A couple of weeks ago, we went to see Bull Durham the Musical at the nearby regional theater. Things come here on their way to Broadway (which is only 14 miles to the west, but it’s a hard fought 14 miles for actors, producers, and rush hour drivers). The play was cute in a big-song-and-dance-numbers-with-baseball-bats-used-as-Fred-Astaire-style-canes kind of way, but it wasn’t Bull Durham. The movie was smoky and sexy. The musical was, well, a musical, and a mediocre one at that. In one of the early scenes, Annie takes both Nuke (who doesn’t have his nickname yet) and Crash (who has had his for years) back to her house and says she’s going to choose one of them to couple up with for the season. After Annie tells them about her new-agey beliefs in quantum physics and pheromones, Crash starts to storm out. But instead of launching into a speech about how he believes in the pussy, the cock, the small of a woman’s back, and that there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing astroturf, this Crash bursts into song. It was so wrong. There was only one really fun song: a jaunty number in the second act called “Winning is Better than Losing.” It was very fun to watch, and last Tuesday, it was very fun to live. It has felt like we’ve been on the losing end of everything for almost a decade now. Even winning the 2020 election didn’t feel much like victory because it was followed by the “Stop the Steal” bulls**t, January 6th, and four years of Biden getting no credit for what he did right and slammed for what he did wrong. But on Tuesday night we won bigly, and the singing version of the Durham Bulls are right—winning is better than losing. The headlines have been about the new women governors of Virginia and New Jersey who won by huge margins, California’s vote to fight gerrymandering with gerrymandering, Pennsylvania retaining its liberal Supreme Court justices, and Mississippi finally cracking the Republican supermajority in its legislature. Those are all great, and the relief I feel at not having Jack Ciattarelli as my governor is enormous (he came way too close to winning in 2021), but there were some other less public wins that may make me even happier. Moms for Liberty—the gay-hating, book-ban-loving, anti-sex ed coalition of conservatives that has been taking over school boards for years—did not have good night. The group put out a press release bragging that its candidates won 17 races across the country. While that is true, what the media statement failed to mention is that all of those races were uncontested. In the races where Moms for Liberty candidates actually had opponents, they lost. The group ran 31 candidates across the country in contested races, and all of them lost. ALL OF THEM. For the last few years, the anti-woke, anti-trans, faux-parent’s-rights platform has been a winning proposition for conservative school board candidates across the country who have gone on to cancel sex ed, pillage libraries, and target trans kids as promised. But it looks like that playbook might not be working anymore. One great example of this is the Central Bucks School District in Bucks County, Pesnnsylvania. In 2021, spurred by anger about pandemic school closures and mask mandates, conservative candidates won a majority of seats on the school board. They went to town enacting the most MAGA of MAGA agendas. They implemented a book banning policy that targeted all words related to sex and made it easy for community members to pull any book they found personally offensive. Mostly, however, they tried to make life miserable for LGBTQ students. They banned pride flags in classrooms, suspended a teacher who stood up for a bullied transgender student, and implemented a policy designed to out transgender kids by informing parents of any requests to be called by a different name. Their reign was mercifully short. The 2023 school board race was absurdly expensive with over $600K spent by all of the candidates combined. (The school board race that just happened in my district got pretty heated, but I’m betting the total bill came in around $750 for lawn signs and tee-shirts.) Thankfully, the people of Bucks County didn’t like the conservative policies or the expensive lawsuits that came with them. Liberal candidates swept that election and gained a majority on the board. For the 2025 school board race there were four seats on the ballot in Central Bucks County. Democratic candidates won all of them. They now have a 9-0 majority on the school board. Here’s to Pride month celebrations, gender neutral bathrooms, comprehensive sex education, and overstuffed library shelves! The modern Far Right was really born on the backs of school boards. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, local conservative candidates started emerging as part of a well-thought-out strategy to win whatever elections they could (from dog catcher to senator) both as a way to change minds and policies and as political steppingstones for higher office. Fifty years later, we have Russell Vought executing Project 2025 from inside the White House. Liberal wins in school board elections might not be as exciting as Virginia Democrats gaining 13 seats in the legislature, but they might (fingers and toes crossed) be an even better indicator that the culture war messaging of the past few years is not working anymore. And winning really does feel better than losing. (Though tell that to the eight Democratic Senators who just squandered the momentum the party finally had without even getting a promise that the House will take up a vote on ACA credits.) It’s Too Big Baby, It’s Too Big, Though We Really Did Try to Make ItHaley Kalil is a model who was one of two winners of the first season of Sports Illustrated Swim Search. She also an influencer who goes by the name Haleyybaylee and has almost 16 million followers. In 2015, she married Matt Kalil, an offensive lineman who played a few seasons for the Minnesota Vikings and one for the Carolina Panthers. Injuries to both his hip and his knee seem to have cut his NFL career short. In 2022, the couple filed for divorce, which was finalized last year. I tell you all of this because I had no idea who either of these people were before reading a story that focused on Matt’s enormous schwanzstucker. That story has become so big (How big is it?) that it took a little digging to find anything else about the couple. I thought I’d spare you the trouble. Here’s what happened. Last week Haley did a live stream with Marlon Garcia (also a model and a Twitch streamer who I had never heard of) in which she discussed some of the issues that led to her divorce. While she did mention therapy and working hard to keep the marriage together, the only part the broader internet heard was that her ex-husband’s dick was too damn big. (How big is it?) She described it as the size of “two, maybe three” coke cans stacked on top of each other. That would make it between approximately 10 and 14 inches tall with a girth of 8 inches. The average penis is 5.1 inches long and 4.6 inches around when erect. This means most men are sporting a banana between their legs, not a soda can let alone three.
Haley said there was no way to “do it” without tears. If she’s drawing an accurate picture of her ex-husband’s member, it’s easy to believe that intercourse would be quite painful. A penis that is too much longer than average can hit the cervix during sex which can hurt and even cause uterine cramping. One that is very wide (and eight inches is VERY wide) would stretch the muscles of the vaginal opening and vaginal walls beyond what is comfortable and could easily tear the sensitive skin in the area. Of course, not having intercourse does not have to be relationship ending. Many couples do other things sexually that they find quite satisfying. There are certainly other things that Matt could have done for Hayley that didn’t involve his penis (tongue, fingers, and sex toys come to mind). The one who really loses out in this situation is probably Matt. Men who have really large penises have explained that there’s no way for them to ever feel fully enveloped, and some have said they have trouble orgasming. Haley added that they looked into liposuction to make it smaller. For those wondering, dick lipo really isn’t a thing. Penis reduction surgery does exist, but it’s very uncommon. In fact, the first one was done just ten years ago. Since the stream, Haley has gotten a lot of criticism for sharing something too personal about her ex (who is now remarried to another model). She apologized but criticized the internet at large (How big is it?) for focusing on this one detail in a much longer and more nuanced discussion of her marriage. Fair enough, but Haley is a media professional. She must know that if she mentions that her ex-husband has a one of those porno King Kong dongs in an interview, no one is going to remember to anything else she said. Heck, if she’s good at her job, she could probably have also predicted that if she mentioned that her ex-husband has one of those porno King Kong dongs in an interview, he would get an offer to do porn ($300K from a webcam company). Wait, maybe this wasn’t TMI. Maybe this was her way of helping him find a lucrative post-NFL career. New Videos on Misinformation About Contraception (That I Made)I’m so excited to announce that SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change just released its three-part video series, Persistent Lies: Misinformation About Contraception, which I helped make. For those who don’t know, SIECUS was my first (and second and seventh) job in the field. I started there during grad school as a part-time associate working on the Community Advocacy Project which had a small grant to help parents fight abstinence-only-until-marriage education. By the time I left, I had a husband, a kid, and a minivan, and I was Vice President for Information and Communications. And it’s hard to say that I left because over the years, I’ve continued to work as a consultant. One of my favorite SIECUS projects was writing a history of sex education that spanned over 100 years. All of my roles at SIECUS involved looking at the myths and misinformation that have been spread by the Far Right and other forces opposed to sex education. I read abstinence-only curricula with names like Sex Respect and W.A.I.T. (Why Am I Tempted) Training, and I kept tabs on organizations like Focus on the Family and the Heritage Foundation. In addition to the moral judgements about sex belonging only within heterosexual marriage, these orgs were already trying to convince young people that birth control was bad for them and condoms never worked. Their messages didn’t have a widespread audience back then other than the kids who were forced to take their misleading classes in church or school, but today these very same messages are all over TikTok and Instagram. Most are in the form of testimonials from young women who tell their followers that hormonal birth control is poison that will make them acne-ridden, infertile, and attracted to wimps. (Yes, there’s a whole lot of videos dedicated to the idea that the pill somehow makes women attracted to less masculine men.) Some influencers go on to suggest followers ditch their pills and yank out their IUDs in favor fertility awareness-based methods. In some ways it’s all part of the wellness movement which is one of the places where the Far Right and the woo woo left wrap around to become one loud (inaccurate) voice. Working with SIECUS to make these videos was the best kind of challenge. We knew it was really important to combat these myths with easy-to-understand and accurate information, and there are three OB/Gyns in the videos who do that very well. But it was just as important to us that the young people who see these videos understand that all of this is part of a much bigger cultural and political picture. The pill put women in the workforce. It gave them independence from men and radically altered gender roles. There are people out there who have been pissed about that for over half a century, and they have been working to reverse those changes for just as long. Individual TikTok videos may be focused on the idea that the pill is physically harmful (it’s not), but the underlying goal is to sow distrust in modern contraception methods so that politicians look reasonable when they start restricting access to them. It was the playbook they used on abortion—stigmatize, lie, and start chipping away at access—and it worked. Misinformation about contraception has gotten a lot of attention in the past few weeks including a statement from ACOG suggesting its members (OB/Gyns) need to counter myths directly because patients are confused. Just this weekend there was an article in the New York Times about the MAHA push for fertility awareness-based methods (because MAHA is really all about getting rid of modern conveniences so women have to stay home). I’ve refrained from writing about them because I really wanted people to see these videos first. I worked with excellent colleagues at SIECUS, a fantastic filmmaker, and really smart experts who gave insightful interviews. And now the movies are ready! I’m excited for you to all go watch and promise we’ll talk more about all of this on future Wednesdays.
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It's Too Big Baby, It's Too Big
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