The Red Tent on the Playground

Florida's "Don't Say Period" Law

I like to tell people I have a Master’s Degree in sex. Technically my Master of Arts from NYU is in Health Education with a focus in Human Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Life, but that’s a far-less-fun mouthful. So I just say sex. I wonder what the graduates of the soon-to-be-available Master of Fine Arts in Intimacy Coordination will tell people they meet at a bar or a dinner party? “I have a Master’s Degree in Sex Scenes?”

Intimacy Coordinators are the hot new player on movie sets who help actors with the ins-and-outs (never do I resist a pun) of pretending to have sex for the camera. The recent popularity of this role, which SAG defines as “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production … in regard to nudity and simulated sex,” is a direct response to the #MeToo movement in Hollywood (and Harvey’s nut sac).

They are now staples for shows like Sex Education and Bridgerton that have young casts and plenty of steamy sex. They implement rules like no tongues in kisses unless both actors agree in advance, choreograph more complicated sex scenes, and ensure that everything is consensual for everyone.

Many actors and producers praise the role as saving them from some of the awkwardness inherent in faking good sex (or bad sex as the scene may call for). Paapa Essiedu, who recently portrayed a sex assault victim on I May Destroy You, said she couldn’t imagine doing that without an intimacy coordinator. Liz Feldman, the showrunner on Dead to Me, told The Hollywood Reporter about feeling pressure when she realized they were about to make two teenage actors film a backseat sex scene: “… as the showrunner, you do start to feel a bit like a pimp. So to have a person whose job it is to help you facilitate that takes a lot of that pimp pressure off.”  

Of course, not everyone is thrilled with the concept. Actor Toni Collette made headlines recently when she admitted she’d kicked intimacy coordinators off the set because she felt more awkward with them present. In an interview with Fresh Air, actress Lizzy Caplan joked that if they’d had an intimacy coordinator on Masters of Sex, which ran from 2013-2016, they’d still be shooting. Others say that the biggest problem is that anyone can come in and call themselves an intimacy coordinator (check out this SNL skit), and it’s a job that needs a certain kind of finesse.

Enter Ita O’Brien, a UK-based intimacy coordinator who has worked on Sex Education, Normal People, and I May Destroy You. O’Brien is in the process of creating a 2-year degree program that would teach the next generation of sex choreographers everything they need to know “… about human anatomy, the use of modest [sic] clothing, sexual health and consent to touch, nudity, and sexual content” for the stage and screen. (I think “modest clothing” might be a type because I know actors call the tiny bit of cloth that covers their penis and scrotum a “modesty sock.”)

Though we don’t yet know who will teach in the program which will be run by UK drama school Mountview Academy, the school’s website promises that faculty will have expertise in such topics as sexual and intimate storytelling, open communication and transparency, power dynamics on set, movement coaching and masking techniques, union contracts concerning nudity and simulated sex, and health and safety training. 

In case you’re wondering, I have not yet been asked to adjunct a class. Perhaps next semester.  

No Place to Have a Baby: Idaho Hospital Stops Delivery Amidst Staffing Shortages

As of mid-May, Bonner General Hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho will no longer be in the business of delivering babies. Hospital leadership explained in a press release that they simply do not have enough staff—OB/GYBs or neonatal specialists—to make it safe to continue offering obstetrics services. This decision will force pregnant women in the area to drive 57 minutes to Coeur d'Alene or one hour and 23 minutes to Spokane. (Go to Spokane, it’s not in Idaho!)

Though many demographic factors (such as aging population and lower birth rates) have led to shrinking demand for maternity services, this decision is also a direct result of the state’s strict abortion laws which threaten health care providers who perform abortions with jail time.

We have been hearing horror stories from all over the country about doctors in states with restrictive abortion laws having to choose between protecting their patients and protecting themselves. Salon tells the story of a nurse in San Antonio, Texas who monitored a patient for three days knowing the woman’s uterus was becoming more and more infected. In normal times, the patient—whose pregnancy was no longer viable after her water broke at 19-weeks—would have had an abortion right away to avoid infection, but these aren’t normal times. Instead, the medical team had to wait for the “fetal heartbeat” to stop while simultaneously monitoring the patient for signs that the infection was becoming sepsis, because that would mean the woman’s life was in danger and they could do the inevitable procedure sooner. (Reminder: a fetal heartbeat is a misnomer that starts long before a heart is even developed and does not mean the pregnancy is viable.)

One of Sandpoint’s few remaining OB-GYNs, Dr. Amelia Huntsberger, was recently featured on This American Life and told Miki Meek all of the ways in which her decision-making has changed since Idaho’s super restrictive laws went into effect. Ectopic pregnancies—when a fertilized egg starts to develop in the fallopian tubes or anywhere else outside of the uterus—are of particular concern to Huntsberger. Medically, she knows that these pregnancies are never viable and could become dangerous to the woman meaning she should intervene immediately. Legally, that could cause problems for her.

Huntsberger tells the story of the first time post-Dobbs that a woman came in with a positive pregnancy test and an empty uterus. Her medical next step would be to give the woman an injection of medication to end the pregnancy because if it wasn’t in the uterus, it was dangerous. Instead of acting on that instinct, she called a hospital administrator who told her he was 90% sure that she could perform the procedure without running afoul of the law. Huntsberger told NPR, “What does that mean? So, you're saying I have a 1-in-10 chance of spending two years in jail with a felony?”

Instead of taking that risk, Huntsberger—who has three children of her own to worry about—sent her patient to the ER because a federal judge had agreed to make an exception for emergency abortions that go through emergency departments.

In fact, Huntsberger now sends all ectopic pregnancies to the ER, but she has concerns about that as well because her husband is an emergency medicine doctor. Under the law, if he performs an emergency abortion, the prosecutor could decide to arrest him anyhow and it would be on him and his legal team to prove that the abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother.

Even if he avoids prosecution, he could get sued by a family member of the “preborn child.” Under the law each family member can sue a doctor who they believe wrongfully terminated a pregnancy. The law states that the minimum damages are $20,000. It does not give a maximum. Huntsberger says this was running through her mind when she was working on a woman who was bleeding heavily from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy:

When you do surgery like that, where it's an emergency and somebody's having ongoing, active bleeding, that's already high stress. And that sort of high stress, I trained for that. I know what to do with that. I can handle that.

Then, you add in this other weird layer of, is her brother going to not understand that this was a not-viable pregnancy and that her life was at risk? And what about her mom? What about her partner? What about her sister?

It sounds terrifying to practice medicine under these conditions and it comes as no surprise that no one wants the job. Huntsberger joked in her interview about the idea of recruiting new OB/GYN resident to Idaho, “And I'm like, hey, there's all sorts of openings in Idaho. And then I'm laughing out loud because I'm like, who is going to be finishing their residency training and being like, I definitely want to go to the state with the super strict abortion laws that criminalize health care? I literally laughed out loud, and that's awful, right?”

If the law itself didn’t make it clear that Idaho legislators don’t give a s**t about women’s health, the testimony of the law’s sponsor certainly does. In discussing potential scenarios, State Senator Todd Lakey said, “If the decision was based solely on a question of some type of health, then you're talking about taking the life of the unborn child. So that weighs more heavily than simply health.” When asked to clarify whether he saw the health of women as irrelevant, Lakey said, “I would say it weighs less, yes, than the life of the child.”

As a twice pregnant woman, hearing him say this made my blood run cold. I’ve always intuited that GOP lawmakers cared more about unborn children than, well, me, but the fact that Lakey would say it out loud seemed like a new level of misogyny. It’s hard to wrap my brain around the idea that the life of any of us with a uterus becomes disposable the moment we get pregnant. It’s also hard to believe that people like Lakey are not horrified by doctors having to choose to save a potentially non-viable fetus over saving the life of a fully formed women. They’re pleased.

I do wonder if they thought this through, and I’m not even going as far the dystopian future in which this callousness toward pregnant women leads to fewer and fewer women willing to get pregnant. I’m talking about the dystopian present. When hospitals like Bonner General have to close maternity wards because doctors don’t want to risk going to jail, the babies these guys say they’re protecting are at just as much risk as the women they admit to not caring about.

Florida Weighing a “Don’t Say Menstruation Law”

I’m starting to wonder if teachers in Florida are just going to have to stay silent all day everyday as lawmakers there continue to work to stop discussions and ban books. They already can’t say gay or discuss anything that might seem “woke,” and now a new proposed bill would have them staying mum on menstruation, at least in elementary school.

In fairness to Rep. Stan McLain (because as a white Republican male, McLain has been treated unfairly recently), the bill he wrote doesn’t actually target discussions about periods. It’s not like he woke up one morning and said, “You know that bleeding that the women do every month? Down there? That’s gross. Let’s just not talk about it,” or proposed sending menstruating girls to the biblically inspired red tent on the playground for a week each month. He just didn’t think about periods when he wrote a bill banning all sex education before 6^th grade.  

McLain’s bill does go after the idea that gender is nonbinary by saying that “sex is determined by biology and reproductive function at birth” and that “these reproductive roles are binary, stable, and unchangeable.” It goes after sexual orientation by insisting schools teach “the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.” And it goes after pre-marital sex by falsely suggesting that “… abstinence from sexual activity is a certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, including acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and other associated health problems.” But it doesn’t mention menstruation.

The reason McLain’s bill is getting all of the media attention and being called the “don’t say period exclamation mark” bill is because a Democratic colleague asked him for clarification during committee discussion, and he didn’t immediately see the problem with telling the truth. Rep. Ashley Gantt pointed out that young girls often start getting their period before 6^th grade. When she asked, “So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in fifth grade or fourth grade, would that prohibit conversations from them since they are in a grade lower than sixth grade?” McLain simply said, “It would.”

When I started monitoring sex education in the late 1990s, I had a colleague who would say that if you taught puberty after fifth grade, it was a history lesson. Nonetheless, puberty and periods have been some of the least controversial topics in sex education. Plumbing and wiring we could teach. It was when we started adding emotions and behavior and relationships that outrage would start.

In further discussions, Gantt, who has actually been a public school teacher, said that she was worried that teachers would be afraid to help little girls with period questions out of concern for their own jobs. (Are we sensing a pattern this week?)

McLain—who is a contractor—said that wasn’t the intention. He has since said he was open to an amendment to the language to allow the discussion of menarche (a girl’s first period). Well, thank goodness for that. We’ll just have to remind little McKenzie to have all of her menstruation questions answered that very first month because her teacher will be unavailable after that.