Monkeypox Mambo

CDC Would Prefer You Have Sex with Your Clothes On

We were early adopters of TiVo, the first and—in my humble opinion— the best DVR. My children have never met a video that can’t be paused, but being able to go to the bathroom or make popcorn without missing anything was magical for those of us who grew up with three channels and rabbit-ear antennae. I no longer had to find a VHS tape with room enough on it for that week’s episodes of West Wing, Buffy, and Gilmore Girls (yes, 2002 was my golden age of television), and I could watch them without commercials thanks to the 30-second skip button.

When it wasn’t recording shows that you asked for, TiVo would take it upon itself—using early “who is this viewer” algorithms—to decide what we might enjoy. I was a little embarrassed by the sudden addition of 9½ Weeks to the queue, but it wasn’t that far off, and TiVo’s description of the movie that introduced everyone to food play was pure gold: “An art dealer becomes a real estate mogul’s sexual plaything for approximately 67 days.”

Of course, sometimes TiVo got it wrong. This gave rise to an article entitled “My TiVo Thinks I’m Gay,” (which I can’t still find) and a follow up in the Wall Street Journal, “If Your TiVo Thinks You’re Gay, Here’s How to Set it Straight.” In our case, it kept recording programs in Spanish that we may have been interested in but wouldn’t have understood.

I mention this because this week my Facebook decided I was a Trump-supporting Republican. The algorithm usually gets me exactly right. I own 2 pairs of Rothy’s and keep getting sucked into to ads for eyeglasses on Zeelool and Vooglam (two sites that sell identical merchandise and were clearly named by the same bot). But this week I got ads for a tee-shirt that would declare me super-MAGA. I also got an ad for freeze-dried meat that would last 25 years. At first, I thought this was pet food, but now I pretty sure it’s for when I’m down in the bunker with my arsenal of guns waiting for the end of the world. (I’m not sure why the world is ending, but clearly it’s Hilary’s fault).

Mostly, however, I got ads for crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). These insidious organizations advertise themselves as abortion clinics but exist only to prevent abortion. They use fear, shame, and lies to talk pregnant people out of abortions. They also spread propaganda and misinformation—this time on my Facebook page. One of the ads promised to share Planned Parenthood’s secret agenda. While their social media ads are a problem, what’s worse is that these organizations show up in Google searches when people in need of an abortion are looking for a clinic near them.

This week, 20 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking him to ensure that searches for abortion services do not include these bogus clinics. At the very least, the lawmakers would like to see the search engine giant clearly label these organizations to distinguish them from actual service providers.  

This issue is even more important now as the Supreme Court decision that will likely overturn Roe v. Wade looms large (but has yet to be officially delivered), and states move to criminalize abortion. Some fear that CPCs will start playing an even more sinister role in preventing abortion by reporting women who thought they were seeking help.

I was tracking CPCs back in 2002. This was the height of the abstinence-only movement when, in addition to scaring pregnant women out of abortion, these organizations were getting millions of taxpayer dollars to scare teens out of having sex. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.) I don’t miss the days of abstinence funding, but I do miss my TiVo and the Bartlet Administration.

Outrage Farming: GOP Candidate Tries to Make Controversy Out of Good Sex Ed Lesson

Croton-on-Hudson, a Westchester County suburb about an hour outside of New York City, is ending its year with a low-key controversy over a high school sex ed lesson that caught the eye of a Republican gubernatorial candidate looking to make waves. Apparently, in a lesson on consent students generated a list of sexual words and acts on a whiteboard. One classmate took a picture, a mom forwarded it, and the wannabe nominee tried to drum up outrage.

Rob Astorino, one of four people vying to be the GOP nominee for governor, held a press conference in front of Croton-Harmon High School at which he said parents were outraged by the lesson that included words and acts so dirty the media won’t even show them. On Wednesday, he doubled down in a statement saying, "I'm all for reasonable sex education, but when children are discussing how to sexually mutilate one another in New York classrooms, it's clear we have a problem,” and suggested that Governor Kathy Hochul has allowed “classroom education to become twisted porn instruction.”

He continued mining for controversy on social media. On Facebook he promised that when he’s governor “…the racial theories, gender ideologies and explicit sexual instruction will be banned from the classroom.” He tweeted a picture of the whiteboard in question along with the assertion that “vulgar and criminal content needs to be banned from the classroom.” He tagged it #revengeofthenormalpeople. (Everyone hears the anti-trans message in that hashtag, yes?)

I understand why Astorino wants to make this a big deal. Republicans love sex. Or they love to hate sex. (Or is it that deep down they hate how much they love sex?) As Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, said in his own Substack newsletter (all the cool kids have one) this week:

“The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has turned itself into a font of sexual innuendo and legal intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal life.”

Paraphrasing Reich’s explanation as to why (but please read it in full): culture wars are easy to sell to voters and the media, they allow Republicans to paint Democrats as deviants; they appeal to both the classic right-wing evangelicals and the new-fangled, extra-right QAnon voters; and they deflect attention from all of the ways in which Republican lawmakers are actually failing most Americans.

In Astorino’s case, he’s in a crowded field of GOP candidates (one of whom is Rudy Giuliani’s son) facing a crowded field of Democratic candidates in an election taking place under the shadow of Andrew Cuomo’s resignation from the office. 

Unfortunately for Rob, his outrage farming isn’t yielding much. A few people agreed with his tweet, but he got a lot of responses that skewed more towards “Have you met today’s high school students?” Parents who spoke with the media were mostly supportive of the sex education program, and even those who were skeptical of this lesson admitted that schools are often damned if they do and damned if they don’t when it comes to sex education.

For its part, the school district stood firmly behind the lesson, pointing out that Astorino never contacted the school or asked for context on the lesson. A letter from the superintendent provided that context:  

Several years ago, after some students were involved in an alleged off-campus sexual assault, the district formed a task force of parents, students and community members to update how the health curriculum addresses consent and sexual health.

One of those learning experiences begins with a discussion about consent, including the nuanced and sensitive language around that topic. Students are then asked to anonymously generate words or phrases they have heard or used related to sexual activity, some of which depict potentially unhealthy dynamics about sex. The individual words and phrases shared by the students are not defined within the class; instead, there is a discussion about the overall connotation of these terms, and the importance of using respectful language around this sensitive topic.

This sounds like a great lesson to me: one that promotes consent, acknowledges the power of language, and teaches critical thinking. Given that the brainstorm is student driven, it is not introducing new topics to the students as much as it is helping them better understand things that they or their peers have already heard.  

I will say, however, that this age group loves to shock teachers and each other, and brainstorming activities are apt to include the very worst things they’ve ever heard. I cannot remember the term I learned from my college students, nor do I have any desire to look it up, but it included the words blood and sandwich and involved punching a woman in the face during intercourse. This led to a great discussion of consent and violence and the influence of porn that I do think is appropriate in a high school classroom, but the term itself is the least important part.

If I were doing the lesson in a high school classroom, I might ask students to write the terms on pieces of paper and then curate the outward-facing list myself. Think of it as a seven-second delay designed not to prevent discussion but to steer it away from teens’ natural instinct to out-raunch each other.

Moreover, while I don’t want sex educators to cave to the fear of controversy, the GOP war on sex education is real. It is possible to offer a great sex ed lesson and avoid the predictable situation in which a whiteboard full of behaviors—ones that lurk in the depths of the urban dictionary but are in reality unlikely to be tried in a suburban teen bedroom—is photographed and taken out of context.

Sex in the Time of Monkeypox

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released guidelines about having sex amidst the monkeypox epidemic which would certainly have made Weekend Update if Saturday Night Live were in season. Covid-19 already had us talking about the socially distanced sex positions, but this is even more complicated because you also have to avoid clothing and bed linens.

Before we get to the dos and don’ts of the Monkeypox Mambo, you should know that monkeypox might be getting a new name. A group of scientists wrote an op-ed arguing that the name is both inaccurate and stigmatizing. They note that while this outbreak is in Europe, Canada, and the United States, the international press continues to use pictures of the pox on African people which plays into stereotypes of Africans as a vector for disease.

As I mentioned in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Monkeypox, the disease was named not because it is passed by primates nor because the pox are shaped like Boots from Dora the Explorer, but because it was first seen in a group of research monkeys in the 1950s. Two decades later, it jumped to humans. Since then, the virus has been endemic to parts of Africa, which as we know, also has monkeys. The current outbreak, however, has nothing to do with monkeys or Africa.

As we saw in the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic with Trump’s insistence on using terms like China flu, associating a disease with a place or population can lead to stigma, discrimination, and even violence.   

The scientists are asking for a more neutral name. They suggest starting with hMPXV to denote that it is the human version of the monkeypox virus and then naming variants by letters and numbers based on order of discovery rather than by the place an outbreak began. This would be similar to how SARS-CoV-2 and its variants have been named over the past few years. The World Health Organization seems poised to take this advice.  

Meanwhile, the question is whether people at risk for monkeypox will take the CDC’s advice about how best to get off without getting it. The current outbreak may have started at two European raves and seems to be primarily affecting men who have sex with men. So in advance of Pride festivals, the CDC’s guidance starts with, “How can a person lower the chances of getting monkeypox at places like raves, parties, clubs, and festivals?” Though slightly more nuanced, the answer basically boils down to “keep your clothes on.”

This advice carries over to how to reduce the risk during sex which includes keeping as many clothes on as possible, avoiding kissing, and washing everything (hands, toys, fetish clothes, sheets, etc.) as soon as possible. Ideally, the CDC would like people who think they have been exposed to monkeypox to stick with video sex or mutual masturbation from opposite sides of the room.

While many headlines called the advice bizarre, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF)—which fought a years-long battle for a condoms-in-porn mandate that neither porn stars nor the city of Los Angeles wanted—thinks the CDC didn’t go far enough because it didn’t suggest condom use. AHF held a press conference at which it argued that condom use needs to be stressed because of preliminary evidence that monkeypox has been found in semen.

I don’t think the CDC is questioning the evidence—viruses from Ebola to Zika have been found in semen. —nor do I think the CDC is suddenly anti-condom. I’m pretty sure the issue here is that if you make it to the semen stage, you’ve gone past the breathing on each other and rubbing skin phase, and you may have even touched each other’s sheets. Condoms wouldn’t make much of difference, unless, of course, your condoms are made by Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker.