Jessica Valenti talks about her new book "The Purity Myth". Also, abstinence-only myths on the "Today Show" and Plan B for 17-year-olds.

 

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Wendy Wright vs. Cecile Richards

Plan B doesn’t work unless you use it

Jessica Valenti on the "Today Show"

Joe Sonka calls out Lakita Garth

Who is Mathematica?

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Jessica Valenti about her new book "The Purity Myth".  And to make it complete, I’ll also have a segment about the abstinence cheerleading that met her when she went on the "Today Show".  Also, is Plan B good for teenage girls?

Last weekend, we lost one of the funniest and most daring TV actors of our time, Bea Arthur.  She was a feminist, a comedian, a Broadway star, and the star of two great sitcoms, "Maude" and "The Golden Girls".  In 1972, her character Maude underwent an accidental pregnancy and for what seems to be the first and last time on TV, a character did what countless women have since. She terminated and didn’t feel bad about it.

• maude *

It’s depressing how optimistic they were in this year before Roe v. Wade, thinking that the stigma against abortion would be gone soon.  Or was gone already!  Unfortunately, the loathing for women’s freedom wasn’t overcome that quickly.

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A court decision has forced the FDA to approve over the counter emergency contraception sales for 17-year-olds, not just women 18 and over.  You would think that anti-choice nuts wouldn’t actually worry too much about what amounts to giving girls a whole year of being able to avoid pregnancy if a condom breaks, which doesn’t seem like that big a deal, even if you support mandatory childbirth for sexually active teenagers, which is the functional opinion of the anti-choice movement.  

Of course, the first thing Fox News did was lie about how emergency contraception works.

• plan b 1 *

Look, I’ve seen pro-choicers make this mistake, too, and I’ve made it, but please, it’s not true.  Emergency contraception works by suppressing ovulation.  What a lot of people don’t get is that if you’ve already ovulated when you have sex, odds are the egg will be dead by the time sperm get there.  Fertilization usually occurs if the egg releases a day or so after you have sex, which means that the pill works by making sure there is no egg releasing.  

The only reason that anti-choicers oppose emergency contraception is that it prevents unwanted pregnancy, and unwanted pregnancy is what they think you have coming to you for being an evil fornicator.  Full stop.  If it’s a matter of "life", then the age of the girl taking it should be irrelevant.  But it’s about teenagers and sex and panicking, which is clear from the anchor’s reaction on CNN.  

• plan b 2 *

He’s right that’s the upshot.  But he’s wrong to suggest this is about abortion and who is for and against it.  Since Plan B prevents the cause of abortion, which is unintended pregnancy, people who oppose it clear aren’t anti-abortion. They’re just anti-sex. They’d like it if they could punish you even more by taking abortion rights from you, but the main thing is making girls pay for having sex.

They had on Cecile Richards from Planned Parenthood, who explained that she supports measures to prevent teen pregnancy.  Wendy Wright can’t just come out and say, "Well, yeah we want more teenage girls to be pregnant," and instead claims that the pill doesn’t work.

• plan b 3 *

I love how anti-choicers will say that contraception is wrong and that it doesn’t work anyway.  That’s the sort of incoherence that makes wingnut watching such a pleasure. I hunted around a little to see where this particular lie is coming from, and found Concerned Women for America linking a few studies showing that making the drug available hasn’t yet dramatically reduced the abortion rate.  They’re clearly hoping their followers don’t actually read the study, because what they found was the Plan B isn’t working because women aren’t using it.

So follow Wendy Wright’s logic.  Plan B isn’t working because women aren’t using it, so clearly what needs to happen is that we need to make sure that women don’t use it.  Because abortion is bad, except that Wright will clearly oppose any measure to reduce the abortion rate if someone has sex and gets away with it.  

Luckily, Cecile Richards finally gets some truth out on national TV.

• plan b 4 *

Yes, it is true.  Concerned Women for America reliably takes every opportunity to oppose any kind of health care for sexually active women, at least if they’re young or unmarried. Wright lied during this segment, pretending at one point to be motivated by wanting more medical oversight, when of course Concerned Women doesn’t care about women’s health, which is why they’ve been at the forefront of the fight against the HPV vaccine.  If there’s a negative consequence of sex, be it unplanned pregnancy, STDs, or cancer, then Concerned Women for America is consistently for it.

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• insert interview *

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As you could tell from the interview, Jessica Valenti went on the "Today Show" to be harangued by Kathie Lee Gifford about her pro-slut position. They didn’t just have Jessica on, they also pitted her against Lakita Garth, a virginity promoter who claims to have waited until she was 36 to have sex on her wedding night.  Since we got to hear from Jessica during the interview, I thought I’d use this segment to do a little debunking of Garth’s claims.  

• purity 1 *

You know, it’s entirely possible that some of the people who brag about waiting until 36 or whatever fall on the very low side of the sex drive spectrum.  I don’t know if that’s true of Garth, but it was, then she’s being really unfair.  You aren’t morally superior because your biology made sex less interesting to you.

One thing for sure, that she waited until 36 shows how unreal anti-choice expectations are.  That’s a 23 year gap between puberty and the first time you have sex.  That’s way too much to ask of women with normal to high sex drives, and for what?  So they don’t make Kathie Lee Gifford uncomfortable?

• purity 2 *

She says that abstinence-only isn’t about putting down girls who do have sex and then immediately starts claiming that sex prevents you from having an education, having wit, having smarts, having a life.  How is that not putting down sexually active women, to claim that they’ve shut themselves off from being people?  

Abstinence-only programs routinely disparage young women who have sex.  They’re told that they’re impure, that they’re damaged goods, and that they won’t be able to have a healthy marriage.  If there was any truth to this, it would be worth warning them.  But the truth is that 95% of Americans have pre-marital sex, and marriage is not going anywhere.  It’s just a lie concocted to put sexually active young women down.  

Jessica points out that abstinence-only programs don’t work.  Garth’s reply is incoherent.

• purity 3 *

The KKK?  Really?  Actually, Joe Sonka clarified who she was talking about.  Mathematica is a respected independent research group who doesn’t really have a dog in this fight.  They aren’t, as Garth implies, a group organized around making sure that women have lots of sex.  They’re just a public health group, and their interest is health.

Worse is the idea that the only people we should listen to are anti-choice nuts.  Sorry, but the Christian right is not who you should look to when asking for standards of scientific evidence.  They will lie in a heartbeat to push their agenda, which is why they continue to claim that abortion causes breast cancer and depression, even though that’s been thoroughly debunked.  Hell, abstinence-only materials usually have lies in them, like when they claim condoms don’t work.  Why should we trust them to evaluate the programs honestly when they can’t even be honest inside the programs?

And now let’s hear from Kathie Lee Gifford, who misses the point completely.

• purity 4 *

God, so many kinds of wrong.  The notion that you give yourself to someone when you have sex with them.  Sorry, but I don’t recall having to hand over the title to my life just because I had sex with someone.  The notion that you don’t respect yourself if you have sex.  I guarantee she wouldn’t say that if they were talking about boys.  And what’s this about getting us to agree to wait until 18?  Hell, wait until you’re 40.  Wait until aliens land on earth. Wait until the next presidential administration.  I’ll happily agree to say any meaningless thing, if anti-choicers would acknowledge that just making demands doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you, because guess what?  They’re not going to listen.

Look, most kids just tune out abstinence-only stuff, because kids aren’t stupid and they know that it’s all lies and stupidity.  But even the kids who appear to buy in by getting rings and making pledges have sex at roughly the same time.  You can preach, pledge, whine, cajole, and generally sound like an idiot until you’re blue in the face, and kids are going to keep doing it.  So what’s there to agree to?

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the super strawman question edition  This one is from the Laura Ingraham show.  

• laura *

One of my favorite things about the hysteria over female sexuality is how many nuts seem convinced that you’re either a virgin or you take all comers.  Well, favorite until  I realize that’s the logic behind bringing someone’s sexual history into a rape trial to insinuate that if the victim had sex before, she had no right to say no to anyone ever again.