Daniel Reimold discusses the trend of college sex columnists. We say goodbye to Dr. Laura (though sadly not likely for long), and the debate over contraception in Denver schools shows how much sex panic has distorted a public health debate.

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Anger that immigrant women are getting prenatal care

Dr. Laura quits her show

Dr. Laura picks on male/female friendships

Dr. Laura on working moms

Dr. Laura blames men cheating on their wives

Colorado high school starts handing out birth control

Parents interviewed

Glenn Beck, lying again

On this episode of Reality Cast, Daniel Reimold will talk about the rise of the campus sex columnist.  Also, I review Dr. Laura’s career not just for the racism that ended her radio show, but for the misogyny that she got away with for years.  And a look at the reactions to a Colorado high school’s common sense provision of birth control to its students.

The racist and sexist meme of “anchor babies” hasn’t gone away, and it’s only getting stronger.  Now you have politicians exploiting the belief that immigrants don’t have a right to give birth in Rhode Island.

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Unsurprisingly, this politician, Peter Palumbo, a Democratic state representative from Rhode Island, is also anti-choice.  He’s against abortion.  But he’s also against women carrying pregnancies to term if he deems them the wrong race or nationality.  He doesn’t want women to terminate pregnancies.  But he doesn’t want them to have good health care while pregnant. These seem like contradictions, unless you assume a measure of just blatant misogyny.

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You  may have heard the news about Dr. Laura.  But if not, a quick recap: A black woman called in to Dr. Laura’s show to ask for advice on how to deal with her white husband’s racist family.  Dr. Laura accused her of being oversensitive, and then went on a rant where she used the n-word roughly 11 times, and then took a potshot at black people who voted for Obama.  This racist rant caused a firestorm of criticism, and this is how it ended. 

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Not that I think Dr. Laura will be going away forever, sadly.  She indicated that she has other kinds of media that she wants to pursue.  But I do think this is a good time to talk about how Dr. Laura has always been a prime piece of evidence against the conservative contention that they’re not misogynists, and that their desires to control female sexuality have nothing to do with sadism or misogyny.  I call it the nuh-uh! defense, and Dr. Laura is a prime example of how the right wing media just pushes mean-spirited, spiteful, prejudiced views of women in general.  And how anti-choice sentiment grows from that.

Amanda Hess did us all a favor by chronicling Dr. Laura’s long-standing viciousness against women that she peddled, usually by putting herself out as the exception to the rule.  For instance, Dr. Laura had no problem encouraging women to view other women as subversive sluts out to get your man, as she did when a woman wrote in freaked out because her boyfriend has a good female friend who is a platonic friend.

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This stuff might seem harmless on its surface, but this is the sort of thinking that puts women into a position where they start to want to control other women in order to reduce threats to themselves.  And once you buy into the other-women-are-the-enemy mentality, you’re primed to do things like think abortion should be banned and birth control regulated, so those scary other women that you think are on the prowl for your man get punished for their sexuality. 

Dr. Laura was also a major pusher of the narrative that retrograde gender roles are both what’s good and natural, but also all women’s fault anyway.

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This is a constant drumbeat of Dr. Laura’s, this notion that women don’t really know what they want.  That women say they want freedom and equality, but really they just want to be submissive to men.  This is the same logic used to push anti-choice policies.  Anti-feminists argue, over and over again, that the only reason women say they want things like access to reproductive health services or the right to sleep with who they want on their own terms is that those women are deluded.  And that they need to be deprived of their choices because they don’t know what they want.  Here we have Dr. Laura singing the same song when it comes to women who work while their husbands stay at home. Amanda Hess also pointed to a video where Dr. Laura suggested that a woman who worked while her husband was unemployed should take the baby to work with her rather than allow a man do what she thinks is degrading work of childcare.  

Dr. Laura was also in the habit of characterizing all disagreements between men and women as the result of women being childish and irrational.

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The notion that this is what women do as a matter of course, which is act irrational to test a man and pick fights just for the hell of it, is right in line with Dr. Laura’s usual assumptions about women.  This is what I mean by routine misogyny, and particularly in pushing the idea that women are too irrational to be allowed to make decisions. But even though Dr. Laura thinks women are too stupid to be trusted to make decisions, she also holds them responsible for everything, including male behavior.  She blamed women when their husbands cheat, for instance.

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I could go on, mentioning the way Dr. Laura told women they owed their husbands sex on the man’s terms no matter what, or the way she promoted the sexual double standard, or the various way she abused  her mostly female audience.  But you get the picture.  The point should be clear.  Conservatives swear up and down their misogynist policy ideas have no relationship to actual misogynist beliefs.  And yet, in right wing land, Dr. Laura was a major self help star, because her schtick was often pure misogyny.  You do the math.

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insert interview

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Another day, another story about anti-choicers doing everything they can to raise the abortion rate and the teenage childbirth rate.  This time, it’s in Colorado.  A school clinic  in Denver is starting to offer contraception services to kids grades 6 through 12 if their parents opt in to the clinic services.  This is the sort of thing that lowers the abortion rate, because if kids use condoms, they don’t get pregnant, and if they don’t get pregnant, they can’t have abortions.  So what do the anti-abortion fanatics have to say to this?

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We’re told, over and over by anti-choicers, that this isn’t about hating on sex, or women’s rights, but that they just love fetuses.  Of course, that doesn’t do a thing to explain why they freak out reliably every time someone female may have sex without their explicit permission, even if there are no fetuses in danger.  Or even when the woman in question takes measures to keep herself from ever having an abortion.  I’d say that perhaps they’re just full of it, and that their willingness to let girls get pregnant as punishment for sex tells the whole story. 

 The local CBS affiliate did a story where they interviewed angry parents, and all of them had rather incoherent, illogical reactions. 

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In other words, I don’t have an argument, just a gut reaction.  I don’t think there should be discussion about it, because I don’t have any coherent reasons for my point of view.  I call this the strict reactionary defense.

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Translation: my child’s sexuality makes me uncomfortable, and I’m hoping if I ignore it, it will go away.  You would think for parents who are made so uncomfortable by the topic that it would be a relief to have the school take that on for them.  As for the whole notion that later is always a good time for this talk, the student body at this school is all post-pubescent.  Many of them are having sex, and almost all of them are thinking about it a lot.  When is a good time to talk to kids?  After they turn up pregnant or with STDs?

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If they’re too young to want to be having sex, the mere fact that contraception is available isn’t going to make them change their minds.  The news reporters seemed interested in making the parents focus on the fact that 6^th graders go to this school, as if this suddenly means that the 12^th graders and their needs don’t count.  6^th graders aren’t, generally speaking, reading on a 12^th grade level. Does that mean that the library shouldn’t carry books for the seniors? 

Part of the problem here is the usual political problem where you get less credit for preventing a problem than fixing one.  You’re unlikely to thank the school if your daughter comes home not pregnant, because that’s just the status quo.  But in many cases, you should thank the school if that’s the outcome, especially if you’re like these parents and unlikely to be providing that help yourself.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, projection edition.  Glenn Beck wants to force women to carry babies to term against their will.  But he thinks of himself as a hero and a victim, so he has to make stuff up to confuse the reality of who is the one demanding oppression.

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His long, roundabout way, Beck is claiming the Obama administration is forcing doctors to do abortions.  This isn’t true.  A separate law than the one he’s talking about protects a doctor’s right to refuse abortions.  The Bush era law was much broader, protecting all health care workers who blocked access to contraception, vaccines, blood transfusions, you name it.  So Beck is lying, about everything except the fact he speaks fluent bullcrap.