A guy at a Coldplay concert gets caught hugging someone who is not his wife, and his life is ruined faster than you can say hashtag-they-must-be-cheating. He’s on leave from his job, and his wife has gone back to using her maiden name on social media. Worse than that, though, he’s always going to be the Coldplay Concert CEO. He may get his company back, and he may even get his wife back, but this one regrettable decision will haunt him forever. To be clear, I’m not talking about the decision to cheat on his wife or even his willingness to cheat on his wife with his head of HR (whose job it is to tell him not to cheat on his wife with an employee). I’m talking about not having the presence of mind to just smile and nod when they were caught on Chris Martin’s Kisscam. Yes, it is likely that his dental hygienist, Jim from accounting, her husband’s best friend’s wife, and/or the coffee cart guy from the office were also in the arena that night. Yes, it is likely that they would have gotten caught in a localized “rumors only grow” kind of way. Yes, their spouses may have found out. But this is so much worse: we all know, and we’re all making fun of them. Okay, some of us are not making fun of them as much as we’re living vicariously through them. Pornhub jumped in on this story with data showing that interest in workplace sex shot up after the concert. Searches for “cheating couple” were up 31%, “secret affair” was up 25%, “office sex” was up 21%, and “boss and employee” was up 17%. Maybe it’s time for HR to step in. Oh, wait. What I’m finding most fascinating though is that our obsession with these two cheaters is coinciding with endless coverage of the MAGA’s Epstein meltdown which seems to be the only sex scandal to come close to marring our adulterer-in-chief. In the early days of Trump, it looked like sex might be his downfall. He’d spent the 80s telling Howard Stern what a stud he’d been and posing in his bathrobe like a wannabe Burt Reynolds. We already knew that wives one and two had overlapped and that wife three had a portfolio of nude photos. Then came the creepy comments about his daughter and the pussy grabbing tape. If Bill Clinton could be impeached over a blow job, surely this was enough to mean Trump couldn’t get elected. Lin Manuel Miranda even sang about it on SNL (click the link or start the video below around 2:35).  But we were wrong, nobody cared. Not even the “pro-family” anti-sex Christian Right. They elected him anyhow and continued not to care as dozens of allegations of sexual assault came out. The porn-is-a-public-health-issue party didn’t even care when we learned that he’d both paid off and threatened a porn star so she’d keep quiet about the time they’d had sex just weeks after his son was born. Somewhere in there, we started talking about Jeffrey Epstein and his parties full of powerful men and underage girls (or maybe we’d be talking about that for years by then). Trump’s name came up in these discussions far more often than Prince Andrew’s. There were pictures of them on the plane and at the parties, and there’s that magazine quote in which Trump called Epstein a good guy who liked his women on the young side. But while Andy got demoted by his mom, Donny appeared to be unscathed yet again. So, when Elon and Donald broke up briefly and the best dirt Musk could give us was that Trump was in the Epstein files, I was disappointed. I assumed everyone knew it and nobody cared. I was wrong. His people cared. They’re actually angry at him. He’s panicked. It’s beautiful. But it’s not about sex. I’m pretty confident that if the list (that is simultaneously on Pam Bondi’s desk and nonexistent) was released and Trump’s name were on it, they wouldn’t care. I’d even bet that if the files proved he’d kept 13-year-old girls as sex slaves (as he and Epstein were once accused of doing), MAGA would find a way to deny it, ignore it, or blame it on the libs. They still don’t care about his sexual misconduct. They do care about their own deep state conspiracy theories, especially the one that has prominent Democrats running child prostitution rings out of pizza parlors. Trump promised multiple times to expose those Democrats and their pedophilic ways. And he offered up the Epstein files as proof that he meant it. His campaign promise to release Epstein’s client list went a long way toward stoking their fire and getting their vote. He kept it going after he got back into office. Bondi insisted the list was on her desk, and the administration invited conservative influencers to the White House to learn more about the case. (The influences were apparently disappointed when the binders full of Epstein they were given turned out to contain only old news.) Then suddenly, there was no list and nothing interesting to release other than the “raw footage” from outside Epstein’s cell which would prove once-and-for-all that he was alone when he died. Except the video had clearly been edited multiple times, and it turned out that three minutes were missing. (Editing supposedly raw footage and lying about it sounds like something the deep state would do. No?) MAGA is pissed, and they’re not letting up no matter what Trump does to try to change the topic. Venous insufficiency, real sugar in coke, and bringing back the Washington Redskins have all failed to change the narrative, as has calling his own supporters stupid and blaming Obama and Biden. Like the Coldplay couple, if Trump and Bondi had just released the files without making themselves look so f**king guilty, far fewer people would have noticed. His supporters have made it very clear over the years that they don’t care about his sexcapades, so who is he protecting, what did they do, and what do they have on Trump that’s convinced him to piss off his own people? (Oh, please let it be butt stuff.) Trump Is Going to Use Title X Money to Pay for “Fertility Education”The pronatalist movement is getting yet another bump from the Trump Administration this time in the form of a $1.5 million grant to build an Infertility Training Center that will provide technical assistance to Title X recipients. We’ve talked about Title X many times, most recently in April when the Trump Administration announced it was withholding $35 million in Title X funding from clinics in California, Hawaii, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, and Utah without any explanation. The program is known for providing free or inexpensive contraception to low-income women, but Title X providers also offer other services like STI testing and cervical cancer screenings. The 1970 legislation that created the program was co-sponsored by Representative George H. W. Bush and signed into law by President Richard Nixon, and the program enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. It’s an obvious favorite of people who believe that access to contraception and the ability to plan one’s family is a right that should be available to everyone regardless of income. But this program should appeal to others as well. An abortion opponent might notice that by 2023 the program was estimated to have prevented 20 million pregnancies, 9 million of which would have ended in abortion. A fiscal conservative might note that 60% of Title X clients in 2023 had family incomes below 101% of the Federal Poverty Limit (meaning that a family 4 made less than $30,000 a year). They might then realize that most of the babies born to these clients will likely need some form of public assistance in their lifetime. Paying for a few months or years of the pill is far cheaper than paying for a hospital birth and having another person added to Medicaid. Hell, the program should even appeal to the racists behind the pronatalist movement who—let’s face it—really only want White women to have more babies. After all, nearly 36% of Title X patients identified as Hispanic or Latina and 19% of clients say they have limited English language skills. Some of these forces want to have it both ways; they want to block access to contraception AND blame poor women for getting pregnant (and, per the Big Bullshit Bill, kick them off of Medicaid as soon as possible). Now they also want to use the Title X program for something that feels dramatically different than it’s current mission—getting women pregnant. As the New York Times reported last week, the Department of Health and Human Services just put out a request for proposals for a new program that will give one recipient up to $1.5 million to “establish and operate an Infertility Training Center to support Title X-funded organizations in expanding and enhancing root cause infertility diagnostic treatments and referrals available to patients at Title X-funded clinics.” The recipient, by the way, can be any entity whether it’s public, private, for-profit, or non-for-profit. Even an individual can apply. (Should I apply? Do you want to?) According to this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), the Infertility Training Center will provide training and technical assistance to Title X grantees to help them:
This is just the latest place where MAHA and Project 2025 cross swords to screw women out of their reproductive choices using language that sounds genuine like “holistic” and “patient-centered care.” There are some almost decent ideas in here. Most young people need more body literacy, and people with uteruses should know more about endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, and thyroid conditions before trying to get pregnant. (They should also have access to care for those conditions but that’s unlikely to happen for Title X clients when Medicaid is cut.) There are also some ideas that are clearly missing from here. If we’re talking about preventing infertility, we should be talking about bacterial STIs. If left untreated, chlamydia and gonorrhea can cause Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID), a more serious infection of the reproductive tract including the uterus and fallopian tubes. PID can in turn cause a buildup of scar tissue in these areas, which can cause… you guessed it… infertility. In 2023, young women ages 20 to 24 (an age group Project 2025 presumably wants to see married and knocked up soon) had the highest rates of chlamydia with 3,435 cases per 100,000. This is why the CDC recommends that all sexually active young women under the age of 25 get tested for chlamydia at least once a year. Title X providers performed 1,343,403 chlamydia tests in 2023, why not use this money to get that up to two million? Throw in some more money for testing, treating, and educating young people and you might actually make a dent in infertility rates. But STIs are not even mentioned in the NOFO (and the CDC page on chlamydia and infertility has been archived). Instead, HHS want Title X-funded clinics “to enable patients to receive as many personalized and comprehensive infertility services needed as possible within the Title X-funded clinic.” That sentence is difficult to parse and likely written by AI, but it certainly gives the impression of a future in which Title X becomes a government-funded network of fertility clinics. (Welcome to Gilead, everyone). Is HHS really expecting clinics to diagnose infertility and offer treatments such as fallopian tube cannulation (a non-surgical procedure to unblock fallopian tubes)? Does it want Title X providers to run full-service fertility clinics that do everything from collecting sperm to harvesting eggs to implanting embryos for IVF? Will they freeze embryos? (Some constituents will not like that.) I asked colleagues at The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, a membership organization for family planning clinics across the country, what they thought about this new pot of money. Kim Diaz Scott, their Vice President of Program, pointed out that the program is already under-funded and under resourced having been flat funded for more than ten years. She said this in an email:
It’s unclear whether this handmaid’s version of Title X peacefully coexists with the current version in RFK, Jr.’s worm-addled brain or if this is the first step toward giving up on pills, patches, rings, and IUDs forever. Fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs) are the only method mentioned in the NOFO, and we already know that Project 2025 would like us to believe they have superior efficacy. Moreover, some of this money seems to be earmarked for teaching more women about their cervical mucus (Hi, Cecily) and basal body temperature. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, these methods can work if you put in the effort to track everything and commit to not having sex or using a different method on fertile days. Learning about these methods can help women understand their cycles, which is useful when they don’t want to get pregnant and even more useful when they do. But other methods are far more effective, and the push toward FABMs has a sinister underbelly. The pill has been credited with getting women out of the home and into the workforce, which allowed them to create their own wealth and independence. Steering women away from methods that are both more effective and less user intensive is part of a broader effort to undermine this success and independence. Project 2025 wants us back in the kitchen, and the Trump administration is happy help. Rejiggering Title X priorities seems like part of that plan. Steven Colbert Gets CancelledThis one isn’t about sex. (Colbert just wrote a cookbook with his wife of 33 years; he’s not schtuppping porn stars or cavorting with pedophiles.) But this is one of the stories that I found myself most upset about this week because of the implications. Amidst the schadenfreude of the MAGA meltdown and despite the terrible new poll numbers, Donald Trump is still scaring the shit out of mainstream media, and they’re conceding in advance. CBS already paid him $16 million because their interview with Kamala hurt Donny’s feelings, and now the network is trying to shut Stephen up because he hurts Donny’s feelings every weeknight at 11:30. It’s demoralizing, and it makes me worry about the future of our democracy. We need the people with the megaphone (or the people who own the megaphone) to call out how dangerous this all is. Or as Jon Stewart so brilliantly put it, we need them to sack up. Watch this. It will make you feel better for at least a couple of minutes.  Sex on Wednesday is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Sex on Wednesday that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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He Ain't Never Gonna Be CEO Now
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