It’s an old, old joke, one I hadn’t expected to hear again in my lifetime, and it is deeply revealing. It goes something like this: The best way to practice birth control is to use an aspirin. The girl puts the aspirin between her knees and holds it there by squeezing her legs together.
It wasn’t funny when I heard it back in my teenage years and it’s not funny now. But that didn’t stop Foster Friess from trotting it out in an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell this week. He said he meant it as a joke, and I am sure he did.
But as a joke, it says a lot.
It sums up much of what I learned about sex growing up as a Jamaican male, stuff that seems crazy in retrospect.
We Jamaican boys were taught – or rather, taught each other – that it was our duty to go as far as we could in trying to get a girl into bed and – here’s the sad part – that it was every “good” girl’s duty to stop us.
Apparently, that’s what the boys in Wisconsin learned, too. At least that’s what they learned when Foster Friess was growing up. He is 71 years old and the world has changed a lot since he courted and won “Badger Beauty” queen Lynnette Estes, a fellow-student at the University of Wisconsin (photo of the couple above).
Something obviously went wrong in their marriage. It must have been happy sometimes; they produced two sons and two daughters. But there was a rocky patch. Back in the Seventies, Friess complained of “a marriage flirting with divorce.” You think the aspirin could have been the problem?
Anyway, they worked things out after Friess was “born again.” And I hope they are enjoying a fulfilling life together.
Why should I care about Foster Friess’ sex life?
Because his personal experiences and the views they bred are being presented as a template for the rest of America.
Friess is one of a handful of super-rich folks vying for control of the American government. With the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that allows unlimited campaign spending by SuperPACs, they are providing the bulk of the funding for the 2012 elections. You’ve probably heard of the Gingrich campaign’s Sheldon Adelson and Romney’s hedge fund buddies, for example.
Friess, a rancher who made a fortune in the stock market, is bankrolling Rick Santorum.
If you don’t know what Rick Santorum stands for, you might want to find out. He could very well become the Republican candidate for president.
Santorum is at least as “conservative” as Friess. He is on a mission to change the way of life in America by outlawing such new-fangled evils as birth control and public education, and rooting out the Islamic fundamentalists hiding under our beds. A devout Roman Catholic, he and his wife, Karen, have seven children (a testament to the efficacy of the aspirin method?).
Here’s a quote from a book Santorum wrote:
We now have a generation that has grown up with the belief, inspired by the Sixties’ free-love assault on sexual mores, that true love is a feeling, and that it should not be resisted or constrained–rather, its ultimate validation is through sexual relations, without regard to the outdated social convention of marriage.
The aspirin joke displays the kind of thinking that could govern our lives if an eccentric billionaire gets the power to invade our bedrooms. The way I see it, Americans could be in danger of returning to the days of the Puritans, when “immoral” women were forced to wear scarlet letters and “witches” were burned at the stake.
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