Michigan’s new onslaught of anti-choice legislation gets attention….for the word “vagina”. Washington parents lose their minds over sex education. Also: Looking at the intersection of sex and disability.

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Radical feminist nuns?

Michigan bill discussed

Lisa Brown severely punished for saying “vagina”

Washington parents upset kids learn about sex from educators instead of other kids

Gretchen Carlson is tired of this sexist nonsense

On this episode of Reality Cast, Robert McRuer will be on to talk about sex and disability. The war over abortion in Michigan gets comical, and some parents in a small town in Washington want their kids to learn about sex from older kids on the playground instead of responsible adults.

Sister Simone Campbell of NETWORK, a progressive nun’s group, went on Stephen Colbert recently to talk about her battle with the Vatican, which is trying to discipline the nuns for concentrating on helping people instead of fighting abortion and gay rights.

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Colbert has really been doing an amazing job on his show of demonstrating that actual Catholics in the pews don’t agree with the Vatican’s radical agenda when it comes to reproductive rights and gay rights. Check out the whole interview!

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The state of Michigan is in an economic crisis. Many towns are basically in bankruptcy, its biggest city is becoming synonymous with the concept of city failure, and the unemployment rate is at 8.5%. Which is all certainly why the state legislature thinks it has all the time and energy in the world to devote to expensive attacks on a woman’s right to choose. The House passed one of what will probably be a series of bills that will eventually be folded into a super monster set of abortion regulations. It’s the single most aggressive attack on abortion rights I think I’ve ever seen, at least in my adult life. And the ambitions of the anti-choice legislators pushing this are huge, as was explained by pro-choice state representative Lisa Brown on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show.

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She’s referring to the 20-week abortion ban when talking about a challenge to Roe. This ban and all 20-week abortion bans are in direct violation of the Supreme Court’s trimester schedule guiding when states can restrict abortion. The hope is that they can get a lawsuit up to the Supreme Court level on this and get Roe completely overturned. I’m not entirely convinced that the legal strategy behind this anti-choice push makes a whole lot of sense, but that is absolutely their intention. Luckily, the Michigan governor appears to be in the process of quietly making that part of all this go away. It’s worth noting that anyone who thinks they can get rid of abortion is a fool. Time and time again, history has shown you can only end legal abortion, but that women who want to terminate pregnancies are going to find a way whether it’s legal or not.

Chloe from Feministing was also on the program, and she explained some of what this bill does:

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Those are the big points, but there’s actually even more stuff in there, including scripts to be read, a confusing requirement to screen for coercion, and a bunch of stuff about disposing fetal remains that I worry might not only be a pain for abortion providers, but any ob-gyn who works with miscarrying women. Unfortunately, it’s some times hard to really get attention for yet another state level assault on reproductive rights, because it’s just a constant thing now, and people are fatigued. To make it worse, since one side disingenuously claims that this is about “life”, it’s hard to get the larger public to understand that this is actually about sex panic and anti-feminist sentiment.

But we got lucky this time, because the Michigan Republicans who control the state House gave the game away, and made it clear exactly how much they hate female sexuality and female empowerment. They banned Rep. Lisa Brown from speaking again during House debates for a number of days. She went on a local news show to discuss it.

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That’s right, the word “vagina” is what got her banned. Once again, you have legislators who treat the vagina like it’s the scariest thing in the world, too scary to be said out loud even as you’re passing laws trying to take away an individual’s right to control her own. One of the male representatives actually said, and I quote, “What she said was offensive. It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.” In other words, he believes that vaginas are only an appropriate topic of conversation amongst men. No wonder he so desperately wants to take away a woman’s right to control her vagina. He doesn’t even think she should be able to hear, much less, speak of the thing that’s in her own body.

For reference, here’s the comment Rep. Brown made on the House floor.

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Anti-choicers know that it hurts their cause every time people catch on to the fact that they’re a bunch of woman-fearing prudes. They know they’re supposed to pretend to be all cool with sex while working to pass policies to punish women for having it. But they just can’t help themselves some times, and their internal panic at, say, hearing the word “vagina” just comes spilling out, exposing their real agenda for the whole world to see.

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Insert interview

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Today in the news of why we can’t have nice things, a handful of Washington state parents, and of course a bunch of anti-choice websites, are flipping out because an elementary school principal acted like a grown-up during a 5^th grade course in sex education. What happened was that school takes the kids aside and puts them through what sounds like a pretty standard issue, age-appropriate sex education course. They addressed HIV and STD prevention, and then opened up the floor to questions, which is something all responsible sex educators do. Your students are the best guide for knowing what they need to know; if they’re asking questions about it, they usually have a reason. In this case, a student asked about oral and anal sex, and the principal answered directly without starting a five alarm fire over it.

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As reported by one parent, her child remembered the so-called racy description as, “You take a man’s penis and you put it in your mouth – that’s what the girls do to the boys. … The boys spread the girls legs apart and put their mouths down on the vaginas.” What I want to know is how sexually deprived the adults must be to find that description to be “racy”. I found it un-arousing. That way of describing sex is like libido kryptonite. It’s so un-hot it was probably enough to keep the kids from sexual experimenting at least a year later than they would have otherwise.

But the way some parents are reacting, you’d think the school showed the girls porn movies. And yes, all outraged reports I read only talked about the girls, because no one seems to mind if boys hear this stuff.

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Setting aside the extreme offensiveness of equating knowing that sex exists to being raped, here’s what is so messed up about this guy’s outrage. A student asked the question. That should dispel the notion that these kids are floating along, blissfully unaware that genitals exist or that people use them to get pleasure. It seems part of the problem here is that many of the girls had been deliberately shielded from any sexual information by their parents, and so hearing about all this for the first time was upsetting. I get that. But a kid in the class asked the question, so what we can say for certain is that the knowledge that anal and oral sex exist is already in the student population. And kids love to brag about how much they know about grown-up stuff. So the parents have two options for how their daughters hear about this stuff. The girls can learn it from a responsible educator who uses unadorned, unarousing, factually accurate language. Or they can hear it from their peers, who are probably going to make it sound even more exotic and scary and traumatizing than the boring ol’ principal ever could. I’m a little unclear on exactly how the principal was supposed to answer this question, if the parents think accuracy was off the table. By making stuff up so that their kids get even more confused?

This was the point made by the superintendent, who is standing by the principal. 

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The reason that they hit them with this stuff before they leave elementary is they know that when the kids move up to junior high school, the playground chatter about sex rises exponentially. Already you have kids who know terms like “oral sex” and “anal sex”. The idea is to have a responsible adult clarify stuff to kids before they hear it from their peers. And they will; that’s not something you can stop. These parents really should ask if they want their daughters to learn what sex is from the principal or from an older kid at their junior high school.

One more thing is important here; some parents complained not that there was sex ed, but that it talked about non-procreative acts. In other words, they said that they’d be fine talking about sex as long as no one mentioned that people do it for pleasure, or that it should be fun for you. But that is dangerous in and of itself, as Dan Savage recently explained on his podcast.

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I realize a lot of parents think shielding your kids from knowing about sex is the best way to prevent them from becoming traumatized. But in reality, ignorance isn’t bliss. Ignorance makes you an easy target for those who want to hurt and abuse you. If you want to protect girls from sexual trauma, arm them with information.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, things get real at Fox News edition. Gretchen Carlson finally got fed up of the constant on-air sexist “jokes” from her male colleagues and walked off the set at Fox.

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It was played off as a joke, but the fact remains that there’s a lot of tension at Fox between its overt anti-woman agenda and the number of high profile pundits and anchors on the network that are female.