Ah, the perils of woo in feminism! It’s one of my greatest pet peeves. Feminists have so many great ideas and insights, and yet we routinely discredit ourselves by tolerating or even promoting the most annoying kinds of woo. Take, for instance, this interview with Laura Eldridge published at Bitch Blog. Eldridge’s life’s work is trying to scare women about the birth control pill, and get them to abandon it in favor of less effective methods, or methods that may not be as conducive to the sort of sex lives they want. But she’s not doing this from an anti-feminist perspective, but from a feminist one that fetishizes the notion of “natural”, a common problem on the left. Jill linked the interview and offered some criticisms of it, but I have to point out that her title “Thinking Critically About the Pill” is simply off. The interview is the opposite of critical thinking. Critical thinking isn’t simply tossing accusations and seeing which ones stick. It’s about considering logic and evidence, and avoiding fallacies or predetermined conclusions.
This interview is a hodge-podge of logical fallacies, starting with the naturalistic fallacy. The funniest part about complaints about how the pill isn’t “natural” is that none of the alternatives offered to women are all that natural either. Feminists aren’t about to suggest you spend most of your fertile years pregnant or nursing, so they instead offer other unnatural alternatives like condoms or whatever euphemism is currently in play for the rhythm method. Anti-contraception fanatics are happy to suggest that you spend your fertile years always pregnant, but that’s not natural, either. We evolved under conditions that included frequent periods of starvation that probably suppressed menstruation and therefore ovulation, but I’m guessing that outside of the world of high fashion, no one’s suggesting that as a method of birth control.
The interview also has one of the most comical examples of what skeptics call “JAQ-ing off” that I’ve ever seen.
I thought it was the right time to present a reassessment of our birth control choices, to encourage women to broaden the contraceptive conversation..
Just asking questions, right?
Seven years into working with Barbara and I was still taking the Pill. She wasn’t judgmental and it wasn’t like I was hiding it from her, but I had to learn the lessons she’d been discussing throughout her career for myself.
If you’re just asking questions and broadening the discussion, why is it so wrong to come to the conclusion that you want to be on the pill? Why the self-flagellation, if this is about broadening the discussion?
Eldridge also uses empty scare words like “chemicals” to raise fears, without noting that everything in nature is a chemical. When you talk about chemicals in the water, for instance, you’re kind of being nonsensical, because water is also a chemical. I’m not being an asshole who enjoys hair-splitting, either. Generic concerns about “unnatural” chemicals distract from substantive discussion. For example, all greenhouse gases are naturally-occurring, albeit in far lower levels than they would be without humans. And conservatives exploit this fact to the hilt when denying the reality of global warming, even sometimes being childish enough to suggest that environmentalists don’t want you to breath out because that produces CO2.
The thing that really bothers me about this is the underlying assumption that women take the pill because they’re fundamentally stupid and misinformed, and if they only knew there were alternatives, they’d go for it. Except of course for the brainwashing. This idea crops up in the interview.