The Centers for Disease Control is currently weighing whether to recommend the circumcision of boys and men in the United States. If the CDC finds that a circumcision recommendation would reduce the risk of HIV among American men, I think that’s swell. Providing people with information to help protect themselves from disease is a wonderful thing. But a CDC recommendation would likely come with one major adverse side-effect. For women who already find uncircumcised penises disgusting, wrong, or unfuckable, the recommendation will also provide more fuel for their ignorance.

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Washington, D.C. and four states are requiring sixth-grade girls to receive the three-shot Gardasil vaccine before entering school this year. Gardasil protects against the “four strains of the sexually transmitted Human Pappilomavirus (HPV)” most likely to cause cervical cancer and genital warts.

Mandating that girls receive the vaccine at age 11 or 12 (there is currently no vaccine for boys) strikes me as a not-bad idea for the following reasons:

(a) D.C. has the highest rate of cervical cancer in the nation
(b) D.C. has one of the most sexually active teen populations in the nation
(c) 80 percent of sexually active teens contract HPV
(d) condoms don’t protect against it
(e) it’s CDC and FDA-approved for women ages 9 to 26
(f) Gardasil has been criticized for marketing the vaccine to the women least at risk for cervical cancer—all the more reason for D.C. to mandate it for the girls most at risk.

And yet, media coverage of the vaccine in recent weeks has focused almost uniformly on the bogeyman du jour— The Vaccine—instead of that other scary thing—The Virus. Check out the following story ledes about Gardasil:

Read More “HPV Vaccine Gardasil Officially Scariest Thing Ever, Media Reports” »