Anwyn’s Note: Originally post at Electric Venom, but accidentally deleted in a database wipeout. Reposted here.

I saw the URL for this site on the back of a PT Cruiser on my way home today. Joyful birthing? Sure. But just above the “joyful” part, on the Cruiser, were more words: HypnoBirthing: The Mongo Method. The Hypno part is here.

I’m dubious. Most of the stuff it talks about–reducing stress to the mother, reducing C-sections and other interventions–I’m 100 percent in favor of. But it never really gets into the specifics of the “hypno” part, and frankly, I was taught all the things it alludes to–that fear leads to stress leads to pain, that your body can do the work just fine on its own if you can relax to the proper degree, etc.–in my regular childbirth class at the hospital. I can’t believe it takes all these specialized methods to help women help themselves to a reasonable, manageable birth experience. Actually, I take that back–I can believe it. If more women took the time to read up and prepare, with tons of courses and books already out there, these “methods” wouldn’t keep proliferating. As for the Hypno part, well, that page talks a lot about daydreaming and the state you enter just before sleep. If that’s all it is, that’s just the same as The Zone, and yes, I got into it while having my son. So really, if it’s just teaching you to zone out and relax, I’m all for it, but if it’s actually hypnosis that somebody else needs to perform on you, count me out.

And that guff about no-pain birth/labor? A doctor’s endorsement at the site says:

I have made the transition to HypnoBirthing®-The Mongan Method. I now believe that birthing involves no pain.

Yeah. That’s cuz you’ve never done it, Jack.

Event: The Grey’s Anatomy flap over Isaiah Washington’s alleged sexual slur against costar T.R. Knight has, predictably, landed Washington in “treatment” for his “behavioral issues.”

Problem: This latest brouhaha came not because he supposedly called Knight the name, but because he denied doing so. He was fatuous enough to use the word in question in public again when he denied the orginal cause of complaint and is now installed for the de rigeur reprogramming of public figures who publicly use words deemed unacceptable by the self-appointed hate-crimes police.

Subsequent to his use of the word after the Globes, costar Katherine Heigl, according to the AP, “characteriz[ed] the incident as one that should be handled privately among the show’s cast and crew.” If she thought that, she was the only one of the three who did. The same article reports that Knight went flogging the incident on Ellen DeGeneres’s show, repeating the word in public yet again (no charge when it’s one of the wronged group doing it!).

Two words, neither of them beginning with an F: Grow up. Don’t call your costars names. And wronged costars, challenge him to take it outside, or hell, leave it inside, but why would you want to continue fostering disunion on the set, discomfort where you work, by dragging the whole world into the problem? Oh yeah–because if you didn’t, you couldn’t get GLAAD to do your dirty work for you by dragging the guy off to “rehab.”

But the notion that this war is about our moral failings is comfort fantasy, pure and simple. It soothes us with the false idea that, if we but mend ourselves, the scary people will leave us alone. … our enemies were not created by the peccadilloes of free people and will not melt away before a moral perfection that we, in any case, can never achieve.

Via Hot Air.