More sex-phobic idiocy is on the horizon. I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s worth repeating–sex-phobic conservatives have gotten to the point where people are actually saying that a vaccine given to prepubescent children to keep them from getting HPV and therefore increasing their chances significantly of getting cervical cancer shouldn’t be given to children lest that be taken as “permission” to have sex.
Look, I realize that for parents of small children, the idea that your baby is going to be an adult who has one day is disconcerting, to say the least. But I assure you, my parents made the transistion from seeing me as a little kid to a grown woman who has relationships and so will you. In fact, unless human nature has drastically changed in the past couple of years, you’ll probably be pestering them to reproduce before you know it. Most people are perfectly capable of understanding that you do something now to prepare for later, and this is firmly in that category. You feed the kids good food now so he is a strong adult later. You put him in school now so that he is an educated person who can get a job later. You give him the vaccine now so he doesn’t get the virus years from now when he’s older and having sex. Easy peasy. Except of course, people get paranoid about sex.
Already the injections have drawn moral opposition from some conservative groups, who fear such immunizations could give young teens a green light to have sex.
Medical experts who are helping develop the vaccines conceded that some parents might find the idea of shielding their young children from future STDs hard to accept. But they said the overriding goal is to save lives by boosting children’s immune systems before they are exposed to the viruses that cause such diseases.
“For most parents, the moral decision is to protect their children,” said Dr. Gregory Zimet, a professor of pediatrics and clinical psychology at Indiana University School of Medicine who has studied parents’ views on the immunizations.
It’s the only moral decison. The vaccine is given to children so they are protected as adults. It is simply immoral of a parent to think that they could or should do things to their small children in order to damage their sex lives as adults. You wouldn’t think of breaking down your grown child’s door and throwing away his condoms, so why do it retroactively by denying this vaccine?
So basically I think the opposition to this is borne from a parent’s squeamishness to the emerging sexuality of their children. Too bad, though. You make ‘em, you have a responsibility to take care of their safety. If it squigs people out so bad, they need to not think of it as a sex thing, but realize it’s just a vaccine like the once you give them for chicken pox or something. And if you’re worried that your kid is going to ask embarassing questions, do what parents have done since time immemorial–make the whole thing seem like Important Grown-up Stuff that Bores Kids. Say, “Oh, this is just another shot like the ones you got against chicken pox and polio and….” just keep ticking them off until his eyes glaze over, which should happen long before you reach “human papillomavirus”. Only the pushiest kid is probably going to ask any further questions so you can keep boring him.
24 Responses to “I said the words “human papillomavirus” to a ten-year-old and his eyes just glazed over”
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I think if you tell any child, “It keeps you from getting warts,” that’s all they’ll need to know. Unless you’re deliberately trying to skeeve them out by announcing that they can get warts on their hoo-hoo-dilly in the first place.
Why can’t the wingnuts drop the bullshit hypocrisy and come out and say it: “Don’t give your kids this vaccine, because not only do you need EVERY scare tactic and threat in your arsenal to prevent them from having sex, but girls who have sex before marriage not only deserve to get pregnant and be forced to give birth, they deserve to die from cervical cancer.”
“What, married women might get it? Why, no no no! A wedding ring is all you need; it’s like a holy shield against all STDs! You can only get them if you’re sinful and have sex before you’re married!”
Dumb fuck of a sexphobic Culture of Oppression (i.e. “Life”). Dumb fuck of a patriarchy.
I don’t know the specifics of the HPV vaccine, but in as a general policy we try to bundle childhood vaccinations whenever possible so that it’s easer to ensure that all appropriate vaccines have been administered. Does anyone know of a medical reason that the HPV vaccine couldn’t be added to the DTaP, MMR or similar cocktails?
“Does anyone know of a medical reason that the HPV vaccine couldn’t be added to the DTaP, MMR or similar cocktails?”
Well, if you did that, the wingnuts would make their kids skip thsoe vaccines as well.
I don’t se anything wrong with letting wingnuts die out of their own stupidity. This sounds like a rare opportunity.
Of course HPV might be the one STD that could be transmited via a toliet seat. Ok unlikely, but it doesn’t require any exchange of fluids just moist contact.
I don’t se anything wrong with letting wingnuts die out of their own stupidity.
Sorry, Scorpio, but it will be their children dying. And wingnutism is aggressive ignorance, not stupidity, so it is not necessarily an hereditary condition.
I don’t se anything wrong with letting wingnuts die out of their own stupidity. This sounds like a rare opportunity.
wingnuttirus isn’t hereditary, infects non-infected potential hosts roughly 45% of the time during puberty and isn’t transmitted via the umbilicus and some times even fails to progress into full fledged type-III wingnuttirus (which is where the stupidity becomes painful to watch) for reasons that are still not fully understood.
unfortunately, there is currently no known reproducible cure or vaccine for wingnuttirus.
I have a daughter, and when it comes to her I tend to revert to a grunting neanderthal. You know, no dates until she’s 30, always going to be my girl and no one else’s.
But these people are the stupidest fucking people on the planet. To leave your child unprotected against disease because - no, it’s worse than that. When the kid is 13 years old, is she going to be reading her vaccination records to see if there’s anything in there that helps her to have sex? If the parents don’t talk about it every day for the rest of the poor kid’s life, then how exactly are they supposed to remember this particular vaccination and how it helps protect them against an STD?
For that matter, are they really suggesting that they would rather their kids get a disease than “get away” with premarital sex? What if they marry someone who had premarital sex but went through one of those “second virginity” things and passed with flying colors and wore the ring and never kissed anyone again until the beautiful and God-ordained deflowering on the wedding night? What if that person, whose previous sexual history was erased by taking a course on 16 consecutive Wednesday nights and who stood in front of the youth group and titillated them all with stories of their sexual escapades, you know, as repentance, what if they had gotten HPV? Would the unvaccinated kid deserve it for marrying this guy? Is “second virginity” not effective? Does God not really pop that cherry back in?
It’s interesting how the opponents of evolution are, in fact, devolving into lesser creatures every day.
Man, my mother freaked out when I started using tampons in high school. “I thought only married women used those”, she said. Which was code for “women having sex”. I wasn’t having sex (since there wasn’t a pill yet and I was dead set on not getting pregnant), but I didn’t like menstrual pads. But, parents! It’s always something with them, isn’t it?
Something like 75% of the population has the HPV virus. Many people have immune systems who fight it off without developing noticeable symptoms (e.g. the woman with the abnormal pap smear only once). Seventy five percent. All of them sluts and uh, and uh, oh yeah, that’s right. The right doesn’t have a word like that to denigrate dudes who fuck around. They don’t lose their cervixes or develop cancerous cells from HPV either.
Someone needs to compile a list of all this nonsense for 2005. Either I’m in the longest sustained shitty mood ever, or this has been a god awful year for this kind of thing.
Amen to the 75% statistic, which is somewhat conservative according to some medical sites. Here’s something I wish I’d known before I had an outbreak: you can (and in the long run likely will) get HPV from non-symptomatic partners. (Ditto herpes, although fortunately that’s at slightly less epidemic levels.)
Also, consider that while the HPV strains that cause genital warts (NOT the ones that cause cervical problems) are easily treated with freezing, lasers, and in some cases surgery, that is VERY VERY expensive if you don’t have excellent medical insurance. It’s not like syphillis or gonorrhea which can be treated with a one-shot dose of antibiotics. Most HPV outbreaks require several visits to the doctor. So really, this should be a cost-benefit thing. Daddy’s little girl stands an excellent chance of getting genital warts (or the HPV strain that can lead to cervical cancer) even if her first sexual contact is on her honeymoon; why add financial stress on top of shame and inconvenience?
Scorpio, bad call. My sisters and I are products of a wingnut and a recovering wingnut (mother and father, respectively). The three of us (and our father, now) are quite liberal, and therefore are living proof that wingnuttery is not, in fact, hereditary.
Also, even if a child winds up following in their parents’ wingnuttish footsteps, it’s not cool to visit the sins of the parents on the children, despite whatever verse wingnuts may quote. Allowing the children of wingnuts to just not get this vaccine would do that.
I have two very young daughters (ages five and two). The thing that boggles my mind about the right-wing opposition to this vaccine: even if I convince myself that my daughters will take the Purity Pledge and will actually stick to it, they could still get raped. They could marry a man who was less committed to chastity during his teenaged years than they were. They could marry a fellow virgin who then goes on to commit adultery. Even if someone believes that all the dirty sluts deserve to get cancer, what about the innocent women who are victims of rape and adultery? Is it more important to punish the promiscuous than to protect those who are betrayed by their partners? I don’t get it.
The thing that boggles my mind about the right-wing opposition to this vaccine: even if I convince myself that my daughters will take the Purity Pledge and will actually stick to it, they could still get raped. They could marry a man who was less committed to chastity during his teenaged years than they were. They could marry a fellow virgin who then goes on to commit adultery. Even if someone believes that all the dirty sluts deserve to get cancer, what about the innocent women who are victims of rape and adultery?
Well, that’s what they get for not loving Jesus enough.
Seriously, someone that would put their daughter in harm’s way so that she not be “encouraged to have sex” is sick to the point of child neglect. I’d prefer my daughter not have sex until at least college, and then, I hope never to know about it until and unless she has a kid–and even then, I’ll sort of think of it as a miraculous conception. But given that every human I know is fallible…well, I’m not going to keep my daughter from getting a shot to protect her from disease just because the disease could be contracted “immorally.”
“You wouldn’t think of breaking down your grown child’s door and throwing away his condoms…”
You know, I’m not sure that that’s actually true, when it comes to the people who are protesting this vaccine.
Also, regarding what Naomi said, fundamentalist religious societies tend to percieve being raped as itself a kind of crime, a punishment for not following proper values. The same is true of marrying a cad; he must have cheated on you because you weren’t serving him well enough.
What you’re saying is that even if somebody follows all the rules, things might still go bad for them. While certainly true, this viewpoint is alien and even sinful to religious fundamentalists.
I just keep thinking that, for a lot of teenagers, having their parents give them the green light for sex might be the most effective sort of abstinence education.
having their parents give them the green light for sex might be the most effective sort of abstinence education
This happened to me when I was 16. My boyfriend’s mom gave us a talk about “if you’re going to having the sex you better be on the pill and I’ll take you.” We were like, ew, uh, thanks but no thanks.
Ok folks - I am one of the few who’s HPV did not clear up on it’s own. As a result I had 3 LEEP procedures. This is where the part of your cervix that has pre-cancerous cells is first numbed, then frozen, then shaved off. I suffered through the “acceptable” side effects of the numbing agent used, and in fact, on the third one the numbing agent didn’t take, and the procedure was done without it. After each one I still had pre-cancerous cells and wound up needing a partial hysterectomy. At the time I was married, and not fooling around. Let me add that I was abso-fucking-lutely terrified that I was going to die from cervical cancer. I don’t even have to words for what it was like to know that I would never be able to have another child. And these people don’t want their children vaccinated? In my (very much not so) humble opinion, that borders on child abuse. If I wasn’t a compassionate person, I would wish that every one of these wingnut moms would get it and suffer through what I did.
Wow, according to a comment on that site, the only reason I come here is because I am a “horny man.” I did not know that LOL.
Surely there is another reason I come here, oh yea THE GREAT EDITORIALS! Oye, I doubt those people could buy a clue…
I’ve assisted with LEEP procedures and PAP smears, and I was privy to some of the early research on the vaccine…and I thought it was so exciting that something was finally being done…and now IDIOTS don’t want the vaccine given to their daughters because somehow this might cause them to have sex?
I wish those nuts could spend one, JUST ONE, hour with a lovely lady I had as a patient, who’d gone too long without a Pap (her husband was her only lover and she thought she was his only lover…so why bother?) and she developed cervical cancer, which spread…except that they can’t, because she’s dead.
Also, regarding what Naomi said, fundamentalist religious societies tend to percieve being raped as itself a kind of crime, a punishment for not following proper values. The same is true of marrying a cad; he must have cheated on you because you weren’t serving him well enough.
The existence of a rapist is a failing on the part of the community as a whole, so it’s easier to just blame the woman and give her total responsibility instead of shouldering the burden of collective blame.
Similarly, If men cheat in marriages it must be wife’s fault because the idea that how marriage is pushed on to people (and the very concept of pre-marital celibacy) cannot, literally cannot, enter into their minds, without their heads exploding.
And like forcing a child to give birth, not allowing a child this vaccine IS child abuse.
Personally, I know that every time I get my tetanus booster, I take it as complete license to go out and play with rusty barbed wire and step on filthy nails.
Otherwise, you know, it’s a total waste of money.
Personally, I know that every time I get my tetanus booster, I take it as complete license to go out and play with rusty barbed wire and step on filthy nails. Otherwise, you know, it’s a total waste of money.
Oh, yeah, like the moral hazards of health care. I know that I’m far, far more likely to go surfboarding at breakneck speeds down snow fields because I live in a country which will set my hideously broken arm in plaster for free.