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Welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, September 22nd.

It's the iced champagne edition.

Joining me here in New York is our special guest, Slate Senior Editor Dan Engber.

Hi, Dan. Hello. And from D.C., we have

double X founding editor Hannah Rosen. Hi, Hannah. Hi. Just in case the listeners haven't noticed,

we want to say that Dan is a man. Just in case, you didn't pick that out from the voice.

Testosterone levels indicate that I'm a man. Exactly.

As far as we know.

On today's Gab Fest, we'll be discussing the recent dustup between Michelle Bachman

and Rick Perry over the HPV vaccine Gardasil, a new study claiming that testosterone levels

drop after men become fathers, and a new spate of fall TV shows that are about women in their 20s

and a bunch of shows about men who are in their 40s and declining.

So let's start with the HPV kerfuffle.

Last week at the GOPD debates, Wolf Blitzer asked Rick Perry about the executive order he made

when he was Texas governor that mandated the HPV vaccine Gardasil for girls between the ages 10 and 12.

Perry's opponents, Michelle Bachman, Ron Paul, and Rixon, Torham took him to task for this decision, and Perry said that if he had to do it over, he would have done it differently.

But that wasn't the end of the HPV vaccination talk.

After the debates, Michelle Bachman said that Gardasil can cause mental retardation, something which has been thoroughly debunked. And she now says, I was, I'm not a scientist. So, Hannah, can you untangle this complicated mess for us and tell us a little bit about why the HPV vaccine is such a contentious issue for Republicans and everybody else. Yeah. I mean, I was really surprised that Michelle Bachman's not a scientist. I mean, all this time, I thought that she was a scientist, and now we learned she's actually not a scientist. It's really shocking. It's really shocking, and neither is Rick Perry. It's so interesting because actually a part of you is thinking maybe I need to be on

Michelle Bachman's side on this, not that the vaccine causes retardation because it doesn't. But reading

about the vaccine makes you have a few suspicions about the vaccine. As someone who's covering

Christian conservatives for a long time, the HPV vaccine was no small thing in that community. It was basically their best weapon against sex. And so when Rick Perry decided that everyone in Texas had to have the HPV vaccine unless they opted out, that was pretty shocking. Like people wonder, why would a Christian conservative do anything like that? When I was covering Christian conservatives, I used to watch videos in which the HPV vaccine is like watching haunted house videos. It was this thing that loomed over your life. As soon as the girl would be flirting with a boy, there would be this, there would be this, you know, cervical cancer was going to get her, you know. so HPV vaccine took away their best weapon.

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