Yes, Sarah Palin gutted funding for pregnant teens at just about the same time her own daughter was romping around with boyfriend but without condom. Yes, she’s a staunch supporter of the abstinence-only education which is delivering a rise in births to US teenagers. And yes, when a personal story occasions sensible reflection on a potential president’s ability to make data-free policy decisions, then I think it’s fair game for press coverage, even if it involves a family member’s sex life.

Others question that; there’s been heated discussion about what it is and isn’t fair to report.

As I was considering these issues I was reminded of a story about a bestiality and rape that was reported with great glee a couple of months back. The victim was almost certainly a minor, the rapist was 16 times her body weight. Was there a discussion about protecting the victim’s privacy? Not a bit of it. Scientists photographed the encounter, and the pictures were widely published. As here:

Lust in a cold climate

The assault involved a seal and a penguin. Different species from us, much like politicians. That’s what made it fair game for reporting.

Over at Bound Not Gagged, Jill — a seasoned reporter on penguin prostitution — assumes that the victim will soon start turning tricks (because as we know, all sex workers were set on the path to harlotry by a dark past of child abuse and incest). So say the very people who also believe that telling teens to cross their legs is an effective way to prevent pregnancy. Heigh ho.

I’m wondering whether the Daily Christian’s aestehtics might achieve what their messages don’t. They suggest you “Size up for a looser fit”. Baggy thongs, eh? I’m thinking that the girls who take that advice might just be among the 27% or so of US virginity pledgers (pdf) who haven’t allowed hormones to get the better of good intentions by the time they leave high school.

Thanks to Salon’s Broadsheet for this one.

Check out “Jesus loves you — and your orgasm”, Salon’s review of Dagmar Herzog’s book “Sex in Crisis”. In the review, Louis Bayard says that Herzog implies that the religious right has hijacked the language of the liberal left, the better to control our sexuality. The rhetoric around sex work, for example:

As recently as 2003, for example, a certain public figure was arguing that voluntary prostitution was “despicable” because it “demeans the value of women” and promotes “the severe degradation and exploitation of women, the literal rape of countless women around the globe.” Was it Andrea Dworkin? Catharine MacKinnon? The correct answer: pro-life Rep. Smith, R-N.J., whose distinctly illiberal purpose was to limit AIDS outreach efforts to prostitutes and sex workers in developing nations.

We’ve seen some of this before. We’ve seen leaders of gay communities play down the association between anal sex with multiple partners and infection (including HIV, LGV and MRSA), so finding themselves in cahoots with “everyone is at risk” profiteers. We’ve seen African leaders adopting distinctly unsecular moral rhetoric rather than talk about sex. But the point is, this is all rhetoric. It is not debate, or conversation, or discussion. It is assertion. Asserting beliefs at one another doesn’t change minds. Kids go on having sex despite having been assaulted with messages telling them not to. Preachers go on employing sex workers despite ranting about the fact that prostitution is not work. Fundamentalists of all stripes go on asserting the virtue of programmes that don’t work, despite people like me constantly asserting the opposite. (Though my assertions at least come with data sets.)

And when I hear assertions like this: “Only those women who have been premaritally abstinent will be truly, deeply, and consistently desired by their husbands in the long years after marriage … Have no sex before marriage and you will have outstanding sex after marriage.” I go on snorting in disbelief. But then in my world, I couldn’t find a large enough sample of still-married virgins-at-marriage to disprove the assertion.

Some would say that means Uganda’s First Lady is a threat to national security; her enthusiastic embrace of abstinence as the main weapon against HIV is thought by some to have contributed to Ugandans getting sloppier about using condoms. (A paper on trends in sexual behaviour in rural Uganda will be published soon in AIDS.)

The army blames bad behaviour when the boys go to other countries on UN peacekeeping missions. By God, there must be a lot of bad behaviour if the figures cited in the New Vision story are right. The UN (and indeed the Ugandan army) screens peacekeeprs for HIV before they go on active duty, so most of the 2,500 Ugandans would have been uninfected when they put on their blue berets. When they came back, the paper says, 90 percent were infected. This is simply not plausible; under two percent of the population is infected with HIV in Benin, (compared with seven percent in Uganda). Yes, rates in sex workers will be higher than that but still…

But for me, the best non-sequitur in the story is this: “Dr. Godfrey Bwire of the UPDF said the HIV prevalence rate in the army was high, but he concealed the figures citing security reasons.”

The proportion of teenagers having sex drifted downward for the first decade it was measured (the surveys started in 1991, a few years after AIDS bludgeoned its way into the heterosexual consciousness). Kids who did have sex used progressively more condoms over that decade, too. But in 2001, the year Georgw W Bush and his moralising supports came to the White House, the downward drift flattened out. A two-year assault on condom education later, condom use also turned the corner.

Trends in Sexual Behaviour among American high school students

(Graph courtesy of the Washington Post)

Admirably, all of these data are available on the remarkably comprehensive CDC survey site so you can run your own tests for trend if you want. But many of the statistical caveats are in the Washington Post’s careful coverage. One paragraph from the story bares repetition:

The new report did not examine the reason for the trends, but experts said there could be many causes, including rising complacency about HIV and AIDS, changing attitudes about sex and pregnancy, shifts in ethnic diversity, and the possibility that there will always be teens who cannot be persuaded to wait.

Well there’s a surprise. Last year, 48% of these high school students couldn’t be persuaded to wait (for what? marriage, which happens on average at age 28 for men and 25 for girls. Please!) Close to 40% had unprotected sex at last intercourse.

What teenage girl would want to be “covered” by her father in areas of purity? Plenty, it seems, if the ongoing success of the Purity Balls is anything to go by. At these balls, fathers pay over US$100 to crow over their daughters’ virginity, pledging publicly to maintain it until they hand them over to another man in marriage.

According to the New York times:

The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing, was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed.
Yet the graying men in the shadow of their glittering daughters were the true focus of the night. To ensure their daughters’ purity, they were asked to set an example and to hew to evangelical ideals in a society they say tempts them as much as it does their daughters.
“It’s also good for me,” said Terry Lee, 54, who attended the ball for a second year, this time with his youngest daughter, Rachel, 16. “It inspires me to be spiritual and moral in turn. If I’m holding them to such high standards, you can be sure I won’t be cheating on their mother.”

Three out of four of the two million American teens who pledge abstinence each year wind up having sex before marriage. I wonder what the odds are that their fathers maintain their own moral standards?

Confused how a silicone penis could make a girl to sleep with her father? Me too. In a lovely blog post, Amanda Marcotte explains that like everything else in the States, it comes back down to the abortion issue. Of course in the great, entrepreneurial nation that is the US, prohibition of sex toys doesn’t actually mean you can’t sell them openly. It’s a matter of semantics, as this video explains:

In response to this taxpayer-funded pap, Josh Covitt & Whit Hertford at The Attack made a more useful video, which asks the questions your pookie bear really wants answered (such as “How do I put a condom on with my mouth?”). It’s one of the better ads I’ve seen. Straight up. My only question is: how come it is categorised as “parody”?

Thanks to Jeff Ballinger.

Here’s what Bush said:

“I monitor the results,” he said. “And if it looks like it’s not working, then we’ll change. But thus far I can report, at least to our citizens, that the program has been unbelievably effective. And we’re going to stay at it.”

So is it the reporting he’s doing “to our citizens”? And if so, why would he give a different report to “our citizens” than he would to the citizens of Ghana, or any other country where the US is strapping up effective HIV prevention? Or does Bush really mean the funding has been effective “to our citizens”? Perhaps the latter, inasmuch as our citizens benefit from taxes paid by pharmaceutical manufacturers, and they in turn benefit from high sales volumes, for which we need lots of patients, and those are in turn generated by failed HIV prevention approaches.