Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article traces the history of Straight Talk, a sex education curriculum introduced into U.S. high schools in the mid‐1980s. Straight Talk was sponsored by Ortho Pharmaceutical, who offered the program as a “public service” to combat the so‐called epidemic of teenage pregnancy that had inspired panic on both sides of the political spectrum. In fact, Straight Talk was part of a campaign to promote Ortho’s newest product: the low‐dose, multiphasic pill Ortho‐Novum 7/7/7. Drawing on media reports, curricular materials and public relations (PR) documents, I argue that Straight Talk is a prime example of “shadow marketing” in the pharmaceutical industry, in which companies use PR strategies to skirt regulations on direct‐to‐consumer advertising. While on the surface Straight Talk looked like a typical comprehensive sex education curriculum, its bias toward the Pill—in particular, the low‐dose multiphasic pill—belied Ortho’s claims of neutrality. The curriculum’s promotion of the Pill also came at the expense of other contraceptive methods, such as the condom, a troubling omission in the age of HIV/AIDS.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.079 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".