In this week’s edition of Reality Cast, Amanda Marcotte shoots straight on the Larry Craig debacle, takes on purity balls and covers the rise of the religious right in Texas. Also: The universal nature of shyness.

Links in this episode of Reality Cast:
ABC News story on Larry Craig’s children
Joel Connelly article
Larry Craig 1982
Laura MacDonald article
Al Jazeera English
Hollywood Purity Ball

Transcript:

On this week’s edition of Reality Cast, we’ll have an interview with former opposition researcher Scott Henson about the rise of the religious right and a question from a reader about getting out and socializing when you’re open to both making friends and scoring dates.
But first, I’d like to plug the Sex Ed: Know And Tell contest. Rewire is holding the contest in conjunction with SIECUS and Advocates For Youth. To enter, you have to be between ages 13 and 24 and capable of making a short video, no longer than 3 minutes, about sex education by December 1st, which is World AIDS Day. Everything else is up to you. Want to mock abstinence-only education? Show examples of good sex education? Do an expose of your community’s lack of sex education? Go for it. Just upload your video on YouTube and send the link to [email protected] with the subject line Sex Ed: Know and Tell. First prize is $1,000, second is $750 and 3rd prize is $500.
Larry Craig is the gift that keeps on giving, at least for those of us out there trying to expose both the hypocrisy of the right and the injustice of socially conservative views. In sum, Craig can’t live by his own rules and that says worlds about why he can’t ask the rest of us to do so.
The attempts to deny the reality of this situation are verging on so pathetic that they’re almost not funny anymore. Almost. Sending Craig’s children Shea Howell and Michael Craig onto “Good Morning America” was both cringe-inducing and amusing. What is the point of trotting out his children? To prove that he has them? Maybe there’s some homophobes out there who think that if you can prove you’ve had sex with a woman in the past, you can’t be gay, but the reality-based community knows better. People who live in the closet will often go to great lengths to conceal their true desires, and if that means occasionally closing your eyes and thinking of men while you’re with your wife, so be it.
It almost seems cruel to mention that Craig’s children are his wife’s from a former marriage and that he adopted them when he married her in 1983. In fact, it is cruel. But what’s more cruel is pressuring your children to take a bullet for you on TV like this. I don’t doubt that he was good to these kids, but he crosses my line by making his indiscretions their problem and not his own.

It’s also worth noting that around the same time, according to Seattle columnist Joel Connelly, Craig spent a lot of time denying rumors that he was gay. In fact, in 1982, Craig denied having anything to do with a congressional page sex scandal, even though no one accused him of anything. From a 1982 ABC News report:
*clip of Craig denial*
He obviously corrected the unmarried problem within a year.
The kids repeated the unbelievable denials that Craig is issuing.
*audio of Craig children*
I’m the first to say that setting up vice cops in public bathrooms is a waste of taxpayer money, but that doesn’t mean that the cop didn’t know *exactly* what was going on here. The New York Times ran an excellent article by Laura MacDonald about the nature of bathroom pick-ups, based on research by social scientist Laud Humphreys in 1970. There’s two important points that MacDonald makes that need to be kept in mind during the coverage of this Craig debacle. First, the bathroom pick-up routine is pretty elaborate, and there’s little chance that Craig would have gotten as far as the swiping and toe-nudging part if he hadn’t gotten some encouragement from the officer.

From the article:
Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.
Second of all, the elaborate bathroom dance is the direct result of the closet. These bathroom cruising situations are all about secretive sex on the run, and the men seeking it definitely don’t want to be outed, so they have an elaborate ritual to make sure that they’ve eliminated any chance that they’ll come onto a straight man who might out them, or worse, attack them.
This story isn’t just about hypocrisy but why the closet itself has to go. Sneaking around having sex in bathrooms behind your wife’s back is irresponsible, doubly so if you’re not using protection. Craig probably thought he was maintaining his dignity all these years hiding in the closet, but now he knows that his dignity was precarious. It’s a far better thing to live with the dignity of being out, a dignity that no one can take away from you.

*interview with Scott Henson*
If you haven’t heard about the right wing trend of “purity balls”, please make sure you’ve got a seat under your butt before you continue listening to this podcast. Purity balls take the abstinence-only concept of a virginity pledge to its logical and hyper-sexist conclusion. Communities throw these dances for young women, most of whom are still in the “sex is icky” phase of their lives from about 8-14, and the girls attend with their fathers and pledge to their fathers that they’ll keep their hymens intact until marriage. There’s usually a ring placed on the wedding finger by the father in an exchange of vows that echoes the wedding ceremony, except the vows are about staying a virgin until the real wedding to a non-blood relative. When the pledger does marry, her husband is supposed to give the virginity ring back to the father. It’s not quite the same idea as giving dear ol’ dad a bloody sheet to prove that a virginity was taken on the honeymoon, but it’s in the same ballpark.
The overtones to this entire ritual are creepy, to say the least. Al Jazeera English had a program on the trend back in May and the father’s rather possessive view of his daughters crosses quickly into the creepy zone.
*purity clip one*
The video shows the date, with the girls dressed in pretty standard looking prom dresses. In fact, it looks basically like a prom, with the dancing and the picture-taking, except that the girls are mostly younger than prom-goers and of course the men are much, much older. Sending your husband off on a prom date with your daughter seems like it should bother a lot of women, but the wife in this clip doesn’t seem to care.

*purity clip two*

It seems like purity balls are almost beyond parody, but I should have had more faith in the creative impulse out there. Reader Javier alerted me to this performance art group called the Hollywood Youth Group that seems dedicated mainly to sending up the right wing movement. They are throwing a Hollywood Purity Ball on September 8th and 15th at the Bulgarian Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Tickets are $30 a piece, and for that you get some dinner, dancing and some serious mockery of the religious right.
The website alone is a hoot. You can check it out at hollywoodpurityball.com, where the motto is “Because once you pop, you can’t stop.” The pledges they’ve written are indistinguishable from the real-life pledges, and they swear that these testimonials they’ve collected are real quotes from girls that have been pushed into pledging their virginities to their fathers.

“I am committed to purity because I don’t want to give my future husband a used gift.”

“I took my virginity pledge because I want to be clean and don’t want to bring garbage into my marriage.”

“There is no better way to say ‘I love you’ to your spouse on your wedding night than by saying ‘Here, I saved this for you’.”

I really like the last one, because I can’t help but picture someone polishing her hymen up like an apple before, well not handing it over, but you get the idea.
Hello!
I’m a 31 year old just-post-op transgirl / lesbian. I have never in my
life dated; all of my relationships have been formed online, including
my marriage.
I’m in an open, poly relationship and my partner is encouraging me to
get out more and meet people, which I would really like to do. The
problem is, I don’t know how. I’m not attractive, and I struggle in
crowded places as my hearing gets overwhelmed.
I’d really like to work on raising my self esteem, in part by getting
out and proving that I /can/ meet people and find interest, but I just
don’t know where to start. I don’t drink, either, which also seems to
be a hindrance as most people recommend places like nightclubs and
bars; neither of which holds much appeal (Bars because of drinking,
nightclubs because they are so crowded and noisy).
So… Help! :)
Thanks!
The how-to-meet-people advice is pretty standard for everyone, whether they are vanilla and straight as an arrow or transgendered and polyamorous or anywhere on the scale—follow your interests and the friends will follow. That said, I don’t want to give you the same boring advice that everyone gives in this situation. I think we can get a little more specific.

In my experience, going to bars and nightclubs is a really lousy way to meet friends anyway, unless you are going for some other reason than just to go. I’ve never made a friend just sitting in a bar, really, even if I’ve talked to people. But if I go to hear a band? Well, then I have something in common with people to talk about, which is music. So really, it’s no different than meeting people doing any other fun activity.

Your shyness and hearing issues might have been much more of an issue in the days pre-internet, but I think you’ve got a golden opportunity to get out more. Meeting people through the internet used to be stigmatized, but now that more people are online and it seems more like real life, that stigma is really falling away. Get on some local message boards that cater to your hobbies and get to know people a little onscreen before you arrange to meet them in real life. Most online groups that have some sort of local presence eventually get together for face-to-face meetings eventually, especially if they share a hobby that you can do together. I can’t tell you how many feminists I know have created knitting groups through online meetings. Facebook is a good tool, since it has a lot of hobby groups and it organizes people by geography so you can see how many people live nearby at a glance.
If you’re meeting people for dating or sex online, you have a big advantage, too. You can take your time and feel out their personality before meeting in person. If sex is on the agenda, you can negotiate safe sex issues and expectations long before you sit down for some coffee. Internet dating has a reputation, of course. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet a couple princes, but I’ve found that kissing frogs is a good way to overcome some of your shyness as well. Just make it clear to anyone you date online that you’re partnered so that they don’t go in with the wrong expectations.
Please send mailbag questions to amanda at rhrealitycheck dot org. We do not dispense medical advice at the mailbag, so please direct medical questions to your health practioner.