I sat and watched this video with my jaw open in astonishment. It’s so unnerving. I’m covering one aspect of it for next week’s podcast—-mainly going over the problem of having three men discuss women’s rights as if women were not involved at all—-but I want to blog some more about this, because it pissed me off so much. Ken Blackwell has nothing at all to add to this, of course. He just screams about how he and his are going to pray away female sexuality, and it’s just a matter of time. It’s mildly useful that Blackwell openly admits and downright brags about how he and his are basically against women having sex and that the only form of birth control they’ll tolerate is the pill you hold between your knees. But mostly he shuts down any discussion. Matthews going out of his way to “respect” Blackwell’s seething misogyny made this feminist despair of ever getting anywhere in the mainstream media.
Blackwell’s argument against the existence of non-procreative sexual intercourse is actually kind of funny, though. He comes right out and says we should abstain as a way to differentiate ourselves from other animals. In my experience, however, wearing clothes, speaking, and walking upright tend to be enough to signal to other humans that I am not a lemur or a newt.
Not that Matthews or Saletan says anything illuminating. Frances Kissling is defending Saletan today on RH Reality Check,, and while I think her point about approaching women where they’re at on a moral level in the clinic is well-considered, I have major, major issues with what Saletan is saying here. She references meetings he’s had with abortion counselors who, understandably, shy away from giving women condescending lectures about their moral obligation to use condoms from here on out. Saletan’s big on the value of moralizing and lecturing women, and he thinks this will create common ground with conservatives, who feel like women who have sex should be punished somehow. Mandatory childbirth is ideal, but perhaps a condescending, boring lecture that you’ll tune out while wishing you could just go home now and take some aspirin will do? What if we throw in law forbidding women to take painkillers, so they have to feel bad about being slutty slut sluts?
Saletan does mean well when he talks about contraception, I think, but he just can’t release the hope that the misogynist punishment regime would be satisfied with halfway punishments. Saletan’s instigating factoid is that the small minority of sexually active straight women who don’t use any form of contraception account for half of abortions (and women who use it sporadically probably almost all of the other half), and with this he and Chris Matthews basically come right out and say that the only reasons could be that such women are stupid and irresponsible. As I say in the comments of Frances’ post, though, that such women get abortions shows that they are not the irresponsible “couldn’t be bothered” hussies that they’re made out to be by these three men—-getting an abortion is taking responsibility. Truly irresponsible women of the sort they’re imagining are the ones who can’t get it together to get the abortion and end up being in someone’s child protective services case file.