The College Fix

Remember when the Obama Administration paid gay men $400,000 to cruise the Argentinian bars to discover why gay men engage in risky behavior while drunk? Well they did, and the fun didn’t end there, apparently.

More recently, the brave researchers at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute (where else?) obtained half a million dollars in federal stimulus money to ponder the ramifications of – oh, how can I say this – man parts that don’t respond well to faulty condom application skills.

The study was titled “Barriers to Correct Condom Use,” (because a study of condoms funded by the “stimulus package” wasn’t enough of a pun, apparently) and ran from 2009 to 2012.

Here, in their own less-than-clear language, is what the researchers spent three years working on:

“This project is one of the first to examine under controlled conditions the role of cognitive and affective factors and condom skills in explaining condom use problems in young, heterosexual adult men.”

In other words, researchers spent three years studying the difficulties drunk guys have putting on condoms.

I wonder, is there video of the study’s experimental subjects?

I’m just kidding about the drunk guy part. There is no evidence that any drunk college students were abused in the making of this study. The researchers may have spent more time talking to the young men about this all-important life skill than actually providing them assistance.

They talked to 479 guys between the ages of 18 and 24, to come up with this shocking, historic discovery: Loose-fitting condoms, and anxiety associated with condoms, may make it more difficult for young men to stay aroused, which may make them not wish to use condoms in the future. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have told them that and saved them three years of research work and half a million bucks.

The folks at the Kinsey Institute argue that this study was critical to the nation and worth half a million taxpayer dollars because “one in two sexually active persons will contract an STD/STI by age 25.”

Never mind that we routinely teach sixth graders about condoms, and that information on how to prevent pregnancy and STDs is available on this new-fangled invention the kids like to use called “the internet” – no, this is a matter for the federal government. To fund. With your money.

For the sake of argument, let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment. Let’s assume that this condom study was actually useful. Even if that were the case, consider the source of the funding.

The stimulus money was an investment, President Obama told us, in jobs. It was all about creating employment. In view of that objective, maybe we should stop making fun of this research and get down to appreciating how many jobs it created. Which according to the federal government, is exactly – zero.

“No jobs created/retained,” says the helpful “recovery.gov” (ha ha) website.

So where did that half a million go? The Kinsey Institute pocketed it, of course, to pay their “researchers.” But as the government is telling us in no uncertain terms – no new jobs were created. None exist today.

It’s just one more fiasco in a long list of performance-dysfunctional stimulus failures of the Obama administration.

Fix Contributor Emily Schrader graduated from the University of Southern California. She currently attends graduate school at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

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