A suspect has been arrested in the Wisconsin terrorism case involving a bomb set off in a Planned Parenthood case. Francis Grady is facing federal charges. A couple of things that are important to keep in mind about this case and this suspect.

1) Profiles in terrorism. Because there's an allergy in the mainstream media to labeling terrorist acts committed by anyone other than Muslim men as what it is---terrorism---important information about the profile of a terrorist tends to go unlearned. Grady is a middle-aged white man. To those who observe anti-choice terrorism closely, this is roughly the least surprising news ever, and not just because of prior incidents of anti-choice terrorism. It's also because the bulk of the men having public conniption fits about women being sexually active are middle-aged white men. There's a sprinkling of women in there, but by and large, the people who are on the radio screeching about how women who use contraception are "sluts", who convene and sit on congressional panels about how contraception is the end of "religious liberty", who pass laws restricting abortion while making speeches comparing women to farm animals, who melt down on Fox News at the very idea that family planning clinics continue to exist, who try to eliminate all funding for contraception on the state and federal level, and who run for President while talking about the evils of contraception or why we need to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood? Middle-aged white men. For some reason, middle-aged white men in our culture are encouraged to take their generalized frustrations in life and dump all that anger on women who dare have sex with someone else without paying an enormous and unnecessary penalty for it. But because of the tendency to only label Muslim terrrorism as "terrorism", this phenomenon gets under-analyzed. There's been a lot of ink spilled about young men and terrorism, because of Muslim terrorism, but the profile of an American terrorist is one where he's just as, if not more, likely to be middle-aged. 

2) Grady is proud of himself. Getting the suspect to confess was no problem at all, it seems, since he's gloating about how awesome he is.

Francis Grady, 50, spoke to reporters who were covering his first appearance in federal court since the Sunday night attack. The Green Bay Press-Gazette posted video of him walking through the courthouse followed by a short clip of him speaking to reporters outside.

"There was no bomb," Grady said. "It was gasoline."

A reporter asked why Grady attacked the clinic.

"Because they're killing babies there," he responded.

The newspaper also got more from inside the federal courtroom, where Grady reportedly interrupted the judge to ask, "“Do you even care at all about the 1,000 babies that died screaming?"

Obviously, this is classic anti-choice delusion. They've convinced themselves embryos are "babies", and so it's not much of a leap to suggest that they therefore "scream", even though they have no mouths, lungs, or throats to scream, or brains that would compel this action. But we all know this isn't about "babies", so much as abortion and reproductive rights generally being a scapegoat for anger at declining male privilege and women's expanding opportunities.

Because of the aforementioned angry, middle-aged white men denouncing women's rights from TV and radio, from the halls of Congress to the presidential campaign, are we surprised that an anti-choice terrorist would get it in his head that he's a hero with widespread social support? Are we surprised that he's bragging about his crime instead of recoiling in shame? He probably thinks the Republican presidential candidates who were in the state campaigning when Grady set this bomb off are watching this on TV and approving of him. 

The mealy-mouthed unwillingness to take anti-choice terrorism seriously is a large part of the problem. It's not called "terrorism". Conservatives offer half-hearted denunciations, but then immediately turn around and continue to offer support for the narratives that create terrorism,  such as claiming that nearly every woman in America is out of line for using her access points to health care---whether it's private insurance or government programs to fill the gaps---to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Or claiming that the 1 in 3 American women who have abortions are murderers. As long as it's socially acceptable for men to be angry about women's bid for equality, and as long as that anger continues to be channeled into hatred for reproductive rights, some of the angry dudes are going to turn violent. Mild denunciations of crossing the line aren't enough. Anyone who continues to support the narrative that forced child-bearing is an appropriate social control placed on women is responsible for this. 

This post by an anonymous doctor suggesting "civil disobedience" from doctors in response to mandatory ultrasound laws is making the rounds, mainly being forwarded by people who are rightfully outraged by these laws, but---and I hate to say this---don't really understand the issue very well. Both actual abortion providers (using their actual names) and I tried very hard in comments to explain that this post is just missing the point, but alas, we were basically ignored. There's no indication that the doctor who wrote the post is an abortion provider, and in fact good reason to think he/she is not, and so it seems more than a little condescending to act like you have all the answers for solving the abortion crisis that the right is inducing with these laws. If you're a doctor and you really want to fight back against the right on abortion, why not start by providing abortion? Sure, that would mean that anonymity for your political views is stripped from you, but if you're going to scold others to break the law and put themselves in danger, the least you can do is set a good example by being public and providing abortion. 

The anon doctor suggests that abortion providers reject the mandatory ultrasound law by refusing to do it, and doctoring patient files to make it look it was done, if necessary. This is characterized as "civil disobedience", but it's really not in the same way that getting arrested at protests for moral but illegal trespassing is. Civil disobedience works best if it has a public component, to draw attention to your issues in hopes of changing the law. Privately doctoring files doesn't accomplish that. 

While it's always theoretically possible that doctors who do this will get away with it, the result if they get caught will not be that they generate outrage in a complacent public and get the law changed. No, they're probably just going to get their license stripped, and be unable to perform legal abortions. Which is what anti-choicers want. They would be delighted if doctors refused to obey the law, and could be stripped of their licenses. Giving the oppressor what they want most in the world isn't effective action. It is, in a word, counterproducitive. The reason anti-choicers pass laws like this is, I believe, they know that women will jump through any hoop to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy, and they want to maximize the pain and suffering of the whole ordeal. Pro-choicers should take that knowledge and realize that depriving women of safe, legal providers is about the worst possible thing you could do under these circumstances. Yes, a non-consensual procedure is a horrible thing, but if you look at the choices women make, not being able to get a safe, legal abortion is more horrible. 

I pointed this out on Twitter, and some folks asked how doctors would get caught. Which points to another reason that a little knowledge is a bad thing. Someone on the outside probably assumes, for obvious reasons, that women getting abortions are pro-choice and would therefore be complicit in this subterfuge. I don't blame someone for having this assumption, but I do blame them for working off it without doing a little research first. The reality is that anti-choice women seek abortion all the time. They tend to justify it by saying that they're not like those other women---those sluts, you know---who are getting abortions. But because of this, a doctor can't trust that a patient in their office won't use them for the abortion, and then run to the police and squeal about law breaking they witnessed. Depressing, but a reality that people on the inside have learned they have to accept. 

So please, don't keep forwarding this piece. I realize it feels good and makes the reader feel they can exert control in a situation that's been set up to make everyone helpless and victimized, but it's an illusion. 

After the Blunt amendment went down, I figured that, policy-wise, Republicans were out of options in their desperate bid to separate middle and working class women from simple access to contraception. It was their single best shot, after all, and it frankly wasn't a very good one. Unfortunately, the war on low income women who don't have access to health care benefits through work continues at a rapid pace; with the pretense about "abortion" or "religious freedom" falling away during the Slutstraganza, Texas is cheerfully cutting 130,000 women off their access to contraception and cancer screening cuz SLUTS. 

Republicans should have let the story die over the weekend, but in part because of the right wing media, that wasn't going to happen. So even though the right is actually out of realistic options, the debate over whether or not 99% of American women are worthless sluts has continued on, and every day it continues is a bad day for Republicans. So it looks like Senate Republicans are taking action to speed up the demise of this debate:

From one top GOP senator openly lamenting the fallout of the ongoing fight over contraception, to the author of the controversial legislation at the heart of that fight effectively conceding defeat in the upper chamber, signs mounted Tuesday that suggest Senate Republicans want to put the birth control controversy to bed.

“You know, I think we’ve got as many votes as I think there were to get on that,” Senate GOP Conference Vice Chairman Roy Blunt told TPM Tuesday afternoon after a weekly Capitol briefing. “I think the House side may take some further action. That debate will go on for a long time, though I don’t know that there’s anything else to happen in the Senate in the near future.”

The concession marks a departure for the GOP leadership, which as recently as last week insisted that Republicans were on the right side of the issue and would fight on.

Last Thursday, after his amendment was narrowly tabled 51-48, Blunt vowed that, “The fight is not over.” He had maintained that he wants to tack it onto legislation the president cannot veto. But on Tuesday, after a meeting with his caucus, he dialed down expectations for any further action in the Senate.

The question is can they really get Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly to stop  hyperventilating about their brand-new discovery that there's this thing called the "birth control pill", and it's been considered a standard part of women's health care for about 50 years now? I'm not sure. 

So why did Republicans think this was going to work in the first place? I think it's because they think that some feminist gains are more controversial among the general public than they actually are. The Beltway media aids in this; they look at all the Bible-thumping nonsense pouring out of red states and overestimate the actual on-the-ground enthusiasm for the no-fucking rules. Never underestimate the capacity of people to compartmentalize, and believe fucking is wrong on Sunday morning, but by Monday night, believing it's oh so right yet again.

Beyond that, I think the whole situation is a result of many on the right and in the Beltway media not understanding that social justice is a piecemeal thing. It's not like feminists just flip on a light and suddenly the contention "women are people" is understood and accepted by all across the board. Some rights, such as the vote, are universally accepted now. Some, such as who does what amount of housework and whether or how much right women have to reject male attention, are still hotly contested. And some have widespread acceptance, but Republicans just haven't gotten the memo yet. I think that this is where they screwed up. They believe two things are still controversial that aren't, and they just found out the hard way how wrong they are:

1) Equal pay for equal work.

2) "Good girls" can.

It's clear that the Republican party still finds equal pay for equal work to be offensive---which is why the Supreme Court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter---but what they fail to understand is that while some excuses are still being made for the wage gap out there, the public at large really does reject paying women less just because they're women. They may not understand why it's a problem that women get less pay because of child care issues and things like that, but open discrimination  where women do exactly the same work as men but get paid less for no other reason than gender has reached the point where it's nearly as offensive as denying women the vote. Republicans still labor under this delusion that men want women who have no aspirations but to be housewives, and while that does exist, I don't think it's as common as they think. A lot of men see dependent women as a burden, and want to form dual-income marriages because duh, that means more money and a more comfortable living. Unfortunately, it's much easier for men to prefer to marry working women because they know women will still do most of the housework, but nonetheless, I think both men and women see that their lives are better if women work. And since they've accepted that, they're not going to be keen on bringing in less money for no other reason than discrimination. 

The contraception mandate is, at its core, about equal pay for equal work. Under the Affordable Health Care Act, all of men's preventive care is covered, so it's only fair to cover all of women's. That Republicans demand that employers have a right to give women fewer benefits simply because they're women is no different than Republicans demanding the right to pay women less simply because they're women. This crosses a big line with most of the public. 

As for the second one, this is where the Republicans really misfired. They really overestimated public antipathy towards privileged adult women having sex while single. I can see why they made this mistake; they watch a lot of Fox News, and Fox is always on about "girls gone wild". What they forgot is that Americans don't see single women as an undifferientiated mass. When it comes to middle class or upper class women who eventually want to marry and have children, there's widespread acceptance of premarital sex. There's also complex racial politics in play here, where women of color still face more shame for being sexual than white women, even when all other things are equal, but I think that's one of those things that's fading away, especially with women like Michelle Obama living up to the modern ideal of sexy-but-wholesome. Right wing media thought that they could label someone like Sandra Fluke a "slut" or a "semen demon" for no other reason than she's 30 and unmarried, and this is where they misfired. Americans are still uptight about poor women having sex, teenage girls having sex, queer women having sex, and women who openly reject the path to marriage and motherhood having sex, but they're just fine with the Sandra Flukes of the world having sex. Cohabitation before marriage is the national norm, and not just for my generation. I'm from Texas, for god's sake, and I can probably count the married couples I know under 60 who didn't live together before marriage on one hand, and in all my life, I've never known anyone to have a fight with their family about that. 

I can see how this fact gets lost in the shuffle, because the anti-choice movement is so loud and has so much power over Republicans. But if you think about it, most of their victories only come when they focus on pushing their extremist anti-sex agenda on the disempowered: the young, the poor, lesbians, women of color, and women who are perceived as being a little too hostile to marriage and motherhood. Even their extremist abortion restrictions have to play on hostility for these less-beloved groups of women: restricting financing, parental notification, and regulations that basically play on the belief that some women just need a little push towards marriage-and-motherhood tend to go over more easily than restrictions that are seen as legitimate obstacles for "good girls".  

Democrats played this well. They could have been more cowardly and found a married woman with health problems to testify, but instead they gambled on a woman who isn't married. In doing so, they really exposed this gap of understanding between Republican politicians and pundits and the rest of the country on how acceptable it is for relatively privileged women to be single and sexually active. In fact, this really succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I doubt that even in Nancy Pelosi's best case scenario feature the self-destruction of Rush Limbaugh, with bits of slime sticking to Mitt Romney. 

None of this means our work is even close to done. Americans are wildly sexist still. There's a ton of women you can unironically call a "slut" without getting tons of backlash, i.e. see above categories. But this was a case where Republicans completely misjudged how ordinary Americans of all political stripes feel. Perhaps there are some political lessons in this that can be paid forward.

Let's be clear: Rush Limbaugh didn't actually apologize to Sandra Fluke and the 99% of American women that use contraception that he's dismissed with words such as "slut" and "prostitute". He only apologized for not using better euphemisms. He maintains that his argument---that nearly every single woman in America is irresponsible and her sexuality makes her a bad person---is still correct. And so far, Mitt Romney is on record agreeing that the problem is finding better euphemisms, and not that every woman who has sex for fun and not procreation is a bad person. I have more here at RH Reality Check, if you want to dive into this argument. 

I think a lot of people are confused about why right now is the time conservatives chose to wage open war on contraception. To be clear, the anti-choice movement has been opposed to contraception use for a long time now, at least a decade. Even more "moderate" anti-choice groups like Feminists For Life circulate anti-contraception propaganda. But anti-choicers, the conservative movement, and certainly the Republican Party realized that being out about this hostility to contraception is politically toxic. That's why they've really been slow in their efforts to chip away at access. The biggest anti-contraception effort prior to Obama's election was abstinence-only education, or as I like to call it, state-funded anti-contraception propaganda.

But now it's all-out war, with conservatives trying to kill off subsidies that make contraception affordable to low income women. This failed at the federal level, but they're having smashing success on the state level, I'm afraid. Now it's about trying to deny decades of precedent that classifies most forms of contraception as insurance-covered medical care, on the grounds of SLUTZ. It seems like a weird time to argue that 99% of American women are irresponsible sluts, I will admit. Which is why I think it's a panic reaction more than it's a a Machivallian scheme to move the needle to the right on reproductive rights. (In fact, the more conservatives bitch about contraception, the more clear it is that their antagonism to abortion is not and never was about "life", but about hating women. The Virginia situation demonstrates this.) Conservatives often have a better read than liberals do on how macro politics affects micro politics, which is to say, they really do get how oppressed people can see progress in the larger political world, and that boosts their self-esteem and makes them feel more entitled to demand better treatment in daily life. Liberals see no co-pay contraception and think, "That'll help women save money and lower the unintended pregnancy rate." 

Conservatives see it and think, "That'll suggest to women that being able to have sex while retaining control over your body is your god-given right that the President went out of his way to protect. That's going to make those bitches uppity." 

Thing is, conservatives are right on this front. While the stigma of contraception has faded over the years, some taboo still clings to it, especially for the young and disempowered. We're still anxious about it, because we as a society haven't completely come around to the argument that sex is good, and therefore should be pursued with minimal risks. But having the President say that contraception is a normal part of health care and that it should be classified as preventive care---that's how normal and universal it is---sends a strong message. It suggests that the government knows you're fucking, and they not only don't judge you for it, but they want to make sure you're safe. "Hey," this move says, "Contraception is normal. Everyone uses it. It's a public good, like indoor plumbing or electricity." That could have profound long-term effects on reducing shame around female sexuality, and thereby giving women more self-confidence when it comes to sex. I suspect women may in fact become harder for men to push around, for instance. God knows if we can actually take the sting out of the word "slut", fewer women will buy the line that they're washed up harridans at age 30, and therefore have to settle down and start cooking for any man who'll take them. You can see how this directly threatens conservative men especially. 

So they're panicking, flinging the word "slut" around a lot, and trying to preserve the sexual taboos that are being dismantled by the pro-choice movement. Unfortunately, they are seeing success. 

She handed me a wrinkled piece of paper. I could tell it had been opened and closed, folded and unfolded wadded up and straightened out so many times it almost looked like it was going to fall apart in my hands.

Little miss innocent, huh? Whatever slut- you take birth control pills so you can f*&# every guy in school! What a joke- u are nothin but a whore! Pretty bad when some guy on the radio who isn't afraid to tell the truth has to break it down for everybody- if u on the Pill u are nothing but a skank ass ho! My mom said girls on the pill are tramps who just wanna get laid and don't care about nothin- is that how u are?

I thought I was going to throw up! I was crying- crying for my sweet daughter who was in a puddle on the front seat of my car, crying because I was so angry I didn't know what to do first! I drove home with one arm around my daughter and one hand on the wheel; I was saying things but for the life of me I can't remember any of what I said now. I just wanted to take the pain away from my child! I wanted to make her stop crying, wanted to erase all the horrible pain that she was feeling.

These kinds of attacks on individual women---in this case, a 16-year-old girl in high school---are only effective in an environment where the bullies can imply that using contraception and/or being sexually active is deviant. The idea is to isolate the victim, make them feel weird and different, and terrify them for it. But when you have the President in the White House talking about contraception as a normal part of health care for pretty much all women, it becomes clear that being sexually active and using contraception is the national norm, as wholesome and American as apple pie. The high levels of support for the HHS mandate suggests that most Americans are already there. This panic reaction is the last gasp of the old order trying to turn back the clock, to a time where it was scandalous for people to live together without being married, to when women who have sex with their boyfriends worry about their reputation, and when contraception was seen as embarrassing, and so some people tried their luck without getting any, and usually failed. 

The thing is, as this example above shows, backsliding is possible. (If anyone in my high school was bullied for using contraception, I don't remember it.) Which is why it's more important than ever to talk about sex, and specifically how normal it is, how universal it is, what the benefits are, and to shame anyone who would say otherwise. We have the numbers on our side. We just need the courage. Remember, the people who think there's something bad about women just because they fuck are the weirdoes here. Don't be afraid to really believe that and act on it. 

Oh, congressional Republicans. There were two ways you could have reacted when Obama gave you what you said you wanted, which was to allow Catholic hospitals and universities not to cover contraception directly for their employees. You could have accepted the compromise gracefully and let it go, or double down and demand that any employer any time be able to cut employees off from health insurance benefits they've already earned, and in doing so, continue the national conversation about contraception that puts you into Camp Anti-Pill. You chose the latter, because your blinding misogyny made you unable to see that this might not be for the best. Thus, the Blunt amendment. Let's take a tally of how that worked out for you.

1) It kept contraception on the radar, which gave the mainstream media plenty of time and opportunity to make it clear that Rick Santorum is an anti-contraception nut who, if elected, would almost surely do everything in his power to keep women from getting access to contraception.

2) It forced Mitt Romney to set the land record in flip-flopping, first defending a woman's right to use contraception and then back-tracking and saying, no, actually, you think her employer should get a vote when it comes to how she conducts her private sex and reproductive life.

3) It revealed to the world that your party thinks it's appropriate to exclude female voices from a discussion about women's health care.

4) It set your most popular spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, on a multi-week rant about how 99% of American women are "sluts" and "prostitutes".

5) It'll probably be a factor in Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe's seats turning blue.

6) It made those in the media who apologize for your anti-choice views realize that actually, this really was about sex all along and  had nothing to do with fetuses.

7) It made you the butt of jokes from "Saturday Night Live", "Funny or Die", Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert.

8) And then the amendment that all this effort was put behind died with a whimper on the Senate floor. 

Excellent performance, GOP! I think, if you can keep up doing good work like this, sweeping victories in November are sure to be yours. 

Conservatives are mad that Democrats picked a fight about contraception---apparently the rules they wrote said Democrats don't get to pick a fight---and now they're forced, forced I tell you, to go full wingnut and denounce all women having ready access to the contraception they need. Well, it's a real shame they're forced to come out so hard against contraception access, because you know, just giving up and letting women have this would at least get the comedians off your back.

Becoming the national laughingstock: Always known to be a winning strategy. Keep it up, Republicans! Eventually, every comedian and comic actor in the country will have a bit about your complete inability to understand that no, most of us don't actually think we're befouling ourselves with sexual intercourse.

If you're eager to say, "Nuh-uh, not every comedian! I bet Dennis Miller doesn't do a joke about this!", it might be time to consider how it is that conservative "comedy" is so easy to forget.

While I was not feeling up to much writing these past couple of days, that didn't stop me from provoking anti-choicers on Twitter to disparage contraception, so that I could then retweet them and help further understanding of where the attack on reproductive rights are coming from. After all, it's a surprisingly easy task that a lobotomized monkey could probably do, but no less entertaining for it. And in doing so, I had a revelation. It came after yet another dude (and so far, out of the dozens of people who explain to me that female sexuality is only for procreation, and not for pleasure, only one has been female) condescendingly explained that contraception "cheapens" sex, presumably by making it something you can have on more than an annual basis, I decided to have some more fun. After all, every time a guy explains that the tools we use to have frequent, spontaneous, carefree sex are naughty, he's basically hanging a sign around his neck that says, "I don't get laid much, if at all, so I don't really know how this works." Listening to anti-choice nuts talk about sex is like listening to Mitt Romney explain hip-hop. They're so painfully out of the loop you can't decide if you want to laugh at them or cringe in embarrassment for them. So I told the guy, hey look, when you say these things, people aren't persuaded of anything but that you don't know what the fuck sex is like.

At what point he told me defensively that he's a virgin. To which I dusted off a hoary old joke and said, "Don't play the game? Don't make the rules." Hey, at least it's funnier than the aspirin-between-the-knees bit, and has the advantage of being true. To which he said I was being "ad hominem", which is a phrase apparently 100% of conservatives think means "you're wrong because you bested a conservative in an argument, and that's against the rules we wrote". 

That's when it occurred to me that one of the things that's feeding the outrage about the contraception thing is that it's a big clusterfuck of mansplaining. 

One of the reasons Issa's male-only morning panel on contraception access took off like wildfire is the obvious WTF reason, but it emotionally resonated on an even deeper level precisely because this is probably the most mansplainy situation of all time: a bunch of men tellign women what our sex lives should look like.  That's men who have never taken a birth control pill, never worried about getting pregnant, often have very littel idea how the female reproductive system works, and often have only remote understanding of what normal* people's relationship to sex is like, if that. Women really hate men who know less about a subject sneering down their nose at us and telling us to shut up and listen to the man's opinion on this. This has been a national bout of mansplaining in the worst possible way, and that's just got emotional resonance.

All that said, I want to be clear that it's not enough to be outraged at the anti-contraception shit and take it as a given that it's way out of bounds. I mean, it seems obvious that it is, but without an aggressive counterattack from the left, right wingers may gain ground in their attempts to redefine the over 99% of women in the country who have sex for fun and not just for procreation as sluts. We need to frame our arguments as a full-throated, unapologetic belief that sex is good, women are good, and women's right to enjoy sexual pleasure without shaming or government interference is good. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing enough of that. Instead, the most important argument---that a woman has a right to be a sexual creature and that sex is good---being abandoned by all sorts of liberals and feminists. The most common form this concession takes is well-meaning, and often person conceding the argument that women who have sex for pleasure are somehow less-than don't intend to concede it. But that's nonetheless what they're doing. That concession looks like this:

"Some women aren't even taking the birth control pill for contraception! They need it for cramps/endometriosis/etc."

Every time you say this, a right winger wanting to imply that women who have sex for pleasure are sluts gets his wings. This statement and all variations on it feeds into the right wing claim that a) contraception is not health care and b) that women who have sex for pleasure are so indefensible that you have to lean on off-label uses for a contraceptive drug to justify its existence. It also does absolutely nothing to defend the non-pill contraception that's covered by the health care act, such as IUDs or sterilization. Plus, that gives them an easy out, which is to say that they're fine with insurance covering pills that are prescribed for non-contraception use, but just object to prescriptions for women who use them to prevent pregnancy.

I realize talking about and defending female sexual pleasure is a hard thing to do. Our society still has a ton of shame around the topic. But that's what this fight is about. It's not even really about contraception, per se. That's why the Republican candidates, when asked about contraception, actually answered the question as if John King had said, "Where do you fall on the subject of women having sex without your explicit permission first?" (I'm serious; their answers about "out of wedlock" births and the like make way more sense if you substitute the phrase "unauthorized sex" for "contraception".)  We can only win this if we have a clean fight about it. And that means tackling the question of sex directly, and not chewing around the edges or worse, building our defenses around women who could theoretically be celibate but still on the pill. 

And you know what I've found? If you defend female sexuality directly, it's not as bad as you think it's going to be. They don't actually have an argument against the contention that women deserve to have support for happy, healthy sex lives, and that sex, being a normal part of human nature, should be incorporated into standard health care just as surely as eating  and work are.** In my experience, they tend to fall on the naturalistic fallacy, claiming that they have secret knowledge that infrequent and stressful sex is more "natural" than carefree, joyful, frequent sex, or they try to find ways to call you a slut without just saying it directly. Neither is an argument. The latter is something I think we can collectively learn to laugh off. Addressing the real subject at hand can often be clarifying and invigorating, and not so scary at all. After all, most people have sex. If they're against female sexuality, they're either ignorant or sadistic (or both), and that becomes clear quickly enough.

*And by normal, I don't mean vanilla, but more that most people on some level overcome their fears and disgust with the human body and learn to enjoy its pleasures with relatively little guilt. In fact, the mainstream of America actually probably is more worried about not getting enough sex than if they're having "too much". Read any advice column. You're not going to see people writing in saying that they're doing it 4 times a week and are worried that's too much. Far more often, you get letters from people who are upset because it's trailed off to once a month or less, and they want to know how to reignite the spark.

**Seriously, imagine applying abstinence-only logic to other kinds of health care issues. Need some help managing stress-related illness? Well, why don't you just abstain from being stressed? Sure, that means quitting your job and then bringing on a whole new bunch of stress-related problems that come with unemployment but NYAH NYAH I CAN'T HEAR YOU ABSTINENCE WORKS 100% OF THE TIME. Want some nutritional advice? Or, if you're diabetic, want some insulin? Why don't you just abstain from eating? That's free, and here's some quacks to tell you that fasting is the key to immortality. The claim antis make is that you don't "need" sex, but that claim insinuates incorrectly that there's a bright white line between "need" and "want" that isn't there. Actually, not being able to pursue a sex life is going to be very risky for the majority of sexual people. Sex supplies fun, companionship, sexual release, closeness, etc., all things that are part of a healthy lifestyle. The risks of not feeling free to pursue sexual pleasure, for sexual people, are despair, loneliness, stress and all related illnesses, and high risk behavior borne from ill-fated attempts to redirect your sexual energies elsewhere. To claim people don't "need" the right to control their own sexuality is similar to claiming they don't need exercise. Well, in the short term, maybe not, but over time, that shit builds up. 

Sara Robinson has a really great summary of how effective contraception Changed Everything, and why---though it's utterly baffling to most of us---patriarchal dudes long for a time when there wasn't any such thing and every act of heterosexual intercourse had an undercurrent of doom for women. It's not because Doom Sex turns them on, though I think for some (Ross Douthat and Rick Santorum come to mind), they can't get it up without that feeling that this particular act could disrupt their partner's life at a moment's notice. It's because they long for a time when half the human race was most assuredly underfoot, and men could count on being the leaders of women, simply because they were born male. It's like the divine right of kings, but for every man. 

Of course, most men like having sex more than getting crowned the petty king of a teeny country, which is why I want to quibble a teeny bit with this argument.

And, frankly, while some men have embraced this new order— perhaps seeing in it the potential to open up some interesting new choices for them, too — a global majority is increasingly confused, enraged, and terrified by it. They never wanted to be at this table in the first place, and they’re furious to even find themselves being forced to have this conversation at all.

I don't think a global majority of men oppose contraception. A plurality of men in this country support it being free to all women, regardless of who they work for. The rest are apparently too stupid to realize that they benefit from contraception, too, which immediately makes me think that women en masse should start demanding that men pay half the cost and do the work of picking up of birth control pills, until they get it into their heads that this benefits them just as much. (I'm assuming that gay men are probably more, not less, likely to see that women's rights to contraception and their rights to health care are firmly entwined.) Most men have a complex relationship to patriarchy. They do enjoy the benefits, but most of them pay a price, too, and having crappy sex because you're worried about having another mouth to feed is just one part of that. That effective contraception tends to take off wherever it's available suggests that in this way, men are just fine with the new order. That said, her general point is absolutely right; feminism does mean diminishing male control and the majority of men reject that. But I do think they have reason to believe that they both get to benefit from contraception without having to embrace its larger implications. 

Sara mentions that we're three---actually four---generations into the pill now. (The first users were my grandmother's generation, then my mother's, then mine, and now the Millenials.) That's going to make it a hard entitlement to attack, since as far as most living Americans are concerned, this is how it's always been. But I think it's even more interesting than that. First of all, you can tack a couple more generations onto that, since birth control became socially normalized in the late 20s and 30s, and was considered pretty standard by the 50s. Before that, there were multiple attempts throughout history to find ways to have sex without pregnancy, usually crude diaphragms and condoms. What the pill did was bridge the gap between the already-existing expectation of being able to have sex without conceiving and many millenia of people wanting to have sex spontaneously. That it's female-controlled is what offends the patriarchs so much about it, but so was the diaphragm. I really do think spontaneity is what sells the pill. 

But just to be a little wonky, I think what really makes a technology world-changing is that it neatly fills a desire that we always had, even if we didn't know it, to the point where we seamlessly drift into using it without much confusion or complaint. The pill was adopted faster and more readily than the cell phone, even though the pay phone indicates that the urge to be able to make a phone call on the run was already existing and already acknowledged. It took off faster than the computer, faster than internet, and faster than the television. Demand for it was so high that even in early stage testing, researchers were overrun with volunteers. The only thing I've seen take off as fast and make so much sense to people as soon as it was available was text messaging, which spoke to the deep desire to be able to share information with someone while minimizing the disruption that the phone has always represented. If you tried to take away text messaging, people riot in the streets. Something to think about. 

All that said, I think Sara is right here:

But if we’re wise, we’ll keep our eyes on the long game, because you can bet that those angry men are, too. The hard fact is this: We’re only 50 years into a revolution that may ultimately take two or three centuries to completely work its way through the world’s many cultures and religions. (To put this in perspective: it was 300 years from Gutenberg’s printing press to the scientific and intellectual re-alignments of the Enlightenment, and to the French and American revolutions that that liberating technology ultimately made possible. These things can take a loooong time to work all the way out.) Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will, in all likelihood, still be working out the details of these new gender agreements a century from now; and it may be a century after that before their grandkids can truly start taking any of this for granted.

I honestly think half the reason that contraception isn't controversial is because most people aren't big thinkers, and therefore don't really see contraception as the straw that broke the patriarchy's back. Part of that is that abortion plays that role, since rejecting pregnancy after a man's seed has planted is a much more resonant symbol of rejecting male power and authority. The interesting thing about this is that many of the men who are up in arms about this are big, long-term thinkers. They're not wrong to see that contraception is far more the problem even than abortion (which has actually been more consistent and widespread in human history than contraception). Where I think they're going to fail is convincing others of it. 

In the annals of justifying Virginia's rape-through-ultrasound, many remarkably stupid things have been said; chief among them is, "Hey, let's force women to be vaginally penetrated in order to show them that they're pregnant...even though they already know."

A strong second, however, is that women deserve to be penetrated because they were penetrated before. This follows a longstanding American tradition of extrapolating indefinite consent from any previous voluntary touching. It is, of course, no longer assault to repeatedly stab a person with a needle once they have a tattoo, or to throw rocks at someone once they receive a hot stone massage. 

Dana Loesch ("She Who Would Urinate On Corpses") has been a wholehearted advocate of this position since the uproar happened, but she goes one step further through the use of statistics: you deserve to have a giant probe shoved inside you even if you've already had a child and therefore know exactly what happens when you get pregnant.

Furthermore, the greatest number of abortions are obtained by women who already have a child/children, so they know how anatomy and physiology works. A lack of planning on the woman’s part doesn’t constitute a mandate for legalized (and in the case of Planned Parenthood, publicly-funded) murder.

If you "know how anatomy and physiology work", then the entire pretense for the ultrasound is meaningless.  As in Texas, the theoretical point is to show you the heartbeat of the fetus, guilting you out of the abortion by requiring you to contemplate that one day, that fetus will become a child. However, if you already have a child, you know exactly how pregnancy works, how a child develops, what it's like to birth and raise a child.

If that's the case for the majority of women, as Loesch states, then the only cognizable purpose for the ultrasound requirement is to shove something inside a woman against her will because she had sex once. A thanks to her, at least, for making the case as simply and elegantly as possible. 

Yesterday, my speculation about the individual motives of a lot of people who are jumping on the "take away the birth control" campaign was that for a lot of them, they believe---rightly or wrongly---that the missed out on the sexual revolution and they'll be damned if other people a good time. (There were the usual, and I believe false, claims in comments that more or less permission has absolutely no influence on people's choices, but I don't agree. More freedom has meant that women probably do say yes more often and sooner, and it certainly has meant women feel more free to ask. We have direct medical evidence to show that it's also increased rates of oral sex, at least oral sex men perform on women. Obviously, conservatives both exaggerate how much sex people are  having now and downplay how much they had in the past, but they aren't entirely wrong that liberation means more and better sex. If liberation had no positive influence on people's sexual happiness, there is no point in fighting for it. But I digress.) But I didn't have time to talk about what I think is the ideological reason that there's so much fear of female sexuality. What about female sexuality is so disruptive and so scary to the right that they will make utter asses out of themselves fighting to suppress it? 

Well, I think it goes back fundamentally to the belief that women should be subservient. To justify women's second class status, conservatives have always leapt on the theory of difference. The argument is that men and women are complete opposites and therefore should have separate spheres. Yes, women's sphere is lesser (though increasingly they deny this, sticking to the "separate but equal" argument), but that is just a fact of biology, in their opinions. The number one conservative whine that I get all the time is, "Feminists deny that men and women are different." Which is a strawman, of course. The question isn't whether or not there are differences, the question is how different are we, really. Feminists say that men and women have more in common than not---and point to people whose gender doesn't fall along a strict binary to show that there are hardly two polar opposite genders to even discusse at all---and that a lot of traits that have been characterized as male-only actually belong to women as well: courage, ambition, strength, intelligence, etc. For conservatives, it's critically important that the differences between men and women be extreme and stable. As they lose ground in many ways, finding themselves unable (as Rick Santorum recently realized when he basically tried to claim women were too "emotional", a code word for stupid, to be in the military) to argue that women are inferior outside of the bedroom, emphasizing differences in sexuality becomes even more important. After all, it's hard to deny that men and women both have brains, but cisgendered men and women do have different genitals, so that can muddy the waters sufficiently, giving conservatives opportunities to make broad statements about how female sexuality is "different", i.e. inferior, and therefore women's lives need to be constrained. The fact that the discussion is about contraception as much as about abortion lately is making that more obvious, with folks like James Poulos basically coming right out and saying that women's sexual difference means that women's role in life is as support staff for men. (He still didn't have the courage of his convictions enough to say so plainly, however, and instead buried that claim in a pile of incomprehensible wankery that he hoped sounded intellectual, but existed mainly to establish plausible deniability. If you can't quite understand his illiterate prose, then you can't really argue against it, right?)

This is why liberated female sexuality is so threatening. Conservative ideology holds that men and women are opposites. Men like sex, and so in order to keep the ideology intact, women can't. In this world, women instead want male approval and of course babies, and sex is something they have to endure to get it. Contraception and especially abortion undermine this theory, not just because they can't conceive of a woman saying no to babies, but also because they're operating under an image of pregnancy as being something that gets men who otherwise want nothing to do with women (outside of sex) to commit. That women themselves say no to babies but yes to sex makes it hard to believe that it's just women putting up with sex to get marriage-and-babies. That women often choose abortion in order to avoid marriage and babies (at least at this point in time) sends them around the bend. It suggests that people are individuals, not easily categorized genders with predictable and opposite behavior. 

If you won't choose it, then they feel that they're in their rights to force it. When women can't access contraception and abortion, sex is, in fact, less fun for them because it's fraught. It does, in fact, introduce a power imbalance to sexual interactions between men and women because women are vulnerable in a way men aren't. Giving men that power over women restores what conservatives believe is the proper order. If they can shame women and convince them that only sluts like sex, they can also get women to engage as enforcers, implying that they're too good for that dirty sex stuff, unlike those lesser women. (Exhibit A.) That just bolsters the illusion that male and female sexuality are very different, and in that difference, they can find leverage to argue---though indirectly, as is their habit---that women are lesser than men.

Greg Sargent catches another Republican stepping into the trap that Obama set. Sam Stein asked Santorum if he's happy with the accomodation on the contraception mandate, and Santorum not only said no, but he said some laughably assholish things. 

"This has nothing to do with access," he said. "This is having someone pay for it, pay for something that shouldn't even be in an insurance plan anyway because it is not, really an insurable item. This is something that is affordable, available. You don't need insurance for these types of relatively small expenditures. This is simply someone trying to impose their values on somebody else, with the arm of the government doing so. That should offend everybody, people of faith and no faith that the government could get on a roll that is that aggressive."

This is when a follow-up question would be nice. I hope someone asks Santorum what other "small" routine expenditures insurance companies shouldn't cover. Lipitor? Insulin? He's treating insurance like it's only there for catastrophes instead of to cover routine care. 

But his description of birth control as "affordable" is more out of touch than Mitt Romney making a crack about betting $10,000. Julie Sunday did a run-down of out-of-pocket costs on birth control pills. If you consider them "affordable", you haven't ever been living paycheck to paycheck.

Yasmin: $85.99

Ocella (Yasmin generic): $71.99

Yaz: $92.99 ($85.60)

Nuvaring: $86.99 ($77.35)  

Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo: $94.99

Plan B One-Step: $47.99 ($47.99)

With my co-pay, my pills are currently costing me $50 a month, which means $600 a year. An IUD can cost $1,000-$2,000 to put in. Depo-Provera is popular amongst uninsured low-income women because it costs $30-$75 a shot, which lasts three months, meaning about $300 a year. That may not seem like a lot of money to Santorum, but for people who don't make very much money or are unemployed, this is a pretty big cost. And it's one they can't skip, because getting pregnant costs even more. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work out for women. A significant portion of women skimp on contraception because they simply can't afford it. Many more use less effective methods because they're cheaper. 

Of course, this is another opportunity to point out that Santorum doesn't understand birth control because he opposes it and has made noises in the direction of supporting bans on it, even as he admits that's unlikely to happen. Now if we could just get someone to ask Mitt Romney what he thinks about all this. The trap is ready and he's probably dumb enough to step in it.

The framing of this entire debate over the contraception mandate is so incredibly frustrating, because, as I explained at RH Reality Check, it profoundly misunderstands American Catholics, who are basically indistinguishable from the public at large both politically and culturally. Having grown up in a heavily Catholic part of the country and having gone to a Catholic university, I can assure you that the only way you can tell if someone's Catholic or not is that Catholics make even more fun of the stuffiness of the church. The polling data backs this up; Catholics and non-Catholics support requiring all employers to cover insurance in roughly equal numbers. In fact, Catholics are slightly more likely to do so than the general public, mainly because evangelical Christians are suppressing the overall support numbers; only 38% of them want the mandate. What we're seeing here is fundamentalist evangelicals and fundamentalist Catholics using ordinary Catholics as cover to push a misogynist agenda. I know, shocking, right?

But there's another aspect to this story I want to talk about. The polling data makes this clear that there's no conflict between Catholics and everyone else. But there are two groups that show huge divergences in the polling data on this: men and women. 

However, women were significantly more likely to favor free contraception through employee healthcare plans at 62 percent versus 47 percent of men, while 54 percent of women agreed religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should provide this coverage versus 43 percent of men.

The religious arguments have no real effect on men's support or non-support of it; they either think it's a benefit or they don't. And the majority don't. The spread between men and women on whether or not contraception should be a covered benefit is 15 points. The non-existent spread between Catholics and non is drawing a bunch of attention, but here is the real story. The only reason this is controversial is that a majority of men oppose it. 

Blah, blah, disclaimer that I'm not saying that all men are sexist pigs. So quit your whining. 47% men support this, after all. So there you go. Nearly half of American men aren't repugnant sexists. That's genuine progress. Nor are all women angels on this. We have 38% of women not supporting this, putting them in the repugnant sexist category. That women can be repugnatn sexists shouldn't be news to readers. See the below post on Maggie Gallagher for evidence.

With the pandering to the easily butthurt and overly literal out of the way, it's time to make the real point. This isn't about religion but about gender. That really came out in the stories about the behind the scenes wrangling over this. The lines weren't drawn religiously, but by gender.

The White House has been skittish from the start about the new rule, which was announced last month only after internal debates at the White House that, to some extent, pitted women - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is Catholic; Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the deputy chief of staff, on one side, arguing forcefully in favor of the rule, administration officials said.

On the other side, cautioning that the administration tread carefully and look for ways to minimize another major break with the church, they said, were several Catholic men who are close advisers to Mr. Obama: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and William M. Daley, the chief of staff at the time. Also weighing in, administration officials said, was Denis R. McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, whose purview does not naturally extend to health issues, but who is a Catholic.

You'll notice that even though the Catholics were sprinkled on both sides of the divide, the framing that this is about religion isn't relinquished easily. But look past that and see what's really going on here. Female advisors to the President supported the mandate; many male ones didn't. Some men felt so strongly about depriving women of their contraception coverage that they weighed in even though this has nothing to do with their assigned job. All of these men should be ashamed of themselves. This is the height of mansplaining assholery, telling those with uteruses what they do and do not need, even though they've never had a uterus and probably have spent no more that a few minutes of their lives even wondering what it must be like. It's been 40 years since women started crashing government meetings regarding the potentlal liberalization of abortion laws and threw a huge fit because there wasn't a single woman invited to speak on the topic, much less one who had had an abortion. Why are we still fighting this fucking battle?

Part of the problem is that contraception is still framed in many ways in our culture as if it were a sex toy or aid, like dildos or porn. This is doubly true of the only contraception most men have direct experience with, i.e. condoms. And overall, I don't have a problem with that. I'm of the mindset that the sexier we make safe sex seem, the more likely it is that people will practice it. But it's also an important and necessary part of women's health care, at least if they're sexually active with someone who can get them pregnant. Which is still the vast majority of women at some point in their lives. 

Breaking down the numbers: A big chunk of people, both men and women, who oppose this mandate are just anti-health care, anti-government nuts. That number probably lingers around 25% of the electorate, so about half the men who oppose this and 2/3 of the women. I think the rest of them have just bought into this framing of contraception as a toy, a sexual plaything, and therefore not properly the concern of insurance companies. You hear this kind of thinking a lot in right wing media in everything from "jokes" about how women could just keep their legs shut to Bill O'Reilly whining that if he has to pay for contraception he might as well pay for dinner first to roughly every comment ever from Dana Loesch about this. (Seriously, listening to her talk about sex is like listening to someone who has never seen "The Wire" try to bullshit their way through a conversation about it.) The way some people talk about contraception, you get the strong impression that they think you pick it up at Victoria's Secret. 

I think this is where you get the 15 point spread between men and women. 15% more of men think of contraception as a sex toy. You can just hear the gears grinding in this 15%: "Why should I have to pay into insurance so she gets her contraception covered? It's not like I'm using it. Where's my fair share? When are they going to start paying for my porn? Pout. Whine. Boo hoo."

This came up a lot in my discussions with people on and offline about this; a lot of men oppose mandated contraception coverage because they don't think it's "fair" because they don't use it. Every man who says this needs to be asked if it's because he's gay or if it's because he's a lifelong celibate. Because if the answer is "neither", you are the biggest asshole on the planet, since you do, in fact, benefit from contraception. Like one woman on my Facebook said, "Yet a majority of men who did not favor contraception coverage still agreed that they liked putting their dicks in the women." Part of the problem is that our culture has made it socially acceptable---in fact, desireable, as a proof of one's manhood---to shun lady things and demand that women go out of their way to conceal the workings of vagina maintenance from you. Tampons are to be carefully concealed, and asking a man to buy them if he's at the grocery store is considered beyond the pale. I suspect that for a lot of people, this mentality extends to contraception. Birth control pills, doctor's visits, things like that; I suspect for a lot of couples, the woman simply does all these things and never shares the details with her man, for fear it's a turn-off. Many men may not even see women take their pills. There's a lot of pressure on women to present men with seamless, fantasy-level sexual experiences, to go through a lot of trouble to make sure that the nitty-gritty realities of biology never pop the fantasy bubble. I can easily see how contraception use, like leg-shaving and other forms of lady prep for sex, is hidden behind closed doors so he doesn't have to think about it. Thus, a 15 point spread in support for this mandate.

The good news is I suspect this is getting better. This "hide the contraception from your man whose sexual fantasies are delicate and need protection" mentality is less prevalent each generation.  It's clear from all the clothes-rending from men in the punditocracy about this that it's older men who seem to think insurance coverage of contraception is like insurance opening up a credit line for women at Babeland. Just by dint of younger men being a lot more likely to have had it drilled into their head to use condoms, the idea that sex is pleasure and responsibility is shared by the genders more in younger generations. Of course, that makes all this wailing and moaning worse, because it's coming from a bunch of older men who are trying to roll back protections that the rest of us need and will need going forward. The whole situation is unbearably disgusting. 

Komen has fallen to their knees and begged for mercy, and Planned Parenthood is doing a victory lap. So am I: I wrote a piece for The Guardian about what Planned Parenthood did right, and what it will take to replicate their success in the future. But not so fast!, say some on the left. If you read Komen's statement, it's clear that they're just retreating for now and will probably kill off the $700,000 in grants to Planned Parenthood in the near future, when they create a better excuse. This is true, and they should be called out for it. There's no reason to return to supporting Komen; they were already an iffy organization that crossed a line they can't uncross. It's clear their management is awash in anti-choice nuts who really do think there's something dirty about Planned Parenthood, and that this wasn't just a cave. No reason to support them.

But that doesn't mean those of us who are declaring victory and doing a victory lap are wrong. Even if the grants are eventually cut, we can safely say we won this one. Because this wasn't really about the money. Planned Parenthood is a billion dollar organization; cutting this extra service from some clinics, while horrible and regrettable, wasn't going to tank them. This was a proxy fight, and it was standing in for the larger fight over women's rights and women's health care. Shelby Knox had an awesome tweet explaining this:

This was a battle about values. Specifically, whether or not we value women as human beings or not. Anti-choicers are trying to marginalize comprehensive health care for women basically to put us in our place, to demote us from the status of people and return us to the status of objects. Saving breasts is all good and well---they are decorative, after all!---but health care for dirty sluts who go around having sex as if they have a right? I think, and said in my Alternet piece, that one reason this really hit home is anti-choice objectification of women had gotten to the point where they were pitting our own body parts against each other, creating a war between wholesome, all-American boobies and evil vaginas. A couple of astute writers put it really well.

Jill Lepore:

In American politics, women’s bodies are not bodies, but parts. People like to talk about some parts more than others. Embryos and fetuses are the most charged subject in American political discourse. Saying the word “cervix” was the beginning of Rick Perry’s end. In politics, breasts are easier to talk about. I first understood this a few years ago, when I was offered, at an otherwise very ordinary restaurant, a cupcake frosted to look like a breast, with a nipple made of piped pink icing. It was called a “breast-cancer cupcake,” and proceeds went to the Race for the Cure.

Digby:

I don't know if some people can understand how dehumanizing this is. Obviously, there are a fair number of both sexes who don't see it that way. But to me, this gets to the real gist of the issue, one I've only vaguely been able to grapple with by using hyperbolic phrases like "gestation vessel." But it's more than abortion or childbirth, although the desire to control that vital human function lies at the heart of this. It's about reducing women to their various body parts. "You get to control this bit, but we'll control that bit, and we like this part but don't want to talk about that part and ... are you complaining again?"

The obsession with fetuses and uteruses and birth control, the fetishization of breasts (in all ways, not just Komen's breast cancer branding) and the ongoing double standards in political and public spaces like this commonly forgets the human being who happens to own those body parts. I think that's what women commonly feel --- and one reason many of us are so adamant about this. It's not just about a discrete set of issues. It's about women being treated as fully human.

The debate over health care is basically about this ultimate fight over whether or not women are people. Conservatives see women as objects. Sex and reproduction the way the objects are used, and like with any other property, how and who uses it is the whole point. That's why abstinence-only classes compare sexually active women to lollipops that have been opened and licked, or toothbrushes that someone else has used. Taken to its extreme---and anti-choicers are nothing if not extreme---this view means that a woman who has sex before marriage is broken and useless, and providing her contraception and STD prevention/treatment is like putting a new paint job on a totaled car. But even for less extreme conservatives, they tend to see sexual health care as "condoning" sex, and just as you don't keep buying your kid a toy if he keeps breaking it, they think taking it away will cause women to stop "damaging" themselves by using those vaginas as we please instead of keeping them nicely wrapped for the true owner---a hypothetical future husband---to have. That married women also need these services is an inconvenient fact that tends to get brushed off. Some times, when you squeeze anti-choicers, they'll say that married women have no need for these services because as long as no one never has sex outside of marriage, STDs and unintended pregnancy just go away. Mostly, however, it's not a well-thought-out position, just a frantic panic attack at the idea that women---these objects---are making decisions for themselves like they're real people. More importantly, they're afraid that if this trend continues, it's going to occur to the public at large that women are people, and things will shift accordingly.

That's what this fight was about. By pressuring Komen, anti-choicers were basically trying to make "women are people" the pariah position, and trying to make anyone who holds the "women are people" position without apology seem like they were out of the mainstream. Having people scrambling to disassociate themselves from you is a really great way to discredit you and your ideas, and that's why so many people with what I consider poor morals really love a witchhunt. So the fight was over who basically owns the mainstream: anti-feminists or feminists, people who think of women as expensive sex toys/gestation machines or people who think of women as people? That's why everyone was so upset. And that's why the feminist win was so meaningful. 

The reason that emotions were high around Komen is they position themselves as an organization that exists to save women's lives. Claiming to be pro-woman (or pro-black people or pro-poor people or even increasingly pro-gay people) while objectifying and dehumanizing women is a common tactic on the right. By making Komen squeal for mercy on this, we won a major moral victory. We said loud and clear that being pro-woman is about more than a bunch of empty homilies. You have to believe women are people, and like people, they have a right to have sex and have a right to full health care and a right to make their own damn choices. Anything less isn't pro-woman. It simply isn't. 

We won a major public battle over values. We sent the message loud and clear that feminist values are mainstream values. We should be proud.

As I noted last night, I have a blog post up at Slate about Susan G. Komen---who purports to be a women's health charity---abandoning their alliance with Planned Parenthood, even though 17% of Planned Parenthood's services are cancer screening and prevention. They claim that it's because Planned Parenthood is under investigation, but it seems that excuse was ginned up because it was easy cover for caving into anti-choice nuts. The investigation has been launched as a nuisance investigation by an anti-choice congressman, and is not compelled by any sincere concern that Planned Parenthood is violating the law with its funds. It's completely obvious that they're caving into anti-choice activists, and specifically, as I noted at Slate, into the ridiculous idea that you can separate "good girl" health care from "bad girl" health care, the latter being everything from cervical cancer prevention and treatment to abortion. And yes, before we forget, it's all lumped together with the anti-choice movement now. That's how they made the HPV vaccine an issue in the Republican primary, because it's widely believed that preventing cervical cancer gives girls "license" to be sluts.

In other words, a supposedly anti-cancer charity just threw their lot in with people who believe that cancer shouldn't be prevented if it's linked to sexually transmitted diseases. Objectively pro-cancer, at least for women they deem slutty, i.e. about 95% of us. 

Reading Tracy-Clark Flory's coverage of the story, I had a revelation. It came after reading this quote:

Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, doesn’t buy the foundation’s explanation, either. “That’s specious,” she said. Instead, Pearson says, “Komen’s chicken. Komen’s caving to pressure.” This is what antiabortion activists do so well: “They will target the providers and the people who relate to the providers,” she says. That’s because “they can’t make Planned Parenthood stop providing abortions” and “they can’t find any evidence that Planned Parenthood is inappropriately using federal funds.”

That's when I realized that anti-choicers do this so well because the war on reproductive health care is basically a witchhunt, and the religious fundamentalists behind it are the modern day version of medieval paranoids of old who believed that women who didn't conform to their exacting standards were consorting with Satan. In fact, considering the span of time and cultural change, the fact that the argument hasn't changed at all---they really do believe pro-choice health care providers are consorting with Satan---is almost startling. It's like they lifted it directly from their medieval ancestors. Except, instead of condemning witches to the stake, they simply want to keep them from doing their jobs, and allowing the other witches, i.e. women whose sexual choices they disapprove of, suffer from various afflications ranging from forced childbirth to death from cervical cancer as a warning to others to stay away from the devil's playground of sexual pleasure. And like traditional witch hunters, they have lurid imaginations, and project all their strange fantasies onto their targets, which is why abortion providers or even just pro-choice clinics have been accused of everything from running sex trafficking rings to instigating genocide to putting fetuses in food. And that's on top of the lurid accusations flung at the kinds of women who might visit a Planned Parenthood, especially unmarried young women. Those women are accused of creating sex cults around Plan B, organizing orgies for the strange purpose of getting really colorful penises in the room, and of using abortion as "birth control", i.e. preferring the no-doubt unequalled pleasures of a good uterus scraping to boring old pill use. I've definitely seen some medieval-style flights of fancy aimed at me personally, including a blogger putitng up a picture of me in a red sweater to make insinuations about the kind of woman who wears red. No, I'm serious. 

But the most salient feature of a witch hunt is that the witch hunters, in their paranoia, are always looking to expand the circle of "guilt". They imagine demons in every corner, and vast conspiracies promoting what they believe is evil that need to be rooted out. In medieval witch hunts, if someone who didn't like you remembered you buying a chicken from the accused witch, you better fall to your knees and start accusing the accused of putting a curse on your family, or you might be assumed to be guilty, too. That's basically what's going on here. Because of the witch hunt logic, it does seem to be that more and more of women's health care is being rolled up under the word "abortion", which is why anti-choicers blithely claims that's all Planned Parenthood does. You can point out repeatedly that 97% of its services are not abortion, but in their mind, that's like saying that the accused witch spent some of her time not doing witchcraft. In their minds, while she slept she was consorting with Satan, and time spent with her pet cat now is her consorting with a familiar. I can't tell you how many times I've been called a "baby killer". Even if you are stupid enough to believe that abortion is killing babies, that accusation doesn't make sense; I've never had nor performed an abortion. But that's the point. The word "abortion" for anti-choicers long ago ceased to mean "terminating a pregnancy". Now it's just a catch-all scare term to be flung around whenever you want to whip people into a frenzy of hatred over women's liberation, especially women's sexual liberation. 

Anyone who thinks breast cancer can be neatly cordoned off from this growing circle of hate for all things women's health care is fooling themselves. That's not how witch hunts work. The fear here is not about fetuses or babies per se, but a deep-set fear of female sexuality. Already anti-choicers have scooped breast cancer under the umbrella "abortion", claiming that abortion causes breast cancer. (It doesn't.)  Komen would rather side with people who see breast cancer as god's judgment on you for having an abortion rather than side with people support comprehensive health care for women. That tells you all you need to know about their organization. I'm all for picking up your sneakers and taking up running as a hobby, but recommend now you do it for you, and not for the ever-elusive cure for cancer. 

At XX Factor yesterday, I joked that Gingrich and other anti-choice nuts are going to rethink their opposition to stem cell research in record time if, as hoped, a cure for a certain form of erectile dysfunction is created. Really, it was only half a joke. The ugly truth of the matter is right wingers' utterly different approach to women's reproductive health care and men's access to ED drugs demonstrates that contrary to their claims of simply acting on devotion to Jesus, these folks are using religion as a cover for a deep-set misogyny. From the Catholic Church to most info you can find on religious websites to the anti-choice members of Congress, when asked about Viagra, they are supportive. Republicans like John McCain have routinely voted against bills that would require insurance companies that cover Viagra to cover contraception. The reason for this is simple: plain misogyny. Anti-choicers tend to see contraception as a "party drug" that allows dirty sluts to go slut it up. But they see Viagra as allowing men their god-given erections. That this is a hypocrisy is glossed over with an argument I've seen all over religious websites, but is best voiced by Bill O'Reilly:

The argument is that erectile dysfunction is a condition that needs to be cured, but since pregnancy is "natural" (actually, so is erectile dysfunction, as it's often just part of aging), preventing it is dirty slutdom. It's the thinnest of excuses for naked misogyny, especially if you consider that the worst that will happen physically to a man who doesn't get an erection is that he doesn't get an erection, but a pregnant woman is going to suffer weight gain and severe pain no matter what, and some of the more serious side effects of pregnancy are diabetes, stroke, and even death. 

Since anti-choicers by and large present themselves as devout Christians who are only doing god's will, however, that makes this misogynist bullshit even worse. Right now, the Catholic bishops are screeching because the HHS is going to require them to cover birth control prescriptions for organizations they control that hire from and serve the general public. What's nakedly sexist about this is the Biblical justifications for banning abortion and contraception are extremely thin, but the Biblical justification for denying access to Viagra is really sound. Anti-choicers have cast around wildly in the Bible looking for verses that mention abortion or contraception---which have been around in one form or another since roughly forever---and haven't found much. A little poetic language about the womb doesn't mean banning abortion, nor does a strange story about a man defying god's direct orders to impregnate his dead brother's wife say much about contraception so much as the importance of taking direct god-orders seriously. 

But Paul's writings in the New Testament are pretty clear on this: he thinks while married sex is better than fornication, no sex at all is the best of all possible worlds. He reluctantly allows that married people, having already gone ahead and been dirty sex-havers, should continue to do that, but it's definitely less than ideal. With this worldview in mind, the Christian seems obligated not to see erectile dysfunction as a tragedy, but as god sending a hint to you that your days of being distracted from your worship by sexual concerns are being called to an end. Paul seems very clear on the point that people have sex for fun and not really for procreation, so the use of birth control strikes me as no more sinful by this measure than simply marrying in the first place. But trying to reverse god-given celibacy with modern medicine seems like directly defying god's obvious will when he struck you with ED. That is, if you read the Bible with an intention to actually doing what it says. Most Christians---even the good ones---come to the Bible with a predetermined belief in what's right and look for rationalizations in the verses. It's clear with anti-choicers that they just don't like women and seek verses that reinforce that, ignoring the fact that Paul is probably just as concerned with how filthy male sexuality is as female.

The good news is I'm not Christian, so I'm free to see all this hostility to sexuality as perverse, and believe instead that sex is up there with chocolate and warm days in reasons to be thankful to be alive, and that medical science should make it their business to make the enjoyment of life safer and less stressful. Thus, Viagra and birth control for all!

On that note, enjoy this story of a legislator in Virginia who has introduced a bill requiring that men who want Viagra undergo a rectal exam in order to do so. For their own health, you know. Just like those mandatory vaginal probes fro women seeking abortion.