RHRealityCheck.org - Podcast

Mourning Dr. Tiller And Fighting For Better Teenage Health

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 03:03:17 +0000

Mourning Dr. Tiller and examining who bears moral responsibility. Heather Corinna on better comprehensive sex education, and Amanda asks for less panicking over oral sex.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Dr. Wicklund on anti-choice harassment and violence

O'Reilly's vendetta against Dr. George Tiller

More of O'Reilly's vendetta

Scott Roeder was not marginal in the anti-choice movement

Right wingers celebrate Dr. Tiller's murder

O'Reilly implies Dr. Tiller had it coming

Oral sex is the new goodnight kiss?

Teenagers delaying intercourse more than ever

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be addressing the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, and attempts by anti-choice leaders to evade moral responsibility. I'll also be interviewing Heather Corinna about new ideas for comprehensive sex education, and I'll also have a segment on a new version of the same teenage sex panic.

Thanks to Rachel Maddow for coming out strong in support of abortion providers in the wake of this act of terrorism. She had Dr. Susan Wicklund on to talk about the issue.

wicklund *

This has been a terrible time. The only thing I can think of to do is to keep on keeping on, the way that Dr. Tiller did, even in the face of being shot in 1993.

**********

Of course, the past week the pro-choice movement has been in mourning over the death of Dr. George Tiller of Kansas, a real hero to the women whose lives he saved and to all of us, who admired the bravery of a man who went out and served every day, even though he knew that he had a target painted on his back. And now, of course, anti-choicers who have spent years viciously condemning Dr. Tiller are running away from their culpability in spreading the hate and lies that led the assassin to feel justified in his behavior. Well, I for one won't let that happen. I will warn you that this was extremely hard for me to write, because I had to muck around in the hate. And it will be hard to listen to, but I feel that I have to document this.

Bill O'Reilly has used the ploy of calling Dr. Tiller a murderer to boost ratings and whip up his base for a long time now. He has featured rabble-rousing against Dr. Tiller 29 separate times on his show for this purpose, and he rarely even hesitated to do so in the most provocative of ways. Daily Kos put together a video highlighting O'Reilly's constant vendetta against Dr. Tiller.

tiller 1 *

That last one is an interesting one, because one of the ongoing issues with the right wing's willingness to use late term abortions as a scare tactic was that late term abortions are, in many ways, the most sympathetic of abortions. The later in a pregnancy that an abortion occurs, the more likely it is going to be to preserve a woman's life or health. A lot of things can go wrong with a pregnancy that put a woman's life in danger, and in addition you have a lot of fetal abnormalities that are incompatible with life, and so the choice to abort instead of go through with the pregnancy is medically the most sound decision. In order to get around this issue, O'Reilly lied, and called the women liars, the women who went to Dr. Tiller to say goodbye to much-wanted babies.

tiller 2 *

Oh yes, he also made the incoherent and false claim that Dr. Tiller was in the habit of delivering babies and then killing them. It's a pure fantasy, concocted specifically to rile people up, and it's ridiculous to suggest that people who spin these lies are unaware of how this might make others feel they have to commit acts of violence in order to stop it.

Some anti-choice leaders made attempts to distance themselves from the murder, even going so far as to make unfounded claims that the shooter had no association with the pro-life movement, even though he was well-remembered by anti-choice activists in Kansas. But as Roy Edroso discovered, plenty were willing to go the distance and celebrate Dr. Tiller's assassination.

Pro Life Blogs claimed to be sad only that Dr. Tiller wasn't converted before he was murdered. Radio host Macsmind told Dr. Tiller to rot in hell. LaShawn Barber openly celebrated the murder. And Don Surber said, "Rest in peace, the Lord forgives", a bit of disingenuous viciousness disguised as piety that's especially galling since Dr. Tiller was murdered at church.

Of course, anti-choice leaders who prep their people day in and day out to have the sort of anger and persecution complexes that lead to violence were careful to cover their asses and claim that they don't condone murder. With that out of the way, they felt free to continue to smear abortion providers and call them murderers. An unruffled Frank Pavone of Priests For Life offered the obligatory, routine reminder that murdering doctors is illegal, before making outrageous claims that it's not likely to be an anti-choicer and making excuses in case it was.

tiller 3 *

Of course, just like every other murderer of an abortion provider, it turned out that the shooter was an anti-choicer, so his weird hopes and excuses sound even more vicious and childish.

But Pavone made his video not to denounce people who shoot doctors, but to go on about how the real bad guys are the pro-choicers.

tiller 4 *

Yeah, uh-huh. But at least he tacitly admits that he and his own the people who shoot doctors with this statement. But just because they have fantasies of pro-choicers stalking and barricading crisis pregnancy centers doesn't make it true. There's no denying the ugly reality here, and we should not let people who want to cover up the ugliness get away with it.

Sadly, O'Reilly had the nerve to try to defend his odious vendetta against the good Dr. Tiller, condemning the murder because it's illegal and focusing his energy on implying Dr. Tiller deserved it.

tiller 5 *

And on and on. So O'Reilly is basically saying that it's wrong to murder someone. And as long as he disingenuously says that, he is free to paint a target on someone's back and say that he had it coming when he

**************

insert interview *

**************
Just when you thought that scaring people about teenage sexuality combined with fantasizing that it's more lurid than it actually is was about to die under a wave of renewed support for comprehensive sex education, I bring you Sharlene Azam. Who is the author of a new book called....wait for it....."Oral Sex Is The New Goodnight Kiss". I expect at any moment the defenders of America's purity to jump all over Azam for her ungodly suggestion that unmarried goodnight kisses, which lead directly to whoredom, are old-fashioned American fun.

The book is described as a journalistic investigation into, believe it or not, prostitution rings in Canada being run out of middle-class high schools and involving teenagers as young as 13. Now, there is truth to the fact that there are prostitutes that young, but they are usually streetwalkers who are at the mercy of abusive pimps, and are not the sort of girls that Azam or her intended audience knows or cares much about. This is about convincing you that your pristine middle class daughter could actually be a prostitute.

Reasonable people should be skeptical. Which is why this author got the red carpet treatment on "Good Morning America". What's interesting is that the line between being upset over kids' sexual behavior and being titillated by fantasizing about it has completely collapsed.

oral sex 1 *

Right before this ridiculous assertion that teenagers are sex-crazed monsters who don't understand mundane things like nerves or crushes, they warned viewers that what they were about to hear was very shocking. Which is another way of saying, this is going to be hot hot hot, so tune in for all the salacious details.

oral sex 2 *

That it took her four years to find stories about oral sex and prostitution tells me that perhaps her claims are a tad bold. And just maybe it took years of digging to get even a few stories to hang this nonsense on.

What's also funny to me is that the book is supposedly about a prostitution ring, but the segment seems more interested in oral sex. Increasingly, I'm convinced that TV producers are the most sexually deprived people in the nation, since they appear to think that oral sex is a shocking new kink that teenagers quite likely invented sometime in the early 21st century.

oral sex 3 *

Honestly, to hear the panic about it, you'd think that oral sex was a much quicker way to get pregnant or an STD than intercourse, which, by the way, 46% of teenage girls 15-19 have done. The real story here is not that teenagers are more sexual than the past, because the Guttmacher shows teenagers are actually delaying sexual intercourse longer than they did in the past.

"Good Morning America" couldn't have it more backward. If teenagers are using oral sex as a substitute for sexual intercourse, then we should be happy, because it shows that kids are finding creative ways to reduce their risks. Far worse would be kids who though you had to have intercourse before oral sex, and gave into both and put themselves in much more danger of STDs and pregnancy.

oral sex 4 *

What I found fascinating about this is that it's assumed right off the bat that the only people who have sex are apparently female. If there are teenage girls getting paid by their classmates for sex, then what does that say about the boys? Why isn't anyone worried about how badly that can ruin a young man, to believe from a young age that women are a commodity to be purchased? Why doesn't anyone worry about the way this could ruin young men for life, make them unable to marry or have real relationships with women?

Well, I know why. Because this is just a dog and pony show to make the sexist oppression of women's rights go down more easily, of course. Thanks, network TV.

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the ass-covering edition. Here's Randall Terry.

terry *

I've looked at that statement 15 different ways, and it's exactly like rape apologists who say the victim did it to herself by wearing that short skirt and being such a tempting target.

Empathy: The Newest, Meanest, Most Vicious of Enemies

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:11:02 +0000

Sotomayor's SCOTUS nomination kicks of the insanity. Plenty of sexy fun, with an interview with Professor Foxy and Mary Roach's orgasm review.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Obama plans to defund abstinence-only

Michael Steele vs. empathy

Orrin Hatch vs. empathy

Anti-feminists vs. empathy

Mary Roach speaks at TED

Conservatives claim children as the original bigots

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing sex advice blogger Professor Foxy. Also, it appears we have a new Supreme Court nominee, so that's probably going to be important. And to counterbalance some of that heavy drama, I've got a segment on Mary Roach and the 10 things you probably didn't know about orgasms.

Big and hopeful news coming from the Obama administration.

zeroing out *

Of course, congressional Democrats might still be afraid of doing this, so it may not work out. But when a popular President gets behind such a plan, it makes it much easier for Congress to get in line. So I'm optimistic.

***********
President Obama has announced his new nomination for the Supreme Court.

sotomayor 1 *

He has his reasons.

sotomayor 2 *

And with that, the Supreme Court craziness begins!

sotomayor 3 *

The talking point of conservatives fighting against an appointee who will be, amongst other things, the first woman of color on the Supreme Court is this: Empathy is a horrible, horrible thing to have. Go, Michael Steele!

sotomayor 4 *

That's the talking point. The idea is that having empathy de facto means that you can't understand the law or how to apply it. In terms of logic, it's what we call a false dilemma. In the real world, good judges understand both the letter of the law and that the people they're trying to serve are human beings. Yes, even the women. And that's the other thing with this "empathy" crap. It's not really what you'd call a subtle sexist dog whistle. Empathy is considered a feminine trait, and so bringing this up is a way to get the conservative base to hit the fainting couch should any female nominee come up.

And that's because gender is absolutely central to the upcoming battle over the Supreme Court seat being left open by Justice Souter. So is race. Conservatives are pinning their last hopes in killing affirmative action, making it legal to discriminate against women and minorities, and paying women less money for equal work on a conservative court. But the real fear is that if someone has empathy, they're going to believe that women have a basic right to control our fertility, and that is what's really at stake every time you hear a right winger use "empathy" like it's a dirty word.

Take Orrin Hatch, laying more bait.

sotomayor 5 *

I have no idea why it's considered only right and proper to use nothing but code words when talking about Supreme Court nominees, but that's where we are. Hatch almost gives away the innuendo, which is the fear that a female judge will, like Sandra Day O'Conner did, empathize with how much it sucks to be on the receiving end of sexism like discrimination or abortion bans. Since O'Connor was nominated by Reagan, I suspect a number of anti-choicers specifically feel betrayed by her pro-choice views, and it's become traditional to link being pro-choice to all sorts of negative stereotypes about women. The two big ones that are going to be trotted out about Sotomayor is the belief that women are stupid and the belief that women are too emotional to make proper decisions. With this empathy thing, you're seeing the latter.

Don't take just my word for it. Paul Gorrell at Religion Dispatches also called the slander of the concept of empathy as misogynist, because it both assumes that things associated with women, like feelings, are wrong, and it also mocks the idea of treating women like people who deserve such a thing as empathy.

The other thing to look out for is attacks on Sotomayor's intelligence. Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic started off by implying that Sotomayor is a lightweight, and Mark Hemingway of the National Review called her dumb and obnoxious. The reality is that Sotomayor has more than 10 years on the federal appeals court, whereas our Chief Justice only had two. Something to keep in mind during the upcoming battles.

***********
Insert interview

************

If you haven't read Mary Roach's book "Bonk", you really, really should. It's a journey through the world of scientific research about sex, and Roach is an extremely funny writer, so she takes an already interesting topic and makes it all the more interesting. Now it's out in trade paperback, so that's all the more reason to pick up a copy. Roach also did a talk at TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and it's a big conference where people talk about big ideas. And Roach talked about the often bizarre world of sex research in her talk "10 Things You Didn't Know About Orgasms".

The first thing she talks about, right off the bat, is the sort of thing that would make your average fetus-worshipper's mind blow right up.

10 things 1 *

Yep, masturbating fetuses. Of course, by the time a fetus is developed enough to try out that particular skill set, it's pretty far along in a pregnancy. I can imagine a wingnut trying to claim that this is just further evidence that women shouldn't have abortion rights, but this is really past the point where said rights apply. But setting aside the one-track mind stuff, what's really amazing about this is that it shows that contrary to the hopes and dreams of the abstinence-only crew, sexuality is an unavoidable part of life, and not something you can put on ice and only awaken when marriage makes it necessary.

What's refreshing about hearing and reading Roach on this subject is that she has no time or energy for the ridiculous controversy about sex that plagues our nation. Fundamentally, the discourse about birth control, education, abortion rights, gay rights---it all comes back to this religious belief not only that sex is nasty, but that it can be plucked out of the human experience and treated not like a body function, but as a special luxury only available to people who've jumped through an extensive set of hoops. In Roach's more realistic world, sex and orgasm specifically are integral to life.

And they have health benefits!

10 things 2 *

But it's not just that orgasm can cure the hiccups. For people who deeply, sincerely believe that human sexuality has only one real purpose and that's procreation, I'm sure they'll be saddened to find out that your ability to procreate is actually damaged by an unwillingness to engage in sexual immorality. It's true! As counter-intuitive as it might seem, if you want to make babies, you have to make some time for yourself, at least if you're a guy.

10 things 3 *

Sadly, there's no excuse yet for women who want to masturbate. Except, of course, that it harms no one and feels good. Safest sex there is. Which is reason enough in my book, and if you're a fan of this theory, you should watch Roach's whole talk to hear about the woman who could orgasm just by thinking about it.

While Roach paints a picture of the reality-based world, where sex is intertwined with everyday life, she does unfortunately have to touch on the times when the fundamentalist hostility to sex has dramatic and sad influence on people's lives. Granted, she does touch on it in the weirdest possible way.

10 things 4 *

So that's why you should be sex positive. It might help you improve your dental hygiene one day. Because any dentist will tell you that mouthwash just isn't enough.

***********
And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, hiding behind the children edition. This is the National Organization for Marriage's latest attempt to scare you about gay marriage.

nom *

The false assumption in the ad is that kids have the kind of stupidity that it takes to be homophobic. In reality, it takes years of work to be that stupid. Kids can understand gay just like they understand straight. I remember when my cousin was a little kid and told her mom that she knew what gay was. Her mom got all nervous, but my cousin said, "It's when a boy kisses a boy!" and that's all there was to it. Kids aren't the close-minded bigots here, and it's shameful to see the actual bigots hide behind children.

Stay On The Pill And Make Love, Not Porn

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:26:00 +0000

The hosts of the "Today Show" embarrass themselves, more on why women don't use contraception consistently, and Make Love, Not Porn.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Colbert mocks "Gathering Storm"

NPR on inconsistent contraception use

Sarah Palin speaks to anti-choice group

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Cindy Gallop about her website Make Love, Not Porn. Also, NPR delves into why women don't use contraception as consistently as they should, and the hosts of the "Today Show" embarrass themselves when talking about vaginas.

Gotta love the "Colbert Report" for the pitch perfect satire of conservatism in America. I was particularly pleased with the fake ad they did mocking the anti-gay "Gathering Storm" ad that was all over the internet.

Colbert *

Many say the round of mockery that greeted the original Gathering Storm ad shows that the anti-gay movement has shifted into the losing side. Let's hope they're right.
***********
Is it just me, or is NPR doing a lot more stories lately about sexual and reproductive health? I don't think I'm wrong on this, since I do try to monitor their coverage and I find myself compelled to quote them more often than I used to. And generally speaking, their coverage is among the most responsible stuff I take in, but that doesn't mean I don't have a lot to add. For obvious reasons, they tend to be very Reproductive Health 101, and on Reality Cast, we're more advanced.

A recent story on why women don't use contraception as consistently as they should impressed me. Granted, it was problem-oriented. I wish for once you heard a story about women who successfully avoid unintended pregnancy and what their secrets are. But problems sell better than solutions, so within that framework, I appreciated that they told this story in real terms, and not just through statistics.

unintended 1 *

One of the few solid messages I absorbed as a young woman was that it was important to be consistent in your contraception use. I think I probably got that from Sassy magazine, which shows why young women need Sassy as much now as we did then. Wherever I got it, I knew that you should just stay on the pill all the time, and not always be going on and off it and going through that process for no reason. But I was surprised, when I grew up, to find that most female friends of mine didn't see it that way. NPR interviews Joy Migala, who expresses a typical pattern I've noticed.

unintended 2 *

This is exactly what I found in my young adulthood with a lot of women I knew. And frankly, the reason was that everyone is afraid of being a bad girl who is ready to have sex outside of the context of having a steady boyfriend. Having the pill and not having a boyfriend was considered the mark of a big slut for a lot of women, and they were willing to put their bodies through all these hormonal ups and downs to make sure that they weren't acting in a way they thought was slutty.

The problem with that is that many young women who think this way go ahead and have sex outside of the context of a steady relationship. Which shouldn't be a big deal if you're using condoms, right? Sadly, condoms are even easier to be inconsistent with, especially if you already have the sort of hang-ups that make taking the pill consistently hard for you.

unintended 3 *

Part of the problem is that young people aren't really well-educated on how likely pregnancy is. A combination of wishful thinking, anti-sex attitudes, and cultural messages that imply that getting pregnant is work lead young people to do things like make guesses like Migala did here. Add to it a strong cultural bias against women who plan to have sex, especially outside of the context of a relationship, and you're going to have a situation where women make excuses for not using contraception reliably, because they need to believe that they don't have to choose between being a slut or being pregnant.

Obviously, consistent contraception use is about more than access. A lot of it is getting around some of these messages. One thing that would be helpful is treating contraception as ordinary pregnancy prevention that should be no more scandalous than taking vitamins. As long as the pill is a marker of your moral worth, we're going to see these problems. The other thing that would help is more sex positivity for women. If women saw sex as something they do for their own reasons, and not a grand statement about their entire being, it would be easier for them to feel good about staying on the pill just in case, and it would help them also remember to have a box of condoms on hand, even if they're single.

********

insert interview *

********

If you want to know the true meaning of terror, I recommend watching the hosts on the "Today Show" do a segment where they specifically use the term "down there" while giving out vagina-specific health tips. Well, I took on that burden for you, and I'm here to report that the results were unpleasant, even if the woman they had on was giving good advice. Leslie Goldman of iVillage was on to report on a piece she did on the basic care of your lady junk. The hosts didn't even try to be cool.

down there 1 *

It seems rather cruel to make them do segments like this, because you can tell that they're thinking that they can't do segments like this, because then everyone will know that they have vaginas. You don't even have to guess, because they come right out and say it.

down there 2 *

This is such a tough thing to deal with, because when you're trying to educate people about sexual health, it's probably best to do so with a great deal of humor, because sex is funny, and people who don't think sex is funny won't get heard and respected. But falling all over yourself laughing and insisting that you wouldn't even dare talk about these things if your producers weren't making you isn't the way to go about being funny about this.

My preferred method is to say things bluntly, and in comical terms that reflect how people actually think about these things to themselves, even if they'd never admit it in public. Luckily, Leslie Goldman get some good cracks in that drive home the message without dwelling in shame or being stupid.

down there 3 *

Okay, I'll give her a plus for the cookie joke and a plus for the joke about how men aren't held to these same standards. She's got a leg up on the hosts of the "Today Show" when it comes to responsible but engaging sex education. But there's a giant minus.

She never told us exactly what she's talking about.

This is no small thing. If you didn't realize she was talking about douches and feminine sprays, then you'd imagine what they're saying is that women are expected to naturally smell like flowers and cookies. Which doesn't make much sense. The ugly truth is that you have to fill in the important details when it comes to sex ed and avoid trying to imply things. The reason is that most of the time, most people imply things, so people who actually need this information quite likely don't know what you're trying to imply.

And then something disturbing happened, after Goldman said that it was a myth that your vulva has to be subject to plastic surgery so you look like a Playboy model. Warning: Kathie Lee Gifford is going to hold forth on the subject of vaginas.

down there 4 *

Woof. It's a peculiar kind of sexism that creates a culture where medical intervention is preferred to plain old exercise, especially when it comes to vaginas. The notion that childbirth permanently blows out your vagina doesn't make sense, or women couldn't use tampons after the fact. Not that women don't have the problems that Gifford is alluding to, but the recommended course of action is to exercise your muscles before and after childbirth. Luckily, Goldman gets her off that, but what a disaster.

************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the Palin circus continues edition. Sarah Palin talks about how she considered and rejected abortion in front of the Indiana Right To Lifers.

palin *

A lot of fuss has been made over the fact that she acknowledged that she had a choice. It's true that anti-choicers will lose their ability to be self-righteous and judgmental if they choice disappears, which they'd miss more than they'd think. But having heard many of these stories, I have to say the moral is pretty clear. She's saying she didn't need the right to abortion, and so neither do you.

Interestingly, she goes on at length during another part of the speech about how adoption is just such a great choice for unmarried, pregnant women, just like having a baby at 44 was for her. Makes me think if the anti-choice movement takes away your right to have an abortion, they're attacking your right to keep the kids you do have next.

The Palin Pregnancy Circus And Better Sex Ed For Kids

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 03:20:00 +0000

The Palin teenage pregnancy circus continues. Also, women get hurt worse by health care premiums, and Robie Harris talks about age-appropriate sex education for children.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

To porn or not to porn

Health care premiums and women

Glenn Beck lies about gay marriage

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing children's author Robie Harris about her work in age-appropriate sex education. Also, the Bristol Palin story keeps feeding the tabloids, and health insurance woes are hitting women harder.

Via Bitch Blogs, I found that there's a new documentary out chronicling the porn debates called "The Price of Pleasure". The blogger at Bitch says it's the rare even-handed movie.

price of pleasure *

My feeling is that a lot of the debate is semantic. Depends on what you mean when you say "porn" if someone is for it or against it.
**********
Health insurance is the great paradox of America. If you've got it, you can't use it, and if you use it, you can't get it. For the self-employed, part time, or those who otherwise have to pay for their own insurance without an employer backing them up, health insurance often seems about as smart a use of your money as taking a big pile of it and setting it on fire as an offering to the gods. Sarah Varney talked about this problem on NPR.

health insurance 1 *

This is pretty standard. I got dumped from one plan for having a repeat Pap smear, and the second one seems to be willing to keep me on, even though I commit the crime of getting routine cancer screening and avail myself of preventive medicine. Dealing with the private health insurance infrastructure seems like dealing with the government under a communist dictatorship---you try to minimize contact and fly under the radar as much as possible. Which is weird, since they're ostensibly there to serve you.

But there's a reason that getting screening and trying to save yourself and the health insurance companies some money is routinely punished.

health insurance 2 *

It's interesting that even a conservative think tank guy couldn't avoid describing the blatant problem with a private insurance system. Of course, he's trying to blame the customer, as if we could change the whole thing by being stupid enough to be pay outrageous premiums for little to no care when we could get a job or get married and get better, cheaper employer-provided insurance.

The obvious solution to this problem is a single payer system. If your health insurance is just plain old government-owned single payer, they actually save money by making sure that you stay healthy. In fact, the English system gives doctors bonuses is they get more people to engage preventive medicine, like getting in shape or quitting smoking.

But the main point of this is that they really stick it to women on premiums.

health insurance 3 *

These sort of bans are helpful, but they are just a band-aid on what is the larger problem, which is that health insurance companies are punishing people for being mindful of their health. I'm sure that even if they banned outright gender discrimination, women would still pay more, because they'd just adjust it so that people who see the doctor for screening more often get hit with higher premiums.

All the proposals I've seen for universal health care are avoiding this major problem, which is that even if they have to pay for your health care, private insurers may just use that as an excuse to charge you more than you could ever afford if you've ever had the nerve to see a doctor before. Providing people with a public option is a good first step, again because they're unlikely to leave it once in, and you can also force the public company to charge reasonable rates. But ideally, we'd just have single payer and avoid all these problems altogether.

***********
insert interview

***********
If you're a fan of the circus, and I mean the media circus because the kidnapped animals circus is kind of depressing, then you've probably been having a fine time lately with the Bristol Palin/Levi Johnston story, otherwise known as the story that finally merged the celebrity tabloids with politics. First Bristol decideds to go on Fox News and wrestle some control of her own story away from her mother, and then Levi Johnston decided to hit the Tyra Banks show to plead for his side in the inevitable break-up. Tyra Banks plus the teenage pregnancy Palin extravaganza? If you'd written it for this podcast, you couldn't have done a better job.

levi 1 *

One of the most amusing aspects of this whole situation is how there's been this immense pressure to pretend that these two had a fighting chance. The engagement, the parading around of these two at the convention, and now acting like there had to be a reason they broke up. Very silly. Most teenage couples don't make it, and in a saner world, we'd realize that this is for the best, because most people don't stay who they were at 17. It's one reason people tend to be hostile to teenage pregnancy and think it's less than ideal.

levi 2 *

I had to include that to heighten the ridiculousness of the situation, and the hopes of social conservatives that we can just go back to the 50s. That was, after all, what this was all about. The Palins paraded around this young couple as if to signal that they represented a return to the era when, yeah, teenage kids had sex, but they paid the consequences and had to get married and grow old resenting their lives, and we'll call that family values. But it's clear that Bristol Palin is more of a 21st century girl than her mother portrayed her to be, and she stalled so there wasn't a marriage and then kicked this guy out because she didn't like his sister. You can't make people stop caring about themselves just by snapping your fingers at them.

What's interesting is that his family had zero problem with him knocking someone up at 17. They claim that they talked about when the baby was coming and how he was going to make himself another hockey player, and I suppose for them it's easy to do this because they probably knew on some level that the baby was going to be the Palin family's problem. The point is that sheds light on what happens next.

levi 3 *

One thing that RH Reality Check has covered a lot is the problem of male resistance to birth control, and what that means for women. Or to be blunt, making a guy wear a condom every time is easy if you're with a guy who considers pregnancy prevention a priority, but if not, it's an uphill battle. And women are socialized to be people pleasers, and so it makes it easier to give in and let him go without sometimes. Not that I know for sure that's what happened here, but the whole story is an illustration of how it could and does happen for a lot of women, especially young women.

Most of the interview is about Levi's sister, and frankly she seems to be jealous and wants to parade the baby around like she had it. And she enjoyed bringing around Levi's ex-girlfriends. Again, it's the sort of thing that makes teenage relationships so short-lived.

levi 4 *

Hey, look, some teenage mothers are particularly mature and handle the whole thing well. But even if they are, they have to put up with stuff like this. The world of high school becomes weird and competitive like this, and injecting babies into a situation like this, like where an obsessive sister is clashing with a teenage girlfriend, is just a real bad idea. I'm with Bristol. It's probably better to wait.

************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, just go ahead and lie edition. Glenn Beck is dropping a whopper about gay marriage.

glenn beck *

It's lies. He doesn't support equal rights, or he'd support marriage. Civil unions are marriage lite, though I suppose it's good that he'd conceded this ground. Second of all, we know the churches don't have to do anything. Churches were the main opposition to interracial marriage, and they still have the right to be as racist as they want, despite the legal status of it.
His real fear isn't that churches will be forced. His real fear is that what happened to interracial marriage will happen here, that it's becoming socially acceptable and churches will start allowing it or see their membership disappear to churches that accept the prevailing norms.

The Fate Of Gay Marriage, Notre Dame, And The World

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 03:14:00 +0000

Michelle Goldberg on women's rights, reproduction, and the fate of the world. Also, gay marriage hits the heartland and Notre Dame's reputation is assailed by anti-choicers.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Iowa!

Reactions

More reactions

Catholics rank the issues

On this edition of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Michelle Goldberg on the past and present state of women's rights around the globe. Also, huge inroads have been made in the fight for same-sex marriage, and a group of fanatics decides that the university of Notre Dame needs to be sacrificed on the altar of sperm worship.

I think the spoofs of the Mac vs. PC commercials are about done, but I have to link to Planned Parenthood's series that they recently released, comparing the pill to emergency contraception.

pills square off *

I guess the motto for Plan B should be, "Plan B, because expletive deleted happens."

**********
I'm sure regular listeners of this podcast are well aware of the good news coming out of Iowa. Yes, the Iowa Supreme unanimously ruled on April 3rd that laws banning same-sex marriage are violations of basic equal protection laws, and now it appears that same sex couples can marry in Iowa. This news, needless to say, came as a surprise to many.

gay 1 *

That's from CNN, and I was amused by it because they make it sound like a roving band of homosexual bacchanals are overrunning this humble Midwestern state, when of course what's happening is rather staid, steady same-sex couples are getting the right, to paraphrase Dolly Parton, be as miserable as the rest of us.

The decision is causing a meltdown amongst the homophobic right. First of all, it shows that their arguments against same-sex marriage won't fly even in traditionally more conservative places, because people with any intellectual honesty at all can see through them. Second of all, the court said as much in the decision, using what I thought was a brilliant dose of thinly veiled humor. My favorite quote from the decision was this. Quote, "The statute, the court found, is under-inclusive because it does not exclude from marriage other groups of parents-such as child abusers, sexual predators, parents neglecting to provide child support, and violent felons-that are undeniably less than optimal parents."

In other words, they called out homophobes for being less than honest with their claims that this is for the children.

The Des Moines Register got some reactions from folks hanging around outside the courtroom to hear the ruling. The gay marriage supporters are adorably Midwestern, very straightforward and no-nonsense, like this guy:

gay 2 *

Unfortunately, even in the Midwest, your organized homophobes are mouth-breathing hysterics.

gay 3 *

Yeah, the so-called ex-gays, known by thinking people as sad sacks who returned to the closet. But it's funny that a Christian wingnut is actually arguing that a trait should be eligible for discrimination on the basis of mutability. You know what's a lot easier to change about yourself than your sexual orientation? Your religion. If that guy wanted to quit being a Christian, all he's have to do is stop going to church and stop believing. He wouldn't need a bunch of fake therapists to convince him that he's only Christian because Daddy didn't play catch with him enough.

Does that mean that he thinks that we should be able to ban Christians from marrying in order to discourage Christianity? Because, interestingly enough, that would be more effective than banning gay marriage has been in squashing out homosexuality.

But to leave it on a positive note, I'm going to echo the Iowa decision and point out that one reason to legalize gay marriage is for the children. Like the one that this couple is expecting in June.

gay 4 *

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Vermont, just a few days after this, overturned the governor's veto and passed the first rock solid law legalizing gay marriage in the country. Even though they're culturally easy to dismiss as super-liberal, this law could end up being the basis of a major challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, because there's no way to say that the marriages in Vermont don't count now.

*********
insert interview

*********
As much as I'd like to ignore it, I feel I have to cover the nonsensical controversy over President Obama going to speak at Notre Dame's graduation. This is a long-standing tradition of the university, and as far as I can tell, it's apolitical. But now anti-choice nutters are claiming that the university has an obligation to shun and condemn anyone who is pro-choice, even though they've never done that before.

For most people, this is a non-controversy, and the people kicking dust up over this are a marginal group of adamant sex-phobes that use religion as a cover for their deep misogyny. But for Fox News, this is apparently one of the most important stories of our time. Because even in the face of a crashing economy and an ongoing war, we cannot forget that women are having sex and getting away with it.

notre 1 *

Really? Catholics around the country are outraged? This implies two things that I find hard to believe. One, that American Catholics follow the political controversies on the campus of Notre Dame with any kind of interest and two, that Catholics think that punishing female sexuality should be the priority of all people at all times, regardless of the circumstances. Any and all polling data you could bring to bear shows how untrue this is---most American Catholics aren't obsessed with banning abortion and the evils of contraception, and especially not to the exclusion of all other issues.

They interview one of the student protestors, and really it's just sad to see someone so young already hardened into a right wing ball of loathing for others.

notre 2 *

So young, and already full blown wingnut who just denies facts if they make her uncomfortable. I don't know all the much about the campus of Notre Dame, but I also went to a Catholic university a lot like Notre Dame, and believe me, the hard right super conservatives who walk around with sticks up their butts freaking out about everyone else's loose sexual morals were not well-liked any more at a Catholic school than a secular school. Catholics are people like you and me, folks. They have sex, they use birth control, they have the same abortion rates as everyone else, and find this sort of stuff ridiculous.

But Fox News would not lay off trying to make a controversy out of what just doesn't want to be a controversy. Mike Huckabee, who belongs to one of those Protestant denominations that thinks all Catholics are going to hell, was willing to exploit the situation, so long as women lose out in the end.

notre 3 *

Boy, Fox News can't hide their prejudices no matter how hard they try. "Pro-abortion"? The President is always on about finding ways to reduce the abortion rate. He's pro-choice, but far from pro-abortion. And the hysteria that he's going to get an honorary degree strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that wouldn't even bear mentioning if Obama wasn't black, and black men with a bunch of honors and degrees didn't offend a certain segment of our supposedly post-racial country.

What's going on here has a lot to do with something Michelle Goldberg said in the interview. The Catholic Church has decided that squelching the rebellion amongst its parishioners, who largely use birth control and have no problem with premarital sex, is more important than anything else. The lives of 9-year-olds are not considered too great a sacrifice in the name of sperm worship, and so obviously they don't care if they ruin Notre Dame, too.

It's a shame, because Catholic schools like Notre Dame have really worked hard for decades at being intellectually respectable institutions that fit into the mainstream of American life. They don't want their graduates to be crippled by anti-intellectual religiosity, and my Catholic school, at least, was interested in honoring the spirit of free speech and intellectual engagement. But these hardcore anti-choice nuts and apparently a number of bishops are willing to dismantle Notre Dame's reputation as a decent school in the mainstream of American life, and for what? To take a pointless stand against women's basic human rights. It won't succeed in anything but hurting the school. Women's rights will not be hurt if Notre Dame blows up in a frenzy of superstitious anti-intellectual sentiment, but the school and the image of intelligent, educated Catholics could go up in smoke.

*********
And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, anti-choicers want everything at all times to be about how bad sex is edition. Jill Stanek posted what may be the least amusing, at least intentionally amusing, song parody ever in response to Notre Dame inviting pro-choice Barack Obama to speak.

notre dame *

Ooh, I think they'd do a lot better at selling themselves if they could write better song parodies. That one makes the author sound like he learned to read of the back of cereal boxes.

If You Want To Contracept, Put A Ring On It

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:42:00 +0000

A San Antonio doctor explains why she denies birth control to single women. Also, fighting against maternal mortality, and how our sex lives are affected by the recession.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Red Staters take on teen pregnancy

No birth control for you!

Rick rant

Condom sales up

Fox News stays classy

"Vagina" DeGette

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Deborah Clark from the White Ribbon Alliance on reducing maternal mortality rates worldwide. Also, a Boston radio show got a doctor who refuses to prescribe birth control to single women to explain herself, and a segment on what happens when a tanking economy intersects with Americans' sex lives.

Salon's got an ongoing parody of redneck conservatism called the Red State Update, and they recently had a hilarious parody of the tone-deaf, sexist preaching at teenage girls about abstinence.

red state update *

Sadly, this is basically the sex education that we had in my small town growing up. Just boys are horny, girls aren't, and the only birth control pill you need is an aspirin you hold between your knees. It worked as well as you can imagine, which is not at all. At my tiny school, someone was always pregnant from junior high on.

**********
Hat tip to Cat Ion for tipping me off on this next story. The Bush administration, as it was running out the door, shoved a last minute rules change through Health and Human Services over the protests of hundreds of thousands on non-crazy citizens. That rule expanded the number of people who have a right to obstruct women's access to health care services without getting fired. Now it's not just the doctor who can say no, but the receptionists and janitors. It also expanded the number of services covered, targeting contraception as a particular evil that needs to be eradicated one religious nut at a time.

What doesn't get covered much is the people who do this refusing and why. Part of the reason, I suspect, is the anti-choice movement wants to push off anti-contraception sentiment as if it were rooted in concern for fetal life. They're not against sex, they say, they just "believe" that the pill causes abortion, though this belief is wishful thinking that has no basis in science. But Boston's public radio show "Here & Now" managed to snag an anti-choice doctor who obstructed women's access to contraception, and well, her reasoning is not what we've been told the reasoning is. The doctor is Dr. Michele Phillips of San Antonio.

refusal 1 *

Come again? Did she say single women specifically? Why yes, yes she did.

refusal 2 *

This aspect of the right to refusal has almost been completely lost in the discourse. In the early days, when the anti-choice movement first happened upon this strategy, the fact that contraception was being given to some and not to others based on marital status was reported. But then, I think, anti-choicers realized that this pretty blatantly exposed their anti-sex, anti-woman agenda, and they focused on confusing the birth control pill with the abortion pill. Which just goes to show that they really are using faux concern for life as a cover for their real agenda.

What's interesting is that she wastes their time before telling them no. More punishment for the sluts, I suppose. And it's clear that Dr. Phillips thinks that there are only three ways women can be: married, virginal, or sluts.

refusal 3 *

You'd think someone with a medical degree would be smart enough to realize that just because you're on the pill doesn't mean you can't use a condom. And that unmarried women are perfectly capable of being in monogamous, tested relationships. So, I'm calling shenanigans. She's not so much about the legitimate health concerns as she is trying to bully women into marriage. Unintended pregnancy is well-understood as a greater risk to your health than contraception. Marrying someone out of duty or fear because of an unintended pregnancy is also not good for your blood pressure.

refusal 4 *

For the entire interview, she dodges questions like this. Asked if it's a good idea to let your patients suffer STDs and even abortion to punish them for being bad girls who have sex, she doesn't answer the question, but just says being a prig is her right. Sure, it's her right. But it makes her a bad doctor, and I hope that her patients take their business to someone more interested in health than freaking out about sex.

************

insert interview

************

Last week, in my humble opinion, might be the one that goes down in history as the week that the nation finally faced up to the fact that we're not facing just a recession, but a genuine depression. I think the moment that drove this home for me was when Rick Santelli went pure royalist on CNBC, screaming on the floor of the stock exchange about how the people who are getting foreclosed on aren't victims, but that he and his rich friends are because they're getting blamed. All they did was exploit people's trust in institutions like banks so that they could create false wealth to line their own pockets. Poor babies. Here's a tidbit, for giggles:

rick rant *

That's the sort of open class warfare that I suspect we'll be seeing more of. This stuff has gone under the radar in coded language for a long time, but now it's front and center, and I don't know if the toothpaste can be shoved back into the tube.

Depression economics will be different than recession economics, I suspect, because people will be clinging to their money even harder. In the Great Depression, certain industries demonstrated that they were pretty much recession-proof, and they were cheap forms of entertainment, like the movies and radio. It's in this spirit that I think we should approach this story.

latex *

There are two general theories about why condom sales might go up during this time. One is simply that people will be staying home more and turning to sex for entertainment. The other is that people might be more cognizant of the need for contraception during an economic downturn, because babies are expensive. It's more fun to think the former, but the latter is also compelling for a very interesting reason. I think that it's quite likely that male investment in contraception is much likelier to wane during flush times than female investment. Pregnancy is about body issues, life issues and other things more for women than for men, and for a lot of men, the financial burden looms the largest. So it would make sense that male-controlled contraception would become more popular during a time when men's biggest anxieties about babies are going up.

Of course, Fox News had to go classy.

sex recession *

Sex-cesstion. That's about the stupidest word ever invented, because it sounds like a recession in sexual activity, but it's actually an acceleration of sexual activity. Fox News has been known to have a careless attitude with the truth, and now I guess we can say they have a careless attitude with the meaning of words. Do they know what a recession is? Or were they just told to do a story about sex and the recession, and they didn't really bother to find out what the word recession means?

I'm also going to take a moment to lodge my complaint against the concept of sex addiction. That's taking the addiction model just way too far. Not that people can't engage in destructive sexual behaviors, but the implication of the term "sex addict" is that someone just has too much sex, or that there's a point where you're doing it too much. Like orgasms degrade your health or something. Self-destructive behaviors involving sex can be cataloged without implying that sex itself is a dangerous substance that is inherently addictive. If you're doing it 10 times a week and it's not interfering with your life, why should you be concerned that you're a so-called sex addict? Probably just in a new relationship, it sounds like. Or home more often, trying to save money.

***********
And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, did you know that women are just so weird and different edition. Denver, Colorado radio talk show host Peter Boyles is getting the high beam intensity pressure campaign because of his sexism towards House member Diana DeGette. Listen to what he calls her.

peter boyles *

In a way, I can understand why he's in pain and he's lashing out by giving people unfunny nicknames. When your real name has both the word "peter" and the word "boils" in it, then you probably feel like everyone else owes it to you to be called by the name of genitals or bad things that can happen to genitals.

99% Octuplets-Free!

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:42:00 +0000

Masturbation is good for you, but romantic comedies not so much. Also, an interview with Helena Silverstein about how the judicial system fails teenage girls seeking abortion.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Anti-masturbation zealots

More dangers of anti-masturbation zealotry

Romantic comedies are bad for you

10 classic romantic comedies

Chris Matthews avoids responsibility

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be talking about the commodification of romance and protests against romancing yourself. Also, an interview with author Helena Silverstein about how the judicial bypass process for minors seeking abortion is failing our teenage girls.

I promised the folks on Twitter that this podcast would be octuplets-free. But give me 45 seconds. I do have to play this small clip that makes me think that the mother of these children and her mother are locked in one of those intense family rivalries that just happens to be playing itself out in public.

octuplets *

As weird as this situation is, I have to point out that what the doctors did in implanting all of the leftover embryos instead of throwing them away is what some anti-choice legislators want to make the law by mandating that all embryos created for IVF are implanted. Hopefully this situation will help shine light on how crazy such laws really would be.

*********

I'm sure by now you've seen these pictures of teenaged kids hanging out on steps with T-shirts that say "ex-masturbator" on them. You don't really need to know the particulars to fill in the story for yourself---yep, another anti-choice ministry with an unhealthy obsession with punishing and controlling teenagers because teenagers have the gall to have young bodies and high libidos and we're all a little jealous. Though we shouldn't be. I remember being a teenager and it was actually mostly hard. The anti-masturbation movement was the natural next step for religious nuts who went after abortion, and then contraception, and then sex education.

So you probably didn't even have to read the posts about these t-shirts to know what's going on. But if you dive in deeper, as you can imagine, it gets even weirder and hairier. For instance, the Passion For Christ Movement that made these t-shirts also has videos of kids testifying about their post-masturbation lives of tension and lack of sleep. Just kidding! They can't tell the truth. We're talking anti-sex nuttery, where lying is king.

The website for the group has all the markers of the increasingly sophisticated anti-feminist, anti-sex Christian right. First of all, they take a message that is in actuality aimed almost solely at young women and pretend that it's bi-gendered by putting a bunch of men in the marketing materials. And they try to make it hip.

ex masturbator 1 *

But when it comes to the specific ex-masturbator shirt, somehow only women seem to be eligible for interviewing.

ex masturbator 2 *

My co-blogger at Pandagon Pam noted that these videos are aimed mainly at young people of color, and this especially concerns her, because, quote, "the sad truth is that, with the unprecedented spread of HIV/AIDS in minority communities, a pious drumbeat to demonize a form of sexual expression that represents safe sex, doesn't involve the possibility of an unintended pregnancy, and no one gives a rip about if done in private is the last thing young POC need to hear." End quote.

Pushing this especially at women creates another set of problems.

ex masturbator 3 *

I've been reading Gloria Feldt's book from a few years back called "Behind Every Choice Is A Story", and the one thing that jumps out at you about the abortion stories is how many of the women who suffered an unintended pregnancy did so because of a sexual encounter they didn't want. And over and over again, it was in part because they couldn't even tell you what they wanted. For many women, sex is not about pleasure. Instead, it's something you do to shut a man up, or because you somehow belong to him. This makes it harder for women to protest men who are raping them or demanding sex without protection, and therefore it leads directly towards increasing the unintended pregnancy rate.

Discouraging masturbation encourages these toxic attitudes. It's about telling women that our bodies don't belong to ourselves, but really belong to some man out there and that even our orgasms aren't about feeling good, but about making some dude who owns you happy. Masturbation is about fun and pleasure, but it's also a neat way to remind yourself that you own yourself and your body belongs to you and not anyone else.

Like pretty much all of these groups, Passion is unable to put up a convincing front about not being wildly sexist. They also make Ex-Diva shirts, and since "diva" is the trendy word to replace "bitch", which is a word to shame women who are outspoken and not submissive, they're obviously encouraging young women to brag about embracing submission.

************

insert interview *

************

Now that we're definitely deep into an economic crisis that's likely to be a genuine depression, you're seeing a major panic in some sectors of the economy that know that they're the first on the chopping block to go when people are looking for ways to cut back. And in the sex-and-romance industry, the panic is at a fever pitch. After all, Valentine's Day was Saturday! That's the national holiday of spending money to get laid and/or show someone you really do love them even if you don't exactly show it the other 364 days of the year.

In case it's not obvious, I'm a conscientious objector to Valentine's Day. I'm disturbed by the commodification of erotic love, and I have my suspicions that said commodification actually hurts people's abilities to make responsible and fulfilling sexual health choices. Consider that romantic comedies have been demonstrated scientifically to hurt people. Warning: this segment is horribly sexist.

valentines 1 *

This bundle of false beliefs, like in soul mates or love at first sight, also comes with another one that troubles me, which is the belief that love is easy and there is never any need for communication. Which in turn is one reason that we have such high rates of contraception non-use. People want to get swept away in the moment, and don't talk about condom use, and the result is high STD and unintended pregnancy rates. Which are definitely not romantic.

I'm a curmudgeon, so when I see lists of top ten romantic comedies as I have seen this past week, I go pfft. When people ask what romantic comedies I love, I mention the two classics in the subgenre boy gets girl, boy acts like an entitled, sexist choad, and boy loses girl permanently. Talk about sending a positive message! These movies are "Chasing Amy"

valentines 2 *

And "Annie Hall".

* valentines 3 *

In both cases, the lesson is that men who don't respect women's intelligence or sexual experience should be alone until they grow up. I can get behind that. Better than the grand gesture fixes everything cliché of other romantic comedies.

Since we're in a recession, I saw a bunch of Valentine's stories about romance on a dime. I love it, because romance is so commodified that we can't even suggest love is free. But maybe love is cheap? Here's a typical example:

valentines 4 *

I won't torture you by playing any more. Be grateful, since she recommends skipping the booze and drinking tea instead, a piece of advice I feel absolutely no one will take. But well-meaning as advice like this is, it still bothers me, because it reinforces this cookie-cutter image of romance. And when people are striving for an ideal instead of just being themselves, they're less likely to cultivate the communication skills necessary for safe sex and healthy relationships.

***************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Chris Matthews really is a major wingnut edition. Matthews just can't get over his childish glee over the idea of conservative Republicans who want to use sex panics to squelch bills that are about economic relief for working Americans.

* matthews *

He's not wrong, actually. I think he's right that sex panic will be used to fight against universal health care. But the blame for this situation sits on his shoulders mightily because he just gives these politicians license to make outrageous claims and he never questions them about it. Matthews wants to mainstream the idea that contraception is controversial, and for that I have to say FAIL.

An Abortion Provider Speaks, And More Common Ground Confusion

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:04:00 +0000

Amy Hagstrom Miller talks about providing abortion after the resurgence of domestic terrorism. Also: Mark Sanford, and Saletan and Waldman terrify on their discussion on Bloggingheads.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Mary Roach on better sex

Whole Woman's Health

William Saletan and Steven Waldman on Bloggingheads

Mark Sanford confesses

Bill O'Reilly bloviates

Rush Limbaugh loosens his grip on reality

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing abortion provider Amy Hagstrom Miller about her work, particularly in the light of the recent assassination of Dr. George Tiller. Also, why Will Saletan and Steve Waldman talking abortion get it all wrong, and why pro-choicers should feel okay about the Governor Sanford spectacle.

Mary Roach fans rejoice! She's putting more video content out there. Here's her talking about how to have a better sex life.

mary roach *

I'm currently reading her book "Stiff", which is about the various things that happen to corpses. The sex stuff is usually a little easier to read about.

**************

jaws theme *

uteruses 1 *

Jodi Jacobson wrote about it, but I can't help myself, I have to play some clips from this train wreck of a conversation between two men who will never be pregnant doing that thing they do, where they rotate between being mildly annoying to making me reach for a butter knife to pop out my eardrums rather than listen to their blather. I watched it so you don't have to, and you'll be privy to some of the more outrageous things that Saletan and Waldman said.

Waldman kicks off with a doozy of a statement.

uteruses 2 *

I'm going to be charitable and chalk this up to wishful thinking instead of to outright deceit. Anti-choicers openly link contraception and abortion, and even though they claim their opposition to both has something to do with "life", it's clear that the more obvious connection is that both have to do with sex. Specifically, the problem is and always has been the fear that women who don't risk childbirth every time they have sex will have an opportunity to escape male control. Waldman's statement here shows why I think this common ground strategy is doomed to failure. If you can't accept the basic reality that the anti-abortion position is grounded in hostility to sexual liberation and women's rights, then you can't really have a productive conversation.

While Waldman shoots out more "are you kidding me?" statements than Saletan, Saletan does do a bang-up job of keeping up with the nonsense.

uteruses 3 *

Okay, fine, I'm happy to use the word "morality". I think it's immoral for people with hang-ups about sex and fantasies of a 1950s patriarchy to advocate for immoral laws banning women's right to make their own moral choices about abortion and birth control. I think that it's immoral to use the word "morality" to mean "not being a slut". I think morality is about how you treat people and act in the world, not who you sleep with or whether or not you have a baby when some stranger thinks you should.

In fact, I think that women choose abortion and contraception for intensely moral reasons most of the time. Because it's moral to want to only have children when you're ready. It's moral to cherish your own health and well-being enough that you are responsible in your sexual behavior. It's moral to believe that women are human beings who deserve not just the right to bodily autonomy, but to finish their educations, marry who they want, and have the right to determine their own lives. I think it's immoral to stop them. I think it's morally suspect to obsess over the fear that some woman somewhere got away with unapproved sex. I think that people who scream at women trying to reproductive health care are not only not the moral standard, but have a distinct lack of morals and a sadistic streak. Is that enough moral talk, or should I apologize for having sex instead?

There's over 60 minutes of this kind of talk, and mostly it's not productive. They dwell on the idea that contraception is common ground, when in reality pro-choicers have always advocated it. Nothing new there. But I can't finish this off without exposing you to a quote from Waldman that really drives home to me that no matter how much he writes about this issue, he doesn't really think about it. He just reacts based on a bunch of reactionary feelings. This is his reaction to Saletan wisely pointing out that most women don't want to carry a baby for 9 months just to give it up for adoption.

uteruses 4 *

And that's basically the entire tone of this discussion and many like it. There's all these noises being made of understanding what it must be like, and then "solutions" are offered that shows that they don't actually know or apparently care to know. How low your opinion must be of unmarried, pregnant women to say that they would be bought over with what amounts to 14 cents an hour for the work of making a baby.

Waldman admits that the push to get more women to give up babies is symbolic. But he should think harder about that, because it shows what symbolically matters to anti-choicers. Adoption symbolizes a return to the proper social order, where bad slutty women give up their babies to deserving married couples. If you think it's a crime when unmarried women have sex, this is the way for them to pay back their debt to society. The common ground discussion will be doomed to fail as long as the misogyny and sex-phobia that drives the anti-choice movement is pointedly ignored like this.

************
insert interview

************

The stories about hypocritical social conservatives who want to control your sex lives but can't even keep it in their pants are coming out so routinely lately that it seems almost pointless to cover them. But I'm going to do a segment on Governor Mark Sanford, in no small part because Senator John Ensign owes Sanford a thank you for upstaging him and his less dramatic affair. Sanford is really playing up the drama that has exploded in the wake of him running off to visit his mistress in Argentina without telling anyone where he was.

Sanford 1 *

Mark Sanford, as he believes that gays don't deserve the right to love and women don't deserve the right to privacy, has forsaken his right to have either respected for himself. But even so, it was hard to watch the feeding frenzy explode, because it resulted in the exposure of his love letters to his mistress, and has put her on the spot. The few pictures available of her are being floated around, probably in no small part because Sanford relished describing her beauty in emails, and that makes people want to see that beauty for themselves. The saddest part of all this is that I doubt that being the object of such a massive exposure and have his love life become an object of ridicule for Sanford probably won't do a thing to convince him to be kinder to women or gays.

Of course, what it has done has given other hypocrites an opportunity to act self-righteous, their favorite thing to do. Bill O'Reilly loves playing martyr over this.

Sanford 2 *

I like how he tries to pass off the impeachment of a President over a blow job as if it was the actions of a minor fringe. But let's make this clear to O'Reilly and everyone else who wants to play the victim over this. The supposed "hard left" are the people out there who actually believe in and respect people's right to a private love life. We support gay rights and reproductive rights. If you don't think people have this right, and Mark Sanford doesn't, then you invite this sort of nonsense.

Also, if you tout patriarchal marriage as the end-all, be-all, as conservatives like Sanford do, then you're basically asking for the kid to say that the emperor has no clothes. Today, I'll be that kid.

Sanford 3 *

Boy, sounds like his marriage must have been boring and miserable that he was flirting with and carrying on at least emotional affairs with 6 and maybe more women. That doesn't do much for recommending the home life. What's that again about how traditional marriage is so great that we have to build our laws around pushing people into it?

*************
And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the black President made me do it edition. Here's Rush Limbaugh, speculating on why Mark Sanford had an affair.

Limbaugh *

There are many reasons this is a stupid thing to think. But let's go for the most obvious, which is the affair actually started before Obama was elected, and it's rumored that it was the reason that McCain picked Sarah Palin instead of Mark Sanford for a running mate.

Really, Sex, Really?

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:25:27 +0000

The Sex, Really blog opens to much mockery. Mike Huckabee shoots his mouth off about things he doesn't understand, and Cari Sietstra talks about the SRH concerns of Burmese refugees.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

Immersion: Porn

Is Sex, Really the worst sex blog out there?

Sex, Really

What could you be thinking, Daily Show?

Huckabee's opinion on women's autonomy (hint: he's against it)

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Cari Sietstra about the reproductive health concerns of refugees from Burma. Also, a review of the new sex blog Sex, Really and a look at Mike Huckabee's anti-choice blathering on the Daily Show.

Thanks to Ampersand at Alas, a Blog, for linking one of the more unusual videos I've seen in a long time. It's called Immersion: Porn by Robbie Cooper, and it's a video of people talking about their relationship with porn interspersed with images of them, just from the waist up, masturbating to it.

porn *

I don't quite know what to think of this video, but for people interested in human sexuality, it's definitely worth watching and pondering. Cooper has done other immersion projects, such as filming kids playing video games.

***********

Tatiana at Jezebel asked the pertinent question regarding Laura Sessions Stepp's new sex blog Sex, Really: Is it too soon to call Sex, Really the worst sex blog out there? Laura Sessions Stepp has been out there preaching about how young women who adopt her very specific map for dating are the only ones who could find success. Her map is basically go on dates and lure a man into commitment by refusing sex, and doling out a little teasing here and there until you guys are an item. His reward for overcoming his male revulsion at acting nice to a woman is that you have sex with him.

The first podcast from Sex, Really is called "Starting a Relationship with Sex: Running the Bases Backwards". The reference to 50s-era slang about the bases is how you know that Sessions Stepp is hip to how the kids these days are thinking. To make it even more fun, she doesn't even understand the old, sexist metaphor she's invoking.

sex really 1 *

I'm not like a perfect writer by any means, but this is an obvious abuse of metaphor I have to point out. Sessions Stepp is right that the base metaphor is a leftover from the days that she wants to bring back, where good girls didn't want dirty things like orgasms, and therefore their job was to hold men off. Metaphorically, then, this means that women were supposed to be playing defense, which means that women are the team on the field. I know ladies aren't supposed to like sports any more than sex, but even we sports allergic ladies have to know that means that the woman isn't running the bases, the man is. Women are trying to strike out men and they're pitching, too, which is why this metaphor breaks down under even the slightest scrutiny.

That, and teams switch off during a real game of baseball.

Suiting the childishness that women are supposed to maintain throughout their lifetime, we're instructed in the proper order of doing sexual things by Barbie demonstration from memory.

sex really 2 *

I think what I love best about that is how it's assumed that 3rd base is the blow job base. Men going down isn't even in the pantheon. Dunno what kind of fake affection a man has to clear before he gets that sexual service. Is that what you do in exchange for roses, or do you have to require payment in jewelry before you offer that?

So one of her interviewees talks about supposedly not running the bases.

sex really 3 *

At this point, I'm really confused about all this talk about running the bases. Clearly there was kissing before intercourse, but maybe what's naughty is that they didn't take time for the boob-touching base or something. Just kidding! Obviously, Sessions Stepp is using the metaphor to mean that you secure some commitment before you do it, though I'm not sure at what point in baseball the runner is supposed to bring the guy on 3rd base home to meet his mother before he lets him tag it. This girl, like many others, finds that you can have sex with someone for the fun of it and then you end up dating. Sessions Stepp doesn't approve, and she is going to use corny language at you as punishment.

sex really 4 *

I like how the assumption is that every woman who ever has sex with a guy is doing so strictly to get a "honey", and not to get one of those filthy bad girl orgasms. And that if a guy condescends to call you after sex, you will automatically be thrilled, because women want the love of a man, any man. That you might be the one who doesn't want a relationship is considered impossible. They're our social superiors, and we should be grateful for what we get, especially if we're dirty sluts who don't deserve to have standards.

Sessions Stepp finishes the show by telling the sob story of a woman who had an unrequited crush on a guy she had sex with. It's pretty cruel, because in order to make this work, Sessions Stepp has to encourage the woman's sense that she's entitled to someone's time or affection.

sex really 5 *

The lie that Sessions Stepp is peddling is that holding off for some undisclosed official amount of time to have sex will prevent you from every feeling rejected by a man. This is a worldview that depends on ignoring a number of realities. People have crushes on others without ever touching them, and it still hurts. Men can actually have feelings for women that reject them. People dump people they claimed to have loved. Marriages can go on for decades and then one spouse decides they're done with it and drops it. Compared to that, falling for a guy you slept with who cuts you off to be merciful is a walk in the park. Of course, Sessions Stepp may explain in a future podcast why your husband of 20 years leaving you is your fault because you let him touch your boobs before he made a diamond-based down payment on your body.

*********

insert interview

*********

I love you Daily Show, I really do. Usually, you succeed beautifully in your mission to mock some of the stupider things the mainstream media does. So why then did you repeat one of most ongoing, egregiously insulting choices that cable news shows engage in all the time, which is bringing a bunch of dudes who will never, ever be pregnant on to talk about how many rights they should "let" women have to control our own bodies? Worse, why give Mike Huckabee a huge portion of your show to trot out all these arguments about abortion that presume that abortion has absolutely nothing to do with pregnancy? I'm not kidding---Huckabee seems confused about what abortions are, and when they happen.

huckabee 1 *

It's funny how Huckabee accuses pro-choicers of not thinking through the implications. After all, to take his argument at face value, you have to believe that he doesn't understand that abortion is terminating this thing that medical scientists call pregnancy. If the term confuses you, look it up. For our purposes, however, pregnancy is an event that happens inside a woman's body, and the right to abortion is a right that women have to control their own bodies.

All jokes aside, I do believe that Huckabee knows what a pregnancy is and that abortion is about pregnancy, and not babies, which come into being because of pregnancy. He just knows it sounds bad to assault women's rights directly, so instead he relies on the old anti-choice trick of mixing up the order in which things happen. In the real world, you get pregnant before the baby Anti-choicers believe that it's baby then pregnancy.

huckabee 2 *

Ah yeah, I also forgot. He invokes the unscientific anti-choice belief that a heartbeat is a person. Which is kind of weird, because outside of abortion, no one seems to believe this. If you put a heart on a plate and make it beat with electrical impulses, no one is going to call that a person. But if you could find a way to use that to restrict a woman's human rights, anti-choicers would be all up on it.

Does make you wonder if fundamentalist Christians object to the scientific theory that the human brain is the source of thoughts and feelings. They object to evolution and the theory that pregnancy proceeds babies, so why not?

Jon Stewart just doesn't get control of this conversation, though he does try to remind Huckabee that there are these people called women involved.

huckabee 3 *

Southern politicians who rely on a voting base that loves the Confederate flag don't realize how insulting it is to minimize slavery this way. You may not like that the woman next door decided to get an abortion and live out her life how she wants instead of settling for a miserable marriage like yours, but that doesn't mean that she kidnapped you and sold you into slavery.

Anyway, this is why Jon Stewart lost control of the situation. Right then was an opportunity to point out that Huckabee does believe that some people own others, and that's why he opposes abortion. He believes that men own their wives, and signed an ad chastising women who resist being treated like property. Stewart should have immediately brought that up, and reminded the audience that Huckabee isn't some indifferent lover of fetal life, but is in fact a strong patriarch who objects to no-fault divorce, sex education, and abortion, all because they give women power to escape direct male control.

***********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, I'm not done with you yet, Mike Huckabee. One more clip from his atrocious interview on the Daily Show, because seriously, it's screwed up.

huckabee 4 *

Yeah, anti-choicers like this one, which makes me wonder if they don't know what phrases like "liberty" or "pursuit of happiness" mean. In reality, I guess they must think because women weren't included when it was written, they don't deserve life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness, either. But if women aren't included, then why should zygotes be? Is it just that men like Huckabee see fetuses as extensions of themselves, and women are just incubators?

The Pill Kills Rational Reactions

editor@rhrealitycheck.org — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:47:27 +0000

Anti-choicers protest the pill, complaints about Sonia Sotomayor reaching new levels of incoherence, and Plan B is easier for 17-year-olds to get, but it's not enough.

Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed

Links in this episode:

When Abortion Was Illegal

IWF vs. Sonia Sotomayor

Really?

On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Joy Baynes about the increased availability of Plan B, and why it's not enough. Also, anti-choicers protest to ban the pill, but they've changed their excuse a little bit. And the Independent Women's Forum shows how the complaints about Sonia Sotomayor are incoherent.

Thanks to blogger Hugo Zoom for posting the documentary "When Abortion Was Illegal". I haven't seen this before, but it's quite powerful.

illegal abortion *

What's particularly distressing is when they read the death confessions they extracted from women dying from botched illegal abortions. It was a common practice. Sexual women weren't allowed to die in peace with clear consciences, but were exploited by withholding care until they gave up the man who got them pregnant and the abortion provider.

*********

The American Life League, in an effort to show how crazy the anti-choice movement really, really is, went ahead with another protest not of Roe v. Wade, but their ultimate aim, which is for an overturn of Griswold v. Connecticut. They call it the Pill Kills protest, and they have it every year around the anniversary of the 1965 case that legalized contraception across the country. What's interesting about this is the Pill Kills group, which is an offshoot of the American Life League, has been trying to refine their message, making it increasingly disingenuous. Obviously, the reason they don't like the pill is because they object to its efficacy. Since it works so well, fewer women are punished with unintended pregnancy for the crime of having sex.

But since sex is so universally popular, they can't just say what they think about the pill, of course. Since anti-choicers have exactly zero objections to lying about anything to further their aims, the American Life League has been trying out a few different lies about the pill in order to scare people away from it. Last year, the big lie was that the pill kills zygotes.

* pill kills 1 *

I guess the combination of the overwhelming evidence against this claim plus the fact that they really can't convince people that zygotes are the same as 5-year-olds has caused them to rethink that lie. Now they're lying and claiming that the pill should be banned because it kills women. I combed the entire Pill Kills website, and all the claims that were in print there were that the pill will pretty much certainly kill you with a stroke, but if you're one of the few lucky ones to survive that, then some mysterious pill-related death will get you. God will have you pay for sex with pregnancy or death, ladies, your choice.

Of course, the sliver of truth here is that the pill isn't safe for women who are stroke risks, especially smokers and especially overweight smokers. This is true, but relative to most prescription medicine, the pill is actually pretty safe, much safer than most drugs, which is why a one-time dose was approved for over the counter sales in the form of emergency contraception. But reading this site, you'd think that no other drug in the history of the world had side effects.

But they're not too interested in facts, as this lecture from anti-choice nut Dr. Lynn Kerr demonstrates.

pill kills 2 *

Blah blah blah, the pill "breaks" you because it alters your body chemistry. By this logic, cholesterol controlling medication and insulin for Type I diabetes are also bad drugs because they counter your body's "natural" inclinations. But what I really like is that anti-choicers are so obsessed with punishing women for sex that they are willing to object to the entire concept of preventive medicine. Doctors are only to look for disease once it's too late and fix it. Unless of course, it's pregnancy-related disease, in which case anti-choicers would welcome you to die, because therapeutic abortions are out of the question, too.

But I want to see anti-choicers really live up to this mantra. No more regular check-ups. No more cancer screenings, nutrition advice, and even exercise should be frowned upon. Prevention is immoral and unnatural and a sign that doctors are out to get you, right? Then act like it.

Of course, it's not an anti-choicer gathering unless they're squawking about natural family planning, the favorite form of making it nearly impossible to avoid pregnancy, especially if your partner is being especially whiny and entitled. I've heard it touted as a cure for all sorts of things, but leave it to anti-choice nuts to claim it solves menstrual problems that the pill is so good at fixing.

pill kills 3 *

Anything, anything, anything but putting a 15-year-old on a pill that might mean that she doesn't have a baby as a side effect. Well, of course, anti-choicers aren't thinking that far ahead. They hear the words teenager and pill next to each other, and no matter what the context, they think, "Young women are having sex and getting away with it! Stop the madness!" And that's the end of their thinking. But really, I love how he thinks girls and their mothers have to go through months of hell and quackery treatments to address symptoms that could safely be addressed with the pill. Because the alternative is she might have sex without getting pregnant, and if you don't want a pregnant teenage girl, than I just don't know what's wrong with you.

*********

insert interview *

*********

To no one's great surprise, the Independent Women's Forum, who claims to be so very pro-woman, isn't very pro-Sonia Sotomayor. So much so that they're not aware of what kind of contradictions that you get into when you try to claim that while you're very sure that it's entirely possible for there to be a qualified woman, but you know damn well that you will claim that any woman picked will have just been selected because she's a woman. So, here's Allison Kasic spouting a subtle but interesting self-contradiction.

sotomayor 1 *

Okay, so essentially she's saying this isn't a surprise, because Sotomayor has been the favorite for this seat for practically forever. And she's right, actually! I know, it's rare, but in this small case she's right. Sotomayor has more federal bench experience than any of the other justices on the Supreme Court had before they were appointed, and she's known as a stickler for precedent and generally pretty moderate, so a safe pick. Most qualified, supposedly least controversial, a perfect pick, right? So why then does Kasic follow it up with this?

sotomayor 2 *

I love it. It's like she's saying, "As a woman, I'd theoretically like to see women get these jobs, but in practice I'm always going to imply strongly that your womanhood means that you aren't qualified." Which of course, is the position IWF has to take to keep the funding coming. The contradiction here is that before she set up the women-can't-really-be-qualified gambit, she confessed that Sotomayor was the favorite because if anyone can claim to be the most qualified, it's Sotomayor. So, which is it?

Kasic then makes a rousing call for getting away from identity politics and talking about merit.

sotomayor 3 *

Call me a cynic, but I had to stop here and laugh and laugh. The people making an issue out of identity politics are conservatives, not Sotomayor's defenders. Conservatives are race-baiting and using anti-choice code phrases like "judicial activism", which are supposed to arouse their anti-feminist base. Doesn't get more identity politics than that. And the reason they're doing it is because he merits and temperament are pretty much above reproach and they know it.

As if to prove how full of it Kasic is, the interviewer immediately asks a question designed to appeal to the most brutish of white guy identity politics.

sotomayor 4 *

Did Kasic mention that Sotomayor is Latina? Did you get that? Did you realize that means she's not a white man? Do you realize that this means that a man who is white will NOT be getting the seat? Are you angry yet?

That's how conservatives avoid playing cheap identity politics. After they do a little of that, they avoid getting hit by cars by running around on the freeway during traffic.

**********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the Fred Phelps edition. I usually try to avoid Phelps, since he's a marginalized wacko, and not mainstreamed at all like the people who excused Dr. George Tiller's murder. But since his church bothered to write a song, I thought I'd share it.

god hates the world *

Okay, I wouldn't say they "wrote" it, because it's an obvious plagiarism of "We Are The World". But considering how hateful they are, that seems like a minor issue.