Math with Twilight Sparkle · 3:33pm May 6th, 2014
Dear Bronies, this is Twilight Sparkle;
Recently I have been doing some reading on the internet about your perceived possible future love lives for me and my friends, and was rather surprised by the number of hypothesis suggested that two, or even all of the Elements of Harmony would have sexual relationships with each other.
I became curious, and wondered if so many people predicted it, was I destined to marry one of my friends? Rather than take your guesses on the matter alone, I decided to keep an open mind, and do some research because research is awesome.
I have not directly inquired to the sexual orientation of any of my friends, nor am I aware of them being in a past or current relationship. As for myself, I have never had a serious romantic relationship with any stallion or mare, except for a brief attraction to Flash Sentry which didn’t last long as we really had nothing in common. Therefore, in the interest of unbiased research I am willing to presume that that may have been ‘just a phase’.
Despite my best efforts, I could not find any reliable statistics on the prominence of homosexuality in Equestria however I did find it rather easy to find number of well researched studies from your world which, (despite minor variations between same-sex attractions by men and women), consistently reported that approximately 2% of humans consider themselves gay.
While doing my research, I continually found the assertion by humans that homosexual tendencies were genetic, (meaning someone might be born gay and they have no choice in the matter,) was almost universally accepted, even though after an exhaustive search I found not one shred of scientific data to support this belief, while a plethora of evidence seemed to support the contrary. I find it fascinating that so many would believe something with virtually no evidence and was about to explore this line of research further, but then I realized that Spike was eating a can of worms and went to stop him before he got diarrhea.
Anyways; if we presume that homosexuality rates among ponies and humans are roughly comparable, it was fairly easy to determine that I only have a 2% chance of being gay. Therefore, unless significant evidence to the contrary occurs, I think it is safe to assume that I am heterosexual; but I was still curious about my friends.
As there are six Elements of Harmony that chances that just one of us is lesbian would be calculated as; “6 X (0.02 X 0.98^5)”, equaling approximately 10.847%, just less than a 1 in 9 chance, making it a plausible, though unlikely scenario.
The chances that two of the elements of Harmony are lesbian, would be expressed as “(0.02^2 X 0.98^4) X 15” equaling a 0.553%, slightly under 1 in 181. (The chances of two Elements of Harmony being lesbian with each other is even less, as two lesbians being friends doesn't necessarily mean they will become lovers.)
The chances that all six of us are lesbian would be calculated as “0.02^6” equaling 0.0000000064% chance, 1 in 15,625,000,000.
By this stage I thought my results were conclusive, but I still wanted to take them farther. Though they were less common than stories that imagined intimate relationships between me and my friends, many of the so called ‘clopfics’ tended to include The Royal Sisters, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna and so as a final curiosity, I included them in my calculations as well. The chances of both Princesses and the Elements of Harmony all having homosexual tendencies, would be expressed as “.02^8” equaling 0.00000000000256%, a staggering 1 in 39,062,500,000,000 chance.
Given the results of my research, I was curious: why would so many people hypothesize romantic relationships for me and my friends, when realistically, the statistical likelihood of them happening is so astronomically low?
Your friend; Twilight Sparkle
I apologise but old habits die hard for me.
to Flash Sentury
Though they were less common then stories that imagined intimate relationships
1. Sentry.
2. Than.
As for the research, let me throw in my two bits.
Humans tend to think that same sex attraction/relationships in this day and age are sexy, plain and simple.
When one thinks about what arouses their interest, they tend to gravitate more so towards that line of thought and apply it to whichever fantasy world is possible and in this case it would be the world of MLP which is (as far as I know) predominately men.
Yes, there are also women included but as far as I know, there is no 1:1 ratio of men/women liking MLP. While there are definitely homosexual people in this world who obviously think about same sex relationships, I believe that the stereotypical assumption that gays/lesbians are prominent because of that; stereotyping.
For example, humans believe that Sharks are what kills people the most next to car accidents and so forth however a research was done stating that coconuts actually killed more people than sharks.
Perhaps the majority believe that because it's easier to grasp compared to another theory which is applied to the Death by Sharks theory
A common misconception, one not supported by statistics
http://www.british-israel.ca/gay%20marriage.htm
http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/my-2-dads-childhood-not-so-happy-and-gay/
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/03/9432/
http://www.familyresearchinst.org/2009/02/getting-the-facts-same-sex-marriage/
When allowed, more than 96% of gay marriages end in divorce within 16 years (less time than it takes to raise a child.)
They're 4 X more likely to have major depression and conduct disorder
5X more likely to have nicotine dependence
2 X higher chance of substance abuse
And 6 X more likely to have attempted suicide.
A study of homosexual men shows that more than 75% of homosexual men admitted to having sex with more than 100 different males in their lifetime: approximately 15% claimed to have had 100-249 sex partners, 17% claimed 250-499, 15% claimed 500-999 and 28% claimed more than 1,000 lifetime sexual partners - equating to rampant AIDS and HIV among the gay community.
Also, despite media clop about gay bashing, domestic violence is so high that a gay person is more then twice as likely to get beat up by their own partner than by an anti-gay harasser.
This isn't saying that I hate all gay people, but I don't think it's wise for society to encourage a behavior with that record of effects, especially given that there is no evidence that homosexuality is genetic.
2088338
A while ago I revisited the research done on homosexuality; particularly gay parenting, and figured I'd update my stance here.
Looking at the methods done behind the research; I'm not sure that there's been any study; either for or against homosexuality, that had a large enough sample size to be taken as conclusive; though I'd still say that the evidence does not look good for homosexuality.
The studies I found quoted again and again to support gay marriage/adoption were done by the gay lobbies with samples drawn and presented in a way that it would have been very close to impossible to show homosexuality as anything but good; but if they need to pull every trick they could to give themselves the edge, just to make it look like gay parenting was equal to straight, that strongly implies that it is in fact worse. (I'd also ask why the gay lobbies feel the need to fabricate evidence if they sincerely believe their own claims.)
The surveys that showed homosexuals, and kids raised by them, having significantly higher rates of mental illness, STDs, domestic violence, drug abuse etc were done reasonably well, apart from their small sample sizes, but still had faults. For instance:
They might compare the mental health of adults who'd been raised by same-sex couples to people raised by their biological parents when something like > 90% of kids being raised by a gay couple is the biological child of one of them from a divorced marriage, meaning they should have compared compare 'kids being raised by gays' to 'kids being raised by divorced heterosexual parents who've remarried. To do the survey well you would need at least six categories, and compared kids from previous marriages, adoptees, and surrogate children from the gay community to the straight one, and leave kids raised by their biological parents out of it as there's nothing you could compare them to in the gay community.
Another thing I saw was that a lot of the 'disadvantages from the gay lifestyle, or gay parenting,' were often interconnected. Low education equals lower employment, higher promiscuity leads to higher STDs and, so far as I know, drug abuse leads to every one of the of the disadvantages listed. Let's say hypothetically that half of hetero-sexual drug users suffer depression; if drug use is four times higher in the gay community, and depression is twice as high; you cannot say that homosexuality caused depression. You might make a case that it leads to drug abuse, but even that might not be the case:
We're still learning about the effects of drug use and you could hypothesize that smoking marijuana triggers the 'gay gene' in some people; and that being gay doesn't cause problems but a large part of the gay population is 'recruited' from the drug user population who already had mental/ economic/ family issues. This is a theory I haven't heard anywhere else, I'm not saying I believe it without further research, but it would fit the (sketchy) information we have available.
You could also theorize that neither homosexuality nor drug use lead to each other, but both have a common cause resulting in the high correlation.
To reiterate: No evidence I've seen even came close to proving homosexuality was purely genetic/ not-chosen. There is enough evidence for me to confidently say that gay lifestyle and parenting are is harmful...though there is not nearly enough research that incorporated enough variables that I would feel comfortable giving numbers to it.
I've included one of the pro-gay surveys that was utterly biased
And one of the anti-gay surveys which was partially biased
As examples.
Feel free to ask about any of this, and definitely feel free to challenge me, just so long as you can back up whatever you say with research.