Why you should go to Feminism 2.0, why men should get the HPV shot, why the hooking up paranoia is anti-woman and anti-health, and why Coulter is reaching the end of her limits.

 

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Links in this episode:

Femident

Gardasil for men?

Feminism 2.0

A bit of hysteria

Coulter screeches more misogyny

 

On this week’s episode of Reality Cast, Shireen Mitchell on an exciting new conference in February and why you should go.  Also, should we extend the HPV vaccine to men and is hooking up paranoia going mainstream, and if so, doesn’t that mean that Kathy Lee Gifford is going to be forced to call you a slut to your face?

I’m ambivalent about the Flight of the Conchords.  You can’t give most of their songs more than one listen, but you know, that first listen is often hilarious.  Like their recent satire of the trend of taking every single product, no matter how ungendered and mundane, and making a special brand just for women.  They’re introducing a new product: Femident.  The toothpaste made just for your delicate lady teeth.  

• femident *

Of course, Lysol used to be promoted as both a mouthwash and a douche, so this isn’t too far off. Now, of course, it’s something you clean the floors with.  So much for feminine delicacy.

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If you ever want to freak yourself out, do some kind of search on YouTube for information about HPV and the HPV vaccination Gardasil.  The quacks have completely taken over.  The majority of the stories on the front page when you do a simple search are about how the vaccine is an elaborate hoax.

* hpv vaccine 1 *

That’s the first video you get if you search for "hpv vaccine" on YouTube.  Here’s another popular search:

* hpv vaccine 2 *

That one was illustrated with a cartoon that shows a bunch of adorable little girls being marched into a building that says "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" with the word "whore" crossed out and replaced with the word "vaccine".  So that’s right wing logic for you.  Because the vaccine is about preventing an STD that means that getting it automatically makes you a whore.  And also that it doesn’t work.  And that it probably causes cancer or makes you go blind.  I’m beginning to wonder if they think that girls masturbate with the vaccine.  

In all seriousness, it’s scary how this vaccine is being understood by large chunks of the population as automatically contaminating because it combines women with the idea of sex, and that alone causes panic.  Once again, I’m baffled by this, because right wingers know full well that pretty much all women have sex with someone at some point in their lives.  Hell, Dennis Prager at Townhall wrote a two part series on why women should give it up whenever their husbands demand it.  So I can only conclude that this is pure misogyny, because it’s about calling women whores if they have any sex at all at any point in time, and expecting that they will have sex, and punishing them for it.  You deserve disease because you’re a woman, I guess.

Anyway, why was I looking up info on Gardasil?  Ironically, I was looking for information on extending the shot to men.  Merck is asking the FDA to approve the shot for young men ages 9 to 26.  I turned to a video of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who at the time of this recording is Obama’s favored candidate for the surgeon general position, for the answers to the question of why they haven’t approved the vaccine before.

• hpv vaccine 3 *

Simple enough reason, and Merck has addressed these concerns by showing that it’s been tested in young men and found to be effective in that group as well.  So, what’s the benefit to young men?

• hpv vaccine 4 *

So it prevents genital warts, which should be reason enough in my mind, but it also can prevent very rare forms of cancer.  But let’s face it—the main reason to vaccinate men is for those so-called indirect health benefits for women.  Men who don’t have HPV don’t spread it to women, and therefore those women don’t get cancer.  Vaccines are about herd immunity as much as individual immunity, so let’s do it, right?

Unfortunately, I suspect we’re going to face some opposition from people who don’t want to vaccinate their boys just to help some unknown women from the future.  So it’s time to start a campaign pointing out that saving women’s lives benefits men, too.  If I had a son, I wouldn’t want him to grow up and get married only to see his wife die of cervical cancer and leaving him widowed.  And that should be the message we’re putting out there, reminding people that care for others is care for ourselves.

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• insert interview *

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Hand-wringing about the so-called hook-up culture used to be mainly a trope in the right wing media, who preferred to blame feminism for these horrible young women who have sex with young men just because they want to, and who don’t use their vaginas as a token to be traded for marriage or at least commitment.  But as we all well know, right wing tropes generally end up in mainstream media given enough time and energy, and this is true, it seems, of the panic over the hook-up culture.  Hysteria about college aged women having casual sex has infected the New York Times and now, of course, the Today Show.

• hooking up 1 *

So already you go in with the assumption that dating is so great and casual sex that may or may not lead to relationships is so not.  This is an argument from tradition, a classic logical fallacy.  Yeah, previous generations had all these rules about hoops that young people had to go through for sex.  First, it was marriage.  Then it’s dating.  Now you’re free to do what you like.  Are older ways necessarily better?  In the past, girls who used contraception were considered sluts and rape was pretty much legal if you were on a date.  So obviously, older doesn’t automatically mean better.

• hooking up 2 *

Once again, what you’re seeing here is that the reason that the supposed hook-up culture is so threatening is because it’s seen as a threat to the transactional model of heterosexual mating.  Or, to be more clear, people tend to think sex is women’s bargaining chip to get other things like relationships from men.  This presumes that women don’t like sex as much as men, for one thing, and for another thing, it presumes that men really don’t want relationships.  It’s an inherently misogynist assumption, because it’s built on the idea that women are so personally loathsome, so hard to put up with, such a drag on a man’s life that he can’t actually be compelled to care about a woman just because he does.  No, she purchases his love with sex.  To which I ask, if you have to buy it, is it love?  

• hooking up 3 *

Okay, women don’t outnumber men 10 to 1 in cities.  There is a slight discrepancy between single men and women, but who knows if it stays if you take widows out of the equation.  But the idea that women are giving into hooking up because men hold all the cards because of a numbers game is pure silliness.  Believe me.  I live in Austin, which is one of the few cities in the country where single men outnumber single women, and casual sex that may or may not lead to dating is popular here as well.  

Conservatives who were fussing about this have it half right.  It may well be a product of feminism.  Where they’re wrong is to suggest that stupid women have been misled by evil feminists into behaving in ways that make them unhappy.  I think it’s more that feminism has given women the idea that sex is or should be a mutually enjoyable activity, and so the idea that sex is something you hang onto and only trade it in for commitment is repulsive to more and more women.  We’re trying to move beyond the idea that all women are essentially prostitutes of one stripe or another, who trade sexual favors for payment.  Nothing against actual prostitutes, of course.  But they’re the ones who are honest about it.

• hooking up 4 *

What the scare tactic people want you to believe is that as women gain more economic and social and even sexual power, we somehow are losing power because the universe wants to punish women or some such thing like that.  Don’t believe it.  Intellectually honest people will admit that hooking up has clicked upwards because women don’t feel like they have to artificially restrain themselves when they want to have sex with a guy.

Earlier in this segment, the hosts basically admit that the idea of the slut is the way to stop the hook-up culture, and I was pleased.  Because that’s exactly what the panickers are trying to do, to bring back the ability of a community to destroy a woman’s good reputation if she has sex with too many men or she isn’t clingy enough or just for the hell of it, in all honesty.  But few things are more dangerous to women’s  health and well-being than the double standard, where guys who have sex are studs, but women who do are sluts.

The idea of the slut justifies both sexual violence and depriving women of basic health care.  When having sex is constructed as a sin or even a crime that women commit, then, for instance, if a woman is raped, then she’s blamed and not the rapist.  In last week’s episode, Jaclyn Friedman talks about this at length.  The fear of the slut also justifies limiting women’s access to contraception and abortion, under the idea that it’s so bad to have sex that we have to make sure you’re punished if you do it.  

If the trade-off is between a few girls having broken hearts because someone they liked rejects them even if they have sex with them and a society that takes rape seriously as crime and believes that women should have full reproductive rights, I’ll take the latter every time.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts.  Skeletor has a new book out, and that means she’s doing the talk show circuit.  Which means, of course, that we have to include her being mean for no other reason than the sheer joy of being mean.  

• coulter monster *

I’ve been seeing some online debate about what she’ll have to do next to stay shocking.  Consensus is that she’ll have to drop the n-word.  But she could also, in my opinion, go avant garde in the haterade department.  I predict next she writes a book accusing puppies and kittens of undermining Judeo-Christian values by softening people up and feminizing them through cuteness.