Mary Grabar of Townhall fame has found the Midwest Teen Sex show, and she is not amused.
These podcasts are introduced with a sign held by a gyrating, scantily clad nubile teenager in a farm field. The porno-inspired intro ends with her on all fours with the sign in her mouth.
So already we know that Mary is missing the point, the underlying theme, the whole base of the jokes. Britney’s laughable prancing with a hand-lettered sign in a freshly-plowed field is a mockery of sexy; a parody of a teenager stuck in the sticks imitating the supposedly sexy poses of women in advertisements and porn. Sure, Brit looks great in a bikini top, but the intro is still supposed to look silly, not sexy.
Unfortunately, Graber’s humorless gaze rests mostly on the Abstinence episode, that sophomore jinx nestled between the genius Female Masturbation episode and the geniuser Older Boyfriend episode. Then she starts complaining about some worksheet, and I searched and searched the MWTSS site for a worksheet before finally finding it on a different website by an organization that once briefly linked to MWTSS then took down the link because apparently no one read the disclaimer that appears at the beginning of each episode.* Which is how Mary found Nikol & Co. in the first place. Also, Jane Fonda is a traitor.
Anyway, in her column “Sex Education Lesson: Beat Up the Virgins”, Mary implies that the retarded, drooling, buck-toothed, one-eyed pro-abstinence girl was beaten into brain damage, although there is nothing in the shows content that suggests this. Rather, the joke seems to be that this clearly undesirable person was just using a commitment to abstinence to explain why she really wasn’t getting any. In poor taste? Oh, God, yes. Probably worse than the “Homosexuality is a choice…like cancer” t-shirts that enjoyed so brief a time on their store’s e-shelves. A suggestion that pro-abstinence kids will be beaten into permanent brain damage by their cooler, fornicating classmates? Eh, not so much.
Nikol, or someone using her email, has taken umbrage with this, and sent Mary a snippy email. Mary fights back in a second column where she lays bare the following devastating facts:
1. The producers of the MidWest Teen Sex Show may be trying to get noticed by the film industry
2. Teens and young adults writing about sex on an internet message board frequently employ poor spelling and grammar, proving that they are not mature enough to engage in discussion about sex that isn’t boring.
I doubt that the link would have been pulled had the Midwest Teen Sex Show’s videos featured nothing more salacious than animations of eggs traveling down fallopian tubes…According to a Wall Street Journal article published on November 8, 2007, the Midwest Teen Sex Show is the venture of Nikol Hasler and Guy Clark, “an aspiring filmmaker,” who wants to use the podcasts to “show off his cinematography skills to would-be employers.” I suspect money and careers are at stake…
What these kids need is not this idiotic posturing about sex, but reading, writing, and arithmetic. To begin with, they should be assigned such anti-censorship greats as John Milton and Richard Weaver, who have advocated exposure and open debate. If Nikol@MidwestTeenSexShow.com stands by her claim that I misrepresented the show, then she would not be worried because the podcasts would speak for themselves. The thing that propagandists—especially those who target minors—fear most is exposure.
That’s right, Nikol. Here you are, ignoring the basic mechanics of sex and focusing on irrelevant social issues to an audience that doesn’t know the slightest thing about John Milton’s Areopagitica, and its defense of the right of a political website columnist to misconstrue a bad joke to make it seem more outrageous to her audience. That is the very definition of irresponsible. As a parent, you should feel ashamed for propagating dangerous information like masturbation tips, unlike abstinence-based sexual education proponents, who would never leave kids with the wrong idea.
*OK, so MWTSS show says the show is for 18+, even though they are pretty educational and we all know that younger teens would eat this stuff up. I wish I’d had something like this when I was in junior high and that stupid smoshing-the-play-doh-promiscuity exercise was just reinforcing the idea that grown-ups had no clue. Still, if you are an Official Sexual Education Provider trying to convince people to let you educate their precious snowflakes on sex in a comprehensive manner and the morality police are watching your every move, then MWTSS is definitely not something you want to be linking to approvingly, and the disclaimer is there to warn you. Let the kids find it themselves, you just focus on keeping them educated enough to figure out when Nikol’s joking.
Also, Britney is like 30, I think. She just looks good, because not being a tightass Townhall columnist is good for the skin.
Anyway, what do girls need to learn this reading/writing/arithmetic crap for? All they’ll do with this fancy education crap is try to have CAREERS that make MONEY, which is what Graber is mad at the MTSS folks for doing in the first place.
I’d never seen MWTSS before! thanks for introducing me…
God I love MWTSS.
I loves me some MWTSS!!!!
Thanks for the great write up and analysis of the Townhall piece! Mary Grabar had me cracking up with both columns.