Fundamentalist dating videos, O'Reilly gets too familiar with Dennis Miller, your cervix in documentary form, and Chris Matthews becomes a full wingnut, all on this holiday edition.

Links in this episode:

Pregnant women's backs
O'Reilly teen sex panic
Sexual harassment in opera form
At Your Cervix
Teaching pelvic exams
Pelvic exam research
Chris and the castrati

Transcript:

This week on Reality Cast, I'll be looking at the horror of Focus on Family dating videos, granting Chris Matthews wingnut status, and looking at your cervix in documentary form. Also, is Bill O'Reilly coming onto Dennis Miller?

If you've ever marveled at overloaded pregnant women and wondered how it is they don't just topple over, another piece of the puzzle has been solved. Anthropologists have recently discovered that the lower vertebrae in women are suited for the backwards-shifting pregnancy lean we all know and make somewhat unfunny jokes about. Basically the researchers found that a woman's lower back curve extends across three vertebrae, whereas a man's only extends across two.

Anti-feminists are always accusing feminists of refusing to admit there's differences between men and women, and this segment proves how wrong they are. I full well admit that women can lean back farther than men because of our hinky spines. I just don't admit that means we get less rights.

******************

Today on the O'Reilly Factor: People younger than you are having sex and not even sending you the pictures! Time to panic in the streets, no doubt.

This teen sex panic has a certain age and incident specificity to it that's what you might call suspicious.

*insert o'reilly panic one*

Notice how he implies that the city of Syracuse, NY is overrun with 11-year-old hussies with camera phones and low morals? It's a dark and sick place, the imagination of Bill O'Reilly, what with the parades of naked middle schoolers marching around, waving fancy gadgets in the air and just generally being disapproval bait.

Turns out that O'Reilly is playing a little loose with the truth here. I know! I too feel that my innocence had been violated. Nicole at Crooks and Liars did a little digging around and found, surprise surprise, it was one incident of one 11-year-old. One incident does not a civilization-destroying trend make. I dare say one incident is evidence mostly of one girl playing at being a bigger girl than she is.

O'Reilly had Dennis Miller on the show to do what he usually does, play the part of the outraged conservative with noticeable boredom. He might as well just outright say, "Yeah, yeah, that's outrageous, end of the world, sign of the apocalypse, can I have my paycheck yet?"

*insert o'reilly panic two*

Yadda yadda Clinton got a blow job and you didn't, thus the end of the world. The Clenis is to blame for everything. What does an ad about Viagra starring middle aged men have to do with 11-year-olds having sex? I mean, in the real world, not in the sick fantasies of O'Reilly or any of his producers. My hunch here is that Dennis Miller wrote that lame, outdated joke about the Viva Viagra ad, figuring that O'Reilly was gonna make him talk about sex somehow, and he could just piggyback it onto whatever. That it has no bearing on the subject at hand didn't really matter.

But it gets even creepier, as O'Reilly starts to talk about Dennis Miller as a half-naked 11-year-old humping machine.

*insert o'reilly panic three*

Answer slowly, Dennis. Make it sexy. And for god's sake, if your dad just sent you to your room for punishment, make up something a little more exciting. Spankings, paddles, the belt, the whole bit.

You think I'm kidding, but I have to remind you that this is the same Bill O'Reilly that got sued by a former employee for sexual harassment because he'd phone her up and make alarming and disgusting propositions. Which reminds me—there is now a clip out of an opera singer singing the transcript of O'Reilly's harassing phone calls.

*insert oreilly song*

Quick summary translation: O'Reilly is telling her that he'd like to sneak up behind her in the shower and massage her back and her boobs with a loofah, which he thinks might be called a falafel. If you go to the link on our transcript page, you can watch the whole thing, with captions.

*********************

Since this is a holiday week, I thought I'd give my hard-working interview subjects a break and skip the interview and instead just do something fun. And what's more fun than watching videos from Focus on Family's webmagazine for young people, Boundless.org? These videos are quite educational, if I do say so myself. The first one is about a couple on a date, or she thinks it's a date but he doesn't. Because sex and dating are for girls, you know.

The couple is talking, but we're privy to what they're thinking.

*insert boundless one*

*insert boundless two*

Lesson one: Women are pathetic and desperate, and guys are up to their ears in pussy. Therefore, ladies, pipe down about all these rights and stuff and just take what you can get.

The second video is about how it's really bad to venture the subject of marriage with a man, though he of course will never bring it up because he would basically rather die than get married. I'm not sure how marriage happens with these traditional Christian couples, if this is actually a representation of how they behave.

*insert boundless three*

The alarms going off are in his head. She's talking about marriage and we know that girlie stuff like love and marriage and stuff is just emasculating! He must make a joke to make it clear that he does not know what she's talking about, because real men don't know what marriage is or what it entails.

But what I love is how he then weasels out of the discussion with a half-concealed threat dressed up in religious language.

*insert boundless four*

In other words, Jesus says that it's a man's right to keep a woman hanging around, desperate and wanting and afraid to ever bring up what she's wanting because it'll be snatched away forever if she does. I'm not sure how this is supposed to sell marriage-eager women on the idea of shutting their traps about it. From this perspective, there's no reason whatsoever for a man to propose to a woman who is obediently quiet about it. The alarms made it clear that men hate the idea of girlie stuff like marriage. And of course, once you actually propose to a woman, you lose that power you have over her to keep her quiet and waiting and hanging around afraid to speak up for fear she'll run you off. Once you actually ask her to marry you, then you've given up the cookie, you know? So I don't get why this video is supposed to be convincing.

All this video did was make me more committed to the feminist view of relationships, where you get into them because everyone involved is wanting to. Screw these headache-inducing power games.

****************

Thanks to the reader who sent me the website for the upcoming documentary At Your Cervix, which seems to mostly be out there to promote gynecological teaching assistants, who are women who help teach medical students how to perform exams using their own bodies as aids. I think these programs are pretty cool, but I'm a bit alarmed at the introduction to the topic from the trailer.

*insert cervix one*

That's a pretty alarming claim, in all honesty. I was skeptical so I looked around and found that yep, the practice of teaching pelvic exams on unconscious women, often without their consent was standard. The University of Michigan did an expose on the practice and how it degrades the students' opinions on the importance of consent, so maybe there's more caution now around the practice. Still, I'm wary, because the expose was only published a few months ago, and it's not like change is that rapid.

The documentary proposes an alternative to working on unconscious women and risking the chance of not getting consent or teaching the students to take informed consent lightly. Yep, gynecological teaching assistants.

*insert cervix two*

When I first read about this particular job, I thought it sounded like a really cool job, showing med students how to perform cervical exams on your own body. In fact, I still think it's a really cool job, but you know, I suspect you have to do a lot of training. But for those of you out there who want to get more in touch with your body, and you don't care if a bunch of people look at your cervix all at once, it's a neat way to make a little extra money. That and help the next generation of gynecologists be much better at their jobs.

*******************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. It's with great sadness that I must officially declare that Chris Matthews has crossed the line from a mere journalist with scary psychosexual issues to an outright wingnut, but his recent comments about the insta-emasculation that will befall a man who supports the sole female candidate in the presidential race pushed him over the line.

*insert your balls will fall off*

People have been begging for more forms of male birth control, so Matthews is being a bit irresponsible here. Warning to the men out there: You will not actually become instant eunuchs if you endorse or support Hillary Clinton. Science has shown no link between supporting female candidates and having your balls fall off. So, keep sticking with non-electoral forms of birth control, regardless of who you support for office.