Cancer, Oral Sex, and Presidential Politics | Psychology Today

The posts on Animals and Us normally deal with the psychology of our relationships with other species. But I am best known at my university as the guy who teaches the sex course. Occasionally a writer needs to clean out the cobwebs by shifting gears a bit. So in this post, I decided to discuss a topic related to the other side of my academic life - human sexuality.

The New Science of Culturomics

One of my favorite toys from the wunderkinds who gave us Google Earth is Google?s Ngram Viewer. Ngram is a free and easy to use graphics program that tracks the ebb and flow of ideas through a culture. At its heart is a massive data set consisting of 500 billion words taken from 5 million digitized books published between 1500 and 2010.

Ngram makes anyone a player in the new science that Ngram devotees call ?culturomics.? Plug the words, names, or phrases you want to track into the search bar and off you go. In a click of a mouse, a graph pops up?showing changes in the relative importance of the concepts over time. Ngram?s uses are endless. For example,?its developers used Ngram to track the Nazi suppression of modern art, and in a previous Psych Today blog I used Ngram to trace changes in the role of pets in American culture.

And I recently used it to test a theory about the rise of oral sex in America.

Reverend Fischer's Oral Sex Hypothesis

Politics is getting particularly dirty as we approach the presidential election, and my foray into the culturomics of sexual behavior was motivated by a recent statement by Reverend Bryan Fischer, a radio commentator and the new darling of the religious right. While you may never have heard of him, his?status as a culture warrior was described by Jane Mayer in a recent article in The New Yorker. Though not as well known as Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh, his radio show, Focal Point, reaches a million listeners every day ? about the same as MSNBC?s Rachel Maddow.

Fischer is most famous for his gay-bashing diatribes. But in a recent attack on Democrats, he railed against the evils of heterosexual oral sex (which he cryptically refers to as ?the kind of activity that President Clinton practiced in the Oval Office?). Specifically, Fischer made two claims about oral sex on his radio show (here). The first is that oral sex has caused a dramatic increase in the number of cancers of the head and neck in the United States. The second is that Bill Clinton is the culprit. Let?s examine these claims separately.

?Is Oral Sex A Health Hazard?

Reverend Fischer says that oral sex can be bad for your health. He is, unfortunately,?probably right. Cancers of the throat and mouth are on rise, and there are now about 35,000 new cases a year. A 2007 study found that people with cancer of the mouth and throat were considerably more likely to have had multiple oral sex partners than a cancer-free control group. Another study found that oral sex (and even open-mouth kissing) facilitates the transmission of human papillomavirus. (HPV is the malicious family of bugs which sometimes cause genital warts and cancer). But what really got Fischer in a twit was a January 2012 study which found that 7% of Americans aged 14 to 69 are infected with oral HPV. This spells trouble as the most common variety of the HPV in people?s mouths is also among the most carcenogenic.

Oddly, Fischer neglected to mention another STD that is associated with oral sex -- herpes. In times past, the simplex 1 variant of herpes was considered a non-sexually transmitted oral form of the virus which caused cold sores on the mouth and lips. A different form, herpes simplex 2, was thought to cause the STD, genital herpes. But because of the increased popularity of oral sex, particularly among the young, more and more people are showing up at their doctors with cold sore herpes on their genitals. Indeed, at the University of Wisconsin, the proportion of students genital sores caused by herpes simplex 1 jumped from 31% in 1993 (the year Bill Clinton became president) to 78% in 2001 (the year Clinton was replaced by his less kinky successor). Hmmm?..

Using Ngram to Test The Fischer Oral Sex Hypothesis

So, while I hate to admit it, Fischer?s claim that oral sex can cause cancer is probably true. But what about his second claim -- that the former president's ?inappropriate relationship? (Clinton's term) with a White House intern instigated an epidemic of oral sex among the youth of America? Fischer is, of course, dredging up a charge that has made the rounds for years. But now, thanks to Google?s Ngram Viewer, I was finally able to put it to an empirical test.

It was the easiest research project I have ever conducted, and you can replicate it yourself. Here?s how. Pull up Ngram viewer by clicking here. Then type Bill Clinton and oral sex separated by a comma into the search bar. Now limit the dates to the period you are interested in and specify the correct language. (I used the years 1960 to 2000 and American English). Finally, hit enter. Bingo?..

Here?s what I got.

Frequency of "Bill Clinton" (blue) and "oral sex" (red)

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In the graph, the relative frequency of usage of the term ?oral sex? is in red and ?Bill Clinton? is in blue. Ngram clearly shows that the rise of oral sex in the American lexicon began nearly three decades before Bill met Monica. The bottom line is that President Clinton had essentially no impact on America?s sexual landscape.

So, sorry Reverend, your theory is wrong. You can't pin the increase of oropharyngeal cancers on Clinton. And when it comes to oral sex, he was product of his times rather than, well, a taste maker.

By the way, I also used Ngram Viewer to test another well-known claim, this one about rock and roll and Christianity. Reverend Fischer would probably approve of the results: John Lennon was wrong - The Beatles were never more popular than Jesus (click here for the graph). It?s not even close.

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Hal Herzog is Professor of Psychology at Western Carolina University. He is the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It?s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals.

Follow on Twitter @herzoghal

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