Talk Dirty To Florida. You Know You Want To.
It seems that the state of Florida wants women to talk dirty to them. And they’ll pay them to do it. Ten bucks. Cash American money.
Florida’s Department of Health is asking for intimate details of the sex lives of 4,100 young women, and offering $10 gift cards in return.
State officials said the unprecedented, $45,000 survey will help them understand women’s need for and approach to family-planning services.
Hundreds of women in South Florida were among the survey recipients, their names pulled from the white pages by a private company, state officials said. They were asked to voluntarily tell the state how many men they’d had sex with in the past year, whether a man had ever poked holes in a condom to get them pregnant, and how they felt emotionally when they last had unprotected sex.
Participants will get a $10 CVS card for use on health-related items.
So, I get a letter in the mail, asking me to answer a questionnaire about my hoochy activities in exchange for $10. I would immediately call the EPA to ask for an environmental impact statement form to dispose of this sucker because you do not know who the hell has been touching it.
And in the dark recesses of some nondescript government building sits a middle aged bald guy lustfully reading all these forms about women’s sparkin’ activities, hoping like hell that he doesn’t get caught and …. oh dear God, y’all, it turns out that Rick Scott is as creepy as we thought.
Thanks to Ralph for the heads up.
WHY?
1This just has to all blow up in the press. You just know that! I bet that Rick Scott (ohhhh, Rick-eee babeee!) will definitely see to it that his party and politics had nothing to do with this. I mean, hey, since when do the Rethugs have anything to do with s*e*x. As in the belief there is a little ninja bouncer that lives at the doorway of every woman’s womb to knock out rape seed or the deal about aspirin between a woman’s knees blah blah blah. I’m bettin’ right now that the little guy reviewing all this stuff in a dark cubicle in the State House somewhere is a eunuch.
2It seems like Florida, Arizona and Texas are having a contest for which state can come up with the Craziest Governance contest.
3WTH??????
4Actually, this was almost certainly designed by a tone-deaf scentist to get information about services women need. I can see the usefulness of this type of questionnaire for determining what services women will use and why. In the article, the current administration is scrambling to run away from it, because, you know, the health services dept doesn’t need to know any real information about women’s sex lives to provide services. I admit it sounds funny. The truly tone-deaf part of it is not sending out a letter first allowing women to go online for the actual questions or agreeing to be sent a questionnaire (and the reward). Sending out a questionnaire with this kind of questions blind, that’s stupid. I can’t believe the article outed the poor doctoral student who’s compiling the results. Gave her name and university. Guess who’s going to be getting death threats soon from the loons for thinking too much about S-E-X.
5Young women? Only *young* women? So if this is the demographic they want to study, what, seriously, are they doing scouting through the white pages for contact numbers? Think about it. White Pages. In other words, the LAND LINE phone book, for the demographic *most likely* to have a cell phone only and *least likely* to have a land line phone at all. I’m also wondering how they figured out which of these phone numbers belonged to “young” women. Or women, period.
Dumbest d*mn thing I’ve heard in a while. And I read about Republicans every day, right here (for my daily dose of dumb)!
6This one will keep me LOL all weekend long!! Can’t you just hear women laughing as they make stuff up for the poor old Joeys who HAVE to read it?? Of course they would be the older ladies with land lines who actually open their mail & take the time to fill in the answers & mail it back! Rolling over & over LMAO just imagining a remake of the Golden Girls doing it on SNL! Florida is giving Texas a run for its money with crazy.
7Dear JJ – I, for one, am exasperated and personally offended with your continually associating male baldness with closeted deviant behavior. Such stereotypical cogitation belongs in the Party of Tea, not with an upstanding Progressive woman such as herself. And, to prove my point that baldness is not the exclusive characteristic of those exhibiting deviancy, I offer up Rick Perry and my own guv Tom Corbett as exhibit A.
8@Stephen Winstein, please don’t be offended. I personally find some bald men very attractive and sexy. JJ was talking about Rick Scott who is neither attractive nor sexy, but is definitely creepy.
9Lyntilla, “tone-deaf” yes–“scientist” unlikely. The results will be meaningless. Ohhh! Aren’t these guys going to read some whoppers!
10You know every one of those letters are headed straight to Rick Scott’s inbox!
11But- if some pervert wants details of My sex life, he damnsure ain’t getting it for a $10 CVS card!
The repugs want to eliminate waste in govt.?
12I’ve designed some social science research in my day. My area was date-rape. I’ve sat through meetings discussing how you try to get the info you want in a reliable and verifiable way. In the article JJ referenced, the last few paragraphs tell you that they were trying to design a study to figure out why “Florida has one of the lowest rates of contraceptive use among women of childbearing age, and “experiences racial disparities” compared with other Southeastern states. Assessing the need for family-planning services is a requirement of federal grant applications.” The 46 question study was designed by pulling together questions from other similar studies and “The survey went through 48 revisions as it was vetted by two institutional review boards, one at the state health department and one at FAMU” and it’s being handled by a doctoral student at FAMU.
Old Mayfly, you may not think much of their abilities, but this was put together by academicians who are social scientists, at least according to the article.
Feel free to make fun of it, but understand, the Republicans are the ones throwing it under the bus. Armstrong, the current appointed (by Scott) health department secretary is promising not to use it. It’s a 46 question survey about sex. Those are usually easy to make look stupid. But, the people who designed and sent out this survey (however clumsily) were trying to INCREASE the use of contraceptives in the state of Florida using actual data.
13Dear Lyntilla, thanks for backing my Mike and me on our take on this deal! I said 1) not enuf info, and 2) this sounds like it could be a shot-in-the-dark preliminary small sample! 41-4200 women is not what I would call a canvassing of Florida! On the whole, I am inclined to wonder what sort of results our delightfully backward state would yield! Nightmarish, I’m certain, sigh! And we can even let Gov Perry sound them out and help tabulate, because he is NOT GAY, you know.
14Dear Lyntilla
Was going to comment, but you’ve said it all
Keep up the good work
Px
15Agreed with Lyntilla and others. You would be amazed at the bad surveys designed by researchers in other fields. This does not surprise me at all, speaking as a biostatistician working in clinical trials. The demographic of 18-24 is probably explained by the estimated number of unintended pregnancies or single parent families by age. It’s all well and good to say that it’s a choice to have a baby, but there are obviously real poverty issues related to lack of access to reproductive care and unintended pregnancies. Finally, a random subset of about 1200 Floridian women in that age group should reliably estimate the proportion of yes responses in a yes/know question to within plus or minus 3 or 4 percentage points. The lonked article shows samples in 3 counties of several hundred each. The response rate will definitely be lower than the surveyors could hope for, and another possible area of incompetance, but I think the target is in the high hundreds at least. Nate Silver didn’t need to canvass America to have a good idea of who would win the presidential election.
It’s probably just bad science with a good goal that is not going to be met.
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