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Red Staters take on teen pregnancy
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.
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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.
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insert interview
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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.
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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.
