First it was studying fat lesbians, then the Emperor’s Government decided to spend more taxpayer dollars to see if gay men used hook-up apps to, um, hook-up.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent nearly a half a million dollars studying gay hookup apps such as Grindr.
“Smartphone technologies have provided a new venue for sexual partnering among men who have sex with men (MSM),” the grant for the project states. “Indeed, there are a rapidly growing number of smartphone applications designed to facilitate sexual partnering among MSM.”
The Feds wanted to know if men would use apps to hook up with other men and then have unsafe sex; not that they would do anything to halt or discourage the practice, because the gay left would have a fit. So they spent a bunch of money to figure out what everybody already knew was going on, with no intention of doing anything to alter the activity they were researching.
Debt? What debt?
This is the problem with handling a multi-trillion dollar budget. Half a million, which sounds like a lot to be spent on something worthless, amounts to 0.00002% of the entire budget.
Don’t you worry your purty head about the debt. I just read a column by the wise Lanny Davis, who states that the debt is too high and that the only solution is to raise taxes on the rich and put that extra income into an untouchable “Debt Repayment Trust Fund” (much like the Social Security Trust Fund, I assume), which the Congress can’t touch without a 75% majority vote.
Problem solved!
Of course, if that “trust fund” is invested in government bonds, like the SS trust fund is, then that just increases government debt. And there’s really no other way to “save” it–hundred-dollar bills in a big Lock Box? Nope.
One wonders why that extra, “free” income couldn’t just be immediately used to pay off existing government debt, with no “saving” involved. I guess I’m just too unsophisticated to understand government and its money-handling ways. But let’s DO raise taxes on those evil wealthy people who, after all, didn’t build that.
A half-million bucks would seem like a bargain if it produced useful results that helped to save money on subsidized Truvada and whatnot.
But any guesses on whether the study actually used the word “A-N-A-L,” or if it merely resorted to circumlocutions like “unprotected sex”? (Note: “unprotected” fellatio is estimated to be about 50 times less risky for HIV than “unprotected” buttsecks, so being vague about which orifice gets penetrated automatically diminishes the value of the any study on HIV in gay/bi men.)
And a question that’s worth asking — but rarely is, from what I can tell — is: What factors tend to affect your choice to engage in anal sex, instead of “staying on 2nd or 3rd” with frottage or oral?” The AIDS virus doesn’t care how two guys meet each other or whether they know each other’s real names or whether they’re doin’ it in a bedroom or in a backseat: it only cares about whether it can get access to the bloodstream.
Of course, a lot of gay sex “educators” don’t want to bluntly single out anal sodomy as particularly risky; while the researchers at NIH and the CDC, for their part, may be wary of appearing to bestow a “government seal of approval” on objectively low-risk Homosexual Practices like frottage (lest right-wingers accuse them of “promoting masturbation to 2nd-graders!!!”).