Jill Stanek disproves her own argument

Jill Stanek is the conservative columnist that has been arguing against the HPV vaccine because it will encourage promiscuity in young women. Debbie Halvorson, the Majority Leader in the Illinois State Senate, recently spoke out about her own HPV infection, precancerous cells, and hysterectomy and is speaking out in support of the HPV vaccine. Jill Stanek then likened her to a porn star in a column.

In a recent post on her website, Stanek now is proposing that male circumcision be mandated for boys if the HPV vaccine becomes mandated for girls. Her justification is a recent Lancet study in Africa that shows a significant reduction in HIV infection rates in men due to circumcision. The reduction was so significant that the study had to be terminated prematurely because to continue with it would have been unethical.

I'm not writing this because I want to discuss circumcision and HIV prevention. (Though the fact that a simple procedure could save many lives is nothing but good news.) I want to point out the fact that Stanek has now disproved her own argument.

The whole premise that girls will become promiscuous if the get the HPV vaccine is fairly ludicrous on its face, but it's the standard argument conservatives put forward for anything that helps prevent STD infection (other than celibacy). Now that we have determined that circumcision protects against HIV infection, will we see an explosion in promiscuity in circumcised men? Of course not. Looking at the same Lancet study, the rate at which the men had sex was basically the same for the circumcised and uncircumcised men.

So, what I don't get is, if giving girls a vaccine to protect them against HPV makes girls slutty, why is Stanek calling for the circumcision of boys to protect them from HIV?

UPDATE: Stanek appears in the comments and writes:

You clearly don't understand sarcasm.

Oh, don't be silly. Of course I understand sarcasm. I was trying to point out in this post that if circumcision protects against HIV, then -- by Stanek's very own argument -- circumcised men and boys should be more promiscuous the uncircumcised men and boys. As such, Stanek should be arguing against the circumcision of young boys. After all, if a girl views getting the HPV vaccine as license to have sex, then it is reasonable to conclude that a boy protected against HIV will do the same. Yet there is no anti-circumcision campaign among conservatives.

The conservative argument against the vaccine says the girls who have been vaccinated will be more likely to be promiscuous. One could also make an argument that girls who have had the HPV vaccine are more likely to be aware of the dangers, prevalence, and infectiousness of HPV, and may actually avoid sexual contact. Conservatives have produce no actual evidence that their argument is correct. As far as I know, they haven't even attempted any studies. Data collected by rhetorical argument is not valid data.

For the record, I'm very much pro-vaccine. I think its existence is a great thing and I hope it saves many lives. I'm also mildly anti-mandate.

Do Christians really want women to die?

ArchPundit reads WorldNetDaily so I don't have to. Today, he linked to a column written by nutjob Jill Stanek, who in turn wrote about how horrible the HPV vaccine is. I'm almost starting to think that conservative Christians want there to be horrible consequences for sex, because it makes it dangerous. Stanek says:

Aside from the fact Winokur has no business telling other people's children about "precautions" to avoid pitfalls of promiscuous sex, her advice stinks. Let's not address the real cause. Let's try to avoid the ramifications of the cause.

Winokur or People magazine are fueling the exploitation and health demise of women by refusing to acknowledge the only full-proof [sic] way to avoid HPV or cervical cancer: abstinence.

Let's ignore the fact that she calls any sex before marriage "promiscuous." No, Jill, actually, that's not the only full-proof way to avoid HPV. Twenty percent of women are forced to have sex before they reach their twenties. So I guess you have to add "not getting raped" to that list of "full-proof" (dumbass) ways to avoid HPV.

Fig has pointed out that HPV can live on surfaces for a short while. It's possible to infect yourself by touching an HPV-laden surface, and then touching yourself. So we also have to add "not touching things" to the list of foolproof ways to avoid HPV.

Then Stanek gets into full-self-righteous mode and gets all judgmental on the slutties:

There is only one good reason a virtuous young woman should consider getting the HPV vaccination. That is if the man she plans to marry has had sex with other women, meaning he could be infected with HPV or an array of other STDs. I don't know why a virtuous young woman would want to marry such a man, but there you go.

Seriously, Stanek has absolutely no idea why a woman would want to marry a man who has had sex? "I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you. What, you're not a virgin? Get lost, tramp!" Is this really what goes through the mind of conservative Christians? Fewer than 10% of Americans are virgins when they get married. So when a woman meets a guy, she has a roughly 90% chance of picking one that has had sex at some point in his life. Those really aren't such great odds when we're talking about a disease that's (a) incredibly common, (b) easy to catch, (c) easy to prevent, and (d) can kill you.

UPDATE: Stanek shows up in the comments and largely apologizes for her attitude towards non-virgins at the end. What she doesn't mention is that many thousands of women are exposed to this virus, even though they do everything "right." This is a simple way to protect a woman from a virus that she is very likely to be exposed to during her life, possibly even against her will. Remember, even, that the adultery rate in American marriage is roughly 40%.