David Wiley speaks about the state of sex education in Texas. Also: how the economy affects family planning, and how "sexting" is "stupid".

 

 

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Links in this episode:

Female condoms

Family planning and the economy

Economy affecting vasectomy rates

Sexting!

OMG sexting!

Girls and ACLU prevail

O’Reilly hate-mongering

Dr. Tiller vindicated

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing David Wiley about his and the Texas Freedom Network’s report on sex education in Texas.  I’ll also be taking a look at how the economy is affecting family planning and what to make out of this controversy over sexy text messages.

The female condom was treated like the red-headed stepchild of contraceptive devices from its inception.  Even though it has, since it came out, found a home mostly amongst those who think it works better for anal sex than a regular condom, it’s mostly been ignored with regards to its original purpose, as a way to make penis in vagina intercourse safer.  But redesigns and distribution are causing people to rethink it.  

• female condom *

Despite the lukewarm reaction to the female condom in the United States, clearly many people in other countries are big fans, or you wouldn’t see this sort of reaction.

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We’re far enough along into the fallout from economic collapse to start to see the effect it has on family planning choices, and the news is roughly what you’d expect, but to a degree that surprises even me.  NPR did a report on how the economic strain is putting more women in situations where they’re seeking lower priced contraception care and are also more interested in abortions.

• economic 1 *

They also interviewed Steve Trombley, the head of Chicago’s Planned Parenthood system.  They’ve seen a spike in the number of women seeking abortion.

• economic 2 *

The National Network of Abortion Funds is also seeing a 50% spike in calls from women seeking the money to pay for abortion, transportation costs, and child care necessary to get abortions.  This should be incredibly alarming, because most abortion funds can only provide help to a percentage of women who call in the first place, and they have to triage in a fairly brutal way, turning down many women who do need help.  To make it worse, the amount of money available for non-profits like abortion funds is also drying up.  The lack of money available to women who are trying to abort as soon as possible  means that many of these women end up pushing off their abortions into the second trimester while they get the money together.  If you are bothered by second trimester abortions, then, you should support government funding making early abortions available to all.  

Unfortunately, NPR makes the baffling choice to interview some disingenuous idiots at a crisis pregnancy center, a place that exists primarily to guilt trip women about abortion, though they’ll put up a façade of caring if they have to.

• economic 3 *

I’m surprised she didn’t bruise herself patting herself on the back for just now realizing that maybe people need to feed and clothe and diaper babies.  Before anyone rushes out to praise this pregnancy center for this, I’d advise you to remember that a single box of diapers and a couple bottles of food do not a healthy baby make.  If these CPCs put half as much money into actually providing for poor women with babies that they do into building more fake clinics and buying more ultrasound machines, they could actually do some good.  And shame on NPR for pretending that the ultrasounds at pregnancy centers are good for anything.  They don’t do them to ascertain how healthy the pregnancy is.  They’re not using them for actual medical care at all.  It’s fetal photography, and women who go in to these places don’t get actual attention from a real doctor.

Even I have to admit I was shocked to hear about this enormous spike in women seeking abortion, which is apparently being caused by a combination of more women rejecting pregnancy and more women getting pregnant by accident because they decided to cut back on contraceptive costs.  As an economic indicator, it’s a disturbing one, not because women are having less babies, but because people are that down on their luck.

But it’s not just women who are affected.  

• economic 4 *

It’s an interesting theory that the economic crunch is affecting vasectomy rates, and quite likely in light of the spike in demand for female-centered family planning.  But if vasectomy rates have been steadily rising for years, I suspect that has a lot to do with feminism, too.  Feminism is all about men sharing responsibility for family planning, and therefore it’s reasonable for a man to get sterilized after years of women being in charge of contraception.  Also, vasectomies are less invasive than female sterilization, so men who choose it are, in essence, saying that women shouldn’t have to take on more risk just because we’re women.

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* insert interview *

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Did you know that hormone-laden teenagers like to see each other naked?  Did you know that they have cell phones?  Did you know that these two horrific facts have come together into a cesspool of terror?

• scary music *

Yes, the mainstream media is trying to stoke a full-blown sex panic over the fact that teenage kids aren’t stupid and have clued into the sexual possibilities inherent in the seemingly private but distant form of communication known as the text message.  You can use photos, too!  Cue the scolding mother figures of news programs.   

• sexting 1 *
• sexting 2 *

"They" don’t call it anything.  The implication is that teenage kids came up with this term "sexting", but I suspect that the media types looking to maximize the scariness of the story did.  Because it’s not enough to conflate sex and technology in hopes that people panic.  You also need to imply that there’s scary new slang.  I’m reminded of the anti-drug movies of the 50s and 60s that were soaked in goofy slang to maximize how scary youth culture is.

• acid *

The problem is that this sort of hysteria is leading to actual bad results for kids that, while maybe not doing the smartest thing in the world, are not malicious criminals or menaces to society.  Overzealous, most likely misogynist, prosecutors are using misinterpretations of child pornography laws to reclassify what you or I would consider a normal teenage girl having a peer-appropriate sex partner into a pedophile.  That girls who didn’t hurt a soul are being treated like child molesters doesn’t strike our network anchors as a major issue, though.  Not when there’s teenage sexuality to freak out about.

• sexting 3 *

Catch that?  According to Katie Couric, it’s bad if your teenage daughter gets thrown in jail and labeled as a sex offender for showing a picture of herself in her bra to her boyfriend, but it’s even worse if a bunch of people see you naked.  Given the choice between going to prison and being excluded from jobs and neighborhoods for the rest of my life and a few people gawking at my boobs, I’m going to take the latter, but then again, I don’t have the proper amount of self-hatred for being female-bodied.  Good, proper women would rather lose their freedom, apparently, than have anyone else know that you’ve got nipples.

The families of three girls in Pennsylvania did not actually think being outed as sexually active was worse than going to jail and being treated like a sex offender, and they actually, with the help of the ACLU, shut down an attempt to punish the girls by treating them as sexually violent criminals because they took some extremely soft nudie shots to show to boyfriends.  

What I thought was interesting was that the D.A. that actually thought it was appropriate to treat teenage girls taking pictures of themselves as if it was child molestation was himself a really creepy dude.

• sexting 4 *

Luckily, common sense and the girls prevailed, but the whole situation chills me to the bone, because so few people in the media were willing to see this situation for what it is, which is persecution of teenage girls for being sexually active.  Truth is, it’s just a high tech version of flirting, and the day we consider adolescent flirting to be sick and criminal is the day that we’ve just given up even pretending to be a decent society.

Not that I think sending these pictures is a good thing.  Boys are often inclined to raise their reputations by making fun of girls who sent them the pictures and showing off to friends.  But you can’t compel girls to consider this danger by shaming them for being sexual.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, keep lying O’Reilly edition.  This one is an old but a goodie in light of recent events.  

• george tiller *

A better nickname would be Tiller The Lady Saver or Tiller The Yet Again Acquitted Of All Phony Charges.  Because anti-choice nuts have once again brought up a bunch of phony charges that Tiller is only pretending to save women’s lives and health when he performs late term abortions.  And once again a court demonstrated that George Tiller does not break the law. The harassment of George Tiller should remind listeners how much anti-choicers hate women.  Without his help, many of his patients would lose their health or their lives.  I guess that sick and dead women is exactly what the anti-choice movement wants, or they’d leave Dr. Tiller alone.