How many people read more than just the cursory details of a story?

Submitted by David on Mon, 2014-05-26 11:07

I came across the following tweet in a Time compilation of the "best" tweets responding to shootings that took place over the weekend in California:

Given that 2/3 of the victims Elliot Rodgers killed were male (as are about 80% of victims of all reported violence by a stranger) that seems an odd way of respecting them. In this guy's case, to quote Forbes:

He expresses jealousy of people in sexual relationships; he seems more hateful of and angry at specific men — friends and social acquaintances — than at particular women.

If you look at his previous rantings you'll also find that he thought about how to kill all other men on the planet in order to get women to have sex with him. Did he objectify women? Yes, but it seems to me that his views of men weren't really any better.

I've come across some arguments suggesting that these killings are due to ignoring mental health problems amongst young boys (with holding a talk at the University of Toronto on this topic previously resulting in some rather nasty protests). However, I think that's a bit of a distraction in this case - even if in other cases this might have some relevance - as per reports he was being seen by multiple therapists and wasn't exactly ignored by his parents (who'd gone so far as to even report him to police weeks before the shootings).

A slightly different angle from which you might be able to look at this situation might actually be as a result of a societal obsession with sex as something which people must engage in. It seems that these days policies tend to get justified on the basis that people just can't suppress their sex drives and simply can't live full lives without them. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them it seems hard to deny that this is what the movements against abstinence-based sex education in schools and for same-sex marriage were driven by. One thing that came to mind reading Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a while back is how people tend to incorporate society's views of what's inevitable and what's acceptable.

If society views a sex drive as something that can't be suppressed - and abstinence as something infeasible - might the promotion of such views have encouraged the killer's, Elliot Rodgers', feelings of entitlement to women's bodies? Divorce, for example, also is "contagious". Abstinence-based sex education currently seems to result mostly in failure - though seems to result in a slight lengthening of time before first sexual experience - yet I speculate that student's media exposure might have something to do with this. Think how introducing broadcast TV in different regions seems to have affected norms to the extent that it produced a noticeable impact on birthrates in those areas:

A careful study by Robert Jensen of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Emily Oster of the University of Chicago found that before television arrived in Indian villages, traditional attitudes ruled: Women had to get a man’s permission to leave the house, and 62 percent of women said it was acceptable for husbands to beat wives. Then villagers watched Indian soap operas with middle-class urban families in which women aren’t beaten and leave the home freely. These norms infiltrated the village, and the arrival of television turned out to be equivalent, in nurturing more egalitarian attitudes, to five years of female education.

None of this means that in a society promoting abstinence outside marriage that you won't entirely stop people having sex outside those limits. It might mean though having significantly less of it though if society were fully onboard.