No Medicaid for Missouri, No Oral Sex for Catwoman
MO Lawmakers Are Risking Medicaid in Effort to Stop Paying for Birth Control
I start this week with a clarification. In my article last week on Jeffery Toobin’s return I wrote about a boss, a feminist porn producer, who provides masturbation breaks to her employees. Specifically, I said:
There’s nothing wrong with taking a masturbation break when you work from home. (Hell, this boss provides a room for her employees to take masturbation breaks in the office, granted she is a producer of feminist porn.) Having done so does not make him a bad person. Being entirely unaware of his privilege might.
I heard from some readers who felt that between questionable comma use and a poorly placed hyperlink, the sentence read as though I was saying “this boss” with two thumbs pointed directly at myself. Of course, the readers who contacted me are people who know me well (I may or may not be married to one of them) and therefore know that I have no employees and am not a producer of feminist porn. They were just giving me a hard time, but in case anyone was actually confused, the boss in question was Erika Lust, who, along with her husband, founded Erika Lust Films. (I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that’s probably not her original last name.)
The company tries to break stereotypes in porn by following eight principles: equal pleasure, diversity, fair pay, transparency, no surprises (everything you see on screen has been agreed upon by all performers in advance), safe sex, worker standards, and fair commissions. The masturbation breaks probably fall into the bucket of worker standards as Lust explained that the idea came to her during the pandemic when employees seemed agitated and low energy: "I value my employees and I know that when they feel good, we do good work….So, knowing that there's only one thing that will make everyone feel good, I've set up a private masturbation station for them to enjoy." She may be on to something; masturbation is known to lower stress, boost self-esteem, improve sleep, and relieve menstrual cramps. Still, I’m not sure how well this idea would go over in other industries.
Lust also runs the Porn Conversation, a nonprofit that tries to help parents talk to their children about porn. So-called porn literacy courses have come under fire lately after a particularly explicit lecture in a New York City private school led parents to complain about classes at another school taught by run by the same sex educator. The controversy made headlines in large part because of the high price tag of tuition at these schools. I can’t comment too much on the specifics of that incident because I only know what I read in the papers, but I will say that I hope it doesn’t give porn literacy a bad name because this is a really important topic.
Your kid will see porn, you can’t control that, but you can help them think critically about it. And, from my cursory read of their materials, that seems to be what Lust’s non-profit tries to do. The guide says “Teach don’t ban” and tries to help parents explain that porn isn’t realistic and that not all porn is created equally. Unhealthy porn, for example, shows sex as something done to a person not with them whereas healthy porn portrays consenting adults who care about mutual pleasure. All of this is very good advice as is taking the occasional, stress-relieving masturbation break as long as it’s not on zoom with colleagues.
Missouri Lawmakers Hold Up Medicaid Over Same-Old Abortifacient Argument
There are two fights going on over Medicaid in Missouri and one of them is based on the same-old arguments we keep hearing about birth control methods like IUDs and the pill causing abortions. I’m almost too tired of this argument to bother telling MO politicians that that’s not how it f**king works. I think they know that and I’m pretty sure they don’t care.
This fight was over something called the Federal Reimbursement Allowance (FRA) which is a tax on providers in the state. Remember, each state has its own Medicaid program to provide health care coverage for low-income residents and the federal government covers somewhere between half and three quarters of the cost depending on the per capita income in the state (the feds pay more in states where people make less). The rest comes from state and local funds. Most states have implemented a provider tax that helps them pay for the state’s share.
It’s a little circular—the providers pay taxes on services like hospital stays which helps the state qualify for its federal funds, and then the state uses those funds to reimburse the very same providers for the care they’ve provided to Medicaid recipients. In Missouri, the FRA generates about $1.6 billion each year and allows the state to collect $3 billion in funding from the federal government.
This legislative session, Missouri Republicans decided to play a game of chicken with this funding. They said they would only approve it with the caveat that no state Medicaid funds would be used to cover “any drug approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration that may cause the destruction of, or prevent the implantation of, an unborn child.”
Abortions, whether surgical or medication, are not funded by Medicaid unless a woman’s life is threatened by the pregnancy, so the goal here is not to prevent medication abortion. Some Missouri lawmakers have suggested that it’s about the morning-after pill (Plan B or Ella) which is sometimes inaccurately referred to as an abortion pill. The language was inserted into the law by Assemblyman Paul Weiland, who sued the state in 2013 to stop the state health insurance plan from covering contraception because it violated his religious beliefs (he’s Catholic). He won.
Weiland, who was elected in 2011, is term-limited and will leave the Assembly in 2023, and, apparently, he wants to go out swinging and imposing his religious beliefs on anyone with a uterus. He explained: “For several years I’ve been figuring out a way to make it so that the state of Missouri taxpayers do not have to fund these drugs that destroy human life. I need to do it while I’m still there.”
I think we just went over this a couple of weeks ago, so I won’t take too much time to tell Weiland what’s what. All methods of birth control including Plan B work primarily to prevent conception—they stave off ovulation and do what they can to keep sperm and egg apart whether that’s by creating a cervical mucus barrier (hi again, Cecily) or by being toxic to sperm. Research has shown that Plan B does not stop implantation if a woman takes it after ovulation/fertilization.
State Rep. Tracy McCreery, a Democrat and woman after my own heart, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “You can tell that they didn’t necessarily talk to doctors and people that understand how birth control works.”
Some lawmakers have pointed out that the language might actually put Missouri on the wrong side of federal regulations that say the state has to provide contraception to Medicaid recipients which would jeopardize the state’s federal funding.
But Weiland and his Republican colleagues stuck to their scientifically inaccurate guns and the Democrats weren’t having it, so they closed out the legislative session without reauthorizing the FRA. (The politics behind all of this were a little more complicated as they also had to do with the second fight over Medicaid—the Republicans’ refusal to fund Medicaid expansion which voters actually asked for last year—but we’ll leave that for another Wednesday.)
Without this reauthorization, the state won’t have enough money in its Medicaid piggybank to get the federal money it would be entitled to and it will not be able to pay providers. Nikki Strong, Director of the Missouri Health Care Association, which advocates for nursing homes, told the Kansas City Star: “Without the FRA, every nursing home in the state will be out of business.” Amy Blouid, CEO of Missouri Budget Project, a nonprofit in the state, said in a statement: “The consequences of failing to renew Missouri’s provider taxes would be dire, affecting services far beyond Medicaid, and they would be felt by Missourians in every community across our state.”
You know who is included in that, Mr. Weiland? Actual unborn babies whose mothers can’t get prenatal care because the Medicaid program in the state has collapsed. Are you at all worried about them or are you finally admitting that this is just about keeping women from accessing birth control?
Governor Mike Parsons, also a Republican, says he’s not opposed to limiting some drugs as long as it doesn’t violate Medicaid regulations but says this needs to be resolved soon. He’s considering calling state lawmakers back for a special session on this issue. He has also threatened to start slashing the state budget on July 1st to make up for the gap.
Batman Forbidden from Going Down on Catwoman
Few people can tell Bats what to do. With infinite money, chiseled good looks, state-of-the-art gadgets, and nerves of steel, Bruce Wayne is always in control, but we now know there’s at least one thing that he’s just not allowed to do—give Catwoman oral pleasure. And, it’s not because the mask gets in the way (though those ears are quite pointy).
In an interview that originally appeared in Variety, Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacher, co-creators of HBO Max's Harley Quinn, explained that a scene in a third season episode which depicted oral sex was decidedly not approved by the powers that be at DC, who apparently said: “Heroes don’t do that.” To which the writers claim they quipped: “Are you saying heroes are just selfish lovers?”
The execs essentially said they sell a lot of batman toys to kids (or more accurately to the parents of kids) and these people don’t want to see the brooding super eating someone out. The interwebs went nuts over this exchange with headlines calling it more proof that Hollywood doesn’t care about female pleasure.
This was one line in a much larger interview. I need more information before I decide whether to be offended. How much sex is in Harley Quinn in the first place? Have they shown or hinted at oral sex between other characters? Would the creators be allowed to have Catwoman give Batman head? This is an adult show that is rated TV-MA. If people are going at it every week, but they draw the line at cunnilingus, then yes, this is sexist and prudish and sends the message that real men don’t give oral. If, on the other hand, their prohibition is on oral altogether, then maybe it’s just marketers fearing a controversy that might or might not ever manifest.
A comic book nerd (to whom I may or may not be married) offered this analysis, which I have abridged for all of our sakes: “This may just be a failure of the unnamed studio executives to truly understand their own IP. Anyone who’s ever watched Eartha Kitt or Michelle Pfeiffer strut their stuff in latex will tell you that Catwoman being orally serviced by Batman is entirely in character.”