So, Sandra Fluke---Georgetown law student---testified in front of Congress about using birth control and the expense. The response from the right is to act like she's the first woman on Earth to have confessed to having sex for reasons other than baby-making, and thus to call her the town dump. I wish I could say I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Rush Limbaugh, who has been married four times and is a well-known fan of taking big bottles of Viagra to the Dominican Republic, said this about Fluke:
LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.
On top of the baffling assertion that there's a direct correlation between the amount of sex you're having and the price of the birth control pill (believe me, they charge you the same whether you're getting laid or not), you of course have the notion that any woman who has sex is a "slut" and a "prostitute". And I mean any. Limbaugh tries to give himself cover by saying the "taxpayer" would be on the hook, but in fact, this is about whether or not insurance plans women pay into should cover their fucking health care. More importantly, the idea that contraception is health care and not just some per-fuck admittance fee for sex has long been established. Conservatives are pretending that Obama is requiring insurance companies to cover something they've never covered before, but in fact, they already cover it. The only thing that this is about is whether or not that coverage should be universal and treated like preventive care, which means offered without a co-pay. For instance, my insurance covers about 40% of the cost now and will, starting in 2013, cover 100%. Since 99% of American women have used contraception and since insurance companies already accept that contraception is a service that should be covered, Limbaugh basically characterized the 99% of American women as "sluts" and "prostitutes". I don't imagine you get a pass if you've only used condoms, either, because roughly 0% of women who use only condoms do so out of some noble unwillingness to accept insurance coverage for their contraception. Additionally, women who only use condoms still get other kinds of health care related to being sexual, such as Pap smears and gynecological consultations on their contraception choices, which, by Limbaugh's logic, puts them firmly in the "slut" and "prostitute" category, since insurance covers that sexuality-related care as well. So I suppose that puts the percentage of American women who are "sluts" at the level All in his world, except maybe a handful of lifelong celibates. And he probably has a few choice, judgmental words for those women, as well.
Which shouldn't be a surprise. Conservatives try to pretend like these blatant anti-woman attitudes are about something other than just seething hatred of women for being female, but this entire contraception debacle has demonstrated that nope, it's just misogyny. For instance, check out the Craig Bannister piece I blogged about at XX Factor today. After going on at length about how women on the pill must all be filthy sluts who spend all day sucking and fucking, Bannister ends his piece with the unapologetic double standard:
If these co-eds really are this guy crazy, I should've gone to law school.
Yep! He trotted out the "if a woman has sex with one man, she will have sex with anyone who asks" line. (Which is, may I remind you, often used to rationalize rape---the "will have sex" turns into "has to have sex, whether she likes it or not" very easily.) I thought I was beyond being surprised by the levels of ignorance, misogyny and prudery that emanate from the right, but nope! Here is a grown ass man who actually still believes that single women can be divided into virgins and "whores"*, and of course still believes that having sex is roughly the worst possible thing a woman can do, a man having sex is just being a man.
To be clear, women are perfectly capable of dishing out the misogyny as well. Female misogynists are a special breed, morons who think they can escape being classified as women---and therefore as filthy whores who don't deserve any respect---if they hate on other women just as much as the male misogynists do. This is a uniquely stupid thing to believe, because not only do they not get a pass (remember, Limbaugh basically classified all women as "sluts" and "prostitutes"), but their male counterparts who are using them are probably laughing at them behind their backs for being such tools. With that in mind, I give you Tina Korbe of Hot Air:
At one point, Fluke mentions a friend who felt “embarrassed and powerless” when she learned her insurance didn’t cover contraception. Can you imagine how proud and empowered that same friend would be if she learned she has the ability to resist her own sexual urges? We can only assume she doesn’t know that because Fluke and she both labor under the illusion that contraception is a medical necessity.
Conservatives are their own worst enemy when trying to persuade the rest of us that women (and let's be clear, as the David Albo example proves, they are only referring to women---Albo felt so entitled to sex, he demanded an apology for not getting any) are "empowered" by not having sex for no good reason. After all, if pointless self-deprivation was so empowering, then folks like Korbe wouldn't be trying to push their lifestyle choices on the rest of us in a desperate bid to feel better about themselves by dragging everyone else down. Korbe just comes across as someone who is afraid of sexually satisfied people, because as long as we're walking around and being happy, we're making her look like a fool for depriving herself for no good reason. After all, she describes women who use contraception as "animals", even though in reality, using contraception is one of those things that sets us apart from other animals. In fact, I'd point out that most animals fuck according to the ideal Rick Santorum model: joylessly, infrequently, and only for procreation. Most even wait until the female is ovulating, to minimize the time they spend rutting! If your objective is to not be like other animals, the best strategy is to fuck all the time and take advantage of our unique ability to enjoy sex for its own sake.
Beyond all the hatefulness, prudery, and misogyny is just the plain weirdness of all of this. Reading the right wing reaction to Sandra Fluke, you get the strong impression that they think that a single woman in her mid-20s who is sexually active is some kind of freakish outlier, as if Fluke admitted to being a mercenary with side business in running drugs to pay off law school. In reality, Fluke is as normal and American as apple pie. Being sexually active before marriage is just what people do; 93% of Americans have premarital sex before turning 30. We can safely guess there's no love here for women whose main pregnancy prevention strategy is to only have sex with women. Additionally, since no distinctions between women who use contraception in or out of marriage are being made here, women who use it to have monogamous sex with their husbands are being rolled into the "town dump" category as well, which means that basically, the utterly normal and nearly universal experience of being female is being characterized on the right as something disgusting and beyond the pale. Which is just a long, roundabout way to say they straight up hate women.
*Scare quotes because I want to be clear that I don't think that being a sex worker is shameful. I hope we're all adult enough here to understand that references to "whores" and "prostitutes" are being used to shame, and that's why they're offensive, not because being a sex worker is inherently shameful.
The news is all abuzz today over the fact that Santorum "lost" the Catholic vote in the primaries last night. It's a construction that assumes that it was his to lose, and is based in one of the most pernecious myths of the Beltway media, which is that America is a sectarian society where "people of faith" not only vote according to religious guidelines, but according to those set by the loudest sectarians amongst them. Thus, you get claims that Obama is going to lose the "Jewish vote" because, I dunno, something about Israel, even though he really hasn't done a damn thing to hurt Israel. And now there's a growing adherence to the nonsensical belief that Catholics are a voting bloc, and one that votes primarily based on what a bunch of right wing celibates who spend all their time on TV denouncing vaginas think. The only group that doesn't get this treatment is mainline Protestants, because as the mainstream media doesn't tend to think of "white" as a race so much as a baseline, so it thinks of mainline Protestantism as the norm by which you measure others against. (On that basis alone, I enjoyed Santorum saying mainline Protestants aren't real Christians, because it actually jolted the media into realizing that various Protestants are also religious groups, just like Jews, Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons.)
But really, this nonsense about the "Catholic vote" has got to stop. There's literally no evidence for such a thing. Most Catholics are pro-choice and use birth control, and they do so in roughly the same numbers as non-Catholics. In fact, they're indistinguishable from the public at large in their voting habits. There's perhaps a slim chance that some of them were moved against Santorum by the JFK comment, but honestly, I'm skeptical. The reason is that we're talking about a Repubilcan primary. I guarantee their identity as Republicans was a bigger factor for Catholic Republicans voting in the primary than their loyalty to the only Catholic President.
Ironically, Rick Santorum is a perfect example of why this supposition that Catholics are following Vatican marching orders when they vote is just completely off-base. Santorum's hardline stance on contraception is presumed, incorrectly, to stem from his devotion. In fact, like with other conservative Catholics, the Pope just provides cover for already-existing misogyny. That is to say, they hated women first and used faith to rationalize it second. You can tell this, because the Pope has lots of other opinions on stuff besides contraception, and Santorum ignores all of it. Juan Cole put together a list of ten Catholic teachings that Santorum rejects while pretending to be a hapless warrior for Catholic Jesus. Santorum has gone against the church on the issues of the Iraq War, universal health care, the death penalty, welfare, the minimum wage, union organizing, and immigration. Interestingly, not only does Santorum reject the church when it comes to these political matters, he also is a cafeteria Catholic on issues of religious questions. For instance, the Catholic Church accepts the theory of evolution and teaches that their god guided the process. Santorum rejects church teachings on this. In fact, not only does the Catholic Church accept evolution, but they are like most religions in this. Really, it's only evangelical Christians that hold that one must reject evolution as a part of their faith; Jews, mainline Protestants, Muslims, etc. by and large accept the theory as not in conflict with their religious beliefs.
The point isn't to say that Santorum is more or less Catholic than other Catholics who may agree with church teachings far more than he (while mostly rejecting the contraception nonsense as the medieval misogyny that it is). The point is that Catholics are a diverse group, politically speaking, and their faith has very little bearing on how they lean. Race, class, geography, personality, etc. all have more influence. In fact, as the example of Santorum shows, there's something of a cultural conflict between the markers of wingnuttery and Catholicism, and so Catholics who want to go full wingnut end up looking and sounding more like evangelicals. Which, in turn, means the notion that a Bible thumper like Santorum is going to make cultural appeals to Catholic voters sound even sillier, since he doesn't really come across as the average Catholic, insofar as there even is such a thing. I bet, if you surveyed people, a substantial number would think he's evangelical. Possibly even a majority.
By the way, that is one religious group that does have a predictable vote: evangelical Christians. While a minority are more liberal, by and large, most are fundamentalists. The whole point of being a fundamentalist is that it gives godly rationalizations to your conservative leanings, and so this isn't surprising.
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.
Via Matt Y., reporting on research that should have broad ramifications for how we organize society, but will probably just be ignored. Researchers at UC Berkley conducted a series of experiments that found that the more wealth and privilege people have, the more unethical they are. And it's not because selfish people get ahead faster (which wouldn't do anything to explain the effect of inherited wealth and privilege). Researchers devised experiments that showed that the reason is environment and not base personality. I want to quote from some of their conclusions:
“This work is important because it suggests that people often act unethically not because they are desperate and in the dumps, but because they feel entitled and want to get ahead,” said evolutionary psychologist and consumer researcher Vladas Griskevicius of the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the work. “I am especially impressed that the findings are consistent across seven different studies with varied methodologies. This work is not just good science, but it is shows deeper insight into the reasons why people lie, cheat, and steal.”
According to Piff, unethical behavior in the study was driven both by greed, which makes people less empathic, and the nature of wealth in a highly stratified society. It insulates people from the consequences of their actions, reduces their need for social connections and fuels feelings of entitlement, all of which become self-reinforcing cultural norms.
They controlled for political persuasion, so this isn't a partisan sort of thing, though the screeching teabaggers in comments, as you can imagine, disagree.
Implications of this:
1) Inequality is bad for society. It's kind of comical how societies realize over and again that power corrupts, and then they promptly forget that lesson. I'm not going full commie here. I accept that there's probably always going to be some economic inequality in our society. The question is, "How much?" Right now, the gap between rich and not-rich is ridiculously high, and I think we're seeing the the effects of this. Our society is coarse and unsympathetic. We have an entire political party now that's taken to cheering at the thought of their fellow citizens dying from lack of health insurance. Heightened inequality probably has a big impact on this. The very wealthy have lost a lot of basic empathy, and their attitudes percolate out through mass media (which they own), infecting us all. Significantly reducing the gap between the rich and everyone could go a long way towards reintroducing empathy back into our political discourse.
2) The rich shouldn't be the moral arbiters of society. There's a strange tendency in the Beltway media to assume that viciousness in politics originates with the working class, and that the rich are above anti-choice sadism, racist assholery, and homophobic nonsense. Part of that is that the very narrow demographic of professional urban people in the upper middle class influences their idea that privileged people are liberal, but if you take a snapshot of the country on the whole, that theory tends to fall apart. Anyone who looks at the giant gap in fund-raising for liberal and conservative non-profits could tell you that the money is on the right. Duh.
But the larger point is that the false assumption that the rich are better than ordinary people keeps us from interrogating how it is that the more power our leaders have, the more likely they are to be really rich. Not like upper middle class privileged, but straight up millionaire rich. Since we have scientific evidence that extreme wealth reduces empathy, this should concern us all. We want ethical people in government, and ethical people tend to come from the ranks of the ordinary more than the wealthy.
3) The personal is political. One interesting thing about this research is it showed unethical behavior in the realm of the personal: The employer making decisions for employees, behavior in traffic, taking candy from children. (Yes, that was literally an experiment.) This has interesting implications, as Mitt Romney's dog can tell you. Any feminist could tell you that power corrupts on a large scale, but also within the small world of the home, which is why we point to high levels of domestic violence and rape as evidence of how ugly giving men so much personal power over women can get. Pushing for more equality is probably good for our politics, but where the impact could really be felt is in the day to day interactions between people. Already we're seeing a decline in hate crimes and violence against women because of growing equality between the races and between men and women. Imagine if we applied that same logic to class.
What if you could forget a bad memory by taking a pill? It seems like a weird question, but as this article in this month's edition of Wired makes clear, it's a question that's probably going to become a very real one for a lot of people within our lifetimes. Scientists have basically figured out how memories work---contrary to popular belief, they're not like files you just pull out and then put away but in fact are rewritten every time you remember them---and once they realized that, they realized that they had a working idea of how to literally erase a memory. And not like in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", either. They believe they can get really specific, targeting a single incident that a person wants to forget. The most obvious application of this technology would be to treat people with PTSD, but it could also be used to curb drug addiction or phantom pain.
I think most people, when they hear about this kind of technology, immediately dismiss it out of hand as dystopian, but I want to make the case for it. I think people should have the option to erase a memory if they want. Call me pro-choice on memory erasure. These are my reasons why:
1) Memory isn't as sacrosanct as people think. People tend to think of memories as perfect recollections of things how they actually happened. We accept that they fade over time, but we generally don't think they're untrustworthy. But as this article shows, actually memory is a pretty shitty system, as could be expected of a system that evolved in a patchwork style. There's a very good-enough-ness quality to how memory actually works. The memory you want to wipe is probably all corrupt and incorrect anyway, making its value less than you might initially think. Human brains are simply not great places to store important information. Not only do they store memories in an inefficient way that corrupts the data, but they degrade and eventually die, which terminates the memory altogether. This is why humans have, throughout our entire history, tried to devise better ways to remember stuff than simply putting it in our brains. We invented writing, the printing press, and now computers mainly so that we can remember stuff that our brains are shitty at recalling. We already know on some level that there's no special reason that memories have to be stored in the brain and nowhere else, so why not purge a memory that is legitimately causing a person problems?
2) Just because a memory isn't stored in your brain doesn't mean it's gone. I think some people think of memory erasure and they think that it's the same thing as pretending something never happened in the first place. (The "Eternal Sunshine" idea.) But that's not exactly how this would play out. If you'll read the article, you'll see that the people that are doing memory-softening trials right now actually write down their memories at the beginning of treatment, and then reread the memories as part of the treatment. If they develop a pill that can target and wipe a specific memory, I imagine this is how it will play out: You'll wipe the memory but have it stored in written form that you can then reread later so that the you know that it did happen and can act accordingly. For instance, imagine you were in a terrible car accident where a passenger was killed, and you can't stop replaying the horror in your head over and over. You take the pill, and forget the accident. Then you read a summary of what happened. You still have the general idea of it---you know and feel that this happened to you---but the visceral horror isn't attached to it anymore.
3) Fears that people will be irresponsible with this are way overblown. The fear---again, stoked by "Eternal Sunshine"---is that people will run around erasing any unpleasant memory willy-nilly, and with it, they won't remember important lessons, etc. This fear misunderstans how most people think of themeselves and their memories. In reality, most people are attached to their negative memories, precisely because they feel those memories are an important part of who they are. Listen to how people actually talk about bad experiences. Very little "I wished that never happened" and a lot more "well, that sucked, but I'm glad I went through it and really, I wouldn't change a thing, because it made me the person I am today". Most people are glad to remember ugly break-ups, stupid fights, and even embarrassing mistakes, because they feel it's prevention against that ever happening again. When it comes to other bad experiences, such as being really sick, that aren't our faults, we still tend to cling to the memory. If nothing else, the time you threw up all over (fill in something really embarrassing) makes a great story.
These technologies are intended for and will be used by people who have a memory that is crippling them. Post-traumatic stress disorder is no joke; symptoms range from insomnia to paranoia to fear or sadness so crippling that the patient can't leave the house. Jobs are lost, marriages break up, and sufferers often resort to suicide. Purging their brain of the memory and putting it on paper where it can't hurt them is an act of mercy. Again, it's not like the patient will be unaware that they were in war/were raped/escaped from a tower on 9/11. They will know this and be familiar with all the relevant details, after they read it on paper. All that will really be missing is the feelings of fear and pain that are attached to the original biological memory.
The arc when strange new technologies come out is that people are fearful and prone to wild theorizing about how this is the one that other people are just going to wildly misuse and all sorts of terrible, dystopian things will happen. And then those things don't happen and slowly but surely, the fears calm down. Eventually, we stop thinking of the technology as "technology" and just think of it as the thing that always was. It's okay to have a little faith in your fellow man, especially when it comes to things like giving them right to make very personal choices on complex matters. That's true of abortion, and it's true of something as deeply personal as handling mental health issues like persistent and troubling memories.
The Bible doesn't mention Rick Santorum's obsession, abortion (though not because ancient people didn't have it; the historical record suggests that as long as women have been getting pregnant, they've looked to abortion to control their fertility), but it does mention that it's really naughty to lie. In fact, lying about important issues, i.e. bearing false witness, is so bad that it's one of the commandments. It's one that Santorum breaks on a daily basis, but it's particularly ironic that Rick Panty Sniffer would lie so flagrantly when it comes to one of his fellow Catholics on the subject of Catholicism.
Santorum's hostility to Kennedy's admirable enthusiasm for First Amendment protections that keep us from sliding into a fundamentalist theocracy have been covered to death, but I particularly like how he lied about what Kennedy clearly meant by "separation of church and state". This is what Santorum claims that separation of church and state means:
To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?
Yep! That's exactly what Catholic President JFK meant, that only atheists should have a role in government. Which is why he ran for President! Perhaps Santorum believes that Kennedy didn't have religion? I realize that Santorum has an allergy to Google, but seriously, it took roughly two seconds to fact check the "Kennedy was an atheist" insinuation.
This is the Republican strategy for imposing theocracy: confusing the issue. They're claiming that "religious liberty" means giving fundamentalists the right to impose their religious views on everyone else, and now the claim is that unless we accede to theocracy, we're preventing religious people (I refuse to use that stupid term "people of faith") from participating in government. The only question now is how many people are stupid enough to buy this?
In Pennsylvania, Halloween happens. In solidarity with their brethren in every other state in this country, some Pennsylvanians are prone to wear offensive costumes.
This is not about the wisdom of offensive costumes, the pitting of nascent libertarianism against the implied need for social responsibility in what we communicate to others, surviving even the implied relief of that responsibility by reliving our childhoods through dressing up in things we bought from thrift stores.
This is about the ability of religion to escape the restriction of generally applicable laws, which seems to be strangely relevant these days.
I hesitate to speak to the unfiltered version of this series of events, as the information available comes from this Opposing Views article, this local ABC news report, and known Islamophobe Andrew C. McCarthy. From what I’m able to tell, though, the Pennsylvania state director of American Atheists, Inc., Ernest Perce V., marched in a Halloween parade as ‘Zombie Muhammed’ alongside a ‘Zombie Pope’. Perce’s costume included a sign bearing phrases insulting to Islam. Talag Elbayomy, a Muslim, confronted Perce and, in some manner, grabbed Perce and/or his sign. Elbayomy was charged with criminal harassment for his actions.
State Magistrate Judge Mark Martin received the case, and ultimately dismissed the charges. Although unclear exactly why he did so, Martin did find it within him to draw on his years as an Army reservist serving in Iraq and lecture Perce (yes, Perce) at length for the offensiveness of his sign (transcript available here).
McCarthy (and many of his fellow travelers on the right) have declared this an unconscionable turn into sharia law, the rise of Islamic domination over American courts. As it turns out, it’s not. As it further turns out, the newly discovered and inviolable right of “freedom of conscience” discovered somewhere between the words “free” and “exercise” in the First Amendment gives Elbayomy a better case for exemption from his harassment charge than it does the Catholic Church for exemption from HHS contraception regulations.
To be clear, I think Judge Martin was likely wrong in his decision – Elbayomy admitted to confronting Perce and attempting to take his sign. The offensiveness of Perce’s language isn’t an excuse for Elbayomy’s actions, and this wasn’t a particularly complex case, barring some evidence or uncertainty not readily apparent here.
That having been said, let’s talk about decades-old Supreme Court cases. In 1942, the court determined that a class of words called “fighting words” lacked First Amendment protection. In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the court said:
There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting" words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.
The doctrine has been severely narrowed by subsequent decisions, and no private action or public regulation has ever been held to be “fighting words”. Of course, in the new era of “freedom of conscience”, it’s not entirely clear that matters.
The crux of the argument that freedom of conscience is a constitutional right is that the Free Exercise clause protects private religious belief from any law that conflicts with it. Despite the fact that an absolute rule of this type leads to absurd results (like, say, a believer’s exemption from harassment laws because someone offends his faith) and the fact that such a rule is completely ahistorical (religious exemptions have always been a matter of public policy preference rather than guaranteed right), conservatives are sticking with it.
The Catholic Church believes that it should be exempt from an HHS regulation that it already complies with in dozens of states because it offends their faith. The same principle, applied to Talag Elbayomy, provides no reason why a devout Muslim should not be able to grab an offensive sign if his religion calls on him to defend his faith without criminal penalty, particularly when married to another exemption from the First Amendment. Arguably, Elbayomy has a better case, if for no other reason than that he hasn’t repeatedly violated the ironclad religious principles that serve as the basis of his objection.
Elbayomy should have faced criminal penalties for harassing (more accurately, assaulting) Perce. And the Catholic Church should comply with regulations governing the secular services it provides. This isn’t because of hostility to faith. It’s because we live in a society that never intended to make religion an impenetrable shield to law, and to do so necessarily opens up the door to anarchy governed only by faith.
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.
Thanks for all the well wishes! While I'm still under the weather and, as is my custom on those very rare occasions when I'm sick, whiny as hell about it, I can get up and walk around and eat very bland food. Good enough! Come celebrate with me in Panda Party. Other reasons to celebrate: It's Friday, conservatives keep digging a hole on reproductive rights, Virginia backed off two "bitches ain't shit" bills, and this ELO/Olivia Newton-John collaboration never gets old.
Sorry about the lack of posting. I'm really ill right now, and I won't be blogging until I'm better, since things like "trying to analyze Republicans" stresses me out, and that makes it worse. Hopefully will be back soon.
I was on NPR's "On Point" this morning, debating a lying-through-her-teeth anti-choicer (seriously, she claimed as often as she could that post-ejaculation contraception was "abortion", an evidence-free claim whose only purpose it to muddy the waters) named Anna Franzonello, and needless to say, it was interesting. You can listen to it here; I was on for about twenty minutes. What was interesting was watching the evolution of the demands based in facetious claims of "religious liberty". Since Obama has made it so that Catholic hospitals and univerisities don't actually have to cover their employees' birth control (though they do get to enjoy the cost savings as if they did!), the argument that forcing employers to directly cover it is a violation of religious liberty is off the table. So instead, the argument has now evolved into claiming that your employer has a right to step in and prevent you from dealing directly with your insurance company to get birth control coverage. That right is justified by the fact that the employer's money was used as part of your benefits package to pay for your insurance.
I dealt with this directly, arguing that your employer doesn't own you. That's what the argument about Taco Bell owners refusing to include contraception in their health care plans is about, whether or not an employer maintains the right to control your compensation package after you earned it. I see no difference in an employer telling you that a health care package you earned can't be used for birth control because of his moral beliefs than an employer telling you that you can't buy condoms with your own money because of his moral beliefs. Once they sign the check, either to you directly or to a service provider that processes your benefits, they should not be allowed to control the money as an attempt to control you.
But when I hung up, I realized that what she was claiming was even more radical that that. She said specifically that even with the Obama compromise, it's a problem, because while Catholic universities and hospitals may not pay directly for your contraception coverage (it comes out of the insurance company's profits, in sum), because they give any money at all to the insurance company, they should have complete veto power over what it covers.
If you step back and think about that, it's a far more radical assertion than even the Stupak amendment, which argued that any person in the entire health care system should, because a dollar that was once in their pocket is floating around in the system, have veto power over your abortion being covered. In this case, they're saying that anyone in the system anywhere should be able to veto any coverage they claim offends their morals. This is about more than the Taco Bell owner functionally fining their own employees for fucking. Franzonello was claiming that the Taco Bell owner, having paid an insurance company, should have veto power over not just his health care plan, but over any money the insurance company spends, since his money is in there, rubbing shoulders with those less pure dollars. That means that, as far as Franzonello was concerned, not only should the Taco Bell owner be able to veto contraception coverage for his direct employees, but for every single employee of every other company that contracts with the same insurance company. So the Taco Bell owner can force you, the H&R Block employee, to pay for your own contraception because you both are insured through Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the Taco Bell employee doesn't want a dollar that was once in his pocket to ever circulate through the system and go towards your contraception, or else Jesus will cry.
And this isn't just about contraception, either. She made a broad-based argument that anyone should be able to veto anyone's coverage on any moral grounds. She claimed this would "only" affect contraception, but we know in the past that people have tried to block, on "moral" grounds, coverage for STD treatments and maternal care for single women. Since paying a single dollar into the system would give you ultimate veto power, in her estimation, it really could be anything. Anti-vaccination person buys insurance for his employees from your insurer? Good-bye vaccination coverage for everyone in the entire system.
That's how seriously they hate women. They're basically willing to burn the entire health care system to the ground rather than let some woman somewhere have sex without paying a penalty for it. Damn.
There's something intensely hilarious about Republicans acting like the election season was announced on them out of nowhere, giving them no time to prepare a suitable candidate. Steve Kornacki has an article about why the "white knight" fantasies Republicans are indulging, where some great candidate that can unify the nuts and the moderates will emerge and save them all from the black President, is just foolish. I recommend reading it; it has some good arguments with which to taunt your conservative friends indulging these fantasies. But really, the fantasy itself is fascinating enough:
This is why there’s suddenly loud talk about a new candidate jumping in the GOP race. If Romney melts down, Santorum looms as the next most likely victor — and his white hot culture war rhetoric these past few days is a perfect demonstration of why most November-minded Republicans believe his nomination would be a disaster. And after Santorum comes Newt Gingrich, whom those same Republicans tend to regard as poison, and then Ron Paul, who’s a nonstarter. As an unnamed Republican senator told ABC News late last week, “If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate.”
Due to rioting in the streets and the eventual election of Richard Nixon, our country soured quickly on brokered conventions, but hey, Americans have short memories, so I can see the fantasy has emerged. But it just makes Republicans look stupid. They kicked off the primary season like 8 months early! Now they're running around saying, "Oh shit, we forgot to develop an acceptable candidate." For the 2008 election, both Clinton and Obama had their campaigns up and running before 2007, and the Republicans are suggesting that it's just fine to grab someone off a shelf in August and toss them into the race. In other words, the very thing that got them into this mess---believing anyone would do and not really putting any effort forward to develop a good candidate---is what they foolishly think will save them. Why on earth do Republicans persist in this delusion?
Well, I think the answer lies in the Republican fondness for teleprompter jokes about Obama. No, hear me out.
I'm sure it hasn't passed anyone here's attention that the now-mandatory jokes about Obama being unable to speak without a teleprompter* are racist dog whistles. These jokes substitute for swipes about "affirmative action" (not that conservatives don't make those as well, but those are more undeniably racist and so tend to exist more on the fringes), and "affirmative action", in turn, substitutes for more straightforward claims about race and merit, claims that have become socially toxic, unless you're Andrew Sullivan whining about the P.C. police shutting you down by making faces at you. But conservatives have a weird relationship with this spoken-in-code belief that the President is stupid and only has his position because the nation had a spasm of affirmative action impulse voting. On one hand, they do believe this. On the other, they only "believe" it, because they're not blind and can see just as well as the rest of us that he is a smart man. The result is that they initially believed any white dude in a suit could beat Obama, and that racism gave them an excellent tailwind in this race. And then, in a class too little too late fashion, they realized that they should have actually considered that Obama is a formidable candidate and beating him is going to be really hard to do. But, being conservatives, their solution appears to be, "Okay, get rid of all these other white dudes in suits, and grab someone else and throw him in! Surely he'll be better." It's weird. I've never seen anything quite like it. It's like someone who keeps buying the latest issue of US Weekly and then is surprised every time that it's not Harper's. I can't help but think if race wasn't such a distraction for conservatives, they could have put something better together.
*Which is an inverse of reality. All politicians use one, because it looks better than the previous era, when all politicians---yes, Lincoln, yes, Roosevelt---read speeches off pieces of paper. (In fact, this practice saved Teddy Roosevelt's life; he had the manuscript of his speech in his pocket when a would-be assailant shot him, and the manuscript slowed the bullet down and kept it from killing him.) But off-teleprompter, Obama performs way better than average. In fact, his ability to give clear but eloquent answers off the cuff is one thing that separated him at a young age from other politicians.
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.
For some reason, this week's Newsweek was really great, with an interesting story about how sports wives and girlfriends are an easy target for fan rage and Andrew Sullivan's pretty good article on the contraception debacle, where he rehashes my theory that Obama set it up this way. (However, he still insists that abortion is different, even though anti-choicers have shown their true colors with the attacks on contraception.) But one article I found really fascinating was this brave one by Nancy Hass decrying the intense media indulgence of parental delusions attached to a bout of mass hysteria in LeRoy, New York. For those who haven't heard, a bunch of teenage girls have been overcome with a series of uncontrollable tics, much like Tourette's syndrome, and---this is critical to understanding what's going on---it's spreading. It's an open and shut case of mass hysteria: localized, no physical cause, contagious, and concentrated in teenage girls. While mass hysteria can occur in other groups, it most commonly occurs in teenage girls, probably because the stresses unique to being a teenage girl create the perfect situation for this. But the parents don't want to hear it. They want the answer to be roughly "anything else". And, according to Hass, a number of media sources are giving them a sympathetic audience to make their understandable but still deluded claims that it's something other than mass hysteria.
There's three major issues with indulging these delusions, beyond just the obvious problem of indulging delusions.
1) It contributes to the stigma around mental illness. What comes across loud in clear in the parents' reactions is that they can't accept the diagnosis of mental illness, because in their minds, mental illness is not "real" illness. Which is a common misconception, and I'm not especially mad at the parents for having it. They probably haven't really been educated on this or had experiences that would help fix their prejudices about mental illness. Where I am mad is at the media that treats their prejudice like it's a legitimate opinion that needs airing. I'm mad at self-styled environmentalists who are eager to use these girls' distress to raise awareness of fracking, which while certainly a bad thing, is just not the cause of this problem. The parents would probably be more willing to listen to the actual experts if there weren't so many other people---environmentalists, journalists---that also seem like authorities confusing the issue.
Mental illness is real illness. To say that these girls are hysterical doesn't mean that their suffering isn't real, or that they don't need help. Insisting that it has to be something other than a mental illness issue simply means creating obstacles to care. It's as if someone has a sinus infection and you insist that it's actually a twisted ankle. You're not going to help them by putting a bandage on their ankle. They need antibiotics. Mental illness is the same; treating it like it's physical means you're not treating it at all.
2) It makes concerns about fracking look like woo. Fracking is a legtimately serious concern. Sober, pro-science environmentalists agree that it's a real concern, and that there's real dangers to it. But when you attach false dangers to it, attributing problems to fracking that obviously have nothing to do with fracking, you open up your movement---for good reason!---to accusations that you're anti-science and no better than anti-vaccination idiots. Which could be used to discredit the whole thing. Which makes me wonder, as I have in the past, if Erin Brockovich is secretly working for the other side. After all, she sent an aide to test the soil in response to this mass hysteria, which ends up bringing attention to the anti-science bent of the environmentalist movement, and makes everyone involved look like an idiot.
3) It's sexist. There's two ways to interpret the fact that mass hysterias tend to take off amongst teenage girls and young women (see: Salem witch trials, multiple personality disorder) more than anyone else. You could go with the sexist explanation, that women are inherently unstable and hysterical. Or you could go with the more nuanced, anti-sexist explanation, which is that young women are under a specific set of stresses that make this sort of thing happen. From Hass's article, it's clear that the experts in this situation are opening door #2, pointing out how hard the lives of many victims are and suggesting they cracked under pressure. I would point out that the transition from childhood to adulthood is particularly difficult for women. You go from being an adored child who lives in a sea of mother-love to being, frankly, a second class citizen whose sexuality is considered the most important and often only relevant aspect of your personality. You're expected to start stifling yourself, accept being talked down to (often by men who know less than you do about a subject), and to constantly monitor your body to make sure you're striking that perfect and impossible balance between sexually alluring and "slutty". This is especially difficult if you're a teenager, with all the attendant awkwardness and raging hormones that implies. That's the baseline of stress for basically all young women. Add to that any more stress, and no wonder teenage girls crack.
By insisting that the symptoms must be physical and not mental, the parents and the media and everyone else involved in making this a "mystery" instead of an open-and-shut case of mass hysteria are basically engaging in a cover-up. They're ignoring the patriarchy and the damage it does to young women, probably in no small part because they're not really interested in actually challenging the social structures that caused this problem. But in doing so, as Hass suggests, they're just making it worse. They're signaling to the girls---to be clear, this is mostly subconscious---that the continued ticcing is the path to returning to that state of childhood, where you're an object of love and concern, instead of returning to your new life as a sex object. Hysterical ticcing is basically the only way for teenage girls end up getting media attention that isn't about sex, after all, and that kind of prejudice goes all the way down to the ground. What needs to happen is that teenage girls need love and support and, yes, attention for things other than what they do with their vaginas or if they're acting all crazy. Again, to be clear, I doubt very much that the girls want this. Their distress is real. Pointing out that the cause is mass hysteria---and that patriachy plays a role in mass hysteria---doesn't mean downplaying their distress. It just gives us a clear view of how to fix this and how to prevent it in the future.
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.
