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I canceled my subscription to the New York Times shortly after they hired Bill Kristol, and yet, every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. Case in point, today’s Ross Douthat column, Sex Ed in Washington, seems to exert some weird, subversive influence on my better judgment — although perhaps it’s just the sad spectacle of Ross spending 700 words trying to talk us all out of ever having sex again, when really, a single picture is worth a thousand:

douthat.jpg

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education.

To be fair, if Bush had devoted the same amount of time and money to promoting phrenology, I think most liberals would have shrugged it off, if only because nobody ever contracted the clap from having their skull groped by a natural philosopher.

The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.

But enough nitpicking…

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication.

Ross wouldn’t have even felt the need to defend an increase in teen pregnancies as another Bush Administration success story, if it hadn’t been for all those snotty girl bloggers doing the end zone dance and making L’s on their foreheads and getting all smarmy about Mendel pwning Lysenko.

On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Yes, Republicans greatly increased both funding and ignorance by slipping support for abstinence-only “sex education” into the Welfare Reform bill, but the federal government has been bankrolling this boondoggle since the Reagan Administration.

If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

True, assuming that you, like Ross, are incapable of distinguishing between “despite” and “because.” As Jill at Feministe points out: “When the teen pregnancy rate dropped in the 1990s, it was largely because of increased contraception use.”

But under Bush, guidelines for federal grants “required states to provide assurance that funded programs and curricula ‘do not promote contraception and/or condom use.’” Also, the Administration urged the CDC to tell school girls they could catch chlamydia from a miasma, so at least those abstinence-only classrooms had a lot of cross-ventilation.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate.

Exactly. This is the sort of enlightened, let-bygones-be-bygones attitude that was encouraged by the parish priest whenever some medieval family called in a barber to treat their ailing child, and the subsequent surgery went a tad awry. “Look, my children, you asked Theodoric for help, and as far as I can tell, he correctly diagnosed your son as suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors and a bad pageboy, and took the only sensible course of action by bleeding him. True, he could have gone a bit easier with the lancet once you started bandying around ten-penny words like ‘hemophiliac,’ but let’s not bicker and argue about who desanguinated who.”

The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

Except, the teen pregnancy rate dropped in the 1990s, largely because of increased contraception use!

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s attended high school. What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem.

That’s true, man — I got nothin’ out of school. Everything I know about algebra and social studies I learned on the street.

(And, of course, the impact of entertainment: the MTV reality show “Teen Mom” is far more absorbing than the average sex-ed curriculum, and probably more influential as well.)

So in Ross’s considered opinion, the most effective form of sex education is a show called “Teen Mom.” Well, that explains why he can’t get an erection around any woman who’s on the pill, but I could have done without the glimpse into his porn preferences.

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless.

Just your column.

But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy.

Because it’s not like those two are related in any way.

Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

You know, I took Sex Ed in California, which has never bought into the abstinence-only scheme, and I don’t recall pro-masturbation proselytizing, or, in fact, any editorializing at all. It was taught by the school nurse, whose obvious boredom with the task and poorly veiled impatience with us drained the subject of any potentially enlivening prurience or risibility, and was delivered in a series of brisk and vague bullet points: Here’s the rhythm method, and since this isn’t a Catholic school I can mention that it has a high failure rate. We’re not going to discuss your mucus. Here’s the pill, it has a low failure rate, but it doesn’t prevent venereal disease. Here’s a condom, relatively low failure rate, will help to prevent certain diseases, I’m going to sort of generally describe the right way to put it on, but I’m not going to demonstrate because then you’ll all start giggling and I hate you little bastards enough already.

Basically, it was like Drivers Ed, except Red Asphalt and Blood on the Highway were replaced with gruesome slides of patients with tertiary syphilis. I don’t know what fundamentalists imagine goes on in sex ed classes, but I’m pretty sure even people from Alabama would have found it dull.

We federalize the culture wars all the time, of course — from Roe v. Wade to the Defense of Marriage Act. But it’s a polarizing habit, and well worth kicking.

Because eliminating government interference in a woman’s right to choose is the same as empowering government to interfere in the rights of gay people to choose whom to marry. You’re right, Ross, your examples do make me want to kick something, although it’s not a habit.

If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached.

No doubt you would have made this same argument for a neutral, high-minded, hands-off approach to sex education before your abstinence-funding peeps were kicked out of office, but you were probably held up in traffic.

Anyhow, while I disagree with Ross’s conclusions, I would never imply that he’s a sexually repressed gynophobe who resents women who’ve callously turned their wombs into a rocky place where his seed can find no purchase:

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”

In a sane world — not a perfect world, mind you, just a marginally better one — Doghouse Riley would have a weekly NYT column, and this douche-nipple would be manning the steam trays at the Old Country Buffet.

You ask me, The New York Times can’t get that pay wall up fast enough.

29 Responses to “Reese Witherspoons So Chunky You Can Eat ‘Em With A Fork”

Do any of these clowns ever write anything that isn’t weasel words? And that isn’t followed by a screed along the lines of “Right & wrong: Everybody knows the difference, & there are no gray areas?”

On a positive note, today is S. G. Prebleman’s birthday (1904).

One aspect to the abstinence only program, that few parents understand, is that young people can start having anal/oral sex right away, without breaking the vow of abstinence. Another positive aspect of the abstinence only program is that when the young person joins it lets all the other kids know that he or she is feeling like having sex.

Obviously, no one ever let him know that sex is usually more intimate if there are mutual respect and shared feelings however fleeting they might be.

He reminds me of two out-of-town business men who approached an acquaintance and I in a nightclub to “fix them up” with “chicks” because they noticed we were friendly with several women at the club. They wanted to “get laid,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.

Is that Doghouse Riley’s job IRL? Manning the steam trays at the Old Country Buffet?

Anyway, long before I got to the end of your column, I was giving you a NYT column, I just wasn’t worried about what Ross did for a living. He seems to be fitted for the priesthood.

“One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas…”

Holy fuck! I think it moved. And then what happened?

I always read his surname as “doubt that”, as in, “I doubt that guy has more than two brain cells”.

This guys takes those “weasel words” and elevates them to a world view built on hunting and trapping pelts, preferable from inbred asexual varmints, then selling them only to proper-thinking communities, just like the gated land of inbreds he inhabits.

Don’t doubt the power of the Douthat.

Which I can never type without momentarily wondering if douchehat or asshat would be more appropriate.

Because, you know that Sex Ed is so very obviously the issue on everyone’s mind these days.

Jeebus Xrist, the more I think about his existence/job, the more Douchehat pisses me off.

…their wombs into a rocky place where his seed can find no purchase

Completely OT, but the fact that Raising Arizona existed almost made me want to forgive Nick Cage for National Treasure. Almost.

This chunky Reese Witherspoon story is kind of odd. I mean, I have had occasions when I found myself in bed with a drunk, and suddenly wasn’t in the mood to. What does he intend us to draw from this anecdote? That if she hadn’t been flapping one of her non-sexual holes, he would have proceeded? That a girl ought not to take responsibility for her body? Or that she should have the good taste not to bring it up to a Harvard man? There is no indication that the writer was prepared on his own with a condom, or that he would have asked her whether she had one, or if she was on the pill.
So what is the point? It doesnt sound like he was going to have sex with her anyway, so I guess he just wants to blame her for taking the excitement out of not knowing if he was going to be making child support payments for the next 18 years. Which is what sex is all about anyway.

“One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents…”

Oh. I read it as “four-way” the first time. He has a funny way of defining success…the big tease.

it’s just the sad spectacle of Ross spending 700 words trying to talk us all out of ever having sex again, when really, a single picture is worth a thousand

ACK! My EYES!

Will the three hundred word credit pay for reconstructive surgery? Huh? Will it, Scott????

I think most liberals would have shrugged it off, if only because nobody ever contracted the clap from having their skull groped by a natural philosopher.

It didn’t help my roseacea, let me tell you!

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication.

And some of us just pointed out the obvious truth.

“Look, my children, you asked Theodoric for help, and as far as I can tell, he correctly diagnosed your son as suffering from an imbalance of bodily humours and a bad pageboy, and took the only sensible course of action by bleeding him. True, he could have gone a bit easier with the lancet once you started bandying around ten-penny words like ‘haemophiliac,’ but let’s not bicker and argue about who desanguinated who.”

Fixed for discontemporaneous spellcheck.

The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex.

Douthat projection. TRANSLATED: “I wouldn’t have had sex if you paid me.”

Everything I know about algebra and social studies I learned on the street.

Dude, here on the mean streets of New York, we got hardcore: calculus, philosophy, and…I’m ashamed to admit this, you see, but someone will expose me anyway…art

*sob*


But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy.

Because it’s not like those two are related in any way.

Not to a conservative. Remember, you can’t legislate morality, like forcing abstinence on someone!

I don’t recall pro-masturbation proselytizing

Clearly, you didn’t go to Catholic school and meet up with “Uncle Priest”…

I don’t know what fundamentalists imagine goes on in sex ed classes, but I’m pretty sure even people from Alabama would have found it dull.

Y’know, there were a few kids who got excited during the sex ed classes and the schematics of the various sexual organs, but these kids were line artists went onto having anime and mange fetishes…

You’re right, Ross, your examples do make me want to kick something, although it’s not a habit.

What if it was on Ross, tho?

By the way, but doesn’t Douthat’s description of his near-miss (premature emastication?) sound an awful lot like a passage out of Bill O’Reilly’s novel?

Ashley was now wearing only brief white panties. She had signaled her desire by removing her shirt and skirt, and by leaning back on the couch. She closed her eyes, concentrating on nothing but Shannon’s tongue and lips. He gently teased her by licking the areas around her most sensitive erogenous zone. Then he slipped her panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly.

Ewwww. actor212, how could you? Bill O’Reilly sex fantasy?

Now I have to go scrub my brain with bleach and a wire brush.

“The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. **But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex**”

** Except there is no ‘evidence’ to support that all sex-ed is ‘ambiguous’

“And, of course, the impact of entertainment: the MTV reality show “Teen Mom” is far more absorbing than the average sex-ed curriculum, and probably more influential as well”

Everyone knows Teen Reality shows are 37% more absorbent than Sex-ed classes.

Ewwww. actor212, how could you? Bill O’Reilly sex fantasy?

I’m up for a Grammy® for best troll-posts.

“‘Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?’ she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth.”

…this is some talented girl, able to say stuff while tongue-pushing…

…this is some talented girl, able to say stuff while tongue-pushing…

*insert obvious cunning linguist joke here*

All I’m asking for is that one of the two righty sinecures at the Times be reserved for someone who understands the “Liberal” position on a single issue and can demonstrate as much. Not anything so cracked as the “leftist” position (why should he get what the Democratic party has no inkling of?), or so coldly sterile as the full range of opinion in the Land Beyond the Beltway, no. Don’t care if he rejects it out of hand. In fact I’d prefer it. Just that he show some reading comprehension.

Instead it’s Brooks and Brooks Lite, both laboring under the same delusion: that they can, by limiting the number of times they attribute some stereotypical “Liberal” position to Satan, demonstrate their fair-mindedness. “Teach the controversy” is not a fucking compromise, assholes.

What about MoDo? The fact that 10% of her mental vomit is anti-Republican makes her officially a liberal by NYT standards.

Being a talentless hack is its own reward. Aside from the six-figure gig at the times, that is.

The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

So let’s see, he’s arguing that because contraceptive-oriented programs don’t reduce the frequency of teen sex that they are a failure? This whole graf is bait-and-switch. “Whether and how” are together, so we can’t decide if his statement claiming the same efficacy of abstinence and contraception is comparing them in the “whether” or in the “how”.

So, according to Ross’s column, everything the Republicans have done with sex education has been a fantastic waste of money and time. And yet somehow… I can’t think of a better way to put it then Mr. Doghouse Riley did:

So you pick a fight, and you get beaten to a pulp because, after all, when God’s on your side you don’t have to train, right? And you lift your head off the canvas at the count of 8 and say, though bloody chicklets, “Hey, why not call it a draw?”

Is it too much to ask that NYT columnists at the very least make arguments that are internally consistent?

I’m also not sure where Roe v. Wade and DOMA fit in. Is Ross’s contention that legality has no effect on the number or quality of abortions women get and DOMA has no effect on how many gay people get married?

And, if a given policy has no clear effect one way or the other, why should it be a legal issue AT ALL? Why not get the states out of it too and just let each individual decide on these things?

And what the fuck is up with that beard?

So what is the point? It doesnt sound like he was going to have sex with her anyway

He wants to condemn the nasty woman and brag about what an attractive stud he is at the same time.

Why, why, why, out of all the available writers in the nation, was this loathsome, unpleasant character the one that the “paper of record” just HAD to have on their staff?

So let’s see, he’s arguing that because contraceptive-oriented programs don’t reduce the frequency of teen sex that they are a failure?

I think he’s arguing against sex ed of any kind in school.

Because, you know, he learned his on the street.

Of course, look where that got him, then ponder the fact that his “street” included an elite boarding school in New Haven, Connecticut, not unlike the one in Dead Poet’s Society, where they piled into buses to see girls cheerlead in tight sweaters as a form of sex ed.

Listen, give Ross a little slack. He’s still hurting from the song Meat Loaf wrote about him:

o/~ And I’d do anything for love, but I won’t Douthat o/~

I LOVE this blog!

“I always read his surname as “doubt that”, as in, “I doubt that guy has more than two brain cells”. ”

Me too.

BTW, I think Ross is an ass who hasn’t had any in far too long.

Why, why, why, out of all the available writers in the nation, was this loathsome, unpleasant character the one that the “paper of record” just HAD to have on their staff?

Because to old people, this is what they want the youth of america to sound like — like the bitter spinsters who they read about in Victorian times.

It’s good he wrote this dumpster load of shit before that new study came out. The one labeled “abstinence-only education” but actually has nothing in coming with actual abstinence-only ed and everything in common with traditional sex-ed (especially b/c it was done with 12 y.o. subjects).

The right is already using that study as a talking point even though the study authors caution that they didn’t use a conventional abstinence-only approach.

Stupid apolitical scientists. No cookie. They should have made up a new term for a novel approach because now they are giant tools who will help Make Things Worse.

Something to say?