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Cats vs. cat calls

Gilbert school board acting out

Arizona Honors Biology

Maddow’s first segment on Gilbert

Maddow’s second segment on Gilbert

Virgin Coaches

Clips from Virgin Coaches

Pat Robertson is going off again

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a researcher will explain how the HPV vaccine is linked to lower cancer rates even before its protective effects kick in. Textbook wars in Arizona show that abstinence-only is not completely dead, and a new show on TLC tries to pretty up the abstinence-until-marriage ideology.

From Feministing, this L.A.-based group of high school girls from a group called ImMEDIAte Justice made an extremely cute video calling for more cats and fewer cat calls, by rewriting the lyrics to that Lil Jon song that somehow never gets old.

• Cat call *

I recommend checking the video out, just to see the special effects magic that makes it look like actual cats are coming out of the mouths of teenage boys attempting to cat call.

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Support for abstinence-only education is in a freefall, which might lead some to believe this issue is over and we don’t need to worry about it anymore. But verily I say unto you, the religious right is a zombie movement and they will continue rising up and trying to push their discredited agenda over and over again, in any way they can. If that involves acting like outright fascists who are literally destroying books, then they will do that. Which is what is happening in the town of Gilbert, Arizona.

• Gilbert 1 *

Two things here. One, the law says that schools can’t promote abortion above childbirth, which is so paranoid I don’t even know what to say to that, but either way, the book is not in violation. You can go to Arizona Honors Biology dot com and see where MSNBC has uploaded the pages and verify for yourself. The page in question is a one-page description not of abortion, but of contraception. Abortion is only briefly mentioned to distinguish it from the morning-after pill. Which all leads me to believe the real objection to the passage is the fact that it contains information about contraception, and abortion is only tacked onto the complaint as a cover story. Second of all, the school board’s recommendation is to, and I’m not joking here, go in and deface the textbooks by ripping pages out, old school fascism-style. So yeah, teach kids to violate the first amendment and destroy ideas you disagree with, all in service of trying to hide the fact that people sometimes have sex for reasons other than baby-making, something they already learned from TV. Great plan, guys.

You will not be surprised that the reason the pages in question have been uploaded to a website by MSNBC is because Rachel Maddow, who is nearly as great a lover of conservative religious anti-sex idiocy as I am, is all over this story.

• Gilbert 2 *

This is what is so frustrating about all this. The law, which was passed in 2012 in what Maddow calls an anti-abortion frenzy, is already an overreach, because it demands the injection of natalist ideology into the classroom. But these books don’t violate the law! It would only be a violation if the books promoted abortion. Anti-choicers are trying to imply that even mentioning abortion is promotion. Or contraception, for that matter, because, as I said before, the pages they want to rip out are almost exclusively about contraception. And they’re not wrong that human beings are inherently interested in information about how to have sex without making babies. But that shows how futile their efforts are. Indeed, I would say that it’s so self-evidently futile, this effort at fooling kids into thinking there’s no such thing as non-procreative sex, that there’s no purpose to it at all. This is more culture war muscle-flexing, censoring books for the pleasure of feeling self-righteous and not out of any sincere attempt to make change.

But there’s been a development.

• Gilbert 3 *

So now there’s a really strange situation going on where the people who are coming into office don’t want to censor these textbooks but the people who are still there might, as one last act of defiance against basic decency and common sense, go get to ripping pages out of books. Personally, I can’t think of a better symbol of what’s up with the religious right. They know they’re losing, they know they’re on their way out, but they’re going to do as much damage as they can before they leave. Let’s hope they are thwarted in this.

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Interview

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TLC, which was supposed to be The Learning Channel, continues its strange trajectory of functioning as something of a propaganda channel for religious right sexual ideals, most of which are so ridiculous that even their adherents tend to reject them when it comes to living their lives. The newest show is Virgin Coaches, a show about Christian sex therapists Bill and Janean Fuller, who run a kind of boot camp of sex ed for engaged couples, actual adults, who are trying to remain chaste until marriage and want help for figuring out that married sex thing. Because, you know, they’re not allowed to warm up to it slowly like the rest of us, but expect themselves to go from 0 to sex expert overnight, which is a way of setting yourself up for failure. Here’s a bit of the promo for the show.

• Virgin 1 *

Yes, “practice making love” does sound incredibly risqué, like they’re going to take a bunch of virgins and plunge them into some kind of over-the-top orgy situation that none of them are even remotely able to handle. The truth, however, is much dorkier than that, for better or for worse. What really happened on the show was they had a maze painted on the ground and the couples were supposed to walk through it and at the middle there were seats and buckets of water. Because, if you’ve ever done group activities in a church or religion-based setting, you know that the default setting is “goofy.” But here, let’s have them explain what the purpose of all this is.

• Virgin 2 *

It’s almost like they’re daring feminists to get mad at them, like see feminists! We’re all about a woman’s pleasure and this about men serving women! But I will not take the bait, and not just because feminists are for equality, not for some chivalry-reminiscent attitude taken to the bedroom. Yes, men should care about women’s pleasure and vice versa. And I do think it’s useful to tell men to take their time and really pay attention, not because men should “serve” women but because sex is a mutual thing and not just masturbating into someone’s body. But setting up women’s bodies like they are some kind of puzzle to unlock reinforces sexist stereotypes about how women are mysterious creatures that are totally unlike men. A better way to handle this is to teach people to learn to communicate with each other about what they like, but of course, they can’t do that, because that would mean having a good idea of what you like, something that can only be learned through the experience they are supposed to deny themselves. So, unable to give truly good advice, they have mazes and rigidly gendered ideas of how sex is supposed to work.

And I mean incredibly rigid ideas about how sex is supposed to work. Really, really rigid.

• Virgin 3 *

Not that you should have your eyes closed, of course. Do what you want with your eyes! That’s the issue here. One reason people have problems with sex is because they get it into their heads there’s one right way to do sex and every other way is wrong or unhealthy. But people who have happy sex lives tend to be flexible and generous. Someone who takes this “God sex” advice to heart is likely to get a complex every time their partner closes his or her eyes during sex. You’re not likely having fun if every closed eye moment causes you to wonder if you’re screwing up somehow. Also, as everyone who has no need for a class for about to be married virgins could probably tell you right off the bat, this requirement that you have your eyes locked at all times precludes a little diversity in your sexual positions. And monotony is really death to a good sex life.

Not that everything they do draws my ire. I liked this part, for instance.

• Virgin 4 *

I considered this a tacit admission that even though their religion strongly forbids it, most of these guys are probably looking at porn and might feel inadequate about it. So that was cool. But overall, I feel the problem with these kinds of classes is they are there to paper over a very serious problem, one that doesn’t need to be a problem. The Christian right has long sold the idea that the way to be happy, sexually and romantically, is to be as sexually inexperienced as possible before entering marriage, but what people all too often find is that instead of the sexual bliss they’re promised, they find that it’s hard to be good at something you’ve stifled for so long. Classes like this are supposed to help people by lowering expectations and teaching some skills so they aren’t so far behind the curve. I think it’s well-meaning, but ultimately it’s just another futile effort to salvage the idea that waiting for marriage is some kind of master key to unlocking happiness. It’s simply not, and in a country where 95 percent of people have sex before marriage, it’s getting ridiculous to continue pushing the idea that waiting is something everyone should strive for.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, good ol’ Pat Robertson edition. Robertson is not becoming less nutty or hateful or weird about sex in his old age, I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to learn.

• Robertson *

Pat Robertson’s world is one where having a bunch of sex or choosing not to have a baby is on level with murder. But only if you’re a woman, of course. Believe me, this entire rant was about sexual so-called sin, and the only sinner whose sins interested him was a woman who had multiple partners, not the men she slept with.