Hey, Texas, Idaho, and Arizona, That’s Not How it F**king Works
I have vaccines on the mind this week. Like many others across the country, I’m constantly hitting refresh on my county’s vaccine scheduling site and scouring the web for a CVS with open appointments for me and my husband. I’m less frantic about it than I was about making sure my parents and my mother-in-law found appointments (they all did). We’re less at risk and with the J&J vaccine in distribution, I believe President Biden that all adults can be vaccinated by the end of May. The news that Merck is partnering with J&J to produce their vaccine actually brought tears to my eyes. I know we like to make big pharma the enemy—and these companies have put profits over patients enough times to earn that reputation—but they have also made amazing breakthroughs and delivering three vaccines that work against a brand new threat in under a year is amazing. Also amazing, in my opinion, is Merck’s decision to partner with another company after its own vaccine trial failed. I hope this decision is worth its weight in PR gold. I found out last week, at the Zoom funeral of my 93-year-old great uncle Dr. Jerome Gold, that he had been part of the team that invented the Rubella vaccine. I’m so impressed, and sad that I didn’t know that earlier. I would have loved to ask Uncle Jerry about how it felt to make such an important contribution to science and how it felt to have that important contribution undermined by falsified data and wild conspiracy theories. I know it will be an uphill battle to get enough people vaccinated—after production and distribution shortfalls are resolved we’ll still have to fight misinformation, and the three stories below sadly show how much of that we are up against across the country.
Texas School Teaches Subservience
Between the unregulated power grid and the governor’s insistence that the pandemic is over, plenty of us have been rolling our eyes at Texas and we’re not likely to stop now. Students at Shallowater High School took home an assignment last week that would have been outdated in the 1950s.
The worksheet, a picture of which went viral on Twitter, is called “Rules for Chivalry” and is directed only at female students. It says that to please men, ladies should “dress in a feminine manner,” “walk behind daintily as if their feet were bound,” “cook,” and “not complain or whine.” Ladies, according to these rules, must not initiate conversations with men (with the exception of male teachers). And, here’s a great one coming from a school: “outside the classroom, women should never show intellectual superiority if it would offend the men around them.” Yep, let’s set our girls up for a lifetime of suffering mansplaining fools with a smile and a nod.
The assignment, it turns out, was not just to read the rules but to practice them. Fathers and other adult males would sign the sheet every time a female student “deemed worthy of honor” demonstrated a rule and each signature earned her ten points.
Everything about this assignment is wrong starting with the fact that it clearly is based on a world in which gender is binary and ending with, well, everything else. I can’t read “worthy of honor” and not question whether they mean virgins. And I can’t read “ladies must obey any reasonable request of a male" without thinking of sexual assault.
A corresponding handout for guys also made the rounds on twitter but is not nearly as horrifying. In fact, the suggestions—like “a gentleman helps ladies to seat themselves and rise from their seats”—only serve to reinforce women as perpetually in need of strong men to guide their way.
When abstinence-only-until-marriage programs take on gender stereotypes they are a little bit more subtle, relying on silly phrases like “watch what you wear, if you don’t aim to tease don’t aim to please” which are clearly but not explicitly only aimed at women. Or, they say that when it comes to sex men are like microwaves and women are like crockpots which sounds goofy but ultimately makes women the gate keepers of sexual behavior and, therefore, at fault when things go “too far.”
This exercise, however, is about as subtle as a brick. So much so that part of me wonders if the point of this handout was to get the students in the class incensed at how absurd expectations for women were not-that-long-ago in order to start a discussion about gender equality. The apology from the principal almost lends credence to my theory: “This assignment has been reviewed, and despite its historical context, it does not reflect our district and community values. The matter has been addressed with the teacher, and the assignment was removed.”
I hope that this was a failed exercise in critical thinking. Of course, it’s equally possible that some teacher really wants to go back in time.
Idaho House Votes for Opt-In Sex Education
The Idaho House voted this week to require explicit parental permission before young people can start sexuality education classes in schools. Existing law in Idaho, like in most states, says that young people will be automatically enrolled in sex education classes (just like they are in math or science), but gives parents the right to “opt-out” if they don’t approve of the subject. Changing this to the stricter “opt-in” requirement is a favorite tactic of those who do not want sex education in schools.
The bill’s sponsor explained that she was just making sure parents were sufficiently involved in their children’s education, but also used her floor time to express horror that elementary school teachers were reading storybooks telling kids they could change their gender. One of her Republican colleagues took it even further, “It’s hard to find a parent who hasn’t been horrified at some point about what they’ve heard being taught to their kids at school. In an area so important as this, that is not just about biology but it is also about values and families and yes, it even does touch religion, we need as much parental involvement as possible.”
Democrats in the House disagreed. Representative John McCrostie called out both the ideological and practical problems with opt-in measures: “Talking about sexual orientation doesn’t make anyone gay. Talking about gender identity doesn’t make anyone transgender. And talking about sex doesn’t make anyone pregnant. Don’t penalize parents who are not able to be as involved in their children’s life due to their own extenuating circumstances. You can hold traditional views and still receive this information and not lose any of those heartfelt values.”
The most vocal opponents of the bill, however, were young people from around the state who organized a march at the Capitol. A 16-year-old organizer of the event wrote in a news release: “Many teenagers are going to engage in sexual intercourse whether their parents like it or not. Not every child has a parent that is willing/able to have those important conversations with them. Without the crucial knowledge taught in comprehensive sex ed, kids will participate in unsafe sexual activities.” And another student at the Capitol that day hit the nail on the head when he said, “This isn’t about parental rights. It’s about denormalizing what they think is being normalized. It’s about denormalizing what they don’t agree with.”
Opt-out measures are more than sufficient to respect parental rights—most parents support comprehensive sexuality education, and those who would be horrified by their children hearing stories of transgender young people will be on it enough to make sure their child isn’t in the room. They have always been a small but very engaged and very vocal minority.
By the way, I am the poster child for why opt-in measures are an unnecessary, administrative nightmare. In my 14 years of parenthood, I have never returned a permission slip on time. How ironic would it be if my kids were the ones who had to sit out sex education?
The bill passed the Idaho House on a party-line vote of 59-12 and now goes to the Senate.
That’s Not How it F**cking Works: AZ Senator Says We Don’t Need Masks Now if We Didn’t Need Them for HIV
The United States has hit almost 525,000 deaths from Covid and Republican lawmakers across the country are fed up. Not with the staggering loss of life but with the requirements that people wear masks whenever they’re out in public. Though public health officials including the new director of the CDC and the now-famous Dr. Fauci, begged them not to, the governors of Iowa, Mississippi, and Texas cancelled their mask mandates last week. A debate in the Arizona legislature over the same issue proves that many state lawmakers do not have a grasp on virology (or reality for that matter).
In making his argument to rescind the Grand Canyon State’s private business mask mandate, Representative Joseph Chaplik reminded his colleagues of the early days of the HIV epidemic, saying that virus “was going to wipe our global destruction of human bodies with AIDS (sic). We heard about that in the ’80s. Yet no masks were required.” I’m not entirely sure where he went after that but I’m guessing his general point was we didn’t wear masks then and we’re not all dead, so we don’t need masks now.
Sorry Joe, but that’s not how it f**cking works.
HIV is not an airborne virus. A mask would do nothing to prevent it.
In fact, HIV is very difficult to contract. It is present in blood and other bodily fluids like semen, vaginal secretions, breastmilk, and saliva. (Though C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general at the beginning of the HIV epidemic, once famously noted that you’d have to drink a bucket of saliva to get enough virus to be infected.) A person needs to come into direct contact with infected bodily fluids and the virus can’t live outside the body for very long. Moreover, intact skin is an effective barrier against HIV transmission. That’s why the only real risk of HIV comes from penetrative sex, sharing needles, mother-to-child transmission, blood transfusions, or health care providers getting stuck by contaminated sharps.
At the beginning of the HIV epidemic, we did ask people to put a barrier between their body and potential sources of the virus when public health professionals pushed condoms as the only source of prevention for sexually active people. We did not mandate condom use because sex is a private event between two consenting adults (if not, it is against the law), but we did require health care providers to use latex gloves so they were not a risk to their patients.
Sure, there are parallels to be drawn between the two pandemics. A new virus emerged around the world, science raced to figure it out, and society had to adapt to stay safe. And there are parallels between condoms and masks as prevention methods, I wrote about it early on.
But, where Chaplik is all wrong is in comparing the two viruses and the ways to protect ourselves. There is no casual transmission of HIV. Sharing food, sharing a toilet, and hugging are totally safe. This is not true of COVID which is thriving on casual contact. This virus makes everyday activities like going to the supermarket, eating at a restaurant, and sitting in a classroom potentially dangerous. I have not hugged my own parents in over a year and many of my friends have lost their parents in part because people across the country refuse to follow public health advice that could prevent community spread.
So, to Chaplik and his colleagues who argued that the bill protected Arizonans’ sacred right [to, what, go to the gym without a mask?], I say “that’s not how it f**cking works.” Shut up and cover your damn mouth… and nose.