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John Oliver’s sex ed

Trump attacks Rosie O’Donnell

Donald Trump makes a period joke

Erick Erickson’s massive hypocrisy

Erick Erickson is a hack

Erick Erickson opposes equal pay because “science”

Scott Walker is not a doctor, no matter what he says

Nope, still not a doctor

Bush dances around Planned Parenthood issue

Rubio backs off his support for rape exceptions

Rubio thinks he has a great “gotcha”

Bizarre Erick Erickson eugenics

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, author Jane Ward will explain the phenomenon of straight men having sex with each other. Donald Trump causes a misogyny controversy, and Republican candidates express odd opinions about abortion.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did one of their famous in-depth reports on the continuing problem of abstinence-only education in this country, which we covered on this show recently in an interview with Erica Hellerstein. Well worth watching the whole video, which is in show links, but what was really fun was they made a short, star-studded video of their own covering what they would like to see covered in a good sex ed class. Including, and this made me really happy, consent.

• Consent *

Consent is not confusing, and most people arguing otherwise have an agenda that is, to say the least, not good. Glad to see John Oliver’s show gets this. I ask someone before I, say, offer them food. I don’t just grab the soup and start pouring it down their throat. It’s not confusing with food, and nor should it be with sex.

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So a straight up bizarre dogfight over misogyny is going on in politics these days, and being conducted almost entirely on the right while amused liberals watch on. It started during the Fox News Republican primary debate, which was a rather unsubtle attempt by Fox to go after Trump hard while throwing softballs to candidates, like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, that party leaders would prefer to see leading in the polls. Part of that meant having Megyn Kelly bait Donald Trump in a rather overt, though admittedly amusing way.

• Trump 1 *

That laughter and overwhelming applause is something to keep in mind as you watch this whole debacle unfurl. Because shortly after this happened, all of a sudden all these conservative leaders started striking outraged poses about how terrible it is that Donald Trump says these things about women. But in reality, that conservative crowd thought that as long as the target was Rosie O’Donnell, who is a liberal and a lesbian, then Trump’s tendency to lob misogynist abuse at women is just great. Hilarious, even. But then, after he stewed a bit over how out of line he thought it was for Fox to allow a mere woman to ask questions of him, Trump decided on his next target for misogynist abuse.

• Trump 2 *

I hesitate to call that a joke, because comments about how women are somehow lesser than men because they menstruate strike me as too tired to qualify as actual humor. I quoted him at length, because he’s claiming, of course, that he wasn’t actually making a sexist comment. But you can tell from the larger context that this was a man who is resorting to sexist condescension in an effort to put a woman in her place, all to punish her for daring to defy him. The “blood” comment was just the icing on that particular cake. Very gross icing.

Well, in a show of some extremely transparent opportunism, a bunch of conservatives are now pretending that they’re all opposed to misogyny because of this. Like Erick Erickson of RedState, who disinvited Trump from his site’s annual conference and told Neil Cavuto that he was glad he did.

• Trump 3 *

Erickson doesn’t want Trump in the race, because he thinks Trump is tarnishing the Republican brand. Plus, there’s plenty of reasons to believe that Erickson’s supposed anger over the evils of misogyny is 100% a put-on to achieve his real goal, getting rid of Trump. Just look at his Twitter feed, which has gems like, “That’s what the feminazis were enraged over? That’s what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain.” Or, “All these angry feminists in my timeline today. I thought Sam Alito ordered them all home to make sandwiches this morning.” Or, “Good thing I didn’t suggest the feminists . . . you know . . . shave. They’d be at my house trying a post-birth abortion on me.” On Cavuto’s show, he tried to defend these as jokes and try the “feminists have no sense of humor” line. But what these tweets show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that Erickson has no sense of humor, because anyone with an actual sense of humor is laughing at what a hack he is. Also, his sexism is often not even thinly disguised as an unfunny joke. Such as when he went on Fox News and explained why it’s wrong for women to make as much money as men.

• Trump 4 *

Ha….ha? I guess I must be a humorless feminist to not get how he’s just kidding around with this crap.

Anyway, the whole conservative argument against Trump can be summed up as, “Misogyny isn’t wrong, unless it’s against Megyn Kelly, then it’s bad.” Which is tremendously unconvincing. More persuasive is Hillary Clinton’s reaction to all this.

• Trump 5 *

I’ll have more on what she meant after the interview.

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Interview

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Hillary Clinton’s accusation that misogyny was hardly limited to Donald Trump during the Republican primary debate got a bunch of scoffing responses on Fox News, but I have to say that she was 100 percent right. Because of those Planned Parenthood hoax videos, Republican candidates were all under a lot of pressure to crawl all over each other to brag about how much they hate abortion and how much they were going to keep as many women from possible from getting quality medical care at Planned Parenthood.

Scott Walker freaked people out the most, because of his blasé answer to Kelly’s question about whether abortion should be allowed to save a woman’s life.

• debate 1 *

In other words, he would just let you die if it were up to him, and he very much wants it to be up to him. And yes, he did say that he knows better than your doctor if your cancer or eclampsia or whatever other condition you have will kill you.

• debate 2 *

Thanks for the diagnosis, non-doctor Walker! I will say he is right about one thing: It’s a false choice between the mother and the fetus. You can’t choose between the mother and the fetus, because letting a woman die from pregnancy almost always kills her fetus, too. So in that sense he’s not lying. He’s not asking you to choose, but instead condemning both to death. That’s because, as much as antis would like you to believe otherwise, the fetus is not separate from a woman’s body. She dies, she takes the fetus with her. Yet another reminder this is about hating women, not trying to save fetal life.

Walker, like many of the other candidates, bragged about defunding Planned Parenthood, which of course means cutting off contraception and STI testing, as none of those funds went to abortion in the first place. Jeb Bush also eagerly pandered on this issue, talking up how he hated Planned Parenthood and whatnot. And then he got caught up in a gotcha.

• debate 3 *

Anti-choice websites aren’t happy with him, which makes sense. They do not want women getting contraception. While he was publicly posing about the evils of reproductive rights, there’s reason to think that he was privately cool with it. Which is what we all expect. Most of these men who are performing outrage at Planned Parenthood have fairly smallish families, suggesting that while they denounce affordable contraception services for you, they quietly enjoy contraception availability at home. It’s all a charade.

Kelly also asked Marco Rubio a question on abortion, asking him why he favored a rape and incest exception to abortion bans.

• debate 4 *

It’s also called apple pie and mom and dogs named Skippy. It was nice of Fox to give Rubio an opportunity to show he’s not as soft on rape victims as antis feared he might be, but he went out on CNN to show that he really does mean it when he wants to reduce all women, including rape victims, to incubators. And he clearly thought he had this hilarious gotcha, too.

• debate 5 *

Well, if Scott Walker can declare he knows better than doctors how dangerous pregnancy is, I guess Marco Rubio can declare, by fiat, what science supposedly says. But that cats and donkeys line suggests he might not be the brilliant biologist he thinks he is. After all, sperm and eggs are also human, even before conception. And they exist for the sole purpose of developing into a separate human being. I’m guessing that Rubio isn’t interested, however, in banning people from killing sperm or eggs. But he should, by his own reckoning, ban both menstruation and male masturbation. After all, what you’re shedding won’t turn into a donkey. Or a cat. It can only turn into a person if its development course is allowed to play itself out. So if that’s your argument, start by banning male masturbation. After all, each ejaculation kills millions of sperm, all of which would develop into humans—humans, not cats or donkeys—if allowed to develop instead of dying in your gym sock. Whereas an abortion only kills one. So clearly, on the not cats or donkeys scale, ejaculation is a million times worse than abortion. If this is about human life, and not, you know punishing women for having sex, that is.

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

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, a totally flawless plan edition. Erick Erickson doesn’t just have oh so brilliant ideas on how women should be silent and servile. His tendency to reduce women to breeding machines spills out into his culture war opinions generally.

• Erickson *

I do apologize for subjecting you to his voice. I know that his combination of smugness and ignorance makes him especially irritating. His self-regard seems be directly proportional to the lack of justification for it. Take this issue, for instance. How does society progress if, as he assumes, people just believe what their parents believe? A hundred years ago, most people opposed gay rights, abortion rights, and even women’s right to vote. Now most people support that. I realize that anti-choice men might be motivated by this fantasy that women are just incubators churning out little mini-mes for the men they sleep with, but that’s not how it works.