The other day, I was called a tramp on a national radio show with 3.5 million listeners. Contrary to what you might expect, I was not the least bit offended and only a little outraged. In truth, it was the first moment in the hour long live broadcast in which I relaxed.
I was a guest on the Michael Medved show. In case you’re not familiar with him, he guest hosts for Rush Limbaugh on occasion, and the pre-recorded introduction to his show calls it another afternoon “in this greatest country on God’s green earth.” I was on to provide a counterpoint to Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist who has written a book called You’re Teaching My Child What?: A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child.
We were there to talk about sex education. Ostensibly. In truth, she was there to promote her book, in which she mentions SIECUS on just about every other page, and I was there to give her someone to yell at. At the beginning of the interview, our host mentioned that he and his wife had written a book in the nineties on the loss of innocence of youth and that in it they discussed the problems with sex ed. So much for any hope of impartial mediation on this particular subject.
SIECUS has been attacked by the far right for 45 years now. We’re used it. Most of the time, we don’t bother responding to attacks. Okay, when Robert Rector wrote a piece in the National Review which claimed SIECUS promoted incest, we responded. But when the twelfth book this year comes out claiming we have a radical leftist agenda and want to hand out condoms to five year olds on the playground, we pass it around the office and chuckle. You see, that book was written for a certain audience—an audience that already believes that sex educators are liberal intellectuals out to undermine parents and corrupt children. An audience of people whose minds I will not change no matter how charming, smart, or interesting I am in writing or on the radio. Moreover, that book will likely only get noticed by its intended audience; calling it out risks bringing more attention to it, buying it free media, and ultimately selling more copies.
This is why we were prepared to let Dr. Grossman’s book slide by the wayside. But, because we’re human, we could not resist the offer of 3.5 million listeners. She would have the audience with or without us, and, with numbers like that, the odds were in our favor that one or two of them would be part of the infamous moveable middle. So we agreed to debate.
In preparation for the debate, one of my coworkers, a brand new intern, and I sat down to read the book. I don’t know where to begin except to say this, like so many attacks on sexuality and sex education, it has very little to do with sex. As far as I can tell, Dr. Grossman is not a big fan of 2009. She does not like today’s reality in which sex is part of the popular culture, women pursue education before families, and premarital sex is no longer verboten. (This sentence from her website summed it up best for me: “Women complete their PhDs at 35, and realize the hardest challenge lies ahead: getting their Mrs., and becoming an Mo.M.”) In the book, she goes into great detail about the dangers that lurk around every sexual corner for young women and her desire to protect them from STDs, infertility, and heartbreak. And she throws around a lot of blame – liberal organizations like SIECUS with our post- 1970s feminist agendas are apparently the cause of the downfall of society. (There are so many inaccuracies, misstatements, and downright lies in her book that it would be difficult, and seems almost pointless, to go through and try to correct each one.)
What she doesn’t do is offer any solutions. She’s not a proponent of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. She claims to want to provide young people with accurate information, but the only examples of such information are the scary ones (on the show she chastised SIECUS for not saying HPV leads to throat cancer in all of our literature), and she doesn’t explain a forum or format she would use that would be preferable to sex education classes. She also says she realizes young people will have sex regardless of what we tell them. It is truly hard to know what she wants.
It gets even harder to figure it out because some of the exchanges she recommends having with young people sound very much like those we (the liberal sex educators she’s bashing) would have. After saying we’re wrong for suggesting kids should use proper body part names like vulva and penis, she describes a model conversation with a five year old about where babies come from. Her suggestions: don’t give too much information, ask what he/she thinks, don’t have one “talk,” provide one new item at a time, and make it a dialogue, not a lecture. Gee, where have I heard this before? Wait, I think I’ve written it. Similarly she suggests that we tell teens that they alone are responsible for their sexual health. I’m all for that—as long as they’ve been given the tools and information to take on that responsibility, of course.
I actually started our hour together saying that I thought she made a number of good points about young people and that some of her suggestions sounded just like what I would suggest. She called me a liar. Okay, she didn’t use that word. She said I was duplicitous. That SIECUS would represent itself as “rational, down-to-earth, and common sense” in public forums like the radio show but that really we have a liberal agenda. She accused us of this at least four times during the show, including once when she said we would be common-sense in our publications as well. (I wanted to ask her, “If we’re rational in the media and in everything we produce, where is it that we carry out this liberal agenda?” I didn’t.)
So begun the first segment; she made some points and I countered them, apparently in a rational way, because that’s when she called me duplicitous the first time. In the second segment, the two of them ganged up on me in a discussion on anal sex that I tried (but failed) to talk my way out of. Then came the callers, who all, for some reason, insisted on shouting into their phones as if they were tin cans on a string. One discussed how happy he was to have his daughters in private school if I was in control of the public school curriculum (if only, I thought). The second called me a tramp—I believe the exact words were an “intellectual fool” who “must have been a tramp back in her day.”
And, as I said, that’s when I calmed down. Because that’s when I realized who was listening to me. Sure, maybe a few people in the moveable middle were listening and maybe one of my rational points made it through to them. But the people who were glued to their radios and moved to call in were individuals who were willing—in the same breath in which they accused me of corrupting their daughters—to call a perfect stranger a slut. And to do so without realizing how ironic, hypocritical, and downright uncivilized it was.
Dr. Grossman’s book didn’t provide any answers because her audience doesn’t want any. They want to be mad. The world is a daunting place. The rules have changed. And they are scared and angry.
I get it. I worry about it for my daughter growing up in this world. That’s why, I, like the rest of the liberal sex educators I work with, are trying to fix those things that are clearly problems (like the STD epidemic), and help young people navigate the rest of today’s reality—without turning back the clock or relying on fear. The truth is, we really are common sense and down-to-earth, and we have no hidden agenda. We just want to make sure that young people will have the information and critical thinking skills they need to make good decisions throughout their lives.
But if Dr. Grossman and her followers seem content to just yell about it, so be it, and, if, for one hour, they want to yell at me; I’ll take it.
