Aug 15th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Sex and Engineering
Via the Poor Man Institute, the latest in abstinence advocacy:
If anything, characterizing the sex-engineering link in this manner seems overwhelmingly more likely to reduce interest in engineering than to reduce interest in sex.
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62 Responses to “Sex and Engineering”
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August 15th, 2008 at 9:33 am
OMG, is this our tax money at work? Because they might as well put a picture of Gomer Pyle up there with the slogan “Proud to be a virgin!” Stupider than the war on drugs: The war on sex!
August 15th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Poor, poor engineers; perhaps this explains the weird fetish so many engineers have for Randian libertarianism.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:40 am
some choose celibacy; some have celibacy thrust upon them. you get both at most engineering schools, where the achingly-low female/male ratios make your sexual urges irrelevant.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:40 am
This is the apex of “sex education” in the right-wingnutosphere.
What next? Will they start promoting being overweight and covered with acne until marriage?
August 15th, 2008 at 9:44 am
you should see these ads throughout interstate highways between nyc and virginia. also, i’ve noticed a good majority of the models in the ads are black…just a thought…
August 15th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Engineering and bad typography– a marriage made in heaven.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:49 am
It’s a great sentiment. So is yelling at the wind to keep it from blowing or lashing the sea to decrease wave size. Good luck!
August 15th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I can still engineer a helluva lot of fellatio, you betcha!!!
More exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!
And some cunnilingus thrown in for good measure, it’s not really sex!!!!!!!
August 15th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Has there ever been an era when teens didn’t engage in some kind of sexual activity?
August 15th, 2008 at 9:56 am
A better approach would be:
Sex will only have to wait until I’m an engineer and can afford it.
Sex, of course, being less dependent on whether or not you chooses engineering and more dependent on whether or not you’re the type of person that would choose engineering.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:57 am
So who paid for this? And how much?
August 15th, 2008 at 9:58 am
If you’re interested in engineering you’re already not too concerned about the sex…
August 15th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Perfect ad.
Engineering is the worst profession for anyone with even half a brain. Worst still if you have a functioning dick.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:00 am
There is something deeply wrong with this country.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am
It is my experience that the two are mutually exclusive, but I’m not sure that it needs to be that way.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:06 am
mutually exclusive as in if you choose one you exclude the other.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Damn. I spend half an hour surfing porn, and I miss the post which undoubtedly sets the all-time opportunity record for snarky responses.
As others have noted, the billboard is redundant: in my experience, people who pursue engineering as a career often end up waiting for sex for quite a while.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Elle ne vise aucune cible, qu’il disait.
Si, le ” paradis “. Uniquement
August 15th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Absolutely not. Interest/concern does not = acquisition. We find sex quite interesting. Indeed, perhaps more so than those who acquire more of it.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Don’t laugh at the engineers. Some people just keep quiet when they’ve found a good thing. (I am not an engineer.)
But, y’know, engineering you can do when you’re old. Sex, not so much.
This billboard will always be a contender for “Dumbest Advertising Ever”. Way dumber than Volvo’s “Car for people who don’t like to drive”.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Y’know, there was a time not so long ago when this bill board might have said, “I want to be an engineer — that’s why I’m joining the Army!”
So maybe this is progress. Or not. I can’t tell. Anyone?
August 15th, 2008 at 10:19 am
But of course, back in the good old days when the Beav and Wally roamed the neighborhood, John Wayne rode the wild west and dispensed rugged individualist justice with a six shooter, and the dirty hippie’s had yet to make an appearance to challenge the Godly and moral establishment wallowing in the affluence of the post-WWII boom.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Not sure which is more stupid, the billboard itself or the notion that you can use outdoor advertising to make teenagers not want sex.
This thing must have public financing; I can’t imagine anyone spending their own money on something this idiotic.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Has there ever been an era when teens didn’t engage in some kind of sexual activity?
If stories are to be believed, yes - during the Cultural Revolution in China. So apparently it’s easy to promote abstinence if you can redirect the kids’ sexual urges towards browbeating and physically assaulting teachers and other authority figures, organize lots of marches and work gangs to burn off physical energy, encourage kids to release even more sexual energy by smashing cultural artifacts, and dress everyone in ugly unisex clothes.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:36 am
You’re either getting sex on your way to becoming an engineer, or sex is going to be rare in your life. That’s just the way it is.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:38 am
They should have put a picture of Dilbert on the sign.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:45 am
I’m not a Photoshop guy, so let me suggest something:
Replace the kid with a photo of George Bush.
Change the caption to “It’s my future. I want to be a War President. Health care can wait!”
NOW we’ve got us a billboard, by cracky!
August 15th, 2008 at 10:48 am
How many of the commenters here are female or look at this topic from a female POV? Women face much, much tougher choices trying to balance sex and its “conceptual” consequences with pursuit of training or a career than men do. Most women would look at the proposition that sexual activity (even including its consequences) does anything to distract men from doing whatever else they want to do (including more sex, or pursuit of a career) for more than, what, 20 minutes, with utter disbelief.
Not so for a female who happens to fall pregnant in the process.
So there is a valid argument to be made that there’s a tradeoff between unprotected sex and pursuit of a career– but it’s women who face that tradeoff, not men.
This is a ridiculous ad campaign. Also offensively racist if it uses disproportionately African-American models and thus perpetuates the idea that it’s only young black men whose uncontrolled sexual activity needs to be reined in.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:52 am
This has been around a long time. At least seven or eight years.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Not sure which is more stupid, the billboard itself or the notion that you can use outdoor advertising to make teenagers not want sex.
You know what would be awesome? Having sex behind that billboard.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Jeez. Back when I was studying engineering in college I found a sexy older woman who’d had a tubal ligation and we had lots of sex, no problems.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I figure if the kid wants to be an engineer, he’s already got his pocket protector. Similarly equipped about 10 cm below the pocket, he’s good to go on sex.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Going into engineering isn’t postponement of sex, it’s giving up entirely.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Gomer Pyle up there with the slogan “Proud to be a virgin!” - elle loco
Do I remember correctly that the actor who played Gomer Pyle may very well have been a “virgin” in the same sense that Suze Ormand is proud to be a “virgin”? Not that there’s anything wrong with that …
August 15th, 2008 at 11:19 am
So there is a valid argument to be made that there’s a tradeoff between unprotected sex and pursuit of a career– but it’s women who face that tradeoff, not men.
Yes, and it’s a very weak argument. Or, it’s an excellent argument for contraceptive-focused advertising. It’s also not entirely inherent that only women face the consequences of unprotected sex, like child-production. There are those of us who might actually feel the obligation to be a father and put off career aspirations like engineering (and there may be those of us who view the ridiculousness of this ad thru such a moral prism and proceed to make snarky comments here). And at the least, the law kind of forces some sort of monetary contribution.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:31 am
If you want to be an engineer, you probably aren’t having sex, anyway. Until you reach your late twenties, that is. By that time, women start to realize that you make pretty good money. Then they divorce their drunken mechanic husband and marry an engineer like you. In the end, it really does pay to be a geek. As for the ads, I used to see that nonsense all the time when I lived in Texas. Now I live in Boulder and we don’t even have billboards.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Speaking as an engineer myself, if this kid really has an engineering mind, he doesn’t need to worry about the having sex problem.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:37 am
If stories are to be believed, yes - during the Cultural Revolution in China.
Not true. I went out during the 80s with a woman from Shanghai who had been a nursing student during that time and she told me that the hospitals had been doing abortions 24/7 during that time. Then as always, people f*cked like rabbits, normal sex, gay sex, and the occasional pathological variant like child abuse and incest, which she could also cite cases of. It was kept a bit more private than we do here, but it all happened under cover, or under the covers as you might say. They were only pure to bullsh*t the occasional Western visitor, and around the North Koreans, who even then were batsh*t crazy.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Those of us who studied engineering have been passing this around for a while, and we noted the unintended message. If sex is your thing, though, engineering provides the option of a doorway into the more eccentric social subcultures of college, and there’s plenty of sex to go around there.
And as others have noted, the “prime dating years” for the engineers tend to be late 20s/early 30s: to the younger women, you compare favorably to the slacker men in their peer group. Older women find your professional success attractive because they’ve become more focused on having a serious relationship. Then you get laid off around 50.
August 15th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
It’s true — raise your kids as geeks and they probably won’t get much sex. I have two boys, 19 and 22, total geeks, no girlfriends, sex, drugs, or alcohol, just computers, D&D, and gaming.
Where did I go wrong?!
August 15th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
OTOH, as a female engineering student myself in the 70s, OMG, it was teh awesome….
August 15th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
some choose celibacy; some have celibacy thrust upon them
Not sure that was the right way to put it . . .
You know what would be awesome? Having sex behind that billboard . . . WITH AN ENGINEER!
August 15th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Yeah, I got a kick out of this WHEN (MATT’S THEN COLLEAGE) MEGAN MCARDLE FIRST PUT IT UP ON HER BLOG WEEKS AGO!
August 15th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
“OTOH, as a female engineering student myself in the 70s, OMG, it was teh awesome….”
As an engineering student, I remember the one female in my classes. She wasn’t very pretty, but she certainly got laid a lot. Sadly, there wasn’t enough of them. Of course, in this category, too much can never be enough.
August 15th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
The message is stupid enough, by my god, the horrible, horrible design!
August 15th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I remember one of the few females in my engineering classes - I used to call her “the beautiful but deadly Melinda Hungerford”. She was smart, beautiful, charming and lethally cutting to anyone who thought he had a right to intimacies, just because you did homework together.
…No point, I just wanted to remember her…
August 15th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I don’t know if Computer Science equals engineering for the purposes of this billboard, but in the early ’80s NYU had plenty of female CompSci students. Granted the Classics department bore more fruit, so to speak.
I thought that geeks were in these days? I’ve been plenty covered in honey(s) over the last decade.
August 15th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Guys, this picture is from the early 90s… why is it making the blog rounds now? It shows up frequently in facebook groups since 2004.
August 15th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
“I want to be an engineer — that’s why I’m joining the Army!”
For one segment of society, doesn’t that naturally lead to:
“Don’t ask / don’t tell. Sex can wait!”
August 15th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I think we all know enginerd don’t get sex anyways…
August 15th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
@El Cid *shakes head* So true… so true… Hank Reardon FTW.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
If you can’t handle contraceptives, I don’t think I want you to become an engineer.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
This has been around for a long time. I remember mocking my cousin with it during college, so it might even predate the Bush administration.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Interesting indeed. It is not, however, and either/or choice.
From personal experience you can have both, even during your college days, especially if graduating in 4 years isn’t a priority.
Back in the ’70’s there were plenty of party options and female non-engineers around, whereas now the students today seem more serious, there are many more female engineering students.
I second the comment that anybody who can’t figure out how a condom works should not be an engineer.
Amazing as it may seem, you can have sex when you’re an engineer, and can have it when you’re (relatively) old as well as young.
What you can’t do is have it when you’re running for President.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Also, remember that without the engineers, you would have no running water in which to take a shower with your sweetie.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
@fostert and donna:
Regarding female engineering students’ romantic prospects, the line I’ve always heard is this: the odds are good, but the goods are odd.
August 16th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Regarding female engineering students’ romantic prospects, the line I’ve always heard is this: the odds are good, but the goods are odd.
But if the female engineering student is a little odd herself, she might not find that to be a bad thing.
August 18th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Am I the only one who bothered to click on the link to the original post, which itself has a link to the real original post, which itself links to another post, well, you get the idea:
UPDATE: Just to clarify, this billboard is not currently up (as far as I know). One commenter says it’s from the early ’90s; I haven’t been able to verify that. I knew it wasn’t currently up when I wrote this post, but I realized I didn’t explicitly say that. Sorry for any confusion, or for your disappointment if you’ve been driving around Kansas City hoping to see it.
http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/08/12/i-want-to-be-an-engineersex-can-wait-encouraging-abstinence-and-making-engineering-seem-really-lame/
August 19th, 2008 at 2:41 am
If there was ever a black model who looked more like Theo Huxtable, I haven’t seen him…
September 25th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I must be the coolest aspiring engineer, i get the sex and the grades. most students, however, seem more concerned with schooling and their jobs then sex. i do not believe that being an engineer states that someone does not want to have sex or is not already having sex. you can thank us for developing the systems in your cell phones and computers later i guess…
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November 21st, 2008 at 2:34 pm