how we can get virginity again? plz. do reply

That’s because they’re going to the wrong religious services. I lost my virginity to a girl at met at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship.

“Do you have any data to show that divorce rates are higher among people who did not have sex before marriage?”

Just anecdotal. The only man I knew who bragged about being a virgin until married eventually became the first divorced Baptist minister I knew...

Q. “why are you assuming the causation goes that way? What if virgins go to services to pray for sex?”

A. “Someone needs to tell them that God helps those that help themselves.”

My understanding is that in most churches, such self-help is frowned upon.

Indeed you will. That’s because whether the data demonstrate that the null hypothesis is false, or don’t demonstrate this, is a blurry concept. Pretending instead that results are either “significant” or “not significant” does not change the fact that experiments actually provide varying amounts of evidence, ranging from “no evidence at all” to “evidence that’s as conclusive as anything you’re ever going to see”.

So, you see, the “whole point” of statistics is not at all to say “this is significant” and “that isn’t”. The point is to provide an accurate and understandable indication of what the experimental data has shown.

It may be counterintuitive, but it’s true. The biggest danger you’re trying to prevent, as the one conducting the study, is introducing your own bias in trying to find a result. If you want something to be true, you’ll call it “almost” true. And, frankly, you’re probably right — which is part of why so many people do it.

But it’s not correct to do so.

If I might be permitted a hypothetical: I believe you said your statistical experience is in the biomedical field. Let’s say your company is searching for a drug by synthesizing zillions of compounds and giving them to rats. The number of rats that survive is compared to the number that survived in the control group. The researchers give you the data, you crunch away, and then you present your results. In many of the groups more rats died than in the control, and in many groups almost as many died as in the control. In some groups, though, very few rats died. In some of those groups, so few rats died that the results are statistically significant at your preselected significance level, and you inform the researchers that those compounds seem efficacious.

A few groups, though, didn’t quite reach significance at your preselected level. Maybe if just one more rat had lived, they would have. What do you report about those? Are they just lumped in as dead ends with the groups where more rats died than in the control group, or do you report them as possibly being worth further study, maybe by varying the compound’s structure slightly. If so, what terminology do you use to refer to those, well, ‘almost significant’ results?

You are correct. But I never said that, so I don’t know what your point is.

“Someday you’ll figure out that your opinions are not factual or even based on any relevant data. They’re just the product of your imagination of what it must be like to live with some sort of religious values.”

I merely cited someone who reports what they see. Perhaps the person is lying, but I have no reason to believe so. I report, you decide. If you have a beef with anyone’s imagination, it would be with the university prof who wrote the comment.

Additionally, Dan Savage is a nationally syndicated columnist who has made a similar point, that he gets letters quite often from people who ‘saved’ themselves for marriage, and 5 years in, 10 years in, or whatever, they are desperately looking for help. Some want to cheat and still remain true to their vows (which is rather difficult), some want a divorce but have kids, and so on. So no, it’s not based on my imagination, but rather upon at least one person who is in a position to know.

One would think that if we should have a policy that discourages divorce, we should look at the reasons why people divorce, and then try to take a proactive approach. The more information the better, in my view. You can interpret that as being anti-religious, but I don’t see it as such. I just want to be practical and find solutions that keep everyone happy. If that means certain religious values are causing a problem, then that needs to be examined. I hardly see why that would be a problem, but to you apparently it is.

I don’t have any answers, but the fact remains that this is an issue for some people. Ignoring it doesn’t really do anyone a favor, does it?

Married rate data for the subgroups matter too. For example, the African American marriage rate is very low comparerd to the population as a whole. The sample would have proportionately many 40 year African Americans who were single, and proportionately few 40 year old Asians who were single. If the number of 40 year old virgins per 1000 people were the same in both samples, the Asian single virginity rate would be much higher than the African American virginity rate. Marriage also probably completely explains the lack of age correlation.

It also isn’t clear from this summary if “single” includes “divorced and not remarried” or “widowed and not remarried” something it wouldn’t in a typical personals ad, but might in this study.

It would also be interesting to see the virgin single, non-virgin single and married groups profiled comprehensively rather than simply predicted with probabilities. Taken together, just how distinctive demographically are single virgins, or single non-virgins.

Randy: Trojan: “Do you have any data to show that divorce rates are higher among people who did not have sex before marriage? If so, please share.”Gladly! From Andrew Sullivan’s blog, a university professor who wrote in: “I teach at a large university in a conservative part of the country, and I think a large part of this fear of children learning that — gasp — people can be attracted to the same sex, has to do with the religious right’s emphasis on marriage as a primarily sexual institution. They would not agree with that, of course, but look at how they teach sexuality education to their children: “Abstinence til marriage. Nothing else need be said.” (Thus sending the message that sex and marriage are yoked at the hip.)The conservative youth group “Young Life” is very active where we live (high schools and college), and I cannot tell you how many young people (18–21) I know who have gotten married because they simply cannot hold out sexually any longer. They get married in order to have sex. They don’t get married because they love the person; they may be deeply in love, but that’s not why they’re getting married at that particular time — they’re getting married before they finish college, before they have decent-paying jobs, before they have health insurance, because they are afraid they won’t be able to control their sexual urges any longer.Sex is intrinsically linked to marriage. Sex=marriage=sex.I also have known quite a number of people in their late 20s and early 30s (students) who are now divorced (or unhappily married), who tell me that that is exactly why they got married 10 or whatever years ago — and they are now stuck with two or three kids, trapped in a marriage they recognize was entered based on an immature idea of what “love” is and pressure from their families and conservative churches to, no matter what, NOT have sex before marriage.This is not to say that many of those young couples can’t make their marriages work, but to point out that the pressure — and the conflation of sex with marriage — is intense.It is no wonder, then, that for a religious conservative, the thought of their first-grader coming home asking questions about their female teacher’s wife, or reading about Heather and her Two Mommies, scares the bejesus out of them. Marriage is all about sex, and sex is already an extremely scary topic (see again their resistance to any kind of true sex education), and Good God ...! It’s downright terrifying for them.”If you have a problem with this, you may wish to take it up with Sullivan or the reader who submitted this. “I think everyone here understands how you feel about the application of religious/moral values to the realm of sexuality. There’s no need to harp on the topic on every single thread.”Since so many people conflate religious and moral values to sexuality, I think it’s necessary to point to out that sometimes it has an ill effect on sexuality and marriage.

Um, none of that is “data.” That is anecdotal evidence (which is probably skewed because of the type of people someone like you would choose to associate with). Besides, what is “quite a number of people,” two or three? I have just as much anecdotal evidence that marriages are stronger when the parties are the type of people with enough self-control to live their beliefs. That would be because I am part of a social group where that is the norm. My experiences, like yours, are not data.

Divorce rates are lower in blue states because people are more likely to live together without getting married. And divorce rates are higher when people are married very, very young, no matter whether they had sex first. But you have ZERO evidence that people who choose to abstain from sexual relations until marriage have a higher divorce rate. That’s because there is none.

Someday you’ll figure out that your opinions are not factual or even based on any relevant data. They’re just the product of your imagination of what it must be like to live with some sort of religious values. It’s not the hell you seem to imagine, lol.

Radford Neal: I think this is mis-guided. The purpose of writing up the results of a study is to communicate useful information to the reader. Reporting only whether the result is “significant” or not does not communicate as much information as reporting the actual p-value. (By the way, p-values (eg, 0.05), not confidence levels (eg, 95%), are the normal way of reporting the results of signficance tests.) It makes a big difference whether the p-value is 0.012, 0.049, or 0.09. It makes very little difference whether the p-value is 0.049 or 0.051, regardless of whether or not you had decided that 0.05 was your threshold of significance. To think otherwise is to mistake research for some sort of game.

I agree that it makes very little difference if your result is 0.049 or 0.051. You can report the result of your test at 0.051 and many people will (rightly) conclude that if your sample size was larger, it would probably have been significant. I also agree that the actual p-value is more meaningful than only whether it was significant or not. But that doesn’t mean that reporting the p-value alone makes something “almost” statistically significant.

The whole point of statistics is to say this is statistically significant, that isn’t. It’s pretty elementary probability theory that if you start calling things “almost” statistically significant, you’re going to end up blurring the concept of whether things are significant or not. You will consider many things to be kind of, sort of significant, that you’ve previously determined are outside of your thresholds. That’s why, even in the kind of loosy-goosy statistics that business clients sometimes used (lower CIs), we always decided our CI with the client first — it prevents you from adjusting your CIs afterwards to make things that you think ought to be significant, significant, merely because they were “almost” significant.

When I did biomedical work, you can bet that we decided our CIs before we so much as looked at our experiments.

Eugene Volokh: Ariel:I guess I don’t find the argument you give about statistical significance to be persuasive.As I understand the argument, if the study says it’s looking for either significance at the 90% level or the 95% level, it presumably then can point to the 90%-significant (or 94%-significant results) as significant at that level — but if the study began with a search for 95%-significant results, it then can’t refer to the 94% results as significant.That strikes me as counterintuitive, and requiring more justification than I’ve seen.It seems to me that 94% significance can be sensibly reported as almost 95% significance, whether or not the study designers had initially said they were looking for 90% significance or only for 95% significance.

It may be counterintuitive, but it’s true. The biggest danger you’re trying to prevent, as the one conducting the study, is introducing your own bias in trying to find a result. If you want something to be true, you’ll call it “almost” true. And, frankly, you’re probably right — which is part of why so many people do it.

But it’s not correct to do so. If you set your CI at 95%, what you’re saying is that you’re 95% confident that the result falls within the range: lower bound <= x <= upper bound. If a result is true at a 94% confidence interval, you’ve confirmed the null hypothesis, that you cannot tell if the confidence interval overlaps with whatever you’re comparing it to, at a 95% confidence interval. By definition, you’ve said: I can’t tell if x is different than y or not. That’s why you have to (or should) decide your confidence intervals first — if you don’t, it will be tempting to decide that x is different than y, when in fact, you have not proven that to be true.

In basic addition, we know that 1+1=2. In statistics, we might think that there are about 12 apples in a covered basket, based on knowing it has apples and the shape and size. Let’s say the 95% confidence interval is 9–15 (I haven’t attempted to estimate this), and you find only 8 apples when you do the count. Now, it’s true that you were almost right. But you’ve disproven the null hypothesis, because your actual result was outside of the confidence interval. This is the same kind of reasoning that would lead one to say “almost” significant in the context you’re saying, and it’s the same reason why that’s not true, just simplified.

Gladly! From Andrew Sullivan’s blog, a university professor who wrote in: “I teach at a large university in a conservative part of the country, and I think a large part of this fear of children learning that — gasp — people can be attracted to the same sex, has to do with the religious right’s emphasis on marriage as a primarily sexual institution. They would not agree with that, of course, but look at how they teach sexuality education to their children: “Abstinence til marriage. Nothing else need be said.” (Thus sending the message that sex and marriage are yoked at the hip.)

The conservative youth group “Young Life” is very active where we live (high schools and college), and I cannot tell you how many young people (18–21) I know who have gotten married because they simply cannot hold out sexually any longer. They get married in order to have sex. They don’t get married because they love the person; they may be deeply in love, but that’s not why they’re getting married at that particular time — they’re getting married before they finish college, before they have decent-paying jobs, before they have health insurance, because they are afraid they won’t be able to control their sexual urges any longer.
Sex is intrinsically linked to marriage. Sex=marriage=sex.

I also have known quite a number of people in their late 20s and early 30s (students) who are now divorced (or unhappily married), who tell me that that is exactly why they got married 10 or whatever years ago — and they are now stuck with two or three kids, trapped in a marriage they recognize was entered based on an immature idea of what “love” is and pressure from their families and conservative churches to, no matter what, NOT have sex before marriage.
This is not to say that many of those young couples can’t make their marriages work, but to point out that the pressure — and the conflation of sex with marriage — is intense.
It is no wonder, then, that for a religious conservative, the thought of their first-grader coming home asking questions about their female teacher’s wife, or reading about Heather and her Two Mommies, scares the bejesus out of them. Marriage is all about sex, and sex is already an extremely scary topic (see again their resistance to any kind of true sex education), and Good God ...! It’s downright terrifying for them.”

If you have a problem with this, you may wish to take it up with Sullivan or the reader who submitted this.

“I think everyone here understands how you feel about the application of religious/moral values to the realm of sexuality. There’s no need to harp on the topic on every single thread.”

Since so many people conflate religious and moral values to sexuality, I think it’s necessary to point to out that sometimes it has an ill effect on sexuality and marriage.

Interesting.

Now does anyone know how much more likely is a never married 25/45 year old man who attends at least one Star Trek convention a year to be a virgin than a never married 25/45 year old man who does not? And while body mass index may not affect the likelihood of virginity, what about the size of comic book collection?

Women also tend to have sex for relational purposes (not all do, but the ones who are just after the physical have already been with the football team and don’t enter this discussion.....).

Several women I have known who have great careers have never even dated to my knowledge because they simply weren’t physically attractive enough to catch the interest of the men in their father’s social circles (who being rich, powerful and tall have a *very* large selection of perky, petite, well-educated, groomed and mannered women competing over them).

Eugene Volokh: Wait, why are you assuming the causation goes that way? What if virgins go to services to pray for sex?

Someone needs to tell them that God helps those that help themselves.

This is completely incorrect. P-values are not the probability that the null hypothesis is true. The p-value is the probability of getting evidence as strong or stronger than what was actually observed, if the null hypothesis is true. This is not even remotely the same thing.

That statement is strictly true only if you pick your analysis in advance. In particular, you can’t collect the data and then analyze it 47 different ways until you squeeze a P=0.95 result out somewhere and then go ‘Eureka!’.

First, it is small p-values that lead you to rejecting the null hypothesis, not big ones. What is it with this thread? Most of the commenters have it backwards (though some may just be using an opposite convention, rather than being truely confused).

You’re right, however, that you can’t do numerous tests and then declare that finding one that gives a “significant” result justifies announcing a discovery.

The other commenters are correct, though, that 0.94 and 0.96 are effectively the same number, and P=0.75 still means three chances out of four.

A p-value of 0.75 (or of 0.25, which seems to be what you really meant to say) is not considered to be of any significance at all by anyone who understands what p-values are.

One of the most brilliant analyses I have seen strung together a sequence of inferences at the P=0.7 to 0.8 level, each of which made good biological sense; that’s a lot more compelling than a P=0.95 result that doesn’t make sense.

You’re right that a “significant” result that doesn’t make sense is probably wrong. That’s one reason why a p-value can’t be interpreted as the probability that the null hypothesis is true. However, the “brilliant” analysis you refer to was probably total bunk. Even one inference based on a p-value of 0.8 (really 0.2, I assume) is highly dubious. A string of such would have essentially no basis in the data. The conclusion might have been true, but the study provided no evidence for it.

I find it difficult (although not impossible) to imagine that people who waited for marriage to have sex because of religious reasons are going to divorce because the sex wasn’t good.

How about the hypothesis that a taboo on premarital sex causes people to marry sooner than they otherwise would, and therefore not necessarily to the same person than they otherwise would, leading to poorer average “fit” between spouses and higher divorce. That seems like a more reasonable explanation of what Randy had in mind.

Do you have any data to show that divorce rates are higher among people who did not have sex before marriage? If so, please share.

At least the tendency for “blue states”, where premarital sex is presumably more common, to have lower divorce rates is well established.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jbarro: Who are the adult virgins? Eugene Volokh examines the data. http://is.gd/4RizZ...

CCTrojan: Do you have any data to show that divorce rates are higher among people who did not have sex before marriage? If so, please share.

I find it difficult (although not impossible) to imagine that people who waited for marriage to have sex because of religious reasons are going to divorce because the sex wasn’t good. I mean, they let their religious beliefs discourage them from having sex before marriage (which Christianity strongly discourages) but not discourage them from getting divorced because the sex wasn’t good enough? (Which Christianity far more strongly discourages.)

I’ve seen a lot of marriages break up, but usually it is because there are very deep problems based on selfishness. I’m sure that bad sex is a symptom, but since Christianity teaches that selfishness is a sin, I’m guessing that the strongest correlation on divorce isn’t, “We’ve got to wait until marriage because Jesus demands it,” but “I deserve a new BMW every three years! What’s wrong with my spouse not making enough money to pay for it?”

I think everyone here understands how you feel about the application of religious/moral values to the realm of sexuality. There’s no need to harp on the topic on every single thread.

Yes there is, because the alternative is introspection.

Randy: “So attending religious services reduces one’s likelihood of having sex.”What’s interesting is that the ‘no sex before marriage’ has been drummed into people’s heads so much that they actually believe it. And so we see lots of people getting married at age 19 or 20 just so that they can finally have sex. Which isn’t exactly a sound basis for marriage, and so you have lots of people getting divorces several years later. But of course, if you deny gays the right to marry, that will correct the situation!

Do you have any data to show that divorce rates are higher among people who did not have sex before marriage? If so, please share.

I think everyone here understands how you feel about the application of religious/moral values to the realm of sexuality. There’s no need to harp on the topic on every single thread.

Dan Weber: I’ve got an ad on the side telling me I can find my Filipina sweetheart today. Is VC trying to tell me something?

I’ve been getting some weird French dieting site lately, so it looks like there is some system at work here.

1. Stay out of church.
2. Drink.
3. If you are a man, avoid college women. If you are a college woman, drop out. (This is nonintuitive)
4. Try not to be asian. If at all possible, be african american.
5. Hitting the gym, moving to or from the city to or from the country, increasing your income, and changing your religion won’t help.
6. Smoking weed won’t help either. (Nearly always true)
7. If all else fails, join the military.
8. If that doesn’t work, get yourself put in jail.

cult of statistical significance.

Great phrase, thanks!

Ariel is right in one sense — carefully phrased, significance at P=0.XX
means that, given the sample size and variation in the data, the probability the hypothesis is true is 0.XX. That statement is strictly true only if you pick your analysis in advance. In particular, you can’t collect the data and then analyze it 47 different ways until you squeeze a P=0.95 result out somewhere and then go ‘Eureka!’. If you analyze it 20 ways, you’d expect one false conclusion at P=0.95. This is particularly abused with multivariate regression, where people start adding and removing variables until they get a ‘significant’ result from the fourth order interaction of shoe size, blood type, astrological sign and hair color.

The other commenters are correct, though, that 0.94 and 0.96 are effectively the same number, and P=0.75 still means three chances out of four. 0.95 isn’t some magical true/false switch. One of the most brilliant analyses I have seen strung together a sequence of inferences at the P=0.7 to 0.8 level, each of which made good biological sense; that’s a lot more compelling than a P=0.95 result that doesn’t make sense.

Eric S.: Re finding No. 3 and the term “coercive homosexual sex”: did some state recently pass a constitutional amendment defining rape as between a man and a woman?

I noticed that one, too. I guess it’s a matter of doublethink: if one were to admit how rampant rape apparently is in American prisons, one would have to do something about it.

Radford Neal: I think this is mis-guided. The purpose of writing up the results of a study is to communicate useful information to the reader. Reporting only whether the result is “significant” or not does not communicate as much information as reporting the actual p-value. (By the way, p-values (eg, 0.05), not confidence levels (eg, 95%), are the normal way of reporting the results of signficance tests.) It makes a big difference whether the p-value is 0.012, 0.049, or 0.09. It makes very little difference whether the p-value is 0.049 or 0.051, regardless of whether or not you had decided that 0.05 was your threshold of significance. To think otherwise is to mistake research for some sort of game.

Indeed. I’ve never understood the preference for reporting significance at some stated level of confidence instead of simply reporting the p value and letting the reader make up his own mind.

Radford Neal: I think this is mis-guided. The purpose of writing up the results of a study is to communicate useful information to the reader. Reporting only whether the result is “significant” or not does not communicate as much information as reporting the actual p-value. (By the way, p-values (eg, 0.05), not confidence levels (eg, 95%), are the normal way of reporting the results of signficance tests.) It makes a big difference whether the p-value is 0.012, 0.049, or 0.09. It makes very little difference whether the p-value is 0.049 or 0.051, regardless of whether or not you had decided that 0.05 was your threshold of significance. To think otherwise is to mistake research for some sort of game.

Very true. Deirdre McCloskey has some good articles attacking the cult of statistical significance. Even if you take statistical significance very seriously, a p-value of 0.051 often tells you “get a bigger sample size,” not “nothing to see here folks, move along.”

Cornellian: I find it surprising that there is no correlation with body mass index. You would think grossly obese people would be less likely to find someone willing to have sex with them, but maybe the people in the study didn’t reach that extreme.

That’s what grossly obese people of the opposite sex are for. OK, that’s what large amounts of alcohol are for too.

Nick

For example, did you know that 35% of MIT graduate students are virgins?

No surprise there. When I was there, it was 90% male to 10% female....

Cheers,

There seem to be no statistically significant correlations between virginity and age, so the results aren’t substantially skewed by 25-year-olds who just haven’t had sex yet — and, to the extent they are (and some such skew is inevitable), that would be offset by something else, presumably greater incidence of virginity 20 years ago, when the 45-year-olds were 25.

No, a greater incidence of virginity among the unmarried 20 years ago. There’s a long history of sex causing marriage: e.g. the woman gets pregnant and social pressure (or shotgun) induce her and the man to marry. As nonmarital sex and single motherhood have become more accepted and effective birth control has become more widely available, having premarital sex is less likely to induce a couple to marry, resulting in a lower rate of virginity among the unmarried. Of course, this is not necessarily the entire explanaion; it may not even be a substantial portion of it. However, a lower rate of virginity among the unmarried is not necessarily caused by a lower rate of virginity.

Limiting the results to virginity among single non-homosexuals (i.e., people who say they are heterosexuals, bisexuals, or “something else”) age 25 to 45 would yield 11.1% virginity among men and 7.7% among women.

What calculation would yield those results?

I take it that most homosexuals wouldn’t really be thought of as “virgins” juts because they hadn’t had heterosexual sex.

I’m a gay man, if you asked me if I was a virgin, I’d say no. If a form asked me if I’d ever had “sexual intercourse”, I’d say no.

I think this is mis-guided. The purpose of writing up the results of a study is to communicate useful information to the reader. Reporting only whether the result is “significant” or not does not communicate as much information as reporting the actual p-value. (By the way, p-values (eg, 0.05), not confidence levels (eg, 95%), are the normal way of reporting the results of signficance tests.) It makes a big difference whether the p-value is 0.012, 0.049, or 0.09. It makes very little difference whether the p-value is 0.049 or 0.051, regardless of whether or not you had decided that 0.05 was your threshold of significance. To think otherwise is to mistake research for some sort of game.

Laura(southernxyl):

Cato The Elder: It is always good to remember that for these type of discussions that religious behavior, such as church attendance, is not the same as religious belief.Interestingly, the same people who will answer that it is “always wrong” to engage in premarital sex on a survey tend to be the same types who perpetrate the behavior more often.

Cato — you have something to base that on, or is it just a slam at people who profess to have morals? I’ve known lots of unmarried people who were active and who never seemed think they were supposed to say premarital sex was “always wrong”.

FWIW (very little I realize), the only layperson I know over 30 who claims/admits to being a virgin is a regular churchgoer. I have no idea how he’d answer the “always wrong” survey question, but I’ve never heard him express a negative judgment about anyone else’s private behavior.

Cato The Elder: The blogger plotted both variables against WORDSUM, a 10 question test which can be capably used as a proxy of IQ score. You can see that the percentage answering PREMARSX 217 as “Always Wrong” monotonically decreases with WORDSUM scores, and that the percentage answering PARTNERS 1291 as “0 Partners within the last year” stays fairly level with increasing WORDSUM score until about 6, at which point it sharply increases. So, the survey shows that the percent giving the first answer is negatively correlated to the percent giving the second — the claim.

Interesting but it’s not clear what this shows. Low IQ is generally correlated with low impulse control — so people may think pre-marital sex is always wrong but just cannot resist the temptation. Just like if you ask a low IQ criminal whether stealing is always wrong, he may well answer yes before knocking off a convenience store.

It’s not clear their views on sex play a causal role in their behavior.

Uh-oh.