A “safe, effective, and reversible” contraceptive pill was recently introduced by a group of international physicians.  It seems that ‘new-and-improved’ birth control pills are being discovered in rapid fashion lately, to the point where most doctors probably couldn’t name them all. This one, however, certainly trumps all others in its uniqueness—it’s for men.

The physicians promise that this pill will provide just as much protection as the other two male options for birth control, vasectomy and condoms. It essentially works like the female pill, restricting sperm production in males. Unfortunately, there is no word out yet on when this pill will be readily available.

I commend this new opportunity for men to participate in birth control, but I cannot help but question what the result of it will be. Elaine Lissner, the director of the M ale Contraception Information Project, hails it as a way for men to “take control” of their destinies. One could not argue with the benefits of a man being extra safe in his sexual encounters, and it is wonderful when anyone decides to go the extra mile to ensure that unwanted pregnancies do not happen.

That being said, I wonder if there won’t be a few males who use it as an excuse to have intercourse sans condoms. I can only imagine the precarious results that will occur once the refrain “it’s okay, I am on the pill” can come from a guy’s mouth as well. Even if they are in fact being protected, it still leaves both parties open for a myriad of STI’s. On a whole, this new pill is beneficial, though its usage will certainly be open to a number of questions. For in the end, I wonder how many men will be eager to take such a pill in the first place, but perhaps I am being a bit too pessimistic.

Ezra Klein has a post up on the at-times disturbing effect of sexual arousal on male rationality:

Sometimes, the percent answering "yes" to a certain practice [while aroused] jumped by as much as 420 percent (sadly, that question was "would you slip a woman a drug t increase the chance that shed have sex with you?"). More often, kinks became more arousing (22 percent of masturbating males found cigarette smoke to be an aphrodisiac, while only 13 percent answer affirmatively in the cold state) and behavior grew riskier (lower adherence to condoms, etc).

It makes sense--arousal, like new love, essentially drugs us with a hot mess of potent hormones. Ezra made a graph comparing non-aroused and aroused answers to a couple of the questions. While the influence of sex on specific action is certainly troubling, I’m more concerned that when they weren't aroused, dudes in the study were more into sex with a 12-year-olds than sex with a 60-year-olds.

Larry Liston, a state representative in Colorado, called pregnant teens “sluts” at a Republican caucus lunch yesterday:

“In my parents’ day and age, [unmarried teen parents] were sent away, they were shunned, they were called what they are,” Republican Rep. Larry Liston said during a GOP legislative caucus meeting in Denver. “There was at least a sense of shame.”

Liston continued: “There's no sense of shame today. Society condones it ... I think it's wrong. They're sluts. And I don't mean just the women. I mean the men, too.”

Classy. He was talking to health professionals from the area, convened to discuss the state’s poor adolescent health care system and teen birth rate. Colorado’s teen birth rate is ranked 36th in the nation, and apparently some of its lawmakers don't know the difference between making babies and protected sex.

Liston later noted that his real point was more about governmental permissiveness than sluttiness—he’s worried that there’s no government disincentive to deter teenagers from having multiple babies. Still, trying to “shame” young men and women into premarital abstinence seems less effective than providing them with quality, comprehensive sex education.

via Feministing. 

    In the United States, approximately two-thirds of all high school seniors have engaged in sexual intercourse.1 According to the Department of Health and Human Services, approximately one in four persons will become infected with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) by the age of twenty-one.2 Additionally, the United States has one the highest rate of teenage pregnancy of any industrialized nation with about forty percent of woman becoming pregnant before the age of twenty.3 While there has been no conclusive evidence that abstinence-only based sexuality education programs either prevent the onset of intercourse or reduce the frequency of intercourse, the United States government currently finances three federal abstinence-until-marriage programs.4 By prohibiting State governments from promoting the use of contraceptives in their school sex education programs in order to receive Federal funding, the United States government is endangering the welfare of its citizens.  
    According to a report entitled “School-Based Programs to Reduce Sexual Risk Behaviors” commissioned by the Division of Adolescent and School Health within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Because incidence of pregnancy and STDs among teenagers is so great, these consequences involve not only the individuals involved and their families, but overall welfare dependency, unemployment, and medical costs in the United States.”5 In 2002, there were an estimated 750,000 pregnancies (450,000 live births) among 15-19 year old girls.6 With the proper use of a condom, chance of pregnancy can be reduced by 98%.7 Furthermore, sexually active teenagers have the greatest chance of becoming infected with an STD than any other age group.8 With about 9.1 million persons between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four being infected every year in the U.S., almost half of all new STD cases occur among young people.9 According to the CDC, at the end of 2003 somewhere between 1,039,000 and 1,850,000 people in the United States were living with HIV/AIDS.10 Of the approximately 40,000 new cases each year, about half occur with persons under twenty-five years old (usually infected through intercourse).11 With the use of a condom, the chance of infection from intercourse with a person with HIV-AIDS is reduced by 80 to 87%.12
    In 1981, Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) “to promote chastity and self discipline” among adolescents by funding “family-centered” programs. The Act, sponsored largely by political conservatives, was used to almost exclusively fund religious and right wing groups that often maintain (without any significant scientific proof) that dissemination of safe sex practice information hastens the initiation of sexual activity and the frequency of intercourse among youths. Allegedly, many of these groups, including Sex Respect and Teen-Aid, relied on “scare-tactics” and misinformation about disease and pregnancy prevention in order to promote their abstinence-based initiatives. In 1983, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the program on the grounds that it violated the seperation of church and state as required by the U.S. Constitution. In 1993, the case between the challengers and the Department of Justice Counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) reached an agreement in which certain requirements must be met before the granting of funds through the AFLA to any sex education program. These stipulations include having AFLA grantees submit their curricula to the DHHS for  “consideration of whether the curricula teach or promote religion and whether such materials are medically accurate.”13
     A 2004 report from the office of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) found that two-thirds of government-funded abstinence-only programs contain misleading or inaccurate information pertaining to abortion, contraception, genetics, and sexually transmitted infections. The report prompted the Government Accountability Office to investigate the claims, releasing a report in 2006 supporting Waxman’s findings.14
    In 1996, Congress attached an additional abstinence-only Federal program to a welfare reform law. According to Title V of Section 510 of the Social Security Act, “Neither the State nor any of its sub-awardees may use Federal or matching funds under this award to promote the use of contraception.” All federally funded sex education programs must adhere to this requirement.15 Over $1.5 billion have been allocated to these federal and state programs since 1996. President Bush has requested $242 million for the funding of abstinence-only programs in his FY2008 budget. Since states are required to match federal funds for abstinence-only programs, some states are forced to divert money away from more comprehensive, medically accurate sex education programs. Eleven states have refused to accept such federal programs because of these terms.16
    In 2007, Congress authorized an extensive year-long study by the Mathematica Policy Research, Inc found that students who participated in federal abstinence-only programs were just as likely to engage in pre-marital sex as those students who did not. They were also found to engage in sexual-risk behaviors at the same mean age and have the same approximate number of sex partners as students who did not participate in the federally funded programs. Another study focusing on individuals engaged in virginity pledge programs (promoting chastity until marriage) found that, although many did delay the onset of sexual activity, many of these youths (88%) still engaged in premarital sex but were less likely than non-pledgers to use contraceptives at first intercourse or to get tested for STDs.17
    Relying on evaluations of twenty-three separate national surveys, the “School-Based Programs to Reduce Sexual Risk Behaviors” report by the CDC found that comprehensive school sex education programs covering topics such as abstinence, conception, pregnancy, STD, and HIV-AIDS did not lead to an increase in sexual activity. Programs designed to promote the use of contraceptives, such as condoms, also did not increase the onset or frequency of sexual activity. “Indeed, all of them either delayed the onset of intercourse or had no effect upon the initiation of intercourse. Furthermore, of the four studies that focused on program impact on the frequency of intercourse, none found significant increases in sexual activity, and one found a significant decrease among the relatively small proportion of youths who initiated intercourse after program implementation.”18
    It is estimated that only 10% of school districts in the U.S. have comprehensive sexuality programs that promote not just abstinence but the use of contraceptives and safe sex practices.19 The CDC “School-Based” report stated that two studies it analyzed indicated that some comprehensive programs reduce the onset of sexual activity, limit the number of sexual partners, and increase the use of contraceptives. “Logically they should also reduce pregnancy, births, STD, and HIV rates.”20 It is the responsibility of the American government to ensure the general welfare of its citizens. When the federal government blatantly disregards rigorous scientific data in order to promote ineffective morality-based sexuality programs in state school systems, that government can be held accountable for actually harming the lives of its citizens.

Britney Spears' younger sister Jamie Lynn Spears announced that she’s pregnant. This is a girl who’s 16, rich and famous, and is now being held up as "responsible" for taking ownership and deciding to keep her baby.

Why isn’t anyone talking about why she’s pregnant in the first place? “It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected,” Jamie Lynn told Ok! magazine. “I was in complete and total shock and so was [my boyfriend].” She can’t possibly lack knowledge or access to birth control, so why was her pregnancy a shock? If you have sex without protection, you might get pregnant. NOT SHOCKING, right? Granted, she could have had a condom break or something, but that's why Plan B is available over-the-counter.

My beef isn’t with what she—or other girls in her position—decided to do with her pregnancy. But instead of using her situation (and spotlight) to mention the preventability of teen pregnancy, Jamie Lynn holds up abstinence as a reasonable solution for other girls. “I definitely don’t think it’s [premarital sex] something you should do; it’s better to wait,” she said. “But I can’t be judgmental because it’s a position I put myself in.” Jamie Lynn casts premarital sex as the problem when unprotected sex is clearly the issue at hand—thus passing up a perfect opportunity to slip the solution into the dialogue. 

A girl who’s a role model for millions of other young girls shouldn’t be heralded for failing to use contraception. Period.

And MSNBC definitely shouldn’t be running a poll on whether Jamie Lynn will be a better mother than Britney.

LOVED Barbara Ehrenreich's piece at the Nation today on Disney Princesses' toxic side effects:

In faithful imitation, the 3-year-old in my life flounces around with her tiara askew and her Princess gown sliding off her shoulder, looking for all the world like a London socialite after a hard night of cocaine and booze. Then she demands a poison apple and falls to the floor in a beautiful swoon. Pass the Rohypnol-laced margarita, please.

...One's sexual inclinations--straightforward or kinky, active or passive, heterosexual or homosexual--should be free to develop without adult intervention or manipulation. Hence our harshness toward the kind of sexual predators who leer at kids and offer candy. But Disney, which also owns ABC, Lifetime, ESPN, A&E and Miramax, is rewarded with $4 billion a year for marketing the masochistic Princess cult and its endlessly proliferating paraphernalia.

Read the whole thing here.

Jessica Valenti has a great post today on Feministing taking down the notion that the current resurgence of Religious-Right-inspired modesty is "revolutionary:"

Pop culture tells women that their bodies are public property and that they have to be sexual in order to be desirable and loved. Purity balls and the like tell women that their bodies are private property (though not our own of course--our bodies belong to our fathers, husbands, and the men in our life) and that they have to be virginal in order to be desirable and loved. In either case women's sexuality belongs to everyone but women. There's nothing counter-cultural or cutting edge about that.

Amen. Read the whole post here. And catch up on Feministing's coverage of the incredibly creepy purity ball phenomenon here.

This video, produced by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films, exposes what Fox News devotees have known for years: Fox consistently runs the sexual content it purports to despise:

Greenwald and Brave New Films use the video to call for a la carte cable—they don’t want viewers to have to pay for the “smut” that frequently graces Fox’s stories. I’m hesitant to label anything “smut” in hopes that it’ll be censored, but the film also effectively highlights Fox News’s hypocrisy. If sexual television content is so bad for America, and the liberal media is responsible for hyper-sexualizing America, why does Fox run so much gratuitous, unnecessary, irrelevant sexual content?

And by prude, I mean that I view Halloween as the last straw in the stack of hay that is the infantilization of women and the fetishizing of youth. Go ahead, say I'm over generalizing, it’s probably just my estrogen getting out of hand. 

I'm sure each of you can come up with your own list, without my help, of the ways in which beauty norms (SDF - for a definition of "norms" and "culture" see mainstream media, don't keep denying that it exists) require a youth aesthetic. 

Easy examples to help you get started: Calvin Klien ads, obsession with the Olsen twins, anti-wrinkle cream, body hair removal. 

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a challenge to Alabama's ban on the sale of sex toys, according to an AP story.

In a move that probably shames Craig as much as suggestions he's gay, those liberal wackies over at the ACLU announced today that they're officially on his team.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero released a statement arguing that the Minneapolis police sting was unconstitutional:

"It is a crime to have sex in public. It is not a crime to propose or solicit sex in public, whether it's in a bar or in a bathroom," Romero said.

So true. I'm totally with Romero on this one--it doesn't matter if this friendly incident makes Craig a dirty hypocrite, and it certainly doesn't matter if he's gay. Either way, he made a stupid move by pleading guilty to a trumped up charge, and the ACLU is right to back him up.

Of course, Craig and the ACLU aren't very close--according to Project Vote Smart, he supported their interests only 25% of the time in 2005-06. I'm sure they'll still find him a sweet lawyer, though.

via Wonkette

You're a young Republican in Indiana (just go with me here). You're looking for a nice way to end the month of July, so you attend a Young Republicans party, where you enjoy good food and drink while probably insulting the waiting staff and getting completely wasted. The leader of the Young Republicans National Federation, Glenn Murphy, is also there, and is also completely wasted. Kind soul that you are, you decide to offer him your house, because, unlike poor people, he deserves a safety net for his mistakes. You expect you'll be thanked in the morning, and this rising GOP star will remember your name for the future. Right?

 Well, you certainly don't expect to wake up in the middle of the night and finding yourself sexually assaulted. But that's exactly what happened two weeks ago in Indiana, in the latest incident of the best-selling series "GOP Stars - Tales of Forbidden Love." At Columbia, we're quite familiar with this: not only did we share every other progressive's slight glee at the outing of Ted Haggard and Mark Foley, but we also got our own dose of male prostitute. It says something when this sort of scandal doesn't even surprise people anymore. A few more details on the Indiana case in extended.

One of the experiences I associate most closely with puberty is the beginning of cat-calls. I can remember clearly the very first time it happened to me: I was walking home from a friend's house at dusk and a car with a few men in it slowed down to a crawl and shouted at me. I don't remember what they said. My first feeling was fear. My second thought was that this meant I was now more of a woman than a girl. While that may have been briefly exciting, it wore off fast. Ever since, I've had to accept cat-calling as an annoying, gross, and scary side effect of WWF (Walking While Female).

I want to thank Ann Friedman for this excellent post taking apart a new Washington City Paper spread on cat-calling here in DC. A coworker put the City Paper on my desk this morning and suggested I read the pieces, but I avoided doing so, knowing it would open up a can of worms. I do applaud the City Paper for tackling this topic, and yes, it will be good for men to learn that what a woman wears has little to do with how much harassment she gets on the street. But I agree with Ann that the pieces are overly sympathetic to harassers and too focused on women's choices of where to live and what to wear...

From hippies reclaiming the body to immigrant groups who wouldn't even consider it, CNN reports that the circumcision rate in the United States has reached an all-time low of 57 percent. The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends forgoing circumcision, calling it an unnecessary and painful surgery. Even so, the United States remains the Western nation with by far the least foreskins. In the U.K, for example, fewer than 20 percent of men are circumcised; in Denmark, the number is less than 2 percent.

But don't call off the bris just yet. As I reported for In These Times last month, the World Health Organization is now recommending the procedure, emboldened by studies that found adult circumcisions in Africa decreased men's likelihood of contracting HIV by as much as 60 percent. Following the WHO's lead, New York City is considering promoting adult circumcision as a preventative measure, which worries activists who've been struggling for decades to send the message that using condoms is the only surefire way to protect yourself.

Seems to me that since evidence clearly shows circumcision protects men and their partners from a variety of sexually transmitted infections, we should be promoting the practice, not among grown men who may see the procedure as an alternative to safe sex, but among expectant parents. Get 'em while they're young and you can give them the anatomical benefits of circumcision alongside the lessons about protection and contraception.

- cross-posted at TAPPED 

Remember "Washingtonienne"? She was the low-level Capitol Hill staffer who was fired from her gig as a mail opener for a Republican Senator when her confessional sex-for-rent-money-and-luxury-gifts blog exploded all over the Internets. Then she got a book deal.

Well now Jessica Cutler (her real name) has filed for bankruptcy. I'm not ashamed to say I've read the book (Madhu made me do it!). Cutler's ex-boyfriend and colleague, who featured in the book as a spanking fetishist, is suing her for defamation. That's rather foolish. Now everybody (who didn't already) knows his real name: Robert Steinbuch. He's a former Judiciary Committee lawyer and now a law professor at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. Anyhow, Cutler claims she can't even pay her bills and student loans, let alone reimburse Steinbuch for the embarrassment of having several thousand obsessive blog readers and political junkies know he's into S&M. 

Okay this is all really an excuse to expose my pet peeve about Washingtonienne. In the book, she "slums it" when she hooks up with a bike messenger who lives in Adams Morgan. You know, the neighborhood I'm priced out of on my non-profit salary.