The Jeff Booth Show

Internet Radio with Pictures

Show Transcripts

September 6th, 2009

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Jeff@eroticuniversity.com

(818) 613-9248

 We had a fundraiser for the Woodhull Foundation last weekend. It took place at Mistress Shae Flannigan’s Academy, a downtown Los Angeles dungeon. I emceed, and it was a very interesting evening. Should have been an interesting Monday for peiopel when asked what they did over the weekend. “Oh, I got to hang out with adult star Nina Hartley and her partner adult film director Ernest Greene, who got her topless and showed us some flogging techniques. Sex expert Carol Queen read us a naughty story. Lamalani, International Ms. Leather demonstrated fire play on a topless woman and then from volunteers from the audience. So, what did you do over the weekend?” It was a fun event for a good cause raising money for sexual freedom rights- and I talk more about this in our Why can’t We All Get Along segment.

In our sex in politics segment, we look at South Dakota abortion politics, how gay marriage destroyed the marriage of an arch-conservative, Pastor Steven Anderson and his admirer who was a guest on our show recently,  late late late term abortions, how violence against women has an expiration date, the Heritage Foundation’s defense of the economic value of kiddie porn, and a really inept defense of anti-lesbian discrimination.

In our Entertainment segment, a woman tries to make magician David Coopperfield’s money disappear,  women appear in calendars their husbands were not legally allowed to see,  In our who is getting naked now segment, Alanis Morrisette, Sharon Stone, and Obama’s mother?  Probably not, but it has been tied up into a remarkably vast conspiracy theory making the rounds of the right blogosphere. Oh, and a toy for girls that sucks.

All that and more, on the Jeff Booth show.

Politics

One of the things the anti-choice crowd has been supportive of is legislation that tells doctors what they are required to tell their patients. Legislation crafted not by doctors, but by anti-choice advocates. As such, it seldom has anything to do with actual medical care or actual medicine. And it often requires doctors to lie to their patients. The main point, though, is t force doctors to tell women anything that might make them feel like wretched human beings for wanting an abortion. Case in point, the South Dakota law that forces doctors to tell their patients seeking an abortion that “abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." They should just take it further and make doctors tell patients that their unborn child could grow up to be a doctor who finds a cure for cancer and by murdering their child they may be killing millions. And in the court case challenging this legislation, the judge found that it was true enough, and allowed that requirement to stand. The judge did strike down the follow-up, where after the fetus is described as a human being, the patient is told that as a pregnant woman, they have an existing relationship with that human being. The judge also struck down the requirement that doctors also tell women that abortion increases risk of suicide ideation and suicide. I am assuming the reason the judge struck this down was because it is a flat out lie. The judge did leave in the part where doctors are required to provide "a description of all known medical risks of the procedure." That seems reasonable, but it opens the door for actions against doctors who do not tell patients abortions increase the risk of cancer. That is not true, but it is a lie that the anti-choice crowd frequently repeats and believes and has little doubt that doctors should be required to tell patients. Planned Parenthood is the only abortion provider in South Dakota, with a single clinic in Sioux Falls. And not a single doctor in South Dakota performs abortions. They are done one day a week with a doctor who flies in from Minnesota. Which explains the latest law they are working to pass. It would require a two hour consultation with the patient the day before any abortion takes place. Since this law technically applies to a single clinic- legislators know exactly what it would do. Patients would have to make the long trek twice- since the consult must take place in the same city as the abortion. The doctor would have to make the trek to South Dakota twice- at significant expense. Even if the patient chooses to wave the consultation, the doctor would still be required to be in the clinic for two hours. Why? For the sole purpose of making abortions as expensive and as impractical as possible. Is that done with any other legal procedure? I don’t think so.

Doug Manchester, the wealthy owner of the Manchester Hyatt and San Diego Marriot hotels and Grand Del Mar and White Tail Club Resorts contributed a good sum of his money to help get Proposition 8 passed in California. He did it, he said, because of his devotion to both the Catholic church and his own marriage. He did it to defend marriage. He just announced that he and his wife are divorcing. Despite his church frowning on divorce and his own financial support to defend marriage, apparently it was not enough. The fact that there are still legal gay married people in California was apparently enough to destroy his marriage- just as he predicted- that gay marriage would destroy straight marriages. Thank God California passed prop 8 just in time, before heterosexual marriage disappeared entirely from California. Sadly, it was too late to save Doug Manchester and his marriage. He was so upset that he emptied out their joint accounts, cashed their joint tax refund himself, and stole mail from her lawyers outlining their divorce strategy. Can’t you see how gay marriage is destroying the morality in this state?

A big shout out to Pastor Steven Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. We interviewed Satan a couple of weeks ago, and he mentioned you very fondly after the show. He even quoted you at length where you preached “The same God who instituted the death penalty for murders is the same god who instituted the death penalty for rapists and for homosexuals, sodomites and queers" and "The sodomites are recruiters and you know who they are after? Your children. They are being recruited by the sodomites. They are being molested by the sodomites. They recruit through rape, they recruit through molestation, they recruit through violation" and  "Our country is run by faggots. You know who was the man who was the architect of the bailout? His name is Barney Frank, he is a pedophile... That's who just sold our country into fascism. That's who just sold our corporations to the government. That's who sold out our country, a faggot!" You even said that God hates Barack Obama and you said he should be executed. Personally, I’d never heard of you, but you’ve got a friend in Satan. You are his kind of guy.

Even though federally funded abortions are not in the health care bill, that does not stop opponents of health care reform from insisting that they are. They are also now reworking their falsified claims of death panels for senior citizens and calling them federally funded mandatory late late late term abortions.

The Violence Against Women Act expires in 2011. I’m not quite sure why the act would have an expiation date, since violence against women certainly doesn’t. And one of the things Congress will need to look at again in renewing the bill is the issue of charging women for their own rape kits. Despite a 2005 revision to the law, some rape victims are still getting charged up to $1200 for their rape kit. Besides the widely reported incidents in Alaska under Sarah Palin’s watch, problems have been reported in states including Illinois, Florida, and Maryland. In some hospitals, women are unable to get emergency contraception after being raped. Using it in a timely manner is critical. This needs to be addressed. It will be up to the Senate Judiciary Committee to rework the act, but there is some question as to how much enthusiasm Republicans on the committee will have, especially from ranking member Jeff Sessions, whose crusade against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor highlighted not only his well-documented racism but his disregard for women in general. During a hearing when a child cried because his mother was going to be deported because her partner was a lesbian and she could not legally marry and be recognized at the federal level, he reportedly said  “enough with the histrionics.” Or from Tom Coburn, who is insanely against any form of birth control. Or from John Cornyn, who strongly opposed the Lily Ledbetter act that provided anti-discrimination in pay protection to women. And Orrin Hatch- don’t really see him as a big advocate for women. I wouldn’t expect much Republican support from a party where many support denying a raped woman the right to an abortion unless their rapist is either convicted or gives his consent.

The very conservative Heritage Foundation also runs a site called overcriminalized.com which advocates that we have too many laws. It describes itself as informing people on the government’s attempt to use the criminal law to "solve" every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making proper use of civil penalties), and coerce Americans into conforming their behavior to satisfy social engineering objectives. Overcriminalized.com sends out legislative update alerts to "e-mail subscribers interested in legislation pending in Congress that could perpetuate the dangerous trend of criminalizing more and more social and economic activity." But I want to believe that their inclusion of H.R. 3515 in their recent alert had to be a mistake. It’s the Prevention and Deterrence of Crimes Against Children Act. It increase criminal penalties for child pornography, child sex trafficking and prostitution, child rape and sex crimes, and sex tourism. Sure, most of those are economic activities, but I don’t think we are going to save our economy by not having tough restrictions on kiddie porn and child prostitution.

Talk about not making your case. A lesbian couple at a Tastee Diner in Silver Spring, Md. were asked to leave for being too intimate. They claimed discrimination. The Tastee Diner responded that their activity was x-rated and way over the line, and for some reason they posted surveillance camera footage on YouTube to prove it. Except it proves just the opposite. They claimed that one woman was burying her face in the other’s breasts when you can see clearly that one woman is sitting on a stool and the other is standing. When they hug, yes, one woman’s face does wind up in that proximity, as is natural with the height discrepancy, but it looks like just a hug. In the entire tape you see nothing that would raise even the slightest of eyebrows if they were a heterosexual couple. Maybe the problem was that the women were not the kind of hot and tastee lesbians that men seem to drool over watching.

Entertainment

Magician David Copperfield has been sued in civil court over allegations of sexually assaulting and threatening a woman he invited to his private island. Yes, David has a private island. I used to work for him, back in the day. I was involved with one of his U.S. television specials, worked on a television special in Mexico where customs authorities got freaked out by lots of boxes with secret panels, and I also worked on one of his tours. There were rumors swirling around that David was gay, but I had two clues that he was not. One was that he never hit on me. The other was that he was living with his girlfriend at the time, who was clearly not sexually dissatisfied, since she never hit on me either.  I think that is pretty definitive. David was kind of an asshole when I worked with him, but the sexual assault charge is pretty hard to swallow. She claims she never would have gone if she had known she would be spending time with him. Good rule of thumb- Unless you are sexually interested in someone, don’t go to their private island. The criminal investigation has gone nowhere in the two years since this allegedly happened. And her allegations are pretty extreme. Repeated rape. Threats to kill her if she did not do certain sexual acts. Perhaps she just misunderstood when he said he wanted to cut her in two. There is a dark side to a lot of the illusions that magicians do. True, I knew David years ago, but this seems so completely out of character. She made it sound like she was alone on the island with him, which is preposterous as you need a good sized staff to maintain a place like that. Plus, David’s attorneys claim there were many other guests on the island, a claim pretty easy to prove or disprove. I can’t know, of course, but it does seem like she is after money in her lawsuit.

British women have created a calendar honoring their soldier husbands by recreating famous Vargas poses featuring themselves. You can check it out at garrisongirls.com. All of their husbands served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where ironically they would not have been allowed to see the calendar as even tasteful nudity is banned.

I am a strong proponent of sex workers’ rights, and of course they get taken advantage of, but I’m not certain where I stand on the recent court case in Boston. Strippers who worked at King Arthur’s Lounge had to pay $35 a night just to work, received no salary, and got 66% of what they earned from private dances. This made it possible for them to make hundreds of dollars a night. And they were classified as independent contractors. SO they sued, claiming they were actually employees entitled to minimum wage guarantees. And they won. The courts did not consider whether this financially hurt them, though. Would they have made as much money if the clubs paid them minimum wage and took 100 percent of what they made off of private dances? In Massachusetts, minimum wage for tipped employees is just $2.63 and hour. And what if King Arthur followed the legal in many states practice of tip pooling- forcing them to share a percentage of their tips with the servers and bartenders? As independent contractors, they could not be forced into tip pooling. Sure, as a class action suit the strippers are going to get a chunk of money. But is it really in the best interest of the dancers? In my show business days I almost always worked as an independent contractor. When I performed in places that served food where I got tips, I never had to share them. I had a lot of flexibility and the people engaging me did not have a lot of say about what I did in my act. I honestly don’t know what the best thing is in this situation, but I see dancers as being much more like entertainers than traditional employees. If making them employees is really in their best interest, I am all for it. But I am not completely convinced yet. And once they become employees, they’ll need to have a union. People in show business without union support get screwed over. Of course, the problem with show business unions is that they are run by actors and performers. I am not saying that actors are generally dumb, it’s just that intellect is not a prerequisite for acting- or for becoming an actor on the Screen Actors Guild board. SAG is one of the most screwed up places you could ever hope to see- and I saw a lot of it over the years. My wife Kris worked there for  years and was one of the key organizers during one of their strikes where I feel they had a legitimate grievance. The Screen Actors Guild employees were so mistreated they had to join the Teamsters just to get a fair shake. SAG was one of the most abusive employers around. And if you follow show business it all, you know they are plagued by infighting- they’ve lost control of most of the television shows to AFTRA- and they are just a mess of a union. Maybe strippers are slightly smarter than actors, and if they form a union it will do better than SAG, but again, I’m still not convinced.

And in who is getting naked now, its Alanis Morisette. She appears naked in bed with a man in a recent episode of Showtime’s Weeds. You don’t see everything, but she is clearly naked. Finally, we get to see God naked.

Sharon Stone looks great on the cover of Paris Match, where she poses topless. Another reminder that stars will appear nude in Europe but it does not happen much here in American magazines- because we are fucking prudes.

And in our most shocking who is getting naked now, it is Obama’s mother. Circulating on the Internet on conservative sites that normally abhor naked pictures are photos reportedly gathered by a self-proclaimed genealogist who claims that “by pure serendipity I found a photo of what I believe is (Obama’s Mother) Ann Dunham.”  I don’t know about serendipity- he had to be trolling a porn site called free-vintage-porn.com, which is where at least one of the three pictures came from. And never mind that the woman in the pictures has very short hair and Obama’s mother always wore her hair long. Or that they don’t really look all that much alike. Or just how unlikely it would be that a site that archives commercial but now out of copyright nude images, would have gotten hold of what would have been private pictures. These pictures originally made the rounds during the election, but are now making the rounds again. In what I believe is the original posting of them before the election, they also make the claim that the background looks like it could have been the apartment of poet and writer Franklin Marshall Davis.  Davis knew Obama as a teenager but Obama wrote about him and his attitudes as being stuck in the past. Obama has never called him a mentor and never writes of him as such. Davis was accused, as were many involved in the labor and civil rights movements, of being a communist by the House UnAmercian Activities Committee. Despite statements by Marshall’s own son that he was not a communist nor Obama’s mentor, accusations equal proof. SO the way it is reported on many conservative sites now- The pictures look like they maybe could have been taken in Frank’s apartment, she is naked so he had to be having sex with her, hence he must be Obama’s real father, which explains how he became Obama’s communist mentor- although Obama is also a fascist and a socialist. That does not mean that Obama is a citizen, though, because he was never born in this country and he probably renounced his American citizenship which he never had in the first placed. And it has been alleged Obama might have had sex with his real father Frank Marshall- a self-admitted bisexual pedophile. This is based on an anonymously written first person fiction novel Marshall wrote for Greenleaf Publications, which published many famous authors anonymously who wrote erotica for the money. In the book he describes being bisexual and also being seduced by a 13 year old girl. But it was sexual fantasy- not actual autobiography. Aren’t facts more fun when you can make them up? And why I am I not surprised that there would be an effort to make the first black president’s white mother out as a whore? The conspiracy theories about Obama are more convoluted and elaborate than those that deny we ever went to the moon. But unlike the loonie lunar deniers, its not just crazy but an all consuming hate that is the engine.

And there is a lot of nudity in the so-called sex tape featuring actor Eric Dane with his wife Rebecca Gayheart and legally of age but former Miss U.S. Teen Kari Ann Peniche. What there is not is any sex. They are just hanging around naked in the self-filmed vid, with the two girls sharing a Jacuzzi tub at one point. They all seem quite comfortable hanging around naked together, but it is hardly a sex romp. If the sex part happened and did not get filmed, I’m just assuming it was because none of them could hold the camera steady enough.

This has some people quite upset, but I don’t get why it is so horrible. It’s a Spanish made doll called Bebe Gluton. And it sucks- it’s a nursing baby doll and little girls can use it to pretend that they are nursing. It makes sucking sounds and you can burp it. We know that babies that get nursed on mother’s milk are healthier, so this seems like a good thing to encourage. Parents complain that the idea of nursing is too grownup. Really? Why? Do they think that little girls are unaware of nursing? Sure, if it were a Ken doll that suckled that would seem inappropriate to me. Sounds to me like the parents need to grow up.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Last weekend we had the fundraiser for the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and it went very well. It actually raised money- which doesn’t always happen the first time you try to mount a fundraiser. The goal of the organization is to fight for sexual freedom and rights for everyone. This includes all consenting adults and the sexual practices between them.

Part of what this fundraiser tried to do was to bring people together from a lot of different lifestyles- porn stars, doms, swingers, fetishists, bisexuals, gays, exotic dancers, polyamorists.  But here is the problem. While all of these groups have shared interests in freedom of sexual expression, they often fall prey to the same sexual prejudices of the so-called vanilla people. My wife and I have been active in a wide variety of sexual lifestyle communities, and have seen first hand these types of prejudices.

In the swinger community you can find a prejudice against male homosexuals and bisexuals. Here is the deal in the swinger community. While women being with other women is common and acceptable, there is a great deal of homophobia when it comes to men being with other men. You’ll hear the anti-gay jokes, a transparent attempt to prove one’s heterosexual bonafides lest others think otherwise. They buy into our cultural homophobia with a complete disconnect about their own acceptance of female bisexuality.

In the polyamory community, which believes that you can have committed relationships with multiple partners, I have frequently encountered a prejudice against swingers. They see them as less developed spiritually, people who reduce sexuality to recreation and don’t really understand its deeper meanings. They feel morally superior. But this just displays a lack of understanding and insecurity.

Even the gay community has their prejudices. Prejudice from homosexuals against bisexuals has been around a long time. My wife, who is bisexual and has been active in gay civil rights groups, has experienced this n several occasions. You can even find prejudice in the gay community against the polyamory community, fueled in part because they believe that poly rights could be used against them in their quest for equal marriage rights.

And when you look at all these prejudices, they really just point out our own fear, ignorance and insecurities. We need to come together for two important reasons. The first is to better understand the different communities who share our need for equality and freedom. The second reason is that if we band together, we can better fight for our rights. If our rights are more secured, some of the fears that fuel the prejudice against other communities may go away.

Gays want to be able to marry the person they love. Polyamorists and swingers don’t want to have their children taken away from them just because they choose to have sex with more than one partner. Retired porn stars don’t want to be fired from their job when it is discovered they used to do porn. We tend to focus on what effects our community- but we really have to look at the big picture. The central message is that the government should not be able to discriminate against us because of our sexuality, nor should our employers, or the courts. We want the same rights as others to not be discriminated against.

If we can’t even accept each other, how are we going to get the larger world to accept our sexual diversity? Added together, there may even be more of us than the strictly narrow straight vanilla  community. If we could just band together we would be a powerful political force.