similar YouTube videos, and thousands of such pictures scattered throughout the MySpace galaxy. I don't find anything about it shocking, not just because I'm 26 rather than 66 -- I will not be shocked by teenage exhibitionism then either. The only thing that has changed is the technology: it is just easier to detect who is and isn't an exhibitionist in the internet age.

I find this development promising, as it means that, although levels of attention-seeking and acting-out are unlikely to change in the near future, at least the outlets into which these impulses are channeled will be more cyber than real. If I had an attention-seeking daughter, I'd rather she dance provocatively for her YouTube clips and get an ego boost that way, as opposed to kissing lots of boys and/or sleeping around at school. Given how large the potential pool of fawners is online -- basically all teenage boys who are connected to the internet, rather than only the boys at her school -- and given how much safer online exhibitionism is (no danger of being groped), she'd have to be silly not to prefer attention-whoring via YouTube or MySpace over the real-world alternative. And obviously, if my daughter didn't have an exhibitionistic disposition, I wouldn't have cause to worry in the first place.

To conclude, I'm sympathetic to the concern that adults have over teenagers behaving sexually; I just require that they state their arguments openly and that they be based on some degree of factual evidence and logical reasoning, the way they were supposed to learn how to write a persuasive essay back in sixth grade. By "stating their arguments openly," I mean come right out and say that they want to check the adolescents' primal urges -- no rationalizations that nature didn't intend it, that they can't appreciate the consequences of bumping & grinding, and so on. I realize that the rhetorical effect is more disarming when the adult assumes the role of a shepherd preventing the ignorant, helpless sheep from straying into harm's way -- the way a parent yanks a toddler away from a busy street -- but the reality is that the adult in this case is like a governor or prison warden who is doing their best to tame the bestial instincts of his self-aware, strong-willed charges.

Similarly, after the rhetoric has been removed, there must lie a solid core of fact and logic. Crucial assumptions must be shown to be at least on the right track. Should there be no convincing evidence that X leads to Y, or that cracking down on X would lead to a decrease in Y, then the proponent must admit that there is "no good reason" for his stance, except that "You'll do as I say." Moreover, if one wants to express shock, the evidence that something exceptional has occurred had better be obvious; or if not, then evidence should be presented. Now if parents view their role as, in certain occasions, reining in beasts and commanding them to obey regardless of "good reasons," that's nobody's business but their own, assuming they're not harming their children. But obfuscation is irritating, and combined with condescension, even more so. And I take it for granted that authority figures who want to prevent their wards from doing as they choose should provide justification, so that any assumptions may be challenged by those who don't agree, not least of all their powerless wards.

11 comments:

  1. the onus is on the proponents of cracking down on "freak dancing" to demonstrate that such dancing increases the risk of having sex among teenagers. Predictably, no evidence is presented to this effect, and there is good a priori reason to believe that suggestive dancing doesn't increase the risk of having sex -- which is that sexually suggestive dancing, combined with loud music, gabbing excitedly with one's friends, and perhaps some french kissing, may be enough to satiate teenagers' desire for some degree of debauchery,

    Weak argument, agnostic. Obviously getting to third base heightens rather than decreases your desire to make it home.

    --gc

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  2. The only thing that has changed is the technology: it is just easier to detect who is and isn't an exhibitionist in the internet age.

    Highly doubt this. Any kind of poll of sexual attitudes is going to show greater openness of modern girls to blowjobs, porn, faux lesbianism, etc. relative to even 20 years ago.

    This is awesome, of course.

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  3. Should there be no convincing evidence that X leads to Y, or that cracking down on X would lead to a decrease in Y, then the proponent must admit that there is "no good reason" for his stance, except that "You'll do as I say."

    But there are certain experiments whose outcome one can forecast before one does them. Kids are going to be more likely to have sex if you let them freak each other on the dance floor. This is the whole point for the kids, but not the parents. Their incentive structures are completely different. As the father of a teenage daughter (or of a teenage son, albeit to a lesser extent), you are on the hook for the emotional/financial aftermath. But for the teenager, you just want to hook up now.

    Now that I'm no longer a teenager, my sympathies are with those who'll end up paying the bill. It would suck to have a kid in high school -- it ruins your whole life. Trusting teenagers to make good judgements on this issue is not very wise. Of course, if I were a teenager, I would do everything in my power to evade the strictures imposed on me by authority. That doesn't mean there isn't a good reason behind those strictures, or that every experiment has to be conducted before we can predict the outcome.

    This whole thing reminds me of the (in retrospect ludicrous) debate over whether swinging did or did not contribute to the dissolution of marriages and increased envy:

    http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002691.html

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  4. Obviously getting to third base heightens rather than decreases your desire to make it home.

    Right, heightens my desire to do so, since I'm a guy. That's why I qualified this by saying only girls need "be satiated by dancing, music, gabbing, and kissing, since their desires are the limiting factor on how much sex will take place." Given how little of an interest teenage girls have in a quick escalation toward intercourse (in general, they feel pressured into it by the boy), and how little they crave sex in general, I think the argument is fine.

    I'll grant that girl-on-girl at parties, sporting tattoos on the lower back, etc., are more common now. I was just talking about sexual intercourse: apparently, little or no change. I balk at classifying tramp stamps and faux lesbianism as a different kind of raciness compared to mini-skirts and oral sex at the drive-in, normed to the milieu of the times. Perhaps a bit higher in degree. But maybe I don't know enough about the '50s, so I'm willing to change on the kinkiness issue. Not on the sex thing, though.

    Kids are going to be more likely to have sex if you let them freak each other on the dance floor.

    Maybe, but not obviously, and increasingly provocative dance styles over the past 30 years apparently haven't impacted the teen sex rate much. IQ, presence of both parents, impulsive vs restrained disposition, etc. -- these will affect teen sex, but how racy you're allowed to be at the school dance doesn't appear to.

    Again, even if freak dancing *did* increase risk of sex, do people know that by prohibiting freak dancing, the desire to freak dance wouldn't simply manifest itself in a substitute activity that had a similar increase in risk of sex?

    I agree that you might prohibit your daughter from having sex, just that it be phrased in honest terms: I want to protect my property from losing value, to check the base instincts of the human animal, etc. But if you're going to prohibit her from doing something else, on the assumption that it increases risk of sex, there should be good evidence of this risk increase. Or, if not, say "I'm not prohibiting you from dancing that way b/c I think it'll lead to sex -- it doesn't -- but instead for reasons 1, 2, 3..."

    In general, I'd just like for discussion of sexual behavior among teenagers to be less hysterical and fact-free.

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  5. To clarify, I know you weren't being hysterical. I'm referring to the general tone in the NYT article and assorted comments at HS. "What's the world coming to?" "Civilization is on its deathbed," and so on. True, but I think dancing styles have little to do w/ it. No one reads, relationships are mostly short-term / high divorce rate, dysgenic trend for IQ, etc. -- those are problems worth worrying about.

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  6. I'm 21, and freak dancing has been in style at my high school and at college parties, so perhaps I should comment. I have a minor problem with freak-dancing, but it hasn't been mentioned so far:

    Freak-dancing makes dances the terrain of the alpha males (I mean, even more than normal). This is how it was at my high school.

    Girls only want to freak with alpha males. If freaking is the only mode of dancing at a dance (with maybe an occasional slow dance thrown in), then the dance floor looks like this the whole night:

    1. Extraverted and sensation-seeking girls freaking with the alpha males.
    2. Other girls dancing in groups, but NOT with guys. These are the girls who aren't into alpha males, or who are more sexually inhibited.
    3. All non-alpha male guys either dancing in groups of girls (but not *with* girls), or sitting by the walls or outside.

    Here's the problem: grinding is too sexual for the more introverted, less sensation-seeking girls to engage in (they are following a long-term mating strategy). Freak-dancing is short-term mating strategy behavior. This means that guys who don't come off as short-term mates (i.e. alpha males), don't get any play. There are girls who might be interested in those guys, but the girls will be too sexually inhibited to want to freak, and definitely not with a guy who looks like a long-term mate rather than short-term.

    Girls who don't want to freak can dance in their groups and with each other, and have at least some fun. But the guys that no girls want to freak with (i.e. all non-alpha males) won't have so much fun dancing in groups with girls (they will be watching the hot girls freaking with alpha males over their shoulders), and they can't dance with each other like girls can.

    In the end, if you aren't an alpha male, you spend most of the time sitting by the wall, or talking with other low status males. On an individual level, the solution is to become an alpha male, if you can. I have gotten to point where at least a subset of moderately attractive women register me as an alpha male. When you aren't an alpha male, freaking with girls is next to impossible. When you instead hit the girl's "potential short-term mate" buttons, then grinding doesn't take much work at all.

    However, while I have improved my personal situation, the system is still the same, and it really sucks for low status and non-sensation-seeking males. Of course, mating tends to suck for low-status males. It's just that with freak-dancing, this suckitude is amplified. With other styles of dancing, like ballroom and latin dance, low status males can at least get on the playing field (and what counts as "status" is more favorable to them), because a girl doesn't have to be initially attracted to them to want to dance, and more sexually-inhibited girls will accept that kind of dance.

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  7. In the end, if you aren't an alpha male, you spend most of the time sitting by the wall, or talking with other low status males.

    Dude, it was the same way 15 years ago in the pre-freak era. I suspect it's always been that way. Those kind of guys just don't dance. At least freak-dancing, unlike much of the stuff we had to do in the 80s, doesn't require any particular steps or coordination, so most guys could do it if so inclined.

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  8. spungen said:
    I suspect it's always been that way.

    Sure, but my point is that freak dancing makes it worse. In different dance environments, like ballroom/latin and salsa, it doesn't require so much contact, so it's easier to initiate, and girls will be more comfortable doing it with guys they aren't initially attracted to. You can get dances without being at the top of the social ladder.

    Those kind of guys just don't dance.

    But some of them would dance for the slow dances (about 3-5 an evening). They clearly wanted to dance. They just couldn't freak with girls.

    At least freak-dancing, unlike much of the stuff we had to do in the 80s, doesn't require any particular steps or coordination, so most guys could do it if so inclined.

    Actually, that's part of the problem. Strangely, dances that require skill are actually better environments for lower status men, because those men can make up in skill what they lack in status.

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  9. The problem here is that a lot of the early intercourse in the Third World is due to early marriage. While early marriage has its own problems, they are not necessarily the same as those associated with early premarital sex. We in the West are concerned mainly with the latter and the latter is what is getting critics of sexually provocative dancing up in arms.

    Quit comparing apples to oranges.

    An Albertan

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  10. Quit comparing apples to oranges.

    I didn't compare the West to non-West -- the data are there, though I didn't focus on this contrast at all, but rather on the trend over time in the West whereby teenagers are not having sex earlier.

    So don't put words in my mouth.

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  11. I know this is a really old post, but the fact is on that graph, in ALL of the western countries shown - in the US and Europe, the percentage of teenage girls who have had sex increased. In all of them... I don't know how you didn't see this.

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