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Links in this episode:
Daniel Tarantola on male circumcision
Janice Shaw Crouse lecture
Below The Waist
Fred Barnes applauds gay bashing
Transcript:
This week on Reality Cast, we'll be interviewing Lisa
Tomasien from the SEIU on the rights of health care workers and what that means
to you as a patient. Also, why are we
still fighting over Alfred Kinsey, why are we still treating teenagers like
they're stupid, and why do wingnuts think that the gay marriage ploy will never
run out of steam?
Panels rock. I'm just going to say that up front, because I want you, if you're in Austin or can be, to come to Netroots Nation to check out the RH Reality Check panel on Saturday, July 19th at the Austin Convention Center. But if you can't make it, well hopefully we'll have highlights online soon. To scratch the panel-watching urge, in the meantime, here's a clip from an HIV panel at the University of New South Wales, where Daniel Tarantola, a former senior advisor for the WHO, talks about the HIV and male circumcision controversy.
- insert Daniel Tarantola
More highlights are available at Fora TV.
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Thanks to Jessica Valenti for sending me a copy of a recent talk given by Janice Shaw Crouse from Concerned Women for America on why you're a dirty slut and will forever suffer because of it. I mean, she doesn't say that, but suffice it to say, that's the takeaway lesson. And I must say, I'm impressed with her very austere and chaste leopard print coat she wears in this. I hope she had equally virginal red open-toed heels. Shall we begin?
- insert crouse 1
I suppose anti-choicers are so used to lying and using made-up statistics that they assume the worst of everyone else, too. But the rumors of Kinsey's supposedly bad research are highly exaggerated. Sex researchers nowadays owe a great deal to Kinsey, and his willingness to sit subjects down and really talk to them to find out their sexual histories is still considered a better way to go about researching than just asking people to fill out forms. If you read Mary Roach's book "Bonk", she discusses in depth how Kinsey and his methods are still widely respected.
But he was less than perfect and missed a lot. Who doesn't? That's the nature of science, to lay ground for the next generation. Sex phobes would have you believe that because Kinsey didn't have it all figured out, he was a fraud. That's like saying Isaac Newton was a fraud because Einstein figured out even more about gravity and revised Newton's theories.
- insert crouse 2
Tricky game she's playing there. I don't think that bringing the public's understanding of sex closer in line with actual behavior is "redefining normality". And that's really what the battle is here, over whether or not we're going to embrace reality or deny it and force everyone to play up a fantasy world. Kinsey didn't redefine squat. He opened the closet door.
And women everywhere actually owe him a debt, because by alerting the world to the fact that women do have sex in and outside of marriage and that they want it, he helped usher in the era of freedom that allows us to access contraception and abortion.
Oh, but there was something more than that, even. Kinsey's emphasis on describing the world as it is, instead of how we want it to be, helped society get past demanding that women have vaginal orgasms. If you have a good relationship with your clitoris, you have Kinsey in part to thank. I will refrain from speculating on this front about the ladies of the CWA and their hostility to Kinsey.
Of course, what's funny is that while she's angry at Kinsey for his supposed fraud, she then says this about Hugh Hefner:
- insert crouse 3
Kinsey is held up as a bad guy because he merely described sexual behavior as it actually existed. But then Crouse suggests that the Playboy philosophy became the law of the land? Really? Because while it's true that Kinsey was right that there are gay people and that women have sex before marriage, I don't think most people live like Hugh Hefner by a long shot. Orgies are still uncommon, and few geriatric millionaires parade around with a posse of hired girlfriends.
- insert crouse 4
Dude, now she's just lying through her teeth. The so-called sexual revolution that conservatives throw a fit about didn't promise women liberation by any stretch. In fact, it was the attitudes of male leftists who thought freedom meant women just gave it up on demand that partially fueled the anger that led to women's liberation.
It's true that freedom from unwanted child-bearing is considered a basic freedom by feminists, but come on. But um. Yeah. How can you say it's not? I mean, just the idea of forced childbirth that Crouse is advocating here tells you the whole story of why it's wrong. You know, the forced part.
- insert crouse 5
Gosh, did anyone ever actually say that sexual freedom meant that you'd have no other problems ever? Is she seriously suggesting that heartbreak, hurt feelings, and other attendant risks of having a dating life simply don't exist if you have a repressive culture that restricts people's freedoms? How? Did getting pregnant at 16 and being forced to marry the first boy you ever slept with really leave a generation of women in lives that were problem-free for the rest of their lives?
I don't think so. I think it's telling that Crouse blames Kinsey for the problems in society. He didn't actually create any of the behaviors he described. But he did shine a light on them and say, "Look." And that's what offends her. It's not that people don't suffer under her preferred system. They suffer a lot more, because they have no escape hatch, no equality, and no options. It's just that in her preferred system, they had to shut up about it and put a happy face on it and just die on the inside. She's not really advocating for a paradise that never existed. She's just calling for a return to hypocrisy.
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- insert interview
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So, let's talk about young people. As much as we'd hope otherwise, it looks like abstinence-only education, which is this profound insult to the dignity of young people above all else, isn't going away even though we've managed to convince the majority of the American public of what a bad idea it is. I bring this up because James Wagoner, the president of Advocates for Youth, was on the Below The Waist podcast and, I want to play the highlights of the interview with some commentary. But I definitely recommend listening to the whole thing.
What I like about Advocates for Youth, and how they really differ from abstinence-only programs, is that they have this real respect for young people. It's the ideal strategy. People, especially young people, will live up to the expectations you put on them more often than not. I invite you to mentally compare how Wagoner feels about young people versus Janice Shaw Crouse and her hectoring tone from the earlier segment.
- insert advocates 1
Last week, I went to the big Campus Progress National Conference to moderate a panel on reproductive justice. The executive director of Choice USA, Kierra Johnson, made some comments I thought were really interesting and a good example of how teenagers can be better people than we give them credit for. And mature in ways that some adults could learn from. She said that in working with high school groups and college age groups, there's this big gender gap. You have a meeting about reproductive justice with high school kids, and the room is 50/50 male and female. You have that same meeting with college kids, and suddenly the room is 90-95% female.
It's tempting to ask why that is, but the one thing we know for sure is that if everyone else was like the high school kids on the gender parity issue, we'd be doing a lot better. When people like Wagoner offer this broad respect for teenagers, they aren't just blowing smoke. There's leadership there, if we want to recognize it.
Here's Wagoner talking about abstinence-only education.
- insert advocates 2
This is the most important framing on the topic, the idea that withholding information and refusing to educate is the point of abstinence-only. Abstinence-only proponents like to make that they're different because they tell kids not to have sex. Well, all programs have the position that you shouldn't have sex before you're ready, even if that's defined as a personal choice instead of just a matter of marriage. Abstinence-only is marked by what they won't tell you, or what lies they'll use to conceal the truth. Once you put it that way, it's hard to be for abstinence-only. Fundamentally, schools are about education, not censorship and certainly not miseducation.
Check out the whole interview. Lots to chew over.
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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes applauded gay bashing as a political technique on Fox News Sunday.
- insert fred barnes
Look, even the dumbest wingnuts are going to eventually realize that they've voted to ban gay marriage like 3 or 4 elections in a row. And maybe they'll clue into the fact that they're being used. Well, we can always hope.
