Unplanned Pregnancies, Sexually-Transmitted Diseases, and Effective Sex-Ed (Mostly Male Division)

Opening of a recent news story from the US Midwest: 

"The former head of Ohio’s sexual abstinence programs 

played a role in the Trump administration’s decision to end

a federal grant program to fight teen pregnancy [...]."

My comment on a key aspect of effective "sex-ed" for reducing unplanned pregnancies and VD/STDs, and more generally: 
One of the more useful moves that will reduce unintended pregnancies is the law in LA requiring male porn performers to wear condoms while performing on camera. America needs a well-crafted and mildly Machiavellian "Wrap That Willy!" campaign getting across the message that Real Men control their reproduction and protect their health, and that young, virile, Real Men use condoms and hold their erections (as opposed to their literally limp-dick elders).
The issue here is indeed morality and values and whether we value taboos and decorum over preventing unwanted pregnancies and definitely unwanted diseases — and reducing the number of abortions. (Mature men additionally value the health and desires of their sexual partners, but that's another ad/propaganda campaign.)I am serious here. When AIDS was a pressing issue I challenged some S.W. Ohio newspaper editors with the question that if they could save ten lives a year they'd run stories with headlines like, "Butt-Fucking Is Risky: Wrap That Willy." Linguistic and other taboos vs. lives. They said, of course, that they'd obey the taboo and not run such headlines or stories — but I'd made them think about it and feel bad, and I said both were my objectives with the thought experiment.

Perrier, Pubes, Condoms, Morēs, & Morality (10 Feb. 2013)

"Manners Are Small Morals"

             I didn't put "spittoons" in my title here, because it's a somewhat long word and a word that might in itself turn away some readers; also, in combination with "pubes," it might attract readers for a different kind of writing than this essay.

            I want to start out with spittoons, though, and the fact that you probably have never seen one outside a Western.

            I'm old enough to remember spittoons in a gym locker-room in Chicago in the 1950s, and a friend of my youth tells me he saw some as recently as the 1970s: in an old-fashioned Chicago pool hall. He wasn't sure if the 1970s spittoons were actually used, or were just traditional decor. The ones in the locker-room were used — and I won't go into details about how I'm sure of that. (Hint: Emptying them was obviously not something the janitors like to do.)

            What's significant here is that I won't go into details because the details disgust me and very likely would disgust you, even a macho guy "you." Within a century or so, spittoons have gone from a sign of increased civilization — a way to avoid spitting on the street — to just gross.

            Part of that change was motivated by concerns for health and hygiene, and enforcement of health regulations, but mostly it was a change in "morés," in social standards and customs.

            I've written before about the power of fads and fashion, and I'm going to reinforce that idea here, but looking more at the up-side.    Especially as multiple-antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis becomes an increasing health hazard, it becomes increasingly a good thing that most Americans no longer casually spit on the street, or even in spittoons — and, mostly, that change in behavior came from a change in morés, in customs, social standards, "manners."

            A couple more items of evidence: more in terms of what people do than what they don't do, with continuing emphasis on guy behavior but bringing in (very crucially) you gals.

            While having my car serviced in a recall, I went into the Parts Department to check out costs for installing fog lights and noticed that they had a refrigerated display with beverages to purchase. So far so familiar: the gas stations I grew up with often had Coca Cola machines. However, the featured item in this Parts Department in 2013 was Perrier Water.

            Trust me, when I was growing up, guys at the gas station who wouldn't shell out a nickel for a Coke, drank the gas station water out of a hose, or (as part of the creeping socialism of the 1950s) from a water fountain. That a trucker checking out mudguards at the Parts Department might drink water from a little green bottle, and pay for the privilege, is a tribute to the power of changing fashions, and to the power of advertisers and marketers to change those fashions.

            Now, moving closer to, uh, home, let us consider the pubic hair of my title.

            I grew up with the folklore about guys' playing nasty honeymoon tricks on their friends, with the nastiest trick getting the groom drunk at his stag party, then (de)pantsing him and shaving his balls. Really, really nasty and perverse friends — the real weirdoes — would shave the guy from waist to thighs, so he'd look prepubescent (not that they'd know the word) and ridiculous when his bride saw him naked.

            As The Simpson's Nelson Muntz would say, "Ha-ha!"

            A quick check of my local porn site (which seems to be in Holland) indicates that a lot of guys have no problem with shaved balls or what may be full-body shaving, with a couple movie comedies' indicting guys' doing the pubic part by themselves to themselves — have the shaving done by a really close and trusted friend.

            And there are women who go way beyond shaving.

            Jeff Foxworthy and I don't agree on a lot of things anymore, but we do agree that if Bikini waxing is ever forced on people, Amnesty International would be sending investigators — and women pay to have it done!

            Even more weirdly and permanently people of both sexes are getting pierced and tattooed — and posting videos of themselves performing naked on the Internet. I'm talking about more or less normal, or at least non-pathological people, who are institutionalized if at all on college campuses and maybe the occasional barracks. I'm talking about people painfully marked, performing private acts to an international public, with faces visible and school colors up so identifying the performers is pretty straightforward even before The Powers That Be start buying genital-recognition software.

            Okay, I'm kidding a bit here but dead serious about how standards can change quickly and how strongly behavior can be modified: piercing, waxing, and tattooing are painful. I joked once that next would come scarification and branding, and, goll-dang, you can get it done in Los Angeles by people reviewed on Yelp!

            People are enduring serious pain in places and ways I want to think about even less than spittoons.

            These changes occurred in less than a generation, and they are major changes in individual behavior and social standards.

            So there is hope for more positive shifts.

            Smoking tobacco is already becoming rare, and chewing and spitting tobacco even rarer. With more social pressure, ashtrays can go the way of spittoons, and smoking in public the way of spitting in public.

            If fads and fashions can get guys to shave their pubes to look like a child or porn star (or gay body-builder?), you can get guys regularly and consistently into condoms when they're lucky enough to find some sex. And until there are more elegant means of birth-control and sex relatively safe from STDs, those condoms are important for public health.

            O, tempera; O, morés! indeed; but we can go with that. People don't change much — not most of us individually, definitely not humans as a species — but our behavior can change.

            Steven Pinker goes over 800 pages on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), showing as much as anything how terribly grossly horrible human beings can be; but he also demonstrates his point that we can do better and are doing better.

            Read Pinker on the earnest topic of decreasing violence, and note that he also discusses manners.

            We can't change much, but we can do better. Look around you and note the absence of spittoons. Watch an old movie and note how many people were smoking cigarettes then and how few now. Consider the utter weirdness of what people do to their bodies, the images they put up on porn sites — and have some hope that, among other improvements, we can reduce the number of unwanted, unplanned pregnancies — and abortions — and reduce the occurrence of sexually-transmitted diseases.


            Never get a pretty much smoking-free California (or wherever)? Never get guys to see condoms as cool? Maybe, but it's worth a try. "Manners are small morals" and some achievable changes in morés are imperatives of commonsense, responsibility, and morality. 

Porn in the Public Interest (3 May 2013)

{Bloggers Note: For whatever reasons, this post on OpenSalon got more hits — a whole lot more — than other individual item I've ever posted to the web.}

Headlines in the News:

"Gates Foundation Funds Development of High Tech Condoms"; 

"California’s landmark condoms in porn bill (AB 332) 

clears first Assembly committee, 5 to 1" (References: Gates, AB 332) 

       
            If fashion can get people, especially young people, to tattoo and pierce their bodies, shave their genitals, wear stiletto heals and low-rider pants, and — in the developed world — buy water in small bottles; then fashion can also be a force for good, encouraging condom use.

            So there should be strong support for California Assembly Bill 332 and similar legislation in other states requiring condoms on male actors in pornographic movies. The argument for condom use for sex-workplace safety is legitimate, but there's a more pressing argument for such legislation as a truly public, public health issue. In their way, porn stars are role models, and if their example can be a major influence getting young people to shave like semi-pro swimmers or body builders, porn-actor behavior can be important in making condom-use fashionable, normal, and normative: perhaps even, in the old expression, cool. Condom use as normal behavior for young people has obvious benefits limiting sexually-transmitted diseases, reducing unwanted pregnancies and, hence, the numbers of abortions, and more generally encouraging responsibility among older boys and young men, who should take responsibility for their reproduction and health.

            As part of a larger public information program — i.e., "Wrap That Willy!" propaganda — porn stars can inculcate the doctrines that "Real Men Control Their Reproduction" and "Real Men Can Hold an Erection Well Enough to Be Cool in Condoms." Well, and that Real Women limit their heterosex lives to such Real Men, and have the sexiness and know-how to help their men, let's say, achieve and maintain their "reality."

            Parents and other older adults could also get involved.

            "Late adolescence" was invented during my lifetime, and it isn't a good idea. "The pill" was an excellent idea, except insofar as its existence got people to think contraception an issue for just women and girls. At 18-years old, I was expected to be a young adult, and a good while before I turned 18 my father gave me an optimistically large box of condoms and told me, "Until you know what to do with it; keep it in your pants." I suspect that bit of SexEd was more useful than most of what gets taught in US schools.

            Parents, however, are radically limited in their influence over fashion; stardom, including porn-star stardom, is powerful.

Solidarity For-ev-er! (repeat 2x): E.R.A.! E.R.A.! NOW! (9 Oct. 2014)

            I've recently sent in a contribution for HIV/AIDS research, and, when contacted, I contribute to the local group that helps poor women get breast cancer screenings; and once a year or so I contribute to research on prostate cancer. These are all worthy causes, but aside from using the return-address labels for GMHC and their "Essential Survives to Men, Women, and Families Living with HIV/AIDS" — and aside from what I just wrote (and purchasing [sic] a life-membership in the National Organization for Women) — I haven't done anything more for those causes.

            No ribbons or marches or contacting friends, and when I write, as now, it is to point out that for women in the United States, death by cancer of any sort is less likely than death by heart disease and stroke. Indeed, for White and Black women, heart disease alone — not counting strokes — is the leading cause of death. In 2008, 24.6% of deaths among White women were from heart disease, 21.6% from cancer. In 2008, 24.9% of deaths among Black women were from heart disease, 21.6% from cancer.
            And "HIV Disease" was number 14 out of 15 as cause of death in the US in 2008, ranking behind homicide and tied with congenital malformations.
            Rankings on "Morbidity and Mortality" are more reliable and significant than, say, Newsweek's ranking of colleges and universities, but such grim statistics are only suggestive; and they need to be analyzed in detail. It is significant, for example, that congenital malformations ordinarily kill children and young people 1-24, that homicide is a significant risk primarily for the young and relatively young, and that AIDS kills in the socio-economic prime of life: ages 25-44.
            What I try to stress in my writing and politics are the cold numbers of Morbidity and Mortality tables. And I stress them for the important reason that the sex-related and journalistically "sexy" diseases of breast cancer, prostate cancer, and AIDS are less of a threat than diseases with less powerful political connections like heart disease and "Cerebrovascular Diseases (Stroke)."
            "So attention must be paid" to diseases specific to women and to men gay and straight, and, to American men who are gay: very few men will get breast cancer; no women will get prostate cancer (though there may be something similar); and in the USA — as opposed to Africa — HIV/AIDS has been most importantly a disease among young gay males. And at various times that attention must be drawn by agitation, propaganda, protest, and even disruption: the standard ways political things get done by people not running a country.
            But attention must also be paid to unnewsworthy, "background" threats like heart disease and stroke, and diseases that threaten pretty much everybody: diseases that should inspire causes that can bring together working coalitions of men and women, gay and straight, incandescent White or of color of various sorts.
            Similarly, to get around to my title topic, "for everything there is a time, and a season," as Koheleth saith (Eccl. 3.1), and I think it now a time that my friends (and unfriends) on the Left return to an emphasis on coalitions, and coalitions built around the decorous uniting theme of equality.
            Greater equality of income and, more important, wealth, for a primarily goal, but that will be a tough fight: people with a lot of money are more into Pride than Greed among the deadly sins, and being better off than other people and a whole lot better off — radical inequality — is precisely the point. With a long-term fight over wealth distribution in the background, however, it is time to get to a more immediate, achievable, and too-long-put-off goal: ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, with the process reinvigorated by a campaign in the 113^thor 114^th Congress.
            Look, if the old hard-radical feminist critique is correct, there is a monolithic structure of (White, European) male privilege of ancient and awesome power, and therefore not much hope for change. For sure, there'd be no reason beyond altruism for any XY and/or male-gendered human beings to do much for women or anyone else below them in the food chain. But there was never "The Man," and men are far from a monolithic group; and a lot of actually-existing guys have a fair sense of fairness and some vague idea that we are far from the top of the food chain and would be better off in a more equal world.
            And greater equality can begin logically and sensibly with the biggest inequality around: patriarchal/sexist exploitation of women. So:

Section 1: Women shall have equal rights in the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2: Congress and the several States shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

            Rape, sexual assault against women, and domestic abuse will remain issues in the United States, but those are crimes and need to be effectively handled as crimes. The cultural contexts in which such crimes are enabled are bigger and more complex problems; I'll note, though, that "The Law is the great teacher" — schoolmaster? — "of the commonwealth" (as someone said), and a fine teacher of the basics is specific expansion of the US Bill of Rights with an ERA for women. If "The Man" still exists in some sense and has problems with the ERA, then he can be shouted down and out-voted by the gals and guys. If some women worry that the second sentence of section 1 might make women susceptible to conscription, and if war-loving men worry that a country that drafts women would be reluctant to go to war …. Well, it may be my privileged off-White, politically straight, and XY-male privilege speaking — or just my souvenir 1-A draft card (Available for [Immediate] Military Service) — but screw 'em. If there's a literal "existential threat" against the USA, then every American from age 18 to 80 should have our names, health status, and brief résumés in the computer, and if we've got needed skills, off we go to defend the Motherland: with one Member of Congress drafted by lottery each week for the duration, and one Senator a month (I'll insist strongly on that last part: drafting members of the Congress).
            Solidarity forever folks; let's return to some old political priorities NOW, if perhaps just for now.