Thursday, December 6, 2012

What are gay men up to? How not to find out

From Gay Star News comes this revelation:
[West Hollywood, California,] was crowned the country's most popular place for gay men looking for casual sex after users of dating website SeekingArrangement.com admitted to having 10 or more sexual partners over the past year.
How is that a representative data set? For those of you who don't know, and I'm guessing that most people have no reason to know, SeekingArrangement.com is a "sugar daddy" site, as described in The New York Times here. Also, the answers were from those who had chosen to answer the question. Thus, there are two levels of self-selection bias right there. Besides, who knows how honest the respondents were being?

That raises the question of how to get more reliable data. If more representative polling can be used, we should use that. If not, then why write the article at all? "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

...why write the article at all?

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Yep, that's why I don't write about that kind of fake "reporting."

That site's probably for hustlers. That's what most LA sex is about anyway.