Sex ed for Laura

Jake at Lying Media Bastards links to a story and a video of a protest where Laura Bush was speaking about Bush and women. It really is cruel how they toss her out there and expect her to build entire speeches around Afghani girls in classrooms. I found the whole video to be pretty hysterical, because it illustrates perfectly where the support for abstinence-only education comes from--the fear that lurks inside the hearts of sex-phobic middle American men that their darling daughters will grow up one day to be able to roll a condom on a banana so quickly and perfectly. The irony of this attitude is that if we had widespread sex education and access to contraceptive, there wouldn't be as much for parents to worry about and they wouldn't have to dwell on their children's sex lives so much. But since we have such a repressive administration, the fathers of all these college-age girls have the pleasure now of seeing exactly how well their daughters have wised up in the ways of lurve.

The important thing to remember is that anti-sex attitudes are based very much in anti-woman attitudes, in the belief that women's sexuality is dangerous and needs to be controlled and/or punished. While the video was interesting, I found the write-up to be much more interesting because they actually engaged women who were for Bush in discussion.

As for the group of republicans countering our demonstration it was interesting to see that it was a white male dominated crowd. A local white male college student had the nerve to interupt an interview a friend and I were doing with three women to tell them that they were talking to us for too long and they needed to get back to the protest. hmmmmm... W stands for women...?

Through a few other interviews with other women there who were holding W is for women signs it became clear that most of these women did not understand why they were at the event. When asked why W stood for women most looked glassy eyed and confused.

I would have liked to see a video of those discussions. In my experience, women who wish to vote for Bush are usually unaware of exactly the amount of loathing that this administration shows for women around the world. BushCo has been very clever in only punishing the sexuality of women who can't vote or speak up for themselves--non-American women, poor women, teenage girls who are not getting properly educated. If they released a full-on attack on all women's right to contraception, they can expect that more women would be pushing back. I hope that these attempts at education are getting through to some.