The Damning of The Villages

"What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money."
Henny Youngman

The Villages, a senior community of 50,000+ near Orlando, FL, has been tagged and ridiculed as a haven of senior sex fiends and rampant with STDs. When I heard that the ratio of women to men there was 7 to 1, my libido went pedal to the metal and purely out of curiosity, I checked it out.
By way of Google, not a personal visit, alas.

The genesis of the story was a piece on the website of WFTV on May 25th of 2006. The crux of the short article (link below) is that doctors have noted an increase in STDs and that the county was preparing an educational program to address the situation. Not much more.
http://www.wftv.com/news/9275560/detail.html

Three days later, May 28th, the democraticunderground.com included a single post that stated: "STDs Running Rampant at The Villages." This simple three line post (which slams "retired GOP types for screwing around") still tops a Google search for: STDs, The Villages. Thus, "increase" was transformed into "rampant" and the game was on. The blogs selected "rampant" as their descriptive favorite and The Villages was now unfairly tainted.

During all of this hullabaloo (which continues even today), not one piece of data has been published to verify this exaggerated claim.

Now, the reality is that you can't put 50,000 seniors together without fun and games any more than an equally sized group of 30 somethings. Boys will be boys and the girls will be, er, ladies. Coupling and sex will break out all over along with the unintended consequences.

The Villages is almost the size of the student body of Ohio State University. I wonder if the students there have a STD problem? Hmm?