| In running for the important post of "First Man" of the United States, it behooved Mr. Clinton to take some responsibility for the belief among young people that oral sex isn�t �really sex.�
It�s not that I wished to demonize Mr. Clinton. He seemed in many respects an admirable human being. As noted above, he didn't invent oral sex. Looking back on my own life, I didn't see a personal history that was morally perfect. But when I was in high school, oral sex was the sort of thing that only the rougher students talked about occasionally, and they used a descriptive phrase that wasn�t of Latin origin. The subsequent gentrification of the practice wasn't a good thing from the perspective of public health. Mr. Clinton surely didn't intend to threaten the health of an entire generation of young adults. Some of Mr. Clinton�s admirers might have liked to protect him from any embarrassment over this issue, but he himself was perhaps inured to the spotlight. For a political leader, this sort of thing may be described as an "occupational hazard." And one would have liked to think he would have felt obliged to deal with the public health issue he helped to exacerbate. We need now to consider the following data: (1) I once knew a woman who had worked as an exotic dancer who had a cyst on her throat. (2) I have also been acquainted with a homosexual man, also with something similar, who needed surgery for oral cancer. (3) And during the 1996 presidential campaign Mr. Clinton had a cyst removed from his neck. That's to say, the growth that was removed from his neck was described in newspaper reports as a �cyst.� A medical description that was released seemed somewhat evasive. From my experience, then, two specific facts--when taken together with the generalization in Gallo�s article--supported the conclusion that oral sex can cause oral cancer. That conclusion was stated in a letter written by me in 1996. The conclusion was repeated in a paper newsletter published by us in 2001 and also in a 2003 internet article. Now, the third of the three facts listed above gave possible political significance because it concerned Mr. Clinton. Also, in 2003 a study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute which came to the same conclusion regarding the connection between oral sex and oral cancer. A similar story has been reported also on the BBC, but, as of 2008, there had been almost nothing in the US mass media. That seemed irresponsible. The reader may click below to see the BBC story. If interested in getting an idea of current media articles in the US, enter "oral sex oral cancer" as a Google search phrase. TO CONTINUE ABOVE ARTICLE: CLICK HERE |
| A SERIOUS POLITICAL SIDE ISSUE: In 1996 I wrote about Mr. Clinton's cyst and made my evaluation of what it may have meant known to a fairly small number of individuals. Not long after I may have let the cat out of the bag about the cyst, former Senator John Glenn made an appearance in a building in Indianapolis where I was attending a workshop. I saw him there face to face. He looked me in the eye and smiled, although he said nothing to me. If he had an interest in me, that may have been because of my criticism of olean�. Olean was a product of Procter & Gamble, a company located in Glenn's home state. From my perspective as a science writer, oral sex and olean are both issues tied to "heterotoxicity." Heterotoxicity is discussed elsewhere on this site, as well as later in this article. But within a short period after that, Glenn had retired from national politics--but he was also given an opportunity to fly another space mission. I, of course, don't know precisely what happened between Sen. Glenn and his fellow Democrats then, but that dramatic and sudden sequence of events made me suspect that President Clinton was indeed concealing a significant political liability. My participation at the workshop was covered by a local TV station. The station was RTV6, the Indianapolis ABC outlet. The reporter was Mr. Derrik Thomas, who was still with that station in 2008. I don't know that Sen. Glenn was shown in any TV report of those events of fall '96, but the on-air RTV6 report, which I saw, certainly did show me participating in that workshop. Could those past events haunt later politics? In 2005 it was being reported that Sen. Hillary Clinton was a likely Democratic presidential candidate for 2008. I wondered whether her candidacy might turn out to be a major Democratic disaster. For that reason, I called Senator Clinton three times in Dec. 2005, leaving very specific information, including my phone number, on her battery of answering machines. There was no response then and none to similar calls and e-mails during the campaign of 2008. |
| Oral sex risks p3 |