I know you are, but what am I?

People never enjoy studies that come out which may seem insulting to a specific type of people. Such as one researcher who claimed to have discovered an intelligence gene which was most pronounced in Asians and least in.. well, I'll leave that out because it's.. well, insulting. After all, it's insulting to call someone less intelligent whether it's how they're born or how they choose to be. Personally, I have no problem admitting Asians are probably smarter than me.. but then, I'm not at the lowest level either.

So you can imagine the uproar that could very well be happening right this moment from a new study which concludes that there is a negative correlation between conservatism and intelligence. This means that when ones goes up, the other goes down. In this case, the more conservative a person is, the lower their intelligence.


"Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores."

Now, of course, a study should be done on a larger scale and with a greater variety of people and not just those already seeking entry into university. I'm not going to say that this study creates a definitive fact which states that liberals are smarter than conservatives, but this, combined with other well known intelligence markers does make it quite interesting. For instance, the more religious a person is, the lower intelligence they're likely to have (and lower education) and, as we all know, the conservative movement is headed by one and only one group- christians.

Critical thinking skills are essential to intelligence (it's not all just memorizing facts and dates) which is something that most religious people severely lack and, in the same group, something conservatives usually lack.

So does this mean the more conservative parties are suddenly going to be known as the stupid parties? Well, to most liberals they already were, but realistically, probably not. Since facts tend to be insulting and no one wants that. Still, it'll be interesting to see where, if anywhere, this leads.

Sexuality in America

This subject has been done to death but after a while I think every blogger has to put in their two cents. America has made huge strides in the progression of sexual tolerance and rights, but we're still not anywhere near where we should be. A homosexual child is still six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings and gay bashing isn't exactly hard time find. Johann Hari recently wrote an article about homophobia in the black community where it is most prevalent. The article claims that, like most homophobes, black or white, the hip hop community is so good at bashing gays because they're oh so good at hiding how gay they actually are.

He writes, "I recently interviewed Dean for Attitude, Britain's best-selling gay magazine. He told me about a man -- I don't believe in outing, so I won't give his name -- who "has been named in the past as one of the biggest rappers of all time by MTV. He's always trashing gay men in his lyrics. But he is surrounded by a posse of transvestites," who he has sex with. Dean then runs through a list of hip-hop gays, each more famous and closeted than the last."

It's funny how many white homophobes instantly get the title of having latent homosexuality, but that's pretty unheard of in the African American community. Maybe rightly so since the man interviewed by Hari, also secretly gay, says he feared for his life. Maybe rappers really are as violent as they sing about.

Still, a study in 1996 by Adams, Write, and Lohr found that the majority of men who identified as having aggressive feelings towards homosexuals were significantly aroused when shown homosexual pornography. The general feeling is that we have enough scientific evidence to suggest that a fear of gays really does suggest a person may be at least partly gay. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8772014)

Let's move on from heterosexuality vs homosexuality for a moment though and talk about bisexuality. This study also showed that 100% of the men were aroused by heterosexual porn meaning that they were not homosexual, but rather, bisexual. Hari writes "we know from decades of sexual research that almost everyone -- especially as a teenager -- has a period when they have omnivorous sexual urges, with attraction to the 'wrong' gender cropping up for a while. (Like most gay boys, I had a burst of heterosexual experiences when I was 15 and 16.)"

This from a man who, by the way, identifies as homosexual and not bisexual, yet he is essentially saying that not only does science indicate that all human beings at some point are attracted to both sexes, but he himself has personal experience in that area. This, ladies and gentlemen, we call bisexuality. Now, even in the bisexual community (people who acknowledge their attraction to both sexes) there is almost always a preference for one sex or the other. Does this mean that bisexuality is really the majority? Perhaps hetero and homosexuality are simply strong preferences by bisexual men and women. Even the gayest people I know still are "bi curious" even though they don't like to admit it. On the same note, even the straightest people I know have admitted to "experimenting" or having a curiousness as well.

I don't believe in homosexuality. I don't believe in heterosexuality. I believe in sexuality. I believe that we, as human beings, as sexual beings and have the capacity to be sexually aroused by numerous things, including both genders.