Posted on 08/05/2003 8:33:43 AM PDT by Theophilus
Why Do Gays Smoke So Much?
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Monday, August 4, 2003, at 11:27 AM PT
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In other words, Varney implicitly assumes that gays are either too stupid to have gotten the message that smoking is bad for you or too irrational to have modified their behavior accordingly. A more inquisitive reporter might instead have raised the obvious question: What good reasons might gays have to smoke more than other people?
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As a matter of fact, childless households (whether gay or straight) spend, on average, 56 percent more on cigarettes and alcohol than their childbearing neighbors. (Among households where the parents have some education, the discrepancy is even larger.) Nor is there anything mysterious about why. First, parents have extra reasons to live long and stay healthy, both so they can be there when their kids need them and so they can enjoy the company of their grandchildren. Second, parents have extra expenses—starting with diapers and continuing through college tuition—that leave less disposable income for cigarettes. Third, a lot of parents don't like the idea of smoking in front of their children.
That alone might be enough to explain why perfectly rational gays (along with perfectly rational childless straights) smoke more than their neighbors. But family size is not the only dimension in which gays—particularly those gays who identify themselves as such to pollsters—are different from straights. The openly gay face some social opprobrium. So do smokers. Maybe it's not too surprising, then, that out-of-the-closet gays and out-of-the-closet smokers are disproportionately the same people. (You can imagine the possibilities: "Now that my parents have learned to deal with my gayness, I might as well tell them I smoke.")
More speculatively, one might well imagine that nicotine, which is popular largely as a stress reliever, might be more useful in a life punctuated by discrimination, familial disapproval, and plain old cruelty. Or even that the people who lead such lives might—perfectly rationally—care less than the rest of us about how long their lives will last. I'm not sure how to test those hypotheses, and I'm not sure how plausible they are, but surely they're both more plausible and more respectful than the suggestion that gays need to see specifically gay-oriented advertising before they can understand that smoking is bad for them.
If you doubt that rational responses are relevant to addictive behaviors like smoking, consider this: MIT professor Jonathan Gruber and University of California, Berkeley, professor Botond Koszegi have studied the way smokers respond to cigarette tax increases. Here's what they find: As soon as a tax increase is announced, but before it goes into effect, smokers do two things: They stockpile cigarettes, and they cut back on smoking. The anticipation of higher prices in the future inspires smokers to adjust their habits in the present, both so their stockpiles can grow and so they can accustom themselves to smoking less. In other words, smokers respond exactly as you'd expect rational beings to respond.
Why, then, should gay smokers be the unique exception to the rule that smokers behave rationally? The answer is that there is no answer. Generally speaking, people have good reasons for the things they do, whether or not those reasons are visible to the folks at National Public Radio.
Regards, Axel
This BEGS a rewrite, to wit:
In other words, gays are either too stupid to have gotten the message that unprotected gay sex is bad for you or too irrational to have modified their behavior accordingly.
In light of the revelations that gays continue to have unprotected sex, and in light that they get on the internet and arrange gay sex parties with the knowledge that there are some present who are HIV positive, I think that the word "irrational" is a profound understatement of their group mental health.
However, I used to listen to NPR all the time. Then I noticed an amazing number of stories about how wonderful and normal fairies are. Then, after establishing that they were spreading propaganda and not reporting news, I'd switch stations every time some pro-fairy (they ALL are pro-fairy) story came on. I listen much less to NPR.
Now, I'm not sure this story is factual but, yo, Bruce-the-smoker, I accept your private property arguments as long as you are smoking in the fairy bars. Enjoy smokers, suck and blow all you like, and I'll go to the smoke-free (and, it seems, fairy-free) bars and restaurants. Deal?
The best I can do is tell you that I have seen the research on this website several times indicating that the average life expectancy for gay men is 42. In addition to the AIDs risk, gay men have the highest suicide rate and the highest rate of alcoholism and drug addiction. Then there's the smoking thing and that the fact that, um, anal promiscuity, um, opens one up to all sorts of non-AIDs health problems. I do not know what the story is with lesbians.
And other unsightly things on your face.
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