"Contraception Begins at Erection" Law -- REALLY??

This morning as I was reading through the various newsfeeds I get every day I saw an interesting item.  The title of the article was:  "Mississippi lawmaker introduces 'Contraception Begins at Erection Act.' "  Of course I had to check it out, not realizing I was about to climb aboard the crazy train.

The bill, introduced by State Senator Bradford Blackmon, would make it unlawful for "a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo."  It would impose fines of $1,000 for the first offense, $5,000 for the second offense, and $10,000 for each subsequent offense.  I was stunned when I read this.

I immediately began to overthink it.  The bill, if it were to pass in Mississippi's legislature, would effectively ban male masturbation.  I don't think it would affect females because, to the best of my knowledge, females don't fire a stream of genetic material across the room when they masturbate.

Ok, let's talk about masturbation for a little bit.  We can talk about this today because the whole subject isn't taboo like it was when I was a teenager.  It's not uncommon today to see it discussed on television or on social media.  When I was a kid it was a shameful act and everyone denied that they ever did it.  Today it's recognized as a normal behavior that's just part of everyday life.  Incidentally, ladies, if a guy ever tells you he doesn't masturbate then there's a 99.99999% chance he's lying to you.  It's just something we do.  I think women are the same way, but since I'm a guy I can't say for sure.

So when does a boy begin to masturbate?  I did a less-than-exhaustive search of the web and the consensus is that they start at about 13 years old.  We'll use 13 years for the purpose of this discussion.  The next question was how many times a week?  Answers varied wildly, but the average seems to be about 10 times a week during the teen years.  Sounds reasonable so we'll use that number, too.

So, using these numbers we can calculate that by the time a guy reaches age 18 he will have masturbated about 2600 times.  So, if Sen. Bradford Blackmon of Mississippi can manage to get his bill all the way through the legislature and it actually becomes a law, the average boy living in Mississippi will owe the State of Mississippi a staggering $26 million in fines by his 18th birthday.

So, the next logical step on my quest for useless information was to determine what the financial impact would be for Mississippi if they were able to actually collect these fines.  I decided not to spend the next couple of days trying to determine how many males within my target age group live in Mississippi so I just asked ChatGPT.  It spit out a very long explanation of how it came to it's answer, but the bottom line was that 117,420 males in this age group live in Mississippi.  That would mean that in any 5 year span Mississippi would realize approximately $3,052,920,000,000 in revenue from masturbation fines.  That's over $3 trillion for those of you who can't deal with commas.

That's a lot of money.  The next question would be enforcement.  Not every teenage boy is going to go to the police station every week and swear out a masturbation confession for the week.  Mississippi would need to come up with some kind of monitoring and enforcement process.  With the very large amount of money we're talking about here the whole thing would certainly draw the attention of technology moguls such as Elon Musk.  My guess would be that Elon would have his engineers develop a device similar to the the ankle monitors you see on people arrested for drunk driving, but attached somewhere entirely different. 

Remember that these calculations are just for one small age group.  I can tell you with 100% certainty that guys don't stop masturbating when they turn 18 and this law would still apply to them for the rest of their lives.  I didn't calculate those numbers but I think the amount of revenue generated would be huge.

So what did I learn from this exercise?  I learned that stupidity has no boundaries and that I would go broke living in Mississippi, so I won't be moving there anytime soon if this law passes.