The Well-Timed Period: Does Abstinence Work?

When it comes to abstinence we have no data on its typical-use* effectiveness. In other words, based on the available evidence [as opposed to belief, wishful thinking, and/or ideology] we don’t know how well this birth control method does [or does not] work.

Of course it’s true that if you abstain from sex, you won’t get pregnant. These abstinence pledges don’t work in practice, however. Nubile bodies demand sexual gratification, good intentions be damned.

This problem reminds me a lot of the dieting conundrum–of course if you eat less and exercise more, you’ll lose weight. Granted, you may have to eat a whole lot less and exercise a whole lot more if you’re a diet refugee, so much as to be completely impractical, but you will eventually lose weight. In practice, however, permanent weight loss is highly unlikely to result from eating less and exercising more. In the short term, when a body gets less food than it needs, it’s going to demand more food, and the dieter will be hard pressed to resist (hence “cheating” and “bingeing”). In addition, over time, the body realizes that it has to become much more efficient if it’s going to survive, so it adjusts its metabolism downwards. Hence plateauing and eventual weight regain.

Point being, just because something works in theory doesn’t mean it’s going to work in practice, especially if human psychology and complex systems are factors. Idealism doesn’t work. If you want the world to be a better place, you have to be pragmatic. Teens are going to have sex, whether you like it or not–the best way to prevent disease and pregnancy is to educate them about safe sex. Likewise, there are going to be fat people in the world whether you like it or not–the best way to keep people healthy is to emphasize a healthy lifestyle, not weight loss.

WhirledView: Anger Management

The Protestant church has brought Americans together and soothed their emotional wounds. In frontier towns, it often provided social interactions as well as schooling, as do today’s megachurches for people who perceive the rest of the nation and the world to be as dangerous as anything on the frontier. At the same time, Americans retained what Lieven calls

the traditional European peasant fear and hatred of the state, without being exposed to the dense web of state influences, institutions and benefits which in Europe later diministed this fear[,]

making the church seem the more reliable institution.