Sex Map Shows Chain of Almost 300 High School Lovers
 

Wow, talk about the 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon . . . . .

This study (article below) shows pretty clearly how important sex education (not just abstinence indoctrination) is for young adults. If you have sex with one person in your high school, you're essentially having sex with about 300 others, from the point of view of disease spread. And that's in a mid-sized town.

The study makes it crystal clear how something like AIDS can spread as fast as it has.





Sex Map Shows Chain of Almost 300 High School Lovers

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first "map" of teen sexual behavior gives new meaning to the old warning that you don't just have sex with a person, but with everyone that person ever had sex with, researchers said on Monday.

They found a chain of 288 one-to-one sexual relationships at a high school in the U.S. Midwest, meaning the teenager at the end of the chain may have had direct sexual contact with only one person, but indirect contact with 286 others.

The sociologists who conducted the study said they were surprised by the findings, which also showed that despite reputations and popularity, most teens in their study did not engage in promiscuous behavior with many others.

"From a student's perspective, a large chain like this would boggle the mind," said sociologist James Moody, who led the study.

"They might know that their partner had a previous partner. But they don't think about the fact that this partner had a previous partner, who had a partner, and so on."

This means that teens need a different approach to sexual health education and especially prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, the team at Ohio State University said.

Moody and colleagues studied a single Midwestern high school, in an unidentified mid-size town. The students had taken part in an anonymous survey that included details of their sexual behavior.

They found that, just as in the U.S. teen population as an average, just over half the students had ever had sexual intercourse.

ALMOST AN INCEST TABOO

In one instance, 288 students were linked in a one-to-one chain of sexual contact that rarely looped back. In other words, one boy had sex with one girl, who had sex with another boy, who had sex with another girl and so on.

And they were doing it this way on purpose, Moody said.

"All the evidence from this network suggests that the kids were very aware of the local pattern and local history of sexual activity," Moody said.

"They know they are not going to date their ex-boyfriend's girlfriend's partner. That's too close."

He said it was almost like an incest taboo. "It forces people to find new partners instead of recycling."

This is very different from adult sexual behavior, Moody said. "In adults you'll have like NBA (basketball) stars with thousands and thousands of partners," Moody said.

Attempts to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among adults target highly active people. Among students, it seems, educational outreach much target each one.

"The students in this network are not unusual. They are just average students, and not extremely active sexually. So social policies that could help some of them protect themselves from STDs could break a lot of these chains that can lead to the spread of disease," Moody said.



"Anything that limits that and restricts the flow of body fluids between people would help." That includes education about condom use, abstinence and other policies, he said.

For their study Moody and colleagues used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, done in 1995.

They say their study is representative of mid-size towns. Moody said the behavior at an urban high school, for instance, would likely be different.

I'm not terribly surprised by this, seeping under the supposed prim and proper surface america is teeming with sexual activity that it's not willing to admit to. Adults are trying to pretend that sex doesn't exist, and leaving the kids to find out about its pleasures and consequences on their own. I think for a majority of high school kids, sex is an important factor in their budding social lives, whether they do it or not. ALL students should be taught with FACTS (not these scare campaigns going around, you cry wolf enough and people stop turning their heads) about sex and the dangers of STI's; those students who choose to abstain will only have more reason to, and those who choose to be sexually active are now armed with full knowledge of the risks they take.

and please include links to the articles you post, thanks

Hm. Seems a little strange, using pro basketball players as an example of how adult sexual relations work...

this doesn't surprise me at all. I knew/know full well that when I sleep with someone that I'm sleeping in a sense with other people. Does this bother me? Not really. Just makes a person more careful is all.

You mean Wilt Chamberlain's exploits weren't normal?


Looks like abstinence education is just as effective as "just say no" was to drugs.

Thank God for STD checks...my current lover has an ex-lover whose history I'm all too familiar with...and yes, it would be like sleeping with two hundred people.

Isn't it rather interesting and yet disturbing to think about all the people you've had indirect sexual contact with in this method?

And I think everyone here has hit on an important issue--it's about education. I know in my AIDS and STDs class here at my university we touched on the idea that you not only sleep with your partner but whoever else they've slept with. It's a hard thing to conceptualize but it's important to add it to education so teens today really understand their actions.

Have sex with a couple of promiscuous people, and you could have indirectly had sex with half of your country. :D

I think if you asked, on average, how many sex partners separate a random pair of people in the U.S. (or within a state or within a city), you would find that number to be alarmingly small. Within any high school or university, it will be smaller still.

For example any two students within a university might be separated by, say, three sex partners. In other words, there are so many links on the sex network that you can always find a link where the average pair is separated by about three people.

I went to a small college, and there was a class field trip that I remember where one of the women on the bus had previously had sex with all but two of the guys on the bus. I was one of the two, but not for long :) But my girlfriend had slept with one of the guys, so I was just two links away from that promiscuous woman. For most of the guys on the bus, we were all one link away from each other.

The "degrees of sex separation" would be a good indicator of the social atmosphere of a place. You could have it printed on real estate brochures ;)

This is a nice way to scare people, but isn't exactly true quantitatively. Each link in the network away from the "source" of a particular disease has a much reduced probability of catching it.

Sounds like you're saying that the shortest pathway that connects two people AND contains disease is going to be longer than the shortest pathway, period. I agree, but does anybody have any idea how much longer? I don't think so.

As far as the source goes, it might be long gone, but the disease is still moving all around through the network. You can visualize it as an amoeba that expands and contracts depending on the frequency of contact relative to the frequency of treatment along any particular pathway.

Another problem with this chain, I expect, is that it goes back and forth in time. If I had sex with Mary last year, and you had sex with her this week and infected her, I don't magically get infected retroactively.

interesting... just another solid argument from a public health standpoint for giving accurate education on sexual health. people can't make good choices if they don't know what a good choice is.

Wonder what happens if i ask her what her chain is.

If you want to see this theory in "action", so to speak, rent the movie "And The Band Played On." It's about the beginning stages of the AIDS epidemic and gives a good portrait of epidemiology at work.

^^^^

Or there is a movie entitled "Kids", that deals with STD's and teens.

And it doesn't matter how far away from the original desease carrier you are in the chain, what matters is if your after the point in the chain where the next person doesn't catch the desease. The probability of you getting the desease from the originator of the disease in the chain is the same as if you slept with some one ten steps down the chain, so long as the disease was transmitted through those ten steps. And if there is a break where a person in the chain does not get the disease then the risk of getting that disease from that person goes to zero, assuming that it is a chain scenario and not a web, and that the person did not already have the disease.

Right. I didn't mean "source" literally, and I know that what I wrote was oversimplified. I did that for clarity, but I guess I got called on it :). The basic point still stands, though.

Maybe I'm being anal about this, but isn't saying "By having sex with one person, you're having sex with x persons", or even just saying "having sexual contacts with x persons", like, way way WAY overexagerating?

I mean yeah, if we're talking STDs..
IF you have unprotected sex
IF your partner has had unprotected sex before
IF it was with a diseased partner
IF your partner contracted the disease
etc.

Other than that, no I'm not marveling about the numerous people I'm supposedly "having sexual contacts" with in just one night.
It would be akin to giving a handshake to someone and marveling "Woooaah, with only this handshake, I'm having indirect hand contact with thousands and thousands of people through a HAND SHAKING NETWORK!"

... Anyway, yeah.. STDs are bad.. use protection :p

:lol: That's great.

Scare tactic propaganda against sex. What are ya gonna do?

On the other hand, I not only have had sex with n people, I have had sex with 300n people! I am such a pimp.

Now wouldn't it be great that if we had sex with one person, we would be able to have sex with his entire network of indirect contacts as well? After all, if we may already contract whatever illnesses the network had, it would only be fair that we could derive the pleasures along with it. Wouldn't that be an amazing idea?

And if you could, would you?

This is why I only sleep with virgins, Its good to eat at the top of the food chain.

That just sickening to think about, I waited till I was 20 to have sex, and I'm glad I waited.

Well sex is a tad more intimate than a handshake.

I wouldn't call the research a scare tactic. Rather it's the first attempt to actually write down all the links in the network within a particular high school in a middle-sized town. If you want to be able to make predictions about the spread of disease, you need to have some reasonable estimate of the parameters of the contact network. Now we have that for this particular location and this particular type of contact.

Certainly people will be touting the research to support their particular political agenda. But you can never prevent that from happening, now would I want to.

http://www.livescience.com/php/multi...ne+high+school.

Image of actual sex map...interesting

Ohhh I see a female-female one! Rawr. ^^

Unless you keep having sex with that first person, and by chance you were both virgins, you will or already have exposed yourself to others.

Really, waiting to be older doesn't matter. I've only had sex with four people (lost it at 19, 22 now) and I shudder to think of all the people I've had indirect sexual contact with through those four people, and two of them had only had one previous partner. Thank GOD I am extremely cautious--I won't engage with a partner who won't use a condom, EVEN with negative STD results. I get myself tested every six months or so. Everyone who is sexually active, unless in a truly monogamous relationship, should do the same.

Health professionals make charts like this to track down and treat syphilis epidemics. Because of the nature of the disease, you can tell who infected who and when.

Did this study indicate what percentage of teens studied used some form of protection, or if there were any STD's in the chain?

Yeah... I rmember about hearing about this catholic high school in Washington (state) where they investigated into a few kids coming down with syphillis, found out almost all of them had syphillis, and then found out that they were having massive 50+ person orgies.

. . . Still makes me laugh to this day.

I compared it to an handshake in the sense that, if no disease was contracted (and no woman impregnated, duh), then the "trace" of sexual contact is gone with a good shower.. poof!

Don't get me wrong.. if this.. information, propangada, whatever you call it, helps convincing the kids to use protection, I'm all for it.. I'm just saying that tripping over the "fact" that you're having a so called "indirect sexual contact" with your partner's partners, and so on, is totally wrong.

I see a male-male one also, I wonder if that low rating of gay/bi to straight kids is representative of most high schools?

Probably, as far as how many have actually acted on it. You know how in highschool there tends to be a feeling that everyone is watching you, and knows anything socially unacceptable that you've done? Probably a contributing factor.

I see only one female-female and only one male-male.

I the female-female case, they appear to be bisexual. In the male-male case one was Bisexual and one was homosexual.

Aparently everyone else in the study was Hetrosexual

This does not represent the sexual preference demographics we are being sold through the media....

hmmm

I see three male-males, one on the ring itself, one on a long branch of the ring to the upper right, and the last is the alpha dude of the whole school, with 9 partners one of whom was male. Five of the six male-male guys were bisexual, and the last one had only that one bisexual male partner.

One of the two alpha ladies (each with 5 partners) had one female partner who also had a couple male partners.

A very interesting map. Wish I had one for my high school. :)

That article is totally misleading. Obviously they meant it to be.

You don't have "indirect contact" with 286 people. Each person may have had direct or indirect contact with, say, 10. The ONLY POSSIBLE WAY you may have had
indirect contact" with 286 people is in this phenominally unlikely instance:

Person 1 has sex with person 2. Person 2 has sex with person 3. 3 with 4, 4 with 5, etc. Finally person 284 has sex with person 285. YOU have sex with person 286. You probably have herpes, gonorhea, syphilis, whatever else the other 286 people have.

That's assuming every person also only has sex with ONE person, then gives up on it. It is the only way it works because of the chronological nature of it. Example: Person 1 has sex with person 2. 1 has sex with 3. 3 never has sex again. 2 goes on to fuck 4 and so on, up through the end of the chain. All of a sudden, one less person If 3 had sex with other people who didn't rejoin the chain at some point, which the article indicates, the number all of a sudden gets much smaller. So, as you can see, the 286 number is clearly far too high.

Much more likely, each person has sexual contact with, say, 4 people. Which means that in PRECISELY THE RIGHT SET OF CHRONOLIGICAL AND SEXUAL CIRCUMSTANCES, you might have had indirect contact with a quarter of that number. Again, this is extremely unlikely.

Furthermore, if any one couple used protection, the chain is broken (for the purposes of this article). Oops, forgot to mention that, didn't we? But I digress.



But the CHAIN ends up getting up to 288 people. I declare shenanigans on the statisticians who compiled this data, because they're clearly just rabble-rousing.



I'm not against having safe sex. I agree with the idea that you're basically having sex with everyone your partner has had sex with, as far as diseases go. I am, however, against the extremely slanted presentation of the numbers. That's all.

You gotta love highschool....a lot of immature people thinking they're doing what mature people do. Move from sexual partner to sexual partner instead of relationship to relationship (which may mean the same thing to some mature people). This is why I never had sex in highschool....oh wait it was because I couldn't get a date for the life of me.

WTF? I should of gone to a different HS.

Key point has been touched several times. Education, education, education. Sex is not an anomality, sex is human nature. Education is key to doing it safely.

Didn't read the comments in this, but assuming that ANYONE in the chain used a condom, then the whole chain is broken up...so yeah, if 100 percent of people in high school didn't use protection, then there'd be indirect contact with 300 people. Fortunately, most people in high school do use protection.

I was also 20 when i first had sex. but as soon the the chicks found out you were a 20 year old virgin it was on.