An interview with Steve Trombley from Chicago Planned Parenthood, Bill O'Reilly takes on teenage lesbians, Tyra Banks tells you whether or not you pee out of your vagina, and do men have the right to an abortion?

Links in this episode:

Affordable access
Roe v. Wade for men?
Bill O'Reilly vs. the teenage lesbians
Tyra and your ladyparts
Singing fetuses

Transcript:

This week on Reality Cast, I'll be talking to Steve Trombley from Planned Parenthood/Chicago Action, commenting on Roe v. Wade for men, examining whether or not you pee out of your vagina, and addressing Bill O'Reilly's lesbian fascination.

But first, it was good last week to see students rallying around in support of the Prevention Through Affordable Access Act, a bill that's meant to address the rise in birth control pill prices on campus throughout the country.

Through a complex bit of budget engineering, the deep discounts drug companies used to offer on pills at colleges have disappeared, driving the price of birth control pills on campuses up from $3-$5 a month to $30-$50 a month, which is a lot of money to college kids.

I've seen some hesitation out there against embracing this cause, on the theory that college kids should be using condoms anyway, and the price increase might encourage that. But there's a couple of problems with that viewpoint. For one, as Lynn Harris at Broadsheet says, "If we know anything about birth control, we know this: The most effective method is the one you actually use." It's good to be on the pill for back-up even if you're using condoms. And for women in disease-free, monogamous relationships, the pill alone is often enough protection. Yes, the stereotype is that college girls are into bed-hopping, but the reality is much more mundane, and a lot of college age women are in the right circumstances to use the pill alone, and that should be their choice.

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Poor Matthew Dubay. This 25-year-old Michigan man learned the hard way that just because you get a woman pregnant doesn't mean you get to make her have an abortion.

Those Miller Lite beer ads lied to him!

*insert poke it own it*

Dubay's complaint is that his ex-girlfriend did not avail herself of the right to abortion when she got pregnant, and now he's suing for a right to a "paper abortion", which sounds like pregnancy termination through paper cut, but really just is about terminating child support.

Dubay is part of the men's rights movement, a movement based around the strange notion that the world is secretly a feminist-run matriarchy designed to destroy men. Their evidence for this theory is pretty weak, mainly a bunch of stuff about how you can tell feminists run the world because rape and domestic violence are treated like actual crimes now. The centerpiece of the men's rights movement is the great injustice that is child support.

Men's rights activists treat child support like it's a consumer rights issue, like there's something terrible unjust about writing checks to a woman you're not even having sex with.

Here's a typical anti-feminist rant from a YouTube video titled "Child Support Is Exhortion!"

*insert MRA rant*

I'll spare you the rest of the illogic. His attempts to frame pregnancy as something that women do all by themselves alone tells you how far off into the woods these guys are.

Anyway, Dubay, fat on this misogynist logic, has been pursuing a case in court that his lawyer nicknamed Roe v. Wade for men. The idea is that men need a special right to relinquish financial responsibility for their children to compensate for women's right to have an abortion.

What Dubay and his lawyers forgot was that there's nothing really about Roe v. Wade that denies men the right to an abortion. I, for one, fully support the right of any pregnant man to terminate an unwanted pregnancy…..in his own body.

What the men's rights activists fail to grasp is that the right to an abortion isn't some special woman-only right to engage in post-conception birth control. It's based in the assumption that all people have that basic right to control their own body and their own fertility. The sick irony is that men who whine about not getting to have abortions of their very own don't have the first clue of what it's like to have your actual right to bodily autonomy threatened. Men are not being blocked by anti-choice protesters, by state laws, by federal laws or by judgmental pharmacists from getting access to the tools to control their own fertility, from condoms to vasectomies.

Dubay's case was thrown out for being thoroughly asinine, a ruling that was upheld recently by a federal appeals court. In the meantime, the case has been a centerpiece for men's rights activists, who would be better labeled as organized deadbeat fathers. They're trying to imply that there's herds of sperm-stealing, wallet-robbing women out there, but the reality is that most men who are trying to dodge child support were not opposed to the birth of the children in the first place. Most deadbeat dads were happy to financially support their children while still married to the mother, and only after the divorce and the cut-off from the advantages of living with the family do they get whiny. Note to deadbeat fathers: Supporting your children is a responsibility, not a purchase.

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*insert interview*

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What would be do without Bill O'Reilly? He's the mouthpiece for all those incoherent things people usually say in private, but he's right there on TV so we can hear the hate in all its glory. On a recent episode of the show, he went into a full-on hissy fit over a lesbian couple that was voted "Cutest Couple" at their high school by their peers, and even had a yearbook page.

Dr. Laura Berman came onto the show to "debate" O'Reilly about whether or not it's important for high schoolers to treat their gay classmates like second class citizens. Under a gentle barrage of Dr. Berman's common sense, O'Reilly's arguments became more and more incoherent.

*insert tweak the parents*

The picture in question is about as mundane as it gets; it's two girls holding hands in a fairly traditional couple pose. But the camera keeps zooming in and out on this like it's a murder scene or some other shockingly horrible thing, which causes the viewer to suspect that O'Reilly is projecting a little here. It's not that the kids wanted to do much else but show they liked these girls and that homosexuality is A-OK with them, but I think that the O'Reilly Factor is definitely trying to provoke and get a rise out of people and make it seem daring and horrible to be accepting of gay couples.

O'Reilly had a whole list of bizarre reasons that the school should have officially homophobic reactions to teenage gay couples while endorsing teenage straight relationships.

*insert one social*

And his proposal for fixing that problem is to make it harder to be a homosexual in America, to have school officials officially treat their gay students like second class citizens, and to encourage classmates to be intolerant. Sounds like a great plan, right next to fixing global warming with SUVs for everyone!

*insert two religious*

Two, we live in a country that has official separation of church and state. If schools start discriminating against kids because of religious dogma, there's no other way to interpret that than to say that schools are favoring one religion over another that might not preach hatred of homosexuals. Not to say all the students that have no religion at all. Last I checked, the First Amendment was still on the books.

*insert three sexuality*

Lest you think the girls were doing it for the camera, let me remind you they're just smiling and posing like a normal, fully clothed, teenage couple, in a way that would not bother O'Reilly if they were straight. Is a gay couple holding hands "exposition of sexuality" in a way that a straight couple isn't? O'Reilly thinks so, for reasons that are charitably described as nonsensical.

*insert private behavior*

Get that? The rarer it is, the more sex-like it seems, through some sort of mysterious process that I can't fathom. Berman points out that, by that measure, black couples should be somehow less private and more sexy sexed up sexified too sexy for public than white couples, at which point O'Reilly moves the goal posts again, saying race is not conduct. Of course, holding hands is what he's objecting to, and that's conduct, so he's basically got no point.

This is all basically good news. Homophobes can't make a coherent argument in public, which is really beginning to work against them in the court of public opinion. Maybe the kids who voted for this lesbian couple were trying to get a rise out of people, but you know? So what! Making fools out of homophobes and publicly demonstrating opposition to homophobia is a *good* thing, and these kids should be applauded. What will their parents think? If their parents are worth respecting, they'll be proud of their kids.

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I'm going to blame Lauren, my co-blogger at Offsprung's political blog Unsprung, for drawing me into her fascination with the Tyra Banks show. It's a real muddle of good intentions and just fumbled presentation, and the recent episode about learning to love your ladyparts is a good example. A sex educator named Dr. Debbie came onto the show and she had a vulva puppet to help women calm down about a body part that they have had with them every day of their entire lives.

*insert vulva puppet*

Speak for yourself! Nah, just kidding. Tyra makes a good point on the show, which is that if you're honestly scared of looking at your vulva, then a soft pearl-and-velvet puppet might take some of the edge off. And I don't doubt that some women are still scared to look at their ladyparts in this day and age, even though feminists recommended whipping out the hand mirror over 30 years ago.

Still, it was a little hard to swallow the idea that very many women could be as ignorant as was hinted here.

*insert pee from urethra*

You know, I believe that some women don't know that you have a separate pee hole, but you'd think that it would be something you figured out the first time you peed with a tampon in. But I suppose shame and fear prevents basic logical deduction in all sorts of areas, so no reason to think human biology would be any different. Of course, the guests on the show are someone who's afraid to use a tampon and another who's afraid to go to the gynecologist, so I suppose the tampon pee test wasn't really an option for them.

As much as the vulva puppet and the tampon coaching makes me flinch, the commenters at Feministing were kind enough to supply information about how necessary this kind of education on national television really is. Commenter Claire said:

I went to a private college in the Midwest where some women were vehemently OPPOSED to learning about their own anatomy because it either seemed "gross" or too much like masterbation.

To which I say, "Maybe they should learn that masturbation is cool, too." God knows men don't need to have a velvet-lined penis puppet shown to them to encourage them to masturbate.

Commenter EG said:

I went to a feminist women's college, and in sophomore year, one of my roommates revealed that she thought that women peed out of our clits. So…yeah, sadly, this is necessary.

To which I'll add that now that the kids filing into colleges have largely been exposed to the abstinence-only boondoggle, these kinds of dangerous misconceptions about basic facts are going to be more, not less, common.

I suppose learning that you have three distinct holes down there is pretty traumatizing for some women, like you're just full of holes. I'm reminded of the Margaret Cho joke where she said she sometimes feels like a power strip.

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Now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. If you haven't heard any of the plethora of fetus singing songs out there, well you're probably luckier for it. But it's a real phenomenon, these anti-choice protest songs that involve grown men singing as if they were fetuses berating their mother. Here's a recent example plucked off You Tube.

*insert singing fetus*

This genre surged into the MTV mainstream a couple years ago with Nick Cannon's nauseatingly dreadful song "Can I Live?" that was roughly the same kind of thing but with more expensive production values.