Caitlin Flanagan gets a lot of attention because she's able to write in these elliptical, obtuse ways that seem really profound, which is why it's useful to listen to her on the radio, where she's forced to be more concise, revealing that she's just the same old culture warrior whose veneer of sophistication falls off at a sneeze, revealing the cranky (prematurely) old church lady underneath. That's why I recommend skipping her strange-sounding new book and listening instead to this interview on WBUR, which has the added bonus of Irin Carmon's presence as a sanity check. Listening to it, you realize that for all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:

*Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy. 

*Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it. 

*Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us. Actual affection from men is clearly impossible to get, but in Flanagan's view, women can get a semblance of self-respect by refusing to have sex with men until they play-act affection by taking us on some dates and letting us call them our boyfriends. According to Flanagan, not having a man hanging around pretending to like you in order to get his dick wet is a major tragedy, probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman. 

And that's about it. A lot of attention is paid to Flanagan's strange descriptions of what she calls "girlhood", which the rest of us tend to think of more as "adolescence", but Flanagan does really collapse the two in significant ways, imagining the typical teenage girl as horrified at her burgeoning sexuality and desperate to return to the comfortable world of childhood. (You can read Irin's review here.) Pretty much all of her descriptions of the life of teenage girls is in support of the above argument. For instance, she's bizarrely insistent that nostalgia for childhood toys is both universal to young women and not something young men care for at all. This has confused quite a few people who live in reality, because, if anything, it's men who are more likely to keep their childhood toys. How many guys not only have a collection of action figures and comic books from their youth, but continue to buy new things that have a connection to childhood playthings? Nor is this a new phenomenon; think of older generations of men with toy train collections or baseball cards. Not that Flanagan is wrong that a number of college girls still have their dollies or teddy bears. That's the point: her continued insistence that men and women are basically opposite in every way is just wrong. 

But it's clear to me why she paints a picture of young men forging into adulthood while young women lean back, clutching teddy bears. It's about S-E-X; everything Flanagan says is in service of her belief that women want Disney princess romances, and sex is this filthy price that men extract from us in exchange for the Prince Charming act. (Seriously, few things are more grim than conservatives' view of heterosexuality.) Thus, she has to insist that girls are innocent and boys are not. 

Flanagan's call to action is for parents to be excessively "protective" of their daughters' innocence. Listening to this program, you get the creeping feeling that Flanagan feels that you're not a successful parent of a daughter unless your child is a social reject because she acts childish throughout her high school years. She gets positively giddy when some overbearing parent calls and brags that her kids aren't allowed to use Facebook. She proposes sheltering girls (and only girls, apparently) in two very important ways: by disallowing them to have their own internet in their rooms and by insisting that cross-gender socializing only occur in traditional date-like situations, probably involving the boy picking the girl up (which conveniently shuts off any dating before 16, soon 18 in places with graduated driving licenses). The excuse she gives for the internet lockdown is that girls shouldn't see pornography, though I suspect that, due to Flanagan's over-excited response to the Facebook ban, the real reason is that she fears girls having a social life outside of the view of adults. (As the mother of only boys, Flanagan conveniently doesn't have to live by her own rules.) As for the porn thing, well, I don't disagree that it's not awesome for young kids to see so much hardcore porn before they even start to think of being sexual themselves, but I also think the results of Flanagan's actions aren't so great, either. I mean, how would you prefer a girl to first see porn: in her bedroom by herself, or because a boyfriend in college shows it to her? 

And that is the fundamental problem with Flanagan's wingnutty attitude towards adolescent girls; she has no interest in helping girls make the transition from girlhood to adulthood. She just wants girlhood to last as long as possible. She's deliberately vague on what happens after the sheltered girl is released into the "wild", as it were. She did slip at one point in the show and say that we shouldn't "let" college women "hook up", which suggests that Flanagan is far more radical than she lets on, and personally fantasizes about young women staying virginal and generally unaware of sex well into adulthood and probably until marriage, by force if necessary. But she won't be up front about it, because she knows showing her cards will end her career as  "provocative" writer and expose her as the same old boring wingnut as every other abstinence hysteric. (Seriously, how do we avoid "letting" grown ass adult women---even if they look like young kids to us---not make their own sexual choices?) The problem is that even though Flanagan is right and sheltering a high school girl is possible, there's not much you can do when they move out of the house. So the question is, then what? Is the college freshman better off having learned a little about men and sex in her adolescence before she's dumped into the waters and asked to swim, or does knowledge give you power? Interestingly, Flanagan really wants high school girls to have boyfriends (she's wrong that they don't; what research I've read suggests that high schoolers drift into committed relationships and college kids are more like to hook up), but her proposal of sheltering them is exactly how to keep girls from having that. What normal boy wants to date the religious weirdo whose parents forbid her from having internet access? I'm guessing that a lot high school relationships are conducted online, in fact, so keeping a girl offline probably removes her flirting and getting-to-know-you opportunities. 

But realizing that requires thinking, and Flanagan, for all that she's a talented prose stylist, isn't a thinking person. She's just a reactionary, and one with a particular obsession with young women.

This story is definitely flying around feminist circles. Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two investigative reporters for the Boston Globe, have published an excerpt from their new book about Mitt Romney in Vanity Fair. In it, they tell the story of a woman who was in Romney's church and when she was pregnant with her second child---while single---Romney, acting as a bishop, paid her a visit. He then pressured her to give up her baby for adoption, which she most adamantly didn't want to do.

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn't exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. "And then he says, 'Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don't, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,'" Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. "This is not playing around," she said. "This is not like 'You don't get to take Communion.' This is like 'You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.'" Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: "Give up your son or give up your God."

It's a believable story, even though the church denies that they prescribe excommunication for the "sin" of single motherhood. After all, it sounds like he didn't phrase it to her that way, more more as a matter of disobedience. More to the point, I can see Romney, who is an imperious fuckhead, getting rapidly frustrated that this woman didn't immediately give in to his demands, so he could wrap up his church duties and return to his beloved business of cannibalizing other businesses and putting people out of work. Or whatever it was he had to do that day. Either way, I don't imagine he thought much of some woman low on the totem pole talking back to him instead of just doing what she was told. In frustration, bringing up the possibility of excommunication to get his way? Totally plausible.

(It's worth noting at this  point that Jezebel is right that his behavior, if true, is beyond the pale.  But from what I understand, Mormons don't believe in hell, per se, so perhaps this threat isn't quite as dire as when it's made by Catholics using the threat of god's punishment to control women's reproductive choices. It's like only 99.9% evil instead of 100% evil. But any Mormons or former Mormons are free to 'splain in comments.)

What's interesting to me is that the Romney campaign is denying the story. This is interesting to me, because it suggests that even out-of-touch Mitt Romney realizes that pressuring a woman to put a baby up for adoption has become politically toxic. This is an interesting and positive development, if that is in fact his concern. 

For as long as I remember, the anti-choice movement has heralded adoption as the "perfect" alternative to abortion, usually accompanies with platitudes like, "Abortion is never the answer." They implied that growing a baby for 9 months, giving birth, and then simply giving the baby to a "deserving" couple and walking away like it never happened was really not much harder than getting an abortion, and anyone who disputed that was just being selfish. The argument demonstrates the fundamental refusal of anti-choicers to see women---all women, even sexually active ones (aka, most women)---as full human beings. The value of women's labor, and the suffering that women reported was a common side effect of giving a baby away? Waved off, because they quite literally don't see it as mattering. Women are basically breeding animals in their view, and just like you don't ask your breeding dog if she wants pups when it's time to bring the stud around, you certainly do't worry if the women you see as stupid sluts get their hearts broken producing babies for "deserving" couples. You even take umbrage at the idea that women should be compensated for their labor with money.* 

For whatever reason, however, the coldness of this point of view has suddenly become apparent, and anti-choicers are scrambling to seem a little less heartless. I mean, they aren't becoming less heartless---their view is still that women who have sex outside of marriage deserve no better than to be forced to bear children and then to have those children taken away from them---but they are beginning to realize that they should probably at least pretend to support other options besides shotgun marriages and giving the baby up for adoption, if they want to present the false image of caring about women. That's why they occasionally make a big fuss over a single mother like Bristol Palin (while of course mindlessly condemning most single mothers who aren't white, wealthy, and Christian-identified). It's about creating the image that they will take single motherhood as a lesser of two evils, because they know their absolutist view of "get married or give it away" isn't flying with the public as much anymore. This feigned support for women who choose single motherhood over abortion is all smoke and mirrors, of course, since the Christian right by and large still doesn't support any social programs that would make raising a child by yourself easier, but that they feel the need to pretend to support single mothers is an interesting development.

Romney's denial suggests that he gets that. The aggressive attacks on single mothers makes it incredibly clear that the opposition to abortion is not about "life", but about patriarchal power and controlling women's reproductive capacities.That anti-choicers have to tone down the sexist aggression, at least for P.R. reasons, is a victory for feminists. While it's frustrating that they pretend to uphold our belief that women are valuable while pushing legislation to relegate women to second class status, it's interesting that our values are so ascendent that they have no other choice. Which, of course, is all the more reason to keep these older stories of women being coerced and threatened into giving babies up for adoption in the public eye. Antis shouldn't be allowed to hide their point of view on this so very easily.

*Yes, yes, I get that there are women who give babies up and walk away and it's not a big deal for them. But that's surprisingly rare. The evidence for this contention is that after maternity homes, which were basically places where pregnant women and girls were made to believe they had no choice but to give up their babies, were shut down, the number of healthy, adoptable babies on the market plummeted. Meanwhile, there was a concurrent rise in the rate of single motherhood, which indicates that it's not legal abortion that really did the adoption market in, but women keeping their babies. In fact, the difficulties white Christian couples have in finding white, healthy babies to adopt is one of the reasons the anti-choice movement is so extreme: They want to restore the supply side, by force, if necessary. Which it appears to be.

One argument in defense of Sebelius's decision on Plan B is really starting to grate on my nerves, so at risk of running this topic into the ground, I'm going to have to vent on this. Michael Tomasky makes a good point---similar to mine from earlier---that Obama was playing less to the right on this issue than to parents, some liberal, who believe that their children (well, daughters) should be subject to strict parental controls and have no sexual privacy.  The difference in our positions is that Tomasky thinks this is a good thing, and I think it's awful. Tomasky:

 But it seems to me that there is a fair issue here, and it has to do with parents having a right to know about and be involved in what their kids are up to. You simply don’t have to be a right-winger to have concerns about your 14- or 15-year-old daughter having easy access to such a pill.

And he follows with:

In an ideal world, parents would rationally support the idea of their daughters having every means available to them to correct an error (or, obviously, to override a violation) that happened a day or two prior. But parents don’t always think rationally about these things. 

Yep. Parents don't always think rationally. That's why the whole notion that parents are entitled to know the extent of their child's sexual experimentation is inherently flawed. It's become a real truism of the debate over teenage sexuality that parental knowledge of the sexual activity is inherently a good thing, with an exception carved out for abusive parents. But I've never seen a shred of evidence that the input of parents who have an across-the-board hostility to sexual intercourse for minors is actually valuable. There's plenty of evidence that parents who are understanding and supportive of high school kids having sex can be good for kids, but I haven't seen any that suggests that there's a net positive if a teenage girl who is sexually active is outed to disapproving parents, unless she's being exploited, of course. But most sexually active teenagers are actually pretty boring. Most of them are in age-appropriate, consensual relationships, often with some kind of commitment. I fail to see any value in invading their sexual privacy. 

The "parental argument", as I'm calling it, is basically that Plan B should be made available to younger women only with a prescription because doing so means a girl who needs it will have to out herself as sexually active to her parents. This argument is bad on a number of fronts. First of all, it's a red herring. The law doesn't require you to talk to your parents, but to a doctor, who is legally required to protect your privacy in most states, unless you're being abused. True, many teenage girls may not know that, but I think parents are kidding themselves if they think those girls are the majority. The first girl to go to Planned Parenthood and get birth control without her parents will spread that knowledge through her peer group with rapid speed. Second of all, it's a blatantly sexist argument; I haven't seen a single soul, including Tomasky, making it even consider the question of condoms, which are legally available without age restrictions in all 50 states. Plus, they're infinitely less hassle and cheaper than Plan B, meaning that if you think there's some inherent good to minimizing the frequency of teenage sex, then condoms should be a greater concern. (Though let's be clear here; lack of access to contraception has been repeatedly shown to have little to no impact on the amount of sex young people have.) The only reason possible that condoms don't come up is pure sexism; Plan B provokes anxiety about female sexuality, and the stereotypical (though not actual) image of who has condoms on their person in high school is male. Fill in jokes about the condom-shaped wear on the leather wallet, etc. 

But most of all, the flaw is in assuming that there's intrinsic value to outing a girl who is having sex to her parents, with the exception of abuse. But if you think about this argument, it assumes a lot that is not proved by a long shot. So, let's walk through the standard, non-abuse discovery of sexual activity of a 15- or 16-year-old, which are the ages when the percentages of kids having sex grows rapidly. (Contrary to hysterical assumptions, younger teenagers just aren't doing it that much.) People who are making the parental argument are literally assuming that a tearful girl comes forward to her parents and confesses shamefacedly that she's been having sex with her boyfriend. Yelling, crying, and recriminations ensue. She gets her Plan B, but is perhaps grounded and her parents are very disappointed in her. They may or may not have a conversation about birth control going forward, but at every point in this process, her choice to have sex is considered less than ideal.

What does this solve? How does this standard American situation improve life for anyone involved?

It doesn't. The girl is highly unlikely to give up having sex, though now she may decide to be sneakier about it. She'll probably be defiant and feel her parents don't understand her; she will be right to think this. She may, correctly, see them as hypocrites, because they probably had sex as teenagers (that being what teenagers do), and it worked out well for them, but now they're going to punish her for the same. She's going to start counting the days when she can get out of the house with these unreasonable people and have a place of her own, where she can do what she wants. Meanwhile, the parents also have a worse go of it. If they really have absorbed prudish attitudes, they may think less of their daughter, even though she hasn't actually done anything wrong. Even if they are just typical American hypocrites who remember their own sexual debuts fondly while enacting hostility towards their daughter in the same situation, they're going to feel weird and out of sorts. They'll always feel that there may be something else they should be doing to stop the sexual activity. They may worry that they failed somehow. They may want to offer advice, but it's going to be filtered through the assumption that youthful sex is bad, and so it's probably not going to be good advice. 

Kids really do need their privacy, for the same reason that adults do. Even though I'm a grown ass adult and there's no shame or recriminations there, I don't talk about my sex life with my mom as a general rule. Because there's no value in it. Everyone's just happier minding their own damn business. I personally think there's a lot of value in letting teenagers spend their high school years gradually gaining rights and responsibilities---including sexual privacy rights and responsibilities---instead of simply dumping them into adulthood at 18 and expecting them not to get overwhelmed. This is another reason I support comprehensive sex education in schools.  I see no reason to believe that information "should" come from parents. Even the most well-meaning parents are going to be embarrassed and conflicted. It's better for everyone involved if kids have a place outside of the family to really talk about these things without being afraid of getting grounded or making their mom cry. 

Since I know you readers are deeply interested in fighting the good fight for social justice in the bedrooms and parlors of this nation, I'm sure you've seen this horrible video:

This was posted by Hillary Adams, whose father is Judge William Adams, who is a judge for Aransas County, which is in the Gulf region of Texas. Adams admits that it's him in the video, and in the style of abusers everywhere, is leaning on the "just a scratch" excuse, as well as skepticism-inducing claims that his behavior here is somehow out of character. (Compare to Cain's statements this past week for another example of how this works.) No one is buying it, of course, since we all see with our eyes how hard he whipped his daughter with the belt. Additionally, since Hillary set the camera up in her room specifically to capture this, we have to assume a) that this had happened enough before to compel that choice and b) that she was getting really good at predicting when he would go off like this. Research into domestic violence shows that it's not uncommon for victims to become well-attuned to when their abusers have a desire to whip the shit out of someone, and they do in fact get good at predicting it. This also belies the abusers' claim that it's a matter of "losing your temper", but that they are in control of their emotions. 

When something like this happens, it's important to put it into context so people realize that behavior like this is not isolated or unusual, sadly. Jill has addressed how common it is for people with disabilities, who are often especially dependent on caregivers, to suffer abuse like this. Hillary has stated that Adams abused all his family members, but it seems he had a special hankering for whipping his only daughter, who happens to suffer from cerebal palsy, so we can see how it fits into this pattern. I want to add to this, and discuss abuse in the context of fundamentalist Christianity. 

Now, I couldn't find any religious information about Judge Adams, but he is a Republican, raising the chances to "high" that he's an evangelical Christian. More importantly, if you watch the video---which I only recommend you do if you have the stomach for this sort of thing---one thing will really jump out at you if you follow the workings of the Christian right. Adams keeps using somewhat strange terms like "disobedient" and "submission". For secular people, even those who have witnessed abuse, it's really rare to see someone spell out their goals of inducing submission and obedience. (Or maybe not. I'm sure commenters have some thoughts.) Other language is employed, in no small part because abusers also have to enact a mindfuck on their victims, and convince them that the abuse isn't somehow apart from the values of their time, which for secular people and moderate religious people include equality and individuality. But the words "obedience" and "submission" are flung around Christian right circles without any hesitation. When speaking to outsiders, they often try to play that awful-sounding language off as something not as bad as it sounds. Their schtick is to pretend that they're just using archaic words for the funsies, but when they say something like "submission", they don't really mean submission. (Michele Bachmann tried this tactic when asked about her pride in being submissive to her husband.) But they do mean it. It's impossible to believe otherwise, when you're reading, say, James Dobson extolling the virtues of whipping your kids into submission, or Christian housewives on blogs discussing how much of a struggle it is to frame their legitimate concerns into a submissive framework where even asking questions can sometimes be seen as an affront to a man's godly right to have the final say over household manners. They do in fact believe in a strict hierarchy of power in the household, and in fact, I would argue that fighting against feminist progress on the home front is their main organizing principle. 

Spanking your children is therefore a big fucking deal to the Christian right. I would honestly say, reading their materials, that being able to whip your children at will is number two in their list of political concerns, right after abortion. Gay marriage was rising on that list for awhile, but it doesn't seem to have the endurance that fears that the government is going to take their spanking rights away do. In fact, the Christian right has been successful at blocking the United States from ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Children. (We are the only nation besides Somalia not to ratify it.) Within Christian right circles, enthusiasm for spanking is really, really high. At Stuff Christian Culture Likes, the blogger describes the general pro-spanking attitudes:

They don't feel that spanking is the same thing as hitting. They will defend it to their dying breath. Christian culture is very concerned that the government may take away their right to spank.

Pretty much all right wing Christian child-rearing manuals are paens to beating your children. And I mean beating. If confronted about this, fundies tend to backpedal and play off their obsession with spanking as if it's the same thing as a mild pat on the ass delivered to a toddler who has tried to run out in traffic or something. But they lean on the "rod" talk in the Bible, which means they are big on using weapons to beat your children. James Dobson believes you should beat children with a paddle or a tree branch, which he has somehow managed to rationalize into "loving" behavior. And he's probably the most mainstream! Other, less popular family "advice" books get even more elaborate when it comes to describing how to select the weapons to use against someone so much smaller than you. Now, that doesn't mean that all or even most fundamentalist Christians whip the shit out of their kids like this guy did. However, once you've created a cultural expectation that abusing your children is not only acceptable but expected, you can expect people to take it to the next level. Outside of the cursing and the threats to hit her in the face, in fact, there's not much in this video that falls outside of the Christian right prescriptions for "disciplining" a child.

Regardless of Judge Adams' personal beliefs, Christian right ideas about family hierarchy and paranoia that the government is coming to take away their "spanking" rights (I hate calling it "spanking", which allows people to equate it with painless bottom pats, which I still think aren't such a great idea but can't be meaningfully compared to whippings in any way) are the water that conservatives are swimming in when it comes to the Bible Belt. That context needs to be understood when looking at this video. It's not enough to be angry with Judge Adams and call for him to leave his job. We need to look at an entire culture that teaches that beating your children is a good thing to do.

By the way, I want to quickly address the people who are all over internet defending Adams by saying, "I was whipped and I turned out okay." Using the surival skills of victims to condone abuse is not okay. That's like saying it's okay to throw yourself downstairs because two years from now, that broken leg will be completely healed. The here and now counts as much as the later. A child is more than the adult they will become. They are a human being now, and their pain and suffering now matters. 

So, combining some of the ideas from my past two posts, I want to write a little about the news that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth---who have been married for 27 years---are throwing in the towel. Well, not the news itself, because even though they're public figures, this is obviously a private matter and none of us are privy to the particulars of their situation. In fact, I'm a little uneasy discussing it at all, because I worry there's no way to comment on the public reaction to the news without somehow commenting on the event of the separation itself, which again, is a private matter between two people and doesn't involve any of the rest of us. But I'm going to try, because I think the public reaction is fascinating, including my reaction.

A lot of writers have commented in recent years, to varying degress of success, on the seeming paradox of Generation X. We're a generation known predominantly for our sense of humor and our cynicism, but it's also becoming increasingly clear that X-ers, as a group, are tremendously devoted to an idealized view of family life. The tension is relieved in a couple of ways. One major way is by having a rowdy sense of humor about it, which is on full display in the explosion of blogs and memoirs of Gen X parenting, and in the trend for "hipster baby" stuff like baby clothes referencing popular musicians. The ugly side of it is the trend towards acting like it's you and your family versus the world, which is why the anti-vaccination movement built around inability to believe that something good for the world could be good for your kids is a Gen X phenomenon. But that we're family-oriented as a group is hard to deny. Boomers basically went through the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, and the divorce boom, but my generation's signature civil rights movement was expanding marriage rights to same sex couples. That is pretty symbolic, I think, of the general hope that we can preserve traditional institutions but remake them with progressive values. Personally speaking, I've long thought of myself as a dissenter from this emphasis on home and hearth that's developed in my generation; I'm glad that a lot of the family-oriented X-ers out there are trying really hard to create a sustainable, egalitarian view of devoted family life, but I'm suspicious of how possible it is. I think it's true that a lot of X-ers grew up in a divorce-heavy society and we've made it a priority not to repeat that pattern of marrying young, divorcing, and remarrying. My approach has been to avoid marriage at all, but for a lot of X-ers, the approach has been to marry later and convince themselves they can avoid divorce. To a large extent, that strategy has been successful; the divorce rate has declined. Still, I remain skeptical of this utopian vision. 

Which is all prelude to explain why, for the subsection of X-ers who are devoted fans of indie and punk rock, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore breaking up was really sad news. Like I noted in my post last night, Sonic Youth was more than just great music for the rock fans of my generation; they were role models. They were people who had strong progressive values, and they seem to live up to them. I look up to them. Pretty much all of my friends do. Looking up to them is a given; they really do seem like great people.  So it's really not surprising that people were genuinely unsettled by the news. 

Nitsuh Abebe summed up how much we Sonic Youth fans had, perhaps unwittingly, invested in the Gordon/Moore marriage:

In Gordon and Moore, you could imagine empirical proof that a lot of things you feared were true about life—things your parents always warned you about—did not necessarily have to be that way. For instance: that a career in an avant-garde rock band might lead not into penury, instability, and isolation but instead to a place in a perma-cool family living in a nice house in the Berkshires. That committing to being a feminist, punk, or artist would not cut you off from normal people and force you into huge compromises in your domestic affairs but might actually lead you to someone who’d share all of those commitments. That a heterosexual married couple could not only work together but collaborate as equals and throw equally large shadows. What better fairy tale to reassure young people that they don’t ever have to settle? It’s like getting a notarized letter containing three important promises: that your bohemian dreams won’t conflict with middle-class contentment; that maybe the reason your parents’ generation all divorced was that they never found partners cool enough to be in a band with; and that you, as an adult, could do better.

We're of course being big babies about this. Three decades of marriage, a healthy child, and a great working relationship that resulted in a paradigm-shifting rock band that did things like help rescue West Texas teenagers from a fate of conservative housewifery: it's sick the way our culture characterizes this as a "failure" if the entire enterprise ends because you choose to end it and not because someoone dies first. Abebe agrees with this assessment, figuring that on the whole, they were a wild success at what they set out to do. But then he ends with a statement I have to take issue with, "But if you were counting on them, or anyone else, as proof that interesting tastes and shared passions could create some version of adulthood and marriage any easier than the one you grew up looking at, then sorry: Your parents were probably right about that part." Okay, well he's not wrong. It's not easier. But I think it's more fulfilling, and I think maybe we can still take comfort in couples like Moore and Gordon, even as they split up. Just because you break up doesn't mean that it wasn't good on the whole. 

I think the reason that fans are so sad even in the face of these facts goes back to our optimism about family life, even as we're generally cynical about everything else. We bought the fantasy of "forever", and even though we grew up as the children of divorce, we didn't really question very deeply why we value "forever" so much, instead of asking hard questions about why a relationship's success is measured by longeivity instead of what the individuals get out of it while in it. I know I was mildly shocked by how unsettled I was and how much I had invested in this idea of "forever", and I'm not the marrying kind! But stepping back from that and looking at the bigger picture, I think that my reaction of being sad was misplaced. I mean, I'm sad for them that they have to go through this and it's probably hard, but beyond that, there's no reason to be sad. They're still the awesome role models of how to do it right that they always were, even if they aren't perfect people. They did make it work for 27 years, and showed that it's totally doable. They remain a good example of why you don't have to settle

Boy, this girl's story written to Dear Abby is truly an argument for not having parental notification laws for abortion:

I'm 16 and pregnant. The father of my baby is my stepbrother. It's my fault because I seduced him when we were home alone. Last night my sister said I need to go on a diet because I'm gaining weight, and she joked that I look pregnant. I don't think she has any idea that I really am.

I won't be able to hide this pregnancy much longer. My parents will go crazy, and my stepbrother will also be in major trouble even though it isn't really his fault. I can tell you my mom will not be understanding. Please help.

The notion that women are the only ones who can say no to sexual temptation remains strong in many communities.  The notion that a teenage boy cannot be expected to know that having unprotected sex with his stepsister is wrong probably seems ludicruous to most readers of this blog, but it's what millions upon millions of Americans tell themselves and each other every day.  Which isn't to say this girl isn't also responsible, but the responsibility is 50/50 here, not 100/0, as she imagines.  Even though this is a consensual sex situation, this notion that a man who has been exposed to sexual temptation is a ravenous beast with no self-control feeds the narrative that when a rape occurs, it's the victim's fault for being tempting, because, you know, men can't say no. 

It's hard to say where the young woman got the idea that sexual decision-making is 100% on girls and women, but often these attitudes come from the family, which is why I found Dear Abby's response troubling:

You're right -- this is major trouble. But your parents have to be told, not only because your pregnancy will soon become obvious, but also because for the sake of the baby, you must have prenatal care. If you are afraid to tell them by yourself, then approach them with the help of another adult, either a close friend or a relative you can confide in. The only thing you shouldn't do is wait any longer.

In situations like this, it shouldn't be blithely assumed that the girl will be safe telling her parents.  This "another adult" stuff is simply too vague.  I'd tell the girl first a) that she and her stepbrother share responsibility and b) that she really needs to think long and hard about how she believes her parents will react.  And that if that reaction is "violently" or in any way that makes her unsafe, she should hold off telling them and instead get herself some professional care.  I'd probably recommend Planned Parenthood or a community clinic; tell a medical professional.  An adult relative she trusts may not be available, for one thing, and for another, such a person isn't working under strict HIPAA regulations to maintain confidentiality.  A professional can screen for domestic violence and determine if the girl should go to social services or to her parents, and give her tools to go to her parents if that ends up being the choice.  

I really question the automatic assumption that parents are safe, especially when you see red flags like this girl's sexist attitudes about sexual decision-making and responsibility.

Media Matters has a report on the newest lie machine faux scandal being pumped by Fox News: the claim that the Department of Education is using Sponge Bob Squarepants to tell kids about global warming without telling them that it's "controversial", which is a little like being mad that the school teachers are telling kids that two plus two equals four when some cranks in a basement say it actually equals five.  I'm really unsure how you would even introduce the "controversy" to the age group that likes Sponge Bob.  How do you convey that there's scientific consensus on an issue, but that there's also a media-manufactured controversy fueled by people who present themselves like experts, but who aren't actually experts?  What Fox News is suggesting, of course, is that we don't do that but just instead lie to kids the way they lie to you.  

And what's interesting is that this sort of thing might have traction.  The underlying assumption here is that parents have a right to have everyone else conspire to keep information from their children that could, once absorbed by the children, make them realize that for all their parents' blather about "family values", they literally care so little for their children's future that they're willing to destroy the planet they leave to their children just so they can air condition buildings to sweater temperatures and drive oversized status symbol cars.  And a lot of people buy that assumption!  In fact, one of the sacrosanct values of American culture is our belief that children are basically ciphers for parental egos, and parents have an overriding right to feed their kids all sorts of bullshit and even, at times, withhold necessary medical care because they've got some kind of quirky religious or New Age belief that their magic is better for them.  I think a lot of people would really get mad if you said that parents actually shouldn't have a right, for instance, to tell their kid whatever political lies they want and then proceed to shield them from facts.  

Which isn't to say I'm against the notion that parents should have control over their children.  But I construe that as a responsibility, not a right.  Children are just people who haven't really had a lot of experience dealing with the negative consequences of poor choices, and so parents are there to force them to make better choices until they grow up and accumulate enough experience that they can start making their own mistakes, and then some time around 30, they finally grow up.  But people have taken what should be a responsibility---making your kid do their homework, making them go to the doctor, making them eat their vegetables---and have determined that this level of control is actually a right.  A right to shape your child in your own ego-driven image, which we as a country euphemize with terms like "teaching values".  But a lot of the time you aren't actually teaching a kid values!  A lot of the "values" that get taught are not values at all, as evidenced by Fox News calling parent rights on teaching kids to squander our limited resources on the only planet we've got.

Not sure how to resolve this problem, since we have to give parents power over their children, and power is known to corrupt.  But I do somehow think that Facebook encouraging more sonogram pictures with the "Expected: Child" option isn't making things any better. 

1) Facebook  is adding an "Expected: Child" option, furthering its decline from a kooky social networking website into a content generator for STFU Parents.  This is a really stupid idea, beyond just being annoying.  I went and tested it by entering that I was expecting child Suck Ass in December 2012.  In other words, you can put that you're expecting before you're even pregnant.  Which means you can definitely put that you're expecting fairly early in your pregnancy, which, combined with the way the internet causes people to be a little swifter and more open with the public than is often wise, will lead to some sad times for women who pee on a stick, put immediately change their status, and then miscarry a month later and have to explain shit.  

You also get to name your embryo/fetus/imaginary uterine occupant.  Which should cause some fun when a pregnant woman puts that she's expecting "Angelica" while her husband puts that he's expecting "Mary Ann".  Or worse, "Anthony". 

2) Hobo wedding, via Regretsy.  While not on the level of a Colonial Africa-themed wedding, still in pretty bad taste, since, you know, you're taking people's poverty and suffering and making it a cutesy quirky-yet-tastefu theme for your happy day.  When I linked this in Twitter, I was told by a follower that it's not as bad as it looks, because they only spent $15K on the wedding, which is significantly less than the national average, which means that if one was buying a car to live it with the cash instead, you'd be having to look at used cars and not so much at a comfier luxury SUV. 

I feel somewhat bad, because the couple who posted their cutesy wedding on Etsy are getting a lot of grief, and they seem like nice people who just had a brain fart when they picked their wedding theme.  It could happen to any of us.  

So I'm going to go ahead and do the liberal thing, and point out this is less about individual error than a systemic problem.  The wedding-industrial complex has made having a wedding a competitive act, which has not only caused spending to go up, but has also escalated the amount of quirky shit that you're supposed to do in order to have people talk about what a unique and amazing couple you are.  And if someone does something quirky, it's immediately copied by everyone else desperate to take it to the next level, making the lifespan of a wedding trend---from the cute inception to the point where it's done to death---about 5 months long, as evidenced by the explosion of "kooky" father-daughter dances on YouTube.

The pressure to do something memorable and unique gets to people, and I think it overrides other considerations after awhile, such as guest enjoyment and avoiding offense.  I'm not sitting in judgment.  I'm a competitive person, and if I was getting married, I'm sure the beast would eat me up and next thing you know I'd be asking people to stand on their heads while someone plays the Chipmunks rapping "Here Comes The Bride" while I walked down the aisle.  This disaster is being cleanly avoided by not getting married at all.

But I'm just one woman, and as my post below indicates, I'm not one to think that boycotts that are small and unorganized have little value beyond making the person engaging in them feel morally superior.  What we clearly need is a collective movement to just say no to the craziness. 

Think Progress reports on the redonkulous arguments made by Ohio legislators supporting the ban on abortion that just passed the Ohio house, and while all of the arguments are shockingly stupid (like arguing that fetuses should get the vote, which would just mean pregnant women get to vote twice, which might not work out as well for Republicans as said legislator thinks), I want to highlight the arguments of Robert Mecklenborg, who is at the top of the video.

REP. ROBERT MECKLENBORG: The easiest way is also to look at it in the context of Nazi Germany, where during the 1920s, these were the arguments postulated by the proponents of abortion as the Third Reich was growing in power. Note they will sound very similar to you because they are exactly the same arguments put forth to support the current positions in support of the abortion laws as we have them on the books.

He goes on to argue that we should ban abortion to increase fecundity, because he feels there aren't enough workers, which strikes me as a particularly strained argument during a time of 10% unemployment.  But to be clear, as Mecklenborg's support for English only laws demonstrates, he's not wanting an increase in fecundity across the board.  He's clearly imagining a forced uptick in the "right" kind of babies. 

For what it's worth, Mecklenborg's argument about the Nazis quite literally couldn't be more wrong.  The Nazis were not pro-choice, and on the contrary, demonstrated an eagerness to control the uterus and push the "right" kind of women to have more babies that Mecklenborg could really get behind.  The Nazis increased the punishments for abortion, discouraged contraception, and bribed couples to have more babies for exactly the same reason that Mecklenborg wants to ban abortion, in order to create more workers and soldiers for the Fatherland.  It's simply an objective fact.  When it comes to this issue, Mecklenborg is on the side the Nazis fell on and pro-choicers are in opposition to the Nazi point of view. 

But wait, there's more!  This same Robert Mecklenborg, the one who believes that women's sexual liberation is basically the end of life as we know it, was arrested back in April for drunk driving with a woman half his age in area where the only real businesses are a strip club and a Burger King.  

Oh yeah, he had Viagra in his system. Probably because he intended to make more soldiers and workers for the Fatherland.

Matt picks up a drum I've been beating for a long time, which is "everything is culture war". There's a tendency in the mainstream media, which is encouraged by numerically small but well-funded and frankly deceitul "libertarians" to think there's some giant gap between "fiscal" and "social" conservatism.  In theory, maybe (and mostly in the elite classes), but for the right wing base, that's largely absent.  Matt cites a van he saw driving around that had slogans about the evils of abortion and slogans about the evils of government spending.  He responds:

Abortion is, obviously, a very emotional and very ideological issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s a problem for the country when strong emotional and ideological views about abortion get intimately linked in people’s ideas with views about much more technical questions about the merits of raising the debt ceiling or whether we have too much inflation or too little.

Naturally, I do think there's something wrong with abortion---which is, as I've said a million times before, a stand in for a host of beliefs about sex and women's role in life---being so emotional.  I think we'd be a far greater country if people could step off and butt out of other people's consensual sexual behavior and their often incredibly personal choices about love, marriage, and child-bearing.  But all that aside, I think this is a good place to point out that while most of us think of "economic" and "social" issues as divergent, they really aren't.  

I'm going to point out that the truck in question here specifically singles out black women who have abortions as bad people. 

The reason I'm going to do so is to point out that in the right wing mind, these are all intertwined things.  The right wing story is basically that this country is going to hell because people have abandoned traditional values, and now they're fucking in the streets and that the hard-working white man has to pay for all this bad behavior with his tax dollars.  Women's sexual choices are blamed for a lot---I'd guess that your average right wing nut thinks that spending on welfare is about half the federal budget.  This is blamed predominantly on women's inability to control their sexual urges.  Black women are especially held out as living lacivious lifestyles that the taxpayer is on the hook for.  I think Dana Loesch's rant at CPAC really boils down the argument:

But you’re not empowered when you’re expecting Uncle Sam to act like your sugar daddy, and take care of your abortions and take care of your birth control, and pay your bills and everything else?

Preventing a pregnancy, having an abortion, and bearing children out of wedlock are all blurred together in the right wing mind as evidence of women's bad behavior that they're subsidizing with their tax dollars, and the debt ceiling gets all caught up in that.  So these aren't separate issues in their minds at all. The assumption is, from what I can tell, that the government needs to "crack down" and stop borrowing money, and throw all those sluts on the street.  And then what will happen is said sluts will stop fucking, get married, and have a husband to support them and this country will return to the 1950s....and the prosperity of it.  

I know that doesn't make a lot of sense if you see social policy and economic policy as different things---and god knows that a sensible approach does call for such a distinction---but for a lot of average voters, the most obvious change from the prosperous 50s to now isn't hard-to-understand economic policies.  Most people have no idea what the tax rate was in 1953, for instance.  But they definitely know how much sexual and gender mores changed, and the most obvious change becomes the scapegoat for all other problems.

Some times nothing, some times everything.  I'm sure someone can do a syllogism of this, but my feeling is that a man who is harassing and violent towards women probably isn't the sort of guy who is likely to suddenly grow a conscience when it comes to cheating on his wife.  But I don't think the flip is true---that a cheater is necessarily a violent man.  So, I'd say that there's no reason to think Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich harasses women because they're cheaters.  But a man who harasses women is probably a cheater. 

I guess the way I'd put it is that X means Y, but that doesn't mean Y means X.  Such as, if it's raining, there are clouds in the sky, but that doesn't mean that because clouds are in the sky, it's raining.  Just substitute cheating for "clouds in the sky" and sexual harassment for "raining".

Which leads me to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the least surprising revelation of all time, that he had a child with a servant ten years ago, and concealed it from his wife, who has taken a lot of shit on his behalf in the time they've been together.  (Not that she's off the hook, which I'll get to.)  This is an excellent time to remind everyone that Schwarzenegger was accused by a lot of women of sexual harassment during the 2003 campaign.  These accusations carried a lot of weight, for a number of reasons:

1) The accusations were numerous, extended over 25 years, and were from women who had nothing to gain personally from accusing him, but were only coming out because they were concerned that he could get elected governor.

2) He admitted guilt: ""Those people that I have offended, I want to say to them that I am deeply sorry about that and I apologise because that's not what I'm trying to do."  Yes, he made excuses for himself, but basically he admitted it.

3) This interview he did for Oui magazine in 1977, where he said this:

"Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's--the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train--there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together." Asked by Manso if he was talking about a "gang bang," Schwarzenegger answered, "Yes, but not everybody, just the guys who can fuck in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don't have a big-enough cock, so they can't get a hard-on. Having chicks around is the kind of thing that breaks up the intense training. It gives you relief, and then afterward you go back to the serious stuff."

The disclaimer is that there's always a slender chance that the woman in question was fully consenting, but if so, the way he describes the incident is strange.  Was the force implied part of a game?  It's hard to tell if he's leaving out the part where the woman said, "Yes please, 'take' me upstairs and 'jump' on me.  Pretending to be raped by a bunch of bodybuilders gets me off." His complete indifference to her experience of the situation is what's remarkable from this passage.  The presence or absence of consent is his recollection leads the reader to conclude he didn't care either way.

Needless to say, for those of us who never forgot all this crap, the fact that the woman in question was a servant of Schwarzenegger's was the least surprising aspect of this story.  I am curious to hear her story and hope that if she's signed some non-disclosure agreement, the exposure of this story will make that null and void.

*****************

Here is a concern that was hashed out on Twitter, with Anthea Butler setting me straight. I noted that I feel bad---and often feel bad---for Maria Shriver, who has been publicly humilated by her douchebag husband repeatedly.  Has any woman in politics had to suffer so many people wondering what she sees in him?  But as Anthea pointed out to me, Shriver has her own responsibility for this mess.  Not the cheating, but the fact that such a horrible man ended up the governor of California.  Because when all these accusations came out about Schwarzenegger, and when he basically admitted to them, it was the presence of the well-respected Maria Shriver that allowed him to basically dodge the accusations.

Twenty-six years later it has become clear that whether she's working to land the man of her dreams—or to propel him all the way to California's governorship—Maria Owings Shriver fights for what she wants. On Oct. 7, wearing a $1,000 Dolce & Gabbana dress and her grandmother Rose's diamond engagement ring, Shriver, 47, beamed as Schwarzenegger declared victory in Los Angeles. "I know how many votes I got today because of you," he told the world. Indeed, at the end of the race Shriver was constantly by his side, helping to blunt charges of sexual harassment that threatened Schwarzenegger's candidacy. "When it comes to her husband, kids and friends, Maria is like a lioness with her cubs," says her good friend Wanda McDaniel Ruddy, who notes that Shriver shed 15 lbs. during the effort. "She didn't eat because she was too busy. She was running on adrenaline."

Here's the problem: Shriver is a prominent feminist activist. She worked with the Center for American Progress to put together a report on American women, their gains and their challenges.  It was a pretty good report!  She does good work, and that's what makes it all the more frustrating that she used all the good will she's garnered in order to propel a groping, lying shitbag into the governor's seat of the largest state in the country.

I'm not eager to judge anyone for who they fall in love with or marry.  Love is remarkably good at blinding people to who they're in love with, and anyone who claims this hasn't happened to them is either lucky or lying. 

But your moral responsibilities kick in when the man you love starts doing things that are wrong and you help him do it.  Shriver could have declined to help him run for governor, and I doubt that anyone would have thought less of her for doing it.  If she wanted to dodge the issue, she could have pointed out that she differs with her husband politically, and she can't bring herself to campaign for someone she wouldn't vote for.  So while I do feel bad that she's getting humiliated so publicly, she played a role in this.  And I hope other women that are caught up in sick relationships with hopeless cads are paying attention.  Even if your emotional and sexual feelings are such that you haven't got it in you to leave yet, that doesn't mean you have to enable.

I'm usually wary of trend pieces, but this one in Marie Claire by Kimberly Goad has some meat to it,  if only because it has some research indicating that 30% of now-divorced women married knowing from the beginning it was a bad idea.  I want to bring attention to it, because I want to address the real dangers that strem from the slew of books and articles and TV shows that are dedicated to making women fear that they're never going to fall in love and get married if they don't hide their intelligence, downplay their ambitions, abandon feminism, and lower their standards. 

This pressure has really reached a saturation point where you can't turn around without someone telling women they expect to much and they need to tone it down (usually without an ounce of evidence).  You get it from conservative scolds like Kay Hymowitz feigning concern that men don't make passes at women who wear glasses in order to scold women for getting too educated.  Dating advice aimed at women is often built around the "don't ask for too much" theme.  The entire whine of the Nice Guy® is built around the assumption that women's bodies are collectivist property to be distributed to men according to who needs orgasms and housework, and certainly not on the basis of what the women themselves want.  Entire books have been written encouraging women to marry a guy even if the idea of having sex with him makes you shudder, so long as he's a good provider.  You know the drill.

I think that it's hard not to look at all this pressure and read this article and see a connection.  This kind of pressure is downplayed by Goad, but at least one of the women she interviews cites misogynist propaganda as part of the reason she got married to a man she didn't really love.

Then there's the usual suspect: the biological clock. Clark's was ticking and she was ready to start a family. "The number 30 reads like an expiration date for unmarried women," says Gauvain. Not only are your baby-making years racing by, but you're leaving behind your 20s — a decade of experimentation, one-night stands, and making mistakes, professionally and personally. In the next decade, you're seen as an adult and can't do those things."

And the unspoken bum's rush to the altar makes things worse. "Although women won't say it aloud, there's often a huge sigh of relief once they get their ring," says Gauvain. "Getting engaged can be a triumph, and if he's the wrong guy, the high from the attention of the engagement can minimize that fact."

But when people create loveless partnerships out of a sense of obligation, no one benefits. I'm skeptical of the claim that the pressure on women to marry quickly and not worry too much about love, maturity, and compatability has nothing to do with "family values".  There's just no family that's being valued when you're escalating the possibility of an unhappy marriage and/or divorce.  Valuing families means wanting those families to be quality families where there is actual stability and intimacy. 

I think the pressure for women to marry quickly is about fear and of course, sexism. And more than a little resentment of people who are assumed to be footloose and fancy-free.  Take rape apologist and misogynist galore R.S. McCain's screeching retort to Monica Potts for her humorous assessment of Hymowitz claiming, without a fact to back her up, that things were better when people married young under duress.  McCain really, really wants you to get married, young women with professional jobs and active social lives!

In the American Prospect, Monica Potts gets all sarcastic about Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys., describing Hymowitz’s thesis:

Hymowitz argues that a generation of parents who spent their time empowering girls has left men adrift and unable to understand their proper place in society. . . . Feminism, she says, has created a perpetual child-man unable to grow up, leaving scores of women partner-less. Apparently, Hymowitz believes, positive stereotypically male traits — courage, fortitude, stoicism — can only be enforced through traditional family structures. Left to their own devices, men fall into their natural irresponsible state, unable to commit because society has sent the message that they are unnecessary.
For this, she blames women!

Whether or not Miss Potts has accurately described Hymowitz’s argument, I’ll leave to others to decide. (I haven’t read the book, so I’m unprepared to defend it.) But I will note that Miss Potts provocatively headlines her article, “Why Aren’t You Married Yet?” — and never answers her own question.

This attitude is far from being atypical among young professional women who, like Miss Potts, are in their late 20s and make a great show of being indifferent to their marital prospects.

They have plenty of opportunities, such women would have you believe. Why, she can’t walk two blocks down the street without encountering some lovestruck man who, as soon as he sees her approach, falls to his knees and begs for her hand in marriage.

So . . . when’s the wedding, sweetheart?

My friends in Washington will laugh at that. Whenever I’m at a cocktail reception and encounter a young couple (who may or may not be dating) I inevitably ask, “When’s the wedding?”

This is asked in a half-joking manner, but only half-joking. Some social conservatives merely talk about traditional family values, but I feel compelled to actually try to do something to reverse America’s slow slide into moral decadence.

“When’s the wedding?” I ask the young couples. This typically provokes laughter — 20-something professionals in D.C. do not, as a rule, think much about their near-term marital prospects — but I persist as if in deadly earnest: “Seriously, there’s no waiting period in Virginia, you know. You two could go to the courthouse in Arlington tomorrow morning and be on your honeymoon before lunch. Time’s a-wasting!”

So what does this tell us, besides the fact that McCain sounds like a horrible bore and if you see him at a party, you should either avoid him or gear up your enthusiasm for shutting down his rudeness with your own.  (If he corners you and starts badgering you to get married ASAP, please feel free to throw your drink in his face and say, "Well, I never!" No one will think less of you for it.)  Well, I can't know for sure why it's so damn important to McCain to bully other people into marriage.  But I do know that I'm always suspicious of the hard sell.

In fact, Lindsay and I were talking about this last night.  (By the way, she's blogging at Dissent now, so check it out!)  The hard sell always makes me think that someone doesn't have faith in the product.  Like, if you walk into a store and there's immediately 15 people dangled over you, shoving stuff in your hands, then I automatically think the product is probably shit, because they're using personal pressure instead of highlighting the actual benefits of the product to get you to buy.  And reading McCain braying about how he delivers the hard sell on marriage, all I can think is he hates marriage and privately thinks it sucks and no one would get married just because they want to.  His ready assumption that women want to be bullied into marriage because they're all secretly craving the validation isn't so much a real belief, but a weapon he's using in the hard sell.  Reading his post, I'm so convinced that McCain thinks marriage is a miserable trap and that he's all about misery loving company that I'm beginning to wonder if he knows anyone in a happy marriage at all. You wouldn't know it to read him. I'm definitely convinced that he's bitter about all the fun he presumes that other people are having---his rant about "fornication" makes that especailly clear---and he wants to bring as much of it to an end as soon as possible. 

There’s an excellent essay up at Salon from a woman who had the misfortune to be raised by an Ayn Rand-worshiper.  While she fell for the Randian blather initially, like kids do, it wasn’t hard for her to see the ugly truth, which is that Objectivism is simply selfish narcissism given a pseudo-intellectual justification.  Unsurprisingly, her father was a control freak who ran off one wife, and surprise surprise, pulled the MRA move of trying to get out of child support while playing the victim the whole time.  (For Galtian masters of the universe, Rand fans really do love playing the helpless victim of having to live up to your responsibilities.)  After all, child-rearing makes no real sense in the selfishness-is-good mentality, at least not for men, who were always exalted over women in the Objectivist worldview.  (Someone has to do the shit work, and since it’s going to be done for free under duress in a libertarian paradise, it’s going to be predominantly foisted on women.)  I always joke that MRAs mainly object to child support because they don’t believe you should write checks to women who aren’t providing orgasms in return, but there’s definitely truth to it.  Fundamentally, there’s a belief underneath all this that men are only obliged to live up to their responsibilities to their children if they’re getting something in return; MRAS, rooting themselves so often in libertarian arguments, see child-rearing as transactional.  And while there’s an obsession with sperm-stealing to justify this, most MRAs are like the father in this story—-they wanted to be married and have kids, and only reject taking responsibility for child-rearing after things don’t work out the way they hoped, usually for reasons that are their own damn fault.

This is what happens when you apply Objectivism to an already toxic stew of MRA-style entitlement and selfishness.

The answer to my question came on an autumn weekend during my sophomore year in high school. I was hosting a Harry Potter-themed float party in our driveway, a normal ritual to prepare decorations for my high school quad the week of homecoming. As I was painting a cardboard owl, my father asked me to come inside the house. He and his new wife sat me down at the dinner table with grave faces.

“We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated,” he said in his lawyer voice.

“What does that mean?” I asked, picking at the mauve paint on my hands. I later discovered that for most kids, declaring emancipation is an extreme measure—something you do if your parents are crack addicts or deadbeats.

“You would need to become financially independent,” he said. “You could work for me at my law firm and pay rent to live here.”

This was my moment of truth as an objectivist. If I believed in the glory of the individual, I would’ve signed the petition papers then and there. But as much as Rand’s novels had taught me to believe in meritocracy, they had not prepared me to go it alone financially and emotionally. I began to cry and refused.

Hardcore objectivists often criticize liberals for basing decisions on emotion, rather than reason. My father saw our family politics no differently. In his mind, it was reasonable to ask that I emancipate myself and work for a living. To me, it felt like he was asking me to sacrifice my childhood so he didn’t have to pay child support. To me, it felt like abandonment.

Actually, it was abandonment.  At the end of the day,  a purely transactional view of human relationships just doesn’t work.  Objectivists, as she said, fancy themselves as purely logical, but they’re not.  It’s a philosophy rooted completely in emotion with no empiricism or rationality to it.  It’s strictly due to a childish desire to kick and scream and have your needs met without having to contribute anything to anyone else.  It’s about closing your eyes to the demonstrable fact that humans are pack animals and interconnected with each other, because you’re so narcissistic that you want to believe that you fly alone.  And it’s often about situations like this, where the libertarian wants an excuse to avoid basic grown-up responsibilities like taking care of your minor children or paying your taxes. 

What’s alarming is that this kind of narcissism is spreading like wildfire amongst conservatives.  Now we’re in a situation like Atrios describes:

Compassionate conservatism was always bullshit, but it reflected a time when people felt the need to be somewhat convinced that they gave a shit, that supporting cuts in vital social programs wouldn’t really cause mass suffering because THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT. People were still assholes, but they weren’t entirely comfortable embracing that.

Julie Sunday, writing for RH Reality Check, reports on a piece of legislation that passed the Texas House and will probably become law because Republicans have a super-majority.  The law would require any university that has a “gender and sexuality center” to also have a “traditional values center” as a form of counter-programming. 

What I like about this is how nakedly obvious it is.  Gender and sexuality centers at universities are there to promote what really should be non-controversial ideas: that women/gay/transgender people are full human beings, that human sexuality is a natural part of life, that rape and domestic violence are bad things, and that people have a right to be healthy regardless of gender or sexual status.  Counter-programming then, I have to assume, is pro-rape, pro-domestic violence and bullyin, anti-health, and anti-woman.  Not a big surprise to those of us who’ve been paying attention and know that the conservative movement does in fact oppose anti-rape efforts, sex education, gay rights, anti-domestic violence efforts, and health care for anyone who has dared experience sexual pleasure, especially outside of their strict rules (which include not just being married, but being the right race and wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for all expenses related to sexual health care).

On that last link, I want to point out that the implication behind the misleading obsession with mammograms on the right carries with it the implication that anyone who dies of cervical cancer—-which Planned Parenthood does screen for in office—-had it coming and deserves to die. Because she touched a penis.  In theory, virgins can get breast cancer, so they’re hard-pressed to oppose screening for it, though I suppose if you released statistics showing that 99.9% of breast cancer patients have had sex at some point, they’d probably go ahead and round that one up to a had-it-coming disease. 

What is fascinating about this particular story is how blatant this is.  Usually there’s an attempt to pretend that anti-woman efforts are somehow pro-woman—-Susan B. Anthony would want women to die of cervical cancer, we swear!—-though of course, no such effort is expended in the game of pretending they care if queer people live or die.  In this case, though, it’s just straightforward.  Gender and sexuality centers offer health and anti-violence information, and that needs counter-programming.  I’m curious what kind of “traditional values” programming we can expect to see. For instance, if gender and sexuality centers organize a Take Back the Night Rally, will the anti-feminist centers organize a Bitches Stay In Or You Deserve To Be Raped Rally?  If a gender and sexuality center has a seminar on avoiding or escaping violent relationships, will the “traditional values” center have a seminar explaining that men only hit because they love too much?  If you think about it, it seems that this move might be a tad counterproductive, except that it creates more jobs for professional anti-feminists.