Those “Gay Activists” Sure Have Amazing Powers

A commenter on the thread discussing the Santa Monica proposal to ban routine circumcision of boys wrote,

One thing you have to say about gay activists –- they have successfully mainstreamed topics of anal and oral sex and now circumcision and foreskins.

Funny: I had thought it was the Old Testament had successfully mainstreamed the topic of circumcision and foreskins, and American doctors in the late 1800s and early 1900s who mainstreamed the topic of routine nonreligiously motivated circumcision.

Likewise, according to Laumann et al., The Social Organization of Sexuality 103 (1994, reporting on 1991 data), over 80% of men and over 75% of women age 24 to 43 had had oral sex at some point. The overwhelming majority of these people, of course, are heterosexual. As to anal sex, the numbers as of 1991 were lower — apparently over 20% — but even so even in married couples 9.5% of married men and 7.6% of married women reported having had anal sex in the past year; that’s considerably more than the number of gay men in the country.

I suspect that all that oral and anal sex is not exactly the work of gay activists. (Or is it that some straight guys never thought of anal sex until they heard of gay guys doing it with each other and thought, “Hey, what a great idea! I’d never have thought about it myself, but now that I hear those influential gay activists are talking about it, I ought to try”?) And I suspect that mainstream discussion of the topic of oral and anal sex — among overwhelmingly heterosexual members of the media talking to overwhelmingly heterosexual audiences about behavior that tens of millions of heterosexuals engage in — is not the work of gay activists, either.

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