m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbseBW-AWn4

It’s important to keep social factors in mind here, think about incentives and the structure of the music industry—who is more likely to be signed by scouts? Who are the scouts and is there any bias in their selection?

Here’s a relevant article looking at gender differences among top 50 charting performers from 1960 to 2008. Note that they find that, gender aside, 71% of songs are about sex or love across the sample AND in each decade (1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000). Obviously this is limited to popular music indicating minimally that songs about sex or relationships tend to chart well—you can be sure talent scouts (who are trying to make money for their labels) are aware of this. Also this can’t address your further question about songwriters (most top artists do not write their own songs, and commercial songwriters are incentivized to write lyrics about sex and love because these songs chart well).

It would be interesting if someone could do a similar study focused on songwriters (though commercial songwriters are not always acknowledged on the songs which might make this difficult). It would also be neat to perform a similar analysis on a group of artists who are less likely to be fiscally motivated to make music than top 50 artists.

Here’s the part of the discussion I found most relevant, “Our analysis of lyrical content of the Top 50 songs from even numbered years between 1960 and 2008 found that dating and sexual content is quite common and is partly consistent with cultural notions of gender-differentiated sexual activity. We found that references to romantic relationships appear in the vast majority of songs, and the word "love" appears in slightly more than half of all songs and is most typically used to refer to romantic love (i.e., being in love), while references to intercourse (and other orgasm producing activities) and sexual objectification appeared in a sizable minority of songs. Content varied by performer's sex, decade, and genre, with sexual (vs. dating) content proportionally more common among male performers, in more recent decades, and in the rap genre. However, we note that male performers outnumbered female performers by a substantial margin (2.5:1), so raw counts for males were higher for almost all cells in the analysis, even when inferential tests indicated the content was more common in female performers' lyrics.
Broadly speaking, gender differences in our results suggest the portrayal of dating and sexuality in popular music lyrics is quite similar to the portrayal in other media formats (Clawson 2005; Herd 2015; Kunkel et al. 2005; Taylor 2005; Ward
1995) and consistent with cultural expectations and stereotypes (Arnett 2002; Smiler 2013; Tolman 2002). In particular, women were more likely to sing about dating and love, and men were more likely to objectify others, particularly women.
Men were also more likely to sing about sex; this difference did not reach statistical significance but given the substantially greater number of songs by male performers, the raw counts are notably different. Women and men did not systematically vary in how they used the word love or the explicitness of their sexual references.
Raw counts told a story about men that is contrary to cultural stereotypes. Our data showed that men sang about dating in two-thirds of the songs we analyzed and love in half of our sample songs, more than doubling the number of times women addressed these topics. Moreover, male performers referenced dating relationships approximately three times more often than they referenced sex.”

Man, I got these dope looking bacon wrapped cheese stuffed jalapenos and idk how that was supposed to work. No e of those cool at the same time. You either got raw bacon, or a cooked to mush jalapeno with a tiny bit of burnt cheese on the bottom from where it had boiled out while the bacon was cooking.

I’m still wounded by this experience. Thanks for listening.

The Boss: Born in the USA.

I was born in Canada.

My view on the matter is that access to abortions falls under the umbrella of the right of bodily autonomy; specifically, protection from being medically exploited. Which by your phraseology would make it a “negative right”.

My go-to comparison is, perhaps oddly, bone marrow donation. Someone with bone cancer is likely doomed to die a horrible death, unless they can find a compatible donor who will consent to share marrow with them. For any given recipient, only a few people at best will be a viable match. Maybe only one. But that person has the absolute right to refuse. You cannot be forced to use your body for the health of another person without your consent.

Some people would say, that’s not comparable to pregnancy, and that getting pregnant is somehow consent. But, at least here in Canada, they stress heavily that you can withdraw consent at any point during the procedure. They also explicitly let you know that, at a certain point in the procedure, the recipient’s bone marrow will have been irradiated, and that if the donor backs out at that point, the recipient will die, but that they’re still allowed to do so. The right to bodily autonomy means any ongoing use of one’s body requires their continued consent, even with a living, breathing human person on the scales. Morally is certainly another question, but the diagram of law and morality is not a perfect circle.

If I’m protected from being the life support of any person, surely that covers an unfinished fetus.

Yes, my entire point is that even if it was a human being, no questions asked, fully developed, with 100% chance of dying and 100% chance of you surviving, still the vast majority of people would agree the government can’t take your kidney, which means that on a case where there’s debate whether it’s even a human being, when it’s debate whether its alive or not, and where there’s questions as to whether it will even survive, the argument becomes that much stronger. Bodily autonomy is one of the rights out society considers most valuable.

When it comes to abortion however, I do believe that it’s a tricky situation ethically. I’m pro-choice, but I say that with difficulty, because considering both sides it’s not an easy position and I see it as much more ethically complex than the issue of unnecessary animal exploitation. That’s because I think you can make the argument that either forcing a person to undergo pregnancy, or terminating the life of an (admittedly unconscious, undeveloped) fetus, are in both cases breaching a sentient (or would-be sentient) individual’s negative (protective) right.

I’m going to answer this, because if we remove the ethical dilemma you have everything else is meaningless.

The right to bodily autonomy is essentially absolute in most people’s moral compass, let’s give an example: imagine a fully grown adult was in a car accident, completely out of his control, he lost a lot of blood and his kidneys were damaged, you are a match to him, and he will 100% die unless you donate blood and one kidney, in that scenario: should the government be able to force you to donate your kidney and blood?

There is no question that the person will die if you don’t, there is no doubt the person is a human being, there’s no doubt you’ll survive the procedure and live a normal life afterwards, yet the vast majority of people would agree that the government should not be able to force you, because we recognise that a person’s right to their own body triumphs over other people’s right to that person’s body. Applying the same logic to a Fetus is straightforward, even if it was a person, it wouldn’t have a higher right to your body than you do, there’s no moral dilemma there just like there isn’t one in the kidney situation.

In the unlikely event that you think the government should in fact be able to force you to donate your kidney, it means you value life above bodily autonomy, the logical next step is that as long as it saves more than one life it’s okay for the government to kill you, e.g. if your heart and lungs are compatible with two people who will die without them, then it should kill you to get them because obviously saving two lives is better than saving one.