The Conservative Cat

I have to admit: when I saw this story hyped on the little newsbreaks between TV shows last night, I was skeptical. Of course, it didn't hurt that they were hyping it over and over and over again. You know what tipped me off? The tag line:

A growing number of Americans are proudly announcing -- no sex, no problem.

Okay, so they would have us believe that people declaring their lack of interest in sex is the hot new trend. Note, however, the journalistic catch-phrase a growing number. This is one of those vague phrases like some people say or many experts believe that are used to disguise the fact that there's really no basis for the claim at all. Trust me: many experts believe that journalists have no absolutely no idea what many experts believe.

The one hard fact in the story is that a particular website devoted to asexuality (http://www.aven.org) has 4000 forum subscribers. As of this writing, the forum has 4831 subscribers, but if you know anything about forums, you also know that while subscribers are forever, people are only active for a short time. Of the 4831 subscribers, 4000 have posted fewer than 14 articles, and of those 4000, 2200 haven't posted at all. Without some serious additional research, we have no idea how many of the 2200 are genuinely asexual and how many are spam artists who are creating identities to increase their Google ranking.

So remember this: when your local news station says something's a hot new trend, it doesn't necessarily mean anything, and unless that trend is a growing number of people getting good advice from a cat, you don't need to tune in to see what it's about.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat