from foxnews.com
Is this video clip really on Fox News? Yep, right here on the homepage in the "FNC iMag" lifestyle video section, and its a video segment labelled "Campus Hookups." And in this segment, FNC "relationship expert" Marie Forleo offers advice incoming college coeds about dating and sex, including but not limited to go out and meet people in bars, try not to sleep with your professors, and go ahead and have a lot of sex. Seriously.
This video — which MSNBC has been airing and debating all day (hat tip) — has to be seen to be believed — not necessarily because Forleo gives bad advice (we'll get to that — though query the absence of a single reference to STDs) but because it just seems so out of place to have an FNC-endorsed expert cheerfully counselling kids to go on out to bars and "meet people" as montages of partyers drink onscreen (beer, wine, and I could've sworn I saw a shooter) as a beat thrums in the background. Again: This is on Fox News?
Here's some pearls of wisdom offered by Forleo:
reality-based community is a scary, scary place. Note accompanying graphic, which forever labels some poor girl walking along a shady street with the word "SHAME."The kicker comes toward the end of the segment, though, when Forleo blithely encourages students to sleep around if they are so inclined: "If you're comfortable with your sexuality and it means having different partners, I honestly don't think it's a bad thing as long as everyone's practicing safe sex and it's consensual." Whoa. That's practical advice, to be sure — keep it safe, make sure it's consensual, and it's a helluva lot more useful to hormone-driven kids than abstinence pledges. But again. This is on Fox.
MSNBC has picked this up and run with it: It appeard yesterday on Tucker Carlson's "Beat The Press" segment (Tucker was shocked — shocked!) and again this morning with Contessa Brewer (whose response to Foreleo's comment about meeting people "in your classes, in the library, walking around on campus" was "Duh!") and this afternoon with Rita Cosby, whose guest did not approve of the wanton assumption that all college kids were heading to school to drink and nail whatever they could.
If this doesn't sound blatant to you, just please imagine the intercut image of Forleo, that red-lipped raven-haired vixen, with partying, dancing, drinking, dimly-lit, skin-showing students on a bender. While Forleo certainly speaks to the reality of the Faber College-esque existence, we can think of other 
responses to iMag host Audrey Hasson's question "Are bars and frat parties a bad idea?" that might caution youngsters to take care with drinking, which by the way isn't legal to be actually doing until they're 21, and to perhaps note that it's a good idea to keep one's wits about oneself to minimize the danger one puts oneself in, including the simple danger of puking all over oneself. Instead, she says that college is "the point of your life when you're all gonna do that," making a sweeping generalization about underage kids going to bars. Whether or not that is true in some cases, it seems a bit odd to be espoused so freely without even a caveat.
Forleo says "You gotta have a sense of humor and let yourself have fun" — MSNBC is doing its best to see that this video blows up. When it does, we'll see what kind of sense of humor the Fox News viewership has.
