The Jeff Booth Show

Internet Radio with Pictures

Show Transcripts

October 14th, 2007

You can contact us at:

Jeff@eroticuniversity.com

(818) 613-9248

Political News

I got so tired of the Larry Craig story. Thank god we have something new to talk about: The Joey DiFatta story. He was running as a Republican for the 1st Senate District in Louisiana until it was released that he was stopped twice by police for suspicion of lewd behavior in a public restroom in Jefferson parish. He was not arrested, but there are police reports of the incidences that took place at a mall.  In the first, a man held DiFatto until police arrived after DiFato peered at him through a hole in the bathroom stall. The misdemeanor summons was dropped only after the man decided not to press charges. In the second incident, DiFatto commenced with the now famous foot tapping, then reached under the stall to caress the undercover officers leg. When the officer asked him what he wanted, DiFatto replied “I want to play with you.” The only reason the investigation stopped was because several children entered the bathroom, otherwise, according to the officer, DiFatto would have been arrested. The officer claims to have confronted DiFatto outside the bathroom where DiFatto admitted that he had problems with this in the past but was seeking counseling. DiFatto claims he did nothing wrong. If only things had been a little different. If we could have called the story when Larry met Joey, DiFatto would probably still be running.

Your tax dollars are at work again, paying for a series of national television spots telling parents to teach their kids not to have sex until they are married. It features a bunch of kids begging their parents to tell them not to have sex and to wait until they get married. I have no problems telling kids to wait until they are mature enough to be responsible before having sex, but with the average age of marriage around 27, that is a long wait. Trust me, that is not what kids want their parents to tell them. They are wishing that everyone would just stop lying to them and just give them some accurate information about sex. But no, instead the ad simply encourages parents not to educate their children about sex, but just to tell them not to do it. Its an ad to educate parents to not educate their kids. And get this great slogan- Success comes to kids who wait to have sex. That’s right- the world is filled with successfuil virgins. And no guy works to be successful to increase the chances of his getting laid. But the campaign missed a major point. When the kids ask why they should wait to have sex until marriage, the ad should have instructed parents to reply, “Because I said so.”  They really dropped the ball there

The Stepford Wives was only a movie, and we are years away from the technology to make perfect obedient fembots, but President Paige Patterson of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary believes he can turn real women into Stepford wives the old-fashioned way. Through a college education designed not for a career, but to teach her how to live in obedient subservience to her husband, finding joy in cooking and cleaning and not worrying her pretty little head about much more than that and those things which please her husband. It’s a sick 1950’s fantasy that this façade of a college offers as a major. You can actually get a bachelor’s degree in being essentially a domestic servant who works solely for room and board. Paige Patterson is the twisted misogynist who, when he was convention president of the Southern Baptists in the 1990’s, banned women from becoming pastors and called on all wives to submit themselves graciously to the servant leadership of their husbands. At the seminary, he fired a female professor of biblical languages, because he believes that the Bible prohibits women from teaching men theology. Of course, he says, according to an article in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times, they don’t want to turn out just domestic servants. They also want these women to be able to home school their children. This makes sure we’ll have future generations of the intellectually challenged.  

And what better way to prepare these girls than the single sex education system in Louisiana, with single sex programs in the state that assigns action books to boys and cosmetic science projects to girls. . Here is how principal Alan Joe Murphy of Livingston parish describes the differences: For instance, girls would receive character education and be subject to high expectations both academically and socially. Girls would be taught math through “hands-on” approaches. Field trips, physical movement, and multisensory strategies would be incorporated into girls’ classes. Girls would act as mentors for elementary school girls.

On the other hand, boys’ teachers would teach and discuss “heroic” behavior and ideas “that show adolescents what it means to truly ‘be a man.’ Boys’ classes would include consistently applied discipline systems and offer tension release strategies. Boys’ classes would also feature more group assignments.

The Simpson’s did an entire episode on this, with Lisa having to pretend to be a boy just to get a decent education. Nothing better than reinforcing 1950’s gender sterotypes to aid in learning. Next stop Southwestern Baptist. The ACLU is suing. Hasn’t the south already tried the separate but sort of equal route. As I recall, that did not turn out so well.

Last year a Maryland appellate court ruled that once a woman consents to sex, she can’t change her mind. She can’t say stop. She can’t say stop, you are hurting me.  I know, that sounds like a ruling from 50 years ago. Or 100.  The scariest part of it is what the court’s ruling was based on- a 1980’s case that cited common law defining rape in the framework of women being property. So essentially, it is a rulling based on the thinking of the 19th century.  . This defines rape as the initial “deflowering” of a woman. The injured part is actually the father or husband, not the womanThe decision notes that after penetration — the “initial infringement upon the responsible male’s interest in a woman’s sexual and reproductive functions” — anything following can’t be rape because “the damage is done” and the woman can never be “re-flowered.” The states highest court has decided to rehear the issue. I hope they decide to convene in this century.

And finally, while the current SexinReview.com has a feature on sexy Halloween costumes for both men and women, something we support, this is about the worst Halloween costume ever. Its called Anna Rexia. The dress "includes a headband, choker looking like a tape measurer, a removable Anna Rexia heart badge, and ribbon tie belt resembling a tape measurer. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a feather.

Science News

The Ignobel awards have been announced, and two of them fall into the sexual category. Peace Prize: The Air Force Wright Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research and development of a chemical weapon, the "gay bomb," that "will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other." Aviation: A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters recover from jet lag. If that can be applied to people, then dropping some Viagra and joining the mile high club may be just the answer. Or at least a particularly fun answer.

In a groundbreaking new study, Indiana University cognitive scientist Peter Todd and colleagues from Germany, England and Scotland used a speed-dating session in Germany comparing what people said they wanted in a mate with whom they actually chose. "While humans may pride themselves on being highly evolved, most still behave like the stereotypical Neanderthals when it comes to choosing a mate," Todd said in a statement."Evolutionary theories in psychology suggest that men and women should trade off different traits in each other, and when we look at the actual mate choices people make, this is what we find evidence for."

The study, was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They set up speed-dating session in which men and women had "mini dates" of between three to five minutes with up to 30 different people. As with regular speed dating, the men and women marked a box on a card saying whether they would like to see the other person again. In the final analysis, men tended to go for the attractive women and women tended to go for the men with wealth and money.  Wow, a study using just 46 people combined with the shallowness of speed dating managed to confirm pre-existing expectations without shedding any real light on actual attraction. What next? A study of how people choose mates in pick-up bars?

Here is a study you probably haven’t heard of, but had the results had been what most of us expect, it would have been all over the news. It was called "Online Requests for Sexual Pictures from Youth: Risk Factors and Incident Characteristics and was published in the August issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. It posed an interesting question in a survey of 1500 kids. In this sampling, how many of them would you have expected to have been asked online for a nude picture of themselves?  The actual answer is just 4 percent, still troubling, but less than I would have guessed. But even more problematic, is that the data showed that the kids being asked tended to be teenaged black girls. What this means I don’t know, but it was apparently too confusing for the mainstream media. Only a few picked up the story, and the few that did failed to mention the race factor entirely. And I’m not completely sure what that means either.

Our sexvestigation this week is about the fake link between abortion and breast cancer, but breast cancer is still a serious issue, and anything that helps not based on made up science is good. So it is good news that Eli Lilly and CO. got FDA permission to sell their osteoporosis drug Evista as a treatment for breast cancer. It is one of the few drugs on the market with the potential to prevent invasive breast cancer for those women at high risk.

Whacko of the Week

I’d almost forgotten about Michael Bailey, until his research was cited in the current issue of Playboy. We realized he was long overdue to admission to our elite Whacko of the Week club.

Bailey is a highly controversial psychologist whose research is focused on biology and sexual orientation. He has a number of interesting ideas. He believes that you can tell if a man is gay or not just by listening to his voice for 20 seconds.

While he does not deny the idea that homosexuality is genetic, he considers it an evolutionary mistake, and may represent a developmental error. He has also linked homosexuality to higher levels of psychopathology.

In one of his most controversial stands, he believes that when the technology becomes available to screen fetuses for potential homosexuality, that it is a morally neutral choice for parents to choose to abort them. He calls this beneficial because homosexuals would have a hard life and it would further the parent’s freedom to raise the type of child they want to raise. How this differs from screening for gender and aborting if it is not the sex you want is difficult to differentiate. To Bailey, homosexuality is not a choice, it’s a disease to be eradicated.

It is this connection to Eugenics that caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In an article on their site, they point out the connection to the neo-eugenics group, the Human Biodiversity Institute, which seems to share some of the same long discredited ideas about shaping humanity that left a negative mark on many of the early birth control pioneers. Their site features crude sexual and ethnic stereotyoing.

His one published book in 2003, The Man Who Would Be Queen, subtitled The Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism, was mired in controversy. In the book he argues that male homosexuality is congenital and a result of heredity and prenatal environment. He also suggests that transsexualism is either an extreme type of homosexuality or an expression of a paraphilia- in other words, they are turned on by vaginas and just want to have one of their own. This is diametrically opposed to the gender identity disorder diagnosis that most of the medical and psychiatric community accepts. He claims that transgendered people are more likely to shoplift, and especially well-suited to prostitution. One of the major criticisms of the book is that it presents Bailey’s opinion as science. The gay and transgender community generally rejected the book’s findings.

So did the transgender people he interviewed for the book, who claim they did not know the discussions were for a book. Some claimed they talked to him because they thought they were getting help for a recommendation for sexual reassignment surgery.

The New York Times article on the research he lead on bisexuality was headlined, “Straight, Gay, or Lying?” This title comes straight from page 96 of his The Man Who Would be Queen book, where he quotes it as a saying of gay men that validates his conjecture.  Bailey believes that male bisexuality as an orientation does not exist. This has been misunderstood to say that bisexuality does not exist, but of course, ships and prisons put the lie to that. It is just not a sexual orientation- perhaps more a matter of convenience. Bisexual men are stigmatized in both the gay and straight communities for a variety of reasons. Now they are told they don’t even exist, a claim that is not new but now suddenly supposedly based hard science.

Bailey’s  attempt to prove this used an appalling small sampling of just 104 men hooked up to a penile plethysmograph, a device which measures blood flow into the penis and is used to monitor arousal. While this has proved a useful tool, the APA notes that the reliability and validity of this procedure in clinical assessment have not been well established. In other words, without set standards, you have a lot of wiggle room in which to determine what is a meaningful result.

Of Bailey’s small sampling of  just 104 men, just 33 of them were self-described as bisexual- so the core of his study is based on his results from just 33 men (sort of, as we’ll explain in a moment). There is no evidence that he took sexual histories from these men to determine where they fell on a scale of bisexuality, which going back to Kinsey we know can be widely different levels of attraction between the two sexes.

He had the men watch 2 minute videos of gay movies, and two minute videos of heterosexual sex. If the men got aroused during gay sex, they were gay. If they got aroused watching heterosexual sex, they were straight. If they got aroused to both, they were bisexual. In his results, 75 percent of the bisexuals were aroused only by the gay porn, and 25 percent only by the straight porn. So, since he believes that arousal is orientation, there is no such thing as bisexuality.

Except these figures aren’t even based on 33 bisexuals. 35 percent of participants in the study did not have measurable arousal at all to either the gay or straight videos. That left just 22 self-reported bisexuals that had measurable responses. So his entire conclusion is based on less than two dozen men. 

And what about those who had no response? Since arousal is orientation, according to Bailey, does that mean that those who did not respond simply lack a sexual orientation?

The whole movie watching thing has a whole lot of problems. We don’t know his standards for determining arousal, and there are no set scientific standards using the plethysmograph. We also don’t know his protocols for choosing the videos. It has been reported that there were two movies of two men having sex and two movies of two women having sex. The later makes no sense. Is it assumed that all bisexual men get turned on by seeing two women together? If not, they are gay?

There are other possible explanations for his results. If most of your experience is straight, then would not viewing the less familiar or more forbidden homosexual content get more of a response? Most of us have seen far more straight content than homosexual. And just because you get aroused seeing something on video, which is in the realm of fantasy, does not mean that is something you want to do. How many straight girls get turned on watching girls together but have no interest in actually having sex with women? From my experience, quite a few. And what turns people on varies widely, as does porn. There are so many variables here that his results skew to the pointless.

This just seems to be appallingly inept science, with conclusions that are scientifically meaningless. An amateur excursion towards the shores of predetermined results. 

Questionable research methods, what seems to be incompetent science experiments, and beliefs widely outside of mainstream science. Yeah, kind of whacko.

Sexvestigation

Abortions are carcinogenic. The anti-abortion crowd has been making this argument for years, and it is still taught in many abstinence only education classes. Most specifically, abortions cause breast cancer. States such as Texas have even passed laws requiring doctors to tell women that abortions cause breast cancer.

The National Cancer Institute brought together more than 100 of the world's leading experts on the subject to review all of the existing research. Their finding was unequivocal: "Induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk."

The supposed link between breast cancer and abortions has been debunked since 2003, but it hasn’t gone away. It is such a compelling and scary argument. Have an abortion and the chances are that you’ll have your breasts cut off or die. Its hard to find anything scarier to tell a young woman considering an abortion. 

They have even published in anti-abortion literature the made up statistic that teens who undergo abortion "may face an eight times greater risk of contracting breast cancer by age 45.” This was in the pamphlet from the group A Woman’s Concern, an anti-abortion and anti-contraception group oddly enough headed by a male medical director. He was, Eric Keroack,  who then went on to become Bush’s choice at the  Department of Health and Human Services to oversee family planning grants. “

The problem was, the anti-abortion crowd has not had the science on their side. So they made some of their own. You wouldn’t know that at first hearing though. Here is a headline you might have seen recently.

Abortion 'Best Predictor of Breast Cancer,' New Study Says

The story is being picked up very heavily in the conservative press. But you have to ask four simple questions. Who did the study? How was it done? Where was it published? And who paid for it? The answers to all of these questions are quite interesting. They take a little digging to discover, though.

First who did the study? It was done by statistician Patrick Carroll of PAPRI in London. PAPRI stands for the Pension and Population Research Institute. They don’t even have a web site. And as far as I can determine, they only have one employee. Statistician Patrick Carroll. He is noted for complaining about Britain’s low birth rate and blaming it on the availability of contraceptives and women taking high level jobs. Hardly a disinterested researcher.

In 2001, PAPRI, under Carroll published a study that claimed that British breast cancer cases could rise by up to 60 percent in the next two decades due to abortion. This was soundly disputed by Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. It was two years before the Cancer Institute’s publication of a complete debunking of the theory.

Not much has changed. Just like that study, Carroll’s current study was funded by a British anti-abortion group.

Where was it published? In the journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Under the title The Breast Cancer Epidemic. It sounds official, but it is actually published by an anti-vaccination anti-abortion group. Their general counsel is Andrew Schlafly, right wing son of Phyllis Schlafely and founder of Conservapeia, a right wing, less fact based version of Wikipedia. He was our whacko of the week in our July 4th edition of this show.  On their web site, they have a resolutrion condemning abortion, which concludes “THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons supports the right to life of human beings from the moment of conception to natural death. It does not rank high on the list of reputable medical journals, which is one of the reasons you don’t see this study quoted anywhere else in the medical literature.

Another reason is that it is statistically meaningless.  This is known as a retrospective study. They look at old statistics and try and reinterpret them. The quality of the results depends entirely upon the quality of that reinterpretation and the mathematical model created. Except that the press release reveals that he is using the same old mathematical model from his 2001 study that was dismissed by the medical experts.  It may be fiddling with numbers, but it is hardly science.

This is where it is important to understand how the study was done. Here is how it is described: The study examined data on abortion and breast cancer from 1971 through 2004 in eight European countries. Now, it sounds more like a medical study, tracing people who have had abortion through to later breast cancer. Actually, though, it is a statistical study. In these countries, they looked at the more affluent population that tended to have more money and a better lifestyle and better access to medical care and noted a higher incidence of breast cancer. Here is how he comes to the linkage, quoted from the press release: “Carroll suggests that the known preference for abortion in this class might explain the phenomenon. Women pursuing higher educations and professional careers often delay marriage and childbearing.” Might explain the phenomena? An increase in alien visitations might explain the phenomena as well. This is not science- this is wishful thinking by an ardent anti-abortionist. He didn’t look at people who had abortions and then had breast cancer. He looked at groups of people who had abortions, and then at groups of people who had breast cancer, and made the assumption that they had to be the same people, and that there was a causal relationship.

It gets even more ludicrous. He came up with things his backers wanted to be true as contributing factors and added them into the mix. Remember- the general trend of the group paying for this study is to encourage women to get married young and have children early and to oppose abortion and birth control. SO, not surprisingly, the risk factors they came up with include:

A low age at first birth is protective.

Childlessness increases the risk.

A larger number of children (higher fertility) increases protection.

Breastfeeding gives additional protection.

Hormonal contraceptives are conducive to breast cancer.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is also conducive to breast cancer.

This study is already being cited by anti-abortion groups all over the Internet. There is absolutely no science behind it. It is a rehash of an older repudiated study, with an additional laundry list of things to scare women into having children early, avoid abortion and birth control, and have lots of children. It is pseudoscience to uphold the basic anti-sex and anti-women tenets of Catholicism. It is to science what a steaming pile of poo is to gourmet cuisine. It utter crap, and nothing new. Fake science in the service of religious extremism has become the rage of late. You’ll find a lot more examples on our SexScienceSkeptic.com site .