This week on Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Aspen Baker from Exhale. Also, news on how the CDC injected a sobering reality into the discourse about teen sex, why the Elliot Spitzer revelations are causing mass media stupidity, and the new threat of the “female agenda”.

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Links in this episode:

Anti-choicers protest at Horton premiere
Fox News on the teen girls and STDs
Fox News admits abstinence-only education is failing teen girls
Teen sex fear mongering
Conflating adultery and prostitution is misleading
Marc Rudov on The O'Reilly Factor

Transcript:

This week on Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Aspen Baker from Exhale. Also, news on how the CDC injected a sobering reality into the discourse about teen sex, why the Elliot Spitzer revelations are causing mass media stupidity, and the new threat of the "female agenda".

The release of a new movie has given the anti-choice community an opportunity to show off how bat leavings they are, and I couldn't be more delighted. The movie?

• insert Horton

Yes, Horton Hears A Who. It's a silly story about an elephant who has a speck of dust talking to him, and it has the refrain, "A person's a person no matter how small" in it. Very simple-minded anti-choicers with one-track minds have decided that this story speaks to them, man, and if it doesn't speak to you in precisely the way that they dictate, well, they're going to ruin your movie-going experience.

That's right, anti-choicers infiltrated the Hollywood premiere and yelled anti-choice slogans over the movie. They apparently don't like the idea of people having any kind of fun outside of their control, whether it's having sex or going to a silly children's movie. As for how much they love the children, well they don't love them enough to let them enjoy a movie in peace, now do they?

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The big, shocking recent news is that 1 in 4 teenage girls in America has a sexually transmitted infection. I was happy to see that the usually alarmist Fox News actually had responsible coverage on this story.

• insert fox news teenagers

I'm not even remotely surprised, since they measured HPV along with other diseases. HPV is so common that it's part of the reason that regular cervical cancer screening is recommended for all women over a certain age. Luckily, this Fox News report had a pediatrician on who had good advice about the whole thing. She blew right past the hand-wringing over abstinence and said that comprehensive sex education, vaccinating girls for HPV young before they start having sex, and regular check-ups with doctors who respect confidentiality is the key to prevention.

A Fox News affiliate made me even happier by letting the reporters point blank admit the truth, that abstinence-only education is failing our kids.

• insert fox news teenagers 2

The vast majority of it was HPV! Wow, we could almost completely wipe out the problem within a few years with an intense vaccination schedule for all young women. The timing of this study couldn't be better, could it? I mean, people are still all worried about this vaccine and boom! Here are some stats that show that we have an enormous problem but also the means to fix it right in hand. It's always nice to see that while the FDA has had to fight off incursions from anti-science, politically motivated conservatives, the CDC still manages to have some independence. When I first saw that the study seems only to address girls, I was a little miffed, but in the context of getting the nation's political will behind vaccinations of all girls well before they become sexually active, it makes a lot more sense that this would be the focus.

The strategy seems to be working. I looked up and down these here internets to find someone hyperventilating about this and suggesting that the problem is that we aren't yelling at girls about how evil sex is loudly enough, and there wasn't much there. For the sex-phobes, it's a real tail-between-the-legs moment. Even Concerned Women for America just lamely put up the press release without going into damn-those-sluts mode. Go, CDC!

But don't put that fainting couch away yet. The forces of pointless fear-mongering about sexuality never shut up for long. Witness this story that is pure awesomeness.

• insert spencer gifts

Yes, sex has made its way into suburbia. Tragedy no doubt follows close behind. But I quarrel with the idea that there were no sex toys or perverted gag gifts in Spencer's when we older people were in high school. I remember that stuff being there very well. I'm sure these outraged parents do, too. But you know, they're figuring that their teenage selves could have handled it, but their own kids are just different somehow.

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• insert aspen baker interview

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Oh god, shoot me now. In the wake of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, the "Today Show" had a program on why men cheat. Not why do men visit prostitutes, which is a much, much, much different thing. God, I'm sick of the two things being conflated. Prostitution is not an adulterous affair. Wherever you fall on your attitudes about it, it's worth noting that the point of prostitution is not just the sex, but the buying of it. Many men who go to prostitutes have no problem getting sex, even adulterous sex if that's their thrill. Conflating adultery and prostitution is immediately misleading.

But oh, that was just the beginning of the stupid. Let's start with Dr. Helen Fisher, spouting the just-so story about the randy and crazy male libido, that's so different than the female libido.

• insert today cheat 1

To her minor credit, she admits that women cheat, too, and then blows right past the fact that almost as many women cheat as men to offer this just-so story about why men cheat. Which is to spread their seed. Which doesn't explain why women cheat as much as men, because we have no seed to spread. A glaring flaw in the men are just born to cheat argument that never seems to get addressed.

If anything, I'd think women were more the born cheaters, because women cheat as much, despite living in a society where male cheating is normalized during programs like this and female cheating is pathologized.

As an avid fan of the trashy website True Hook-Up Confessions, I have to say that in all my perusing of the website, the secret need to spread seed hasn't come up in the cheating confessions. True, my study is unscientific, but at least I don't ignore the fact that to argue men and women are very different is seriously undercut when they behave exactly the same. From my unscientific survey, it seems men and women cheat for a bunch of different reasons. Some are punishing their primary partners for some reason. More seem to have self esteem issues and can't turn down the chance to get validated by a bunch of different partners. And some just seem to be amoral people who see no reason to allow the feelings of loved ones to get in the way of a cheap thrill. The psychologist Jeff Gardere basically says what I do, so we'll skip him while I gloat for a moment. Unfortunately, he doesn't address the entirely separate issue of why men go to prostitutes.

But Dr. Laura, of course, has to blame women. Because the first rule of wingnuttery is never blame a man when a woman is around.

• insert today cheat

Ah yeah, if your husband cheats, then it's because you weren't obliging enough at home. Don't know how that's supposed to help Mrs. Spitzer, who couldn't provide the thrill of seeing a prostitute, due to the already being the wife and all. Don't ask those hard questions! Just know that all women's problems disappear if they just submit to their god-given roles as servants to their husbands, sexual and otherwise.

Meredith Viera acts shocked that Dr. Laura took her bait and ran crazy with the women are to blame for everything, including men's behavior. Don't be so coy, Meredith. You knew that Dr. Laura was a raving misogynist.

• insert today

Interestingly, Dr. Laura doesn't seem to hold herself to these standards. She's out there doing career-y stuff, practically begging her husband to cheat by this argument. Wonder if she'd be happy to say out loud, "My husband cheats on me, or at least he should, because I'm too busy being on the Today Show to cater endlessly to his needs."

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, with Marc Rudov going on the O'Reilly Factor to bleat a brand new paranoid idea.

• insert female agenda

Fascinating that the question of whether America is ready for a male President doesn't come up. I love how "all the people" doesn't include the female half of all the people. Call me a Marxist radical feminist all you want, but I think that all the people includes women as well as men.