Sometimes, people inquire as to my motivations for doing what I do (in education, that is). Naturally, I talk about the fantastic health care, the amazing salary, the flexible hours, and the spacious offices. (To say nothing of the private showers, the chilled Glenfiddich, the indoor driving range, the array of vintage ‘80s video games like Donkey Kong and Q*Bert, and what not.) Given that I teach a course in human sexuality, one of my major motivations is to change people’s attitudes about sexuality – being safer and more integrated sexual beings, understanding the internal and external factors that contribute to one’s notion of “man” and “woman” and “gay” and “straight” and “moral” and “immoral” and on and on. But I teach one section a semester to a population that probably should have gotten the information years earlier, so it can be a pretty confounding experience, especially when I have to undo some “facts” that they’ve learned in the past. And especially when the Pope gets involved.
You might have heard that, in a recent speech on St. Patrick's Day, Pope Benedict XVI defied decades of unquestionable science with respect to condoms and AIDS by saying that condom use would “aggravate the problem” of HIV infection in Africa. Now, granted, that’s pretty much the Papal company line; in 1990, Pope John Paul II said that condom use was a sin under any circumstances. So like any multibillion-dollar corporate entity, The Vatican is in full spin mode, modifying Benedict’s recent idiocy by altering the text of his speech to suggest condoms “risked” aggravating the problem. Of course, this is the same Pope that has offered Papal recognition of clergy that are overt Holocaust deniers, so a Bizzaroworld declaration that condom use increases the likelihood of HIV is about par for the course.
It’s just another example of what Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 1986 essay On Bullshit. In Frankfurt’s philosophical perception, “bullshit” is the willful obfuscation of the truth for opaque and/or mendacious purposes. When scientists have known for decades that proper condom usage drastically reduces the spread of HIV – and when in the face of that knowledge a person continues to trot out the same damnation of contraception when the motivations for said damnation are all too clear – people have to call bullshit on that. When tens of millions of dollars (conservatively) have been pumped into abstinence-only sex education – and decades of data show that the only measurable effect of such education is higher pregnancy rates when those abstinence-only teens make sexual mistakes, as they have no knowledge base with respect to easy and affordable contraception – people have to call bullshit on that.
[Want some actual data by actual researchers? The teen birthrate (“teen” here being females age 15-19) in the U.S. is 42.5 per 1000 girls, far and away the highest in the industrialized world. England, our nearest partner in global hegemony? A not-so-close second at 26.7 per 1000 girls. Our eh-bors to the north in Canada? 13.3. And those hypersexualized oily French? 7.8 per 1000 girls. In short, we are failing our young American girls in the worst possible manner.]
So what is my major motivating factors behind teaching, and why do I see myself teaching until I am broken-down and dessicated? Because I have an ever-expanding and evolving knowledge base that compels me to call bullshit until I am brown in the face. And because you, dear reader, have a responsibility to call bullshit when you leave my class after being empowered by said knowledge.
You might have heard that, in a recent speech on St. Patrick's Day, Pope Benedict XVI defied decades of unquestionable science with respect to condoms and AIDS by saying that condom use would “aggravate the problem” of HIV infection in Africa. Now, granted, that’s pretty much the Papal company line; in 1990, Pope John Paul II said that condom use was a sin under any circumstances. So like any multibillion-dollar corporate entity, The Vatican is in full spin mode, modifying Benedict’s recent idiocy by altering the text of his speech to suggest condoms “risked” aggravating the problem. Of course, this is the same Pope that has offered Papal recognition of clergy that are overt Holocaust deniers, so a Bizzaroworld declaration that condom use increases the likelihood of HIV is about par for the course.
It’s just another example of what Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 1986 essay On Bullshit. In Frankfurt’s philosophical perception, “bullshit” is the willful obfuscation of the truth for opaque and/or mendacious purposes. When scientists have known for decades that proper condom usage drastically reduces the spread of HIV – and when in the face of that knowledge a person continues to trot out the same damnation of contraception when the motivations for said damnation are all too clear – people have to call bullshit on that. When tens of millions of dollars (conservatively) have been pumped into abstinence-only sex education – and decades of data show that the only measurable effect of such education is higher pregnancy rates when those abstinence-only teens make sexual mistakes, as they have no knowledge base with respect to easy and affordable contraception – people have to call bullshit on that.
[Want some actual data by actual researchers? The teen birthrate (“teen” here being females age 15-19) in the U.S. is 42.5 per 1000 girls, far and away the highest in the industrialized world. England, our nearest partner in global hegemony? A not-so-close second at 26.7 per 1000 girls. Our eh-bors to the north in Canada? 13.3. And those hypersexualized oily French? 7.8 per 1000 girls. In short, we are failing our young American girls in the worst possible manner.]
So what is my major motivating factors behind teaching, and why do I see myself teaching until I am broken-down and dessicated? Because I have an ever-expanding and evolving knowledge base that compels me to call bullshit until I am brown in the face. And because you, dear reader, have a responsibility to call bullshit when you leave my class after being empowered by said knowledge.
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