AIDS Conference And War On Contraception Exposed

McCain's stumble exposes the war on contraception, Heather Boonstra fills us in on the International AIDS Conference, the Tyra Banks Show gives really bad dating advice, and a pick-up artist gets his on the internets.

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Links in this episode:
Man on the street at Netroots Nation
O'Reilly vs. contraception
Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes
Clinton on HHS redefinitions
Worst phone message ever

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Transcript:
This week on Reality Cast, we'll have an interview about the International Aids Conference with a representative from Guttmacher, another installment about the ongoing war on contraception, and a break from the heavy stuff by mocking the sexist dating advice on the Tyra Banks Show. Also, a taste of a phone message left by the worst person alive.

 

Thanks to everyone who agreed to be in our man on the street interviews at Netroots Nation. Here's a sample:

 

* insert netroots nation

 

As is traditional on these podcasts, I have a couple requests for listeners to help get the word out about RH Reality Check. First of all, go to rhrealitycheck.org to sign up for a daily email summarizing the news in reproductive rights that day. Also, if you could go to the Digg page linked from the transcript page of this show and Digg the podcast, I'd be most grateful. It really helps drive listeners to the podcast if it gets high enough in the rankings.

 

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Now more news on the ongoing and mostly underground war on contraception. And when I say mostly underground, I mean that it's becoming more and more above ground, probably because anti-choicers feel that they're really close to being able to push harder on this issue. One big initial issue is the fallout from John McCain being caught on video unwilling to say anything positive about contraception, and certainly unwilling to say that it's unfair for insurance companies to cover Viagra but not contraception.

 

Of course, the right wing surrogates jumped up to take it a step further and try to push Americans to the right on this issue, arguing that contraception should become controversial again, instead of just a normal part of life. Bill O'Reilly, functioning under his usual belief that women aren't quite human beings, led the brigade.

 

• insert oreilly contraception

 

In other words, men having sex in a medical necessity, but women having sex are just sluts trying to get away with something. The irony of this is that the worst thing that can happen to a man who doesn't have Viagra, medically speaking, is that he doesn't have intercourse and an orgasm. For a woman who is denied access to birth control, the medical effects can be hypertension, weight gain, searing pain, surgery, and even death. So O'Reilly thinks that a woman dying is less of a medical problem than a man having to skip the sex once in awhile. That's an unvarnished double standard, though I have no doubt O'Reilly would bristle if you called him sexist.

 

And who are these men that need sex supposed to be having sex with if women aren't supposed to be having sex? Each other? I suppose that's a solution, but not one that I expect a homophobe like O'Reilly to understand. Maybe he thinks Viagra is so you can get an erection to waggle at other men to show that you can do it, but not actually used for sexual intercourse.

 

The good news is that McCain's squirmy moment means that the anti-contraception agenda of the far right is getting mainstream media attention. Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow talked about it on MSNBC.

 

• maddow birth control

 

So that's some good media attention. I wish, however, that more attention was paid to why McCain is doing this little dance around an issue that is relatively popular, which is insurance coverage for birth control, which the majority of Americans rely on for a happy, healthy sex life. Or even if they don't need it, many support it on principle. He's doing it to kow-tow to an extremist right wing that needs to be exposed for the nutbars they are.

 

Which is why I'm glad to see Hillary Clinton lending her name to an effort to resist the HHS attempt to redefine the birth control pill as abortion under the Bush administration, in an effort to make it easier for health care providers to refuse to provide this basic medical service. Look: They don't really think it's abortion so much as they've realized that it's politically easier to turn people on fake abortions than it is to say, as Bill O'Reilly did, that your desire not to get pregnant is irrelevant. Most people don't experience the need to use birth control as irrelevant, nor do most people think of women as subhuman with interests we don't have to care about at all.

 

* insert Clinton birth control

 

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• insert interview

 

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Oh my god, I haven't checked over to the Tyra Banks Show's website in awhile, and I missed how they've got web exclusives with even more nauseatingly wrong-headed sex and dating advice on it. Most disturbingly, they had this woman named Patti Stanger giving her own version of The Rules for single women, and as you can imagine, they're horrifically bad rules and sexist to boot.

 

• insert stanger 1

 

Assumption: You, as a single woman, have nothing to do but date and can devote your every last hour on men, no matter how little you like them. Horribly sexist. This assumes that women live for men and men alone. When I was single, I barely had time for 3 dates a week for someone I was madly in love with, much less a bunch of dudes that I know I don't like. Because I have a life and a job. And a blog. The assumption is that single women make getting married their career, which doesn't correspond to reality.

 

Her next piece of advice is not to drink too much on dates, which is not bad advice, I guess, but I think she's offering it in bad faith. I think she's offering it because she wants your inhibitions to be up so you follow this next piece of advice.

 

• insert stanger 2

 

Assumption: Women have no sexual desires of their own, but simply view our bodies as currency to exchange for other things. In other words, every woman is a prostitute, except instead of selling your body for money, in this case, you're selling it for commitment.

 

This belief, that women only want commitment and men only want sex, and that relationships only happen after a tense exchange of the two like it's a financial transaction, is what guides abstinence-only education and even anti-choice arguments. See, if we chance getting knocked up every time we have sex, then we won't have sex without the wedding ring and tah-dah! Um, well, that's the only way we'll get married? I think that's the argument. Never mind that most people get married and 95% of Americans have sex before marriage. Maybe---and I know this is crazy feminist talk---a man commits to you because he loves you and wants to be with you. I know. Impossible. Even though plenty of experience out there says otherwise.

 

The next piece of advice is good, about how you need to be mindful of the fact that you inherit someone's debt when you marry him. That's why I think that debtor laws probably need to be reconsidered. But it's no wonder that women will marry men that bring all sorts of baggage in an environment where women are told that getting married should be their main and possibly only goal in life. Desperation invades at that point.

 

• insert stanger 3

 

Every girl wants to get married? Uh, well I don't. But then again, I call myself a woman, not a girl, so there you go. The idea that you should be announcing your engagement within less than a year of dating someone is the sort of thinking that leads straight to our high divorce rate. You can whine and bemoan our culture where people date for a long time before they get married, but you'll be contending with statistical evidence against you. People are dating longer and marrying later in life, and this is leading to a drop in the divorce rate. The rush to the altar is a quick way of legally binding yourself to someone you don't know very well. Hell, I wasn't even willing to talk about moving in with my boyfriend until we'd been dating a year. What's the harm in going slow and protecting yourself? With her timeline, you'd probably not even have a chance to figure out if you're sexually compatible before you get married, which is not to say the other compatibility problems that would arise later if you don't know the person you're marrying.

 

***********

 

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. A phone message left for a woman met on the street by professional anti-feminist and pick-up artist wannabe James Sears got released online.

 

• insert douchebag call

 

It was so hard to figure out what part to sample from this. The entire thing was just an amazing example of male entitlement. At no point does he even pause to consider the idea that she's not calling him because he's anything less than the greatest guy on earth.

 

He's bitter and started an anti-feminist cottage industry after his medical license was stripped because he was caught sexually assaulting female patients.

 

Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte