As you know, House Republicans are flipping out and screaming about Obama and the HHS wanting to mandate contraception coverage for those dirty, dirty sluts that use contraception, the ones that constitute over 99% of women. This isn't about "religious freedom", no matter how much that's being used as a distraction. As Mother Jones reports, the USCCB has made it clear that they want a repeal of the entire mandate, because they think women having sex for pleasure is wrong, full stop. Before they were screeching about "religious freedom", the USCCB was clear that they just really want to punish women for fucking. Dana Goldstein reported on this in 2010, and got this delicious quote:
"I don't want to overstate or understate our level of concern," said McQuade, the Catholic bishops' spokesperson. "We consider [birth control] an elective drug. Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn't make you sick."
This is a full-blown war on women's sexuality. Always has been. Republicans are rallying around the idea that women who have sex are sinful and dirty and that therefore their basic health care needs aren't "real" health care. That's what's behind this battle, and was behind the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, and the pushing of abstinence-only education before that.
“‘I was thinking about how sexy it would be to kiss you,’” world renowned pickup artist Wayne Elise told a group of young Rick Santorum fans. “You can say that [to a girl], it’s a cool.”
Elise, better known by his handle “Juggler” from Neil Strauss’ notorious pickup memoir The Game, was offering advice to attendees at conservative mega-conference CPAC on how to improve their dating game. Remember that old VH1 reality show The Pickup Artist with that lanky host with a Slash hat and goggles teaching people how to insult girls then hit on them when their self esteem is shattered? This is one of his top rivals, charging upwards of $5,000 for a one-day private session.....
But on Thursday, young socially conservative activists got it for free. One tip, he noted, was to introduce sensuality into early conversations with girls — like the above quote — to keep from falling into the platonic zone with your target.
“Most guys fall into the category of not being sexual enough, so that girls will easily see them as friend material and the guys have a hard time getting out of that,” he said. “I think one of my ideas that connects to conservatives is that it’s OK to wait but you definitely want to show the person you’re sexual and sensual.”
Emphasis mine. This goes on for awhile, but the short version of it is that while simultaneously screeching about the evils of feminism and how terrible it is that women want to have their contraception covered like common slatterns, conservative activists are also encouraging young men to be more sexual, more sexually aggressive, and to even seek casual sex with women. Women who then can be condemned by the Catholic bishops, House Republicans, anti-choice activists, and whoever else wants a potshot for offending their delicate sensibilities with their desire not to get pregnant. The double standard always lurks in these discussions about sex, but man, it's just getting blatant. Being a perverted liberal, I've been to lots of conferences where groups like Planned Parenthood and the like handed out condoms, precisely because they know people hook up at these things. But I'm guessing they're not welcome at CPAC. Because while men apparently need to be more sexual, women being sexual at all is a national tragedy that moaning and wailing about it has to dominate the cable news and the halls of Congress.
Update: I also want to point out that "pick-up artistry" is sexist, in that it promotes a "men are hunters/women are prey" approach to sex, as opposed to the enthusiastic consent model of femihism. But it's also just bullshit. If anything, some of their pointers, such as being rude and insulting to women, probably make it less likely you'll get laid. You're better off honing your overall social skills, because women are people, and being people, they act like people.
The framing of this entire debate over the contraception mandate is so incredibly frustrating, because, as I explained at RH Reality Check, it profoundly misunderstands American Catholics, who are basically indistinguishable from the public at large both politically and culturally. Having grown up in a heavily Catholic part of the country and having gone to a Catholic university, I can assure you that the only way you can tell if someone's Catholic or not is that Catholics make even more fun of the stuffiness of the church. The polling data backs this up; Catholics and non-Catholics support requiring all employers to cover insurance in roughly equal numbers. In fact, Catholics are slightly more likely to do so than the general public, mainly because evangelical Christians are suppressing the overall support numbers; only 38% of them want the mandate. What we're seeing here is fundamentalist evangelicals and fundamentalist Catholics using ordinary Catholics as cover to push a misogynist agenda. I know, shocking, right?
But there's another aspect to this story I want to talk about. The polling data makes this clear that there's no conflict between Catholics and everyone else. But there are two groups that show huge divergences in the polling data on this: men and women.
However, women were significantly more likely to favor free contraception through employee healthcare plans at 62 percent versus 47 percent of men, while 54 percent of women agreed religiously affiliated colleges and hospitals should provide this coverage versus 43 percent of men.
The religious arguments have no real effect on men's support or non-support of it; they either think it's a benefit or they don't. And the majority don't. The spread between men and women on whether or not contraception should be a covered benefit is 15 points. The non-existent spread between Catholics and non is drawing a bunch of attention, but here is the real story. The only reason this is controversial is that a majority of men oppose it.
Blah, blah, disclaimer that I'm not saying that all men are sexist pigs. So quit your whining. 47% men support this, after all. So there you go. Nearly half of American men aren't repugnant sexists. That's genuine progress. Nor are all women angels on this. We have 38% of women not supporting this, putting them in the repugnant sexist category. That women can be repugnatn sexists shouldn't be news to readers. See the below post on Maggie Gallagher for evidence.
With the pandering to the easily butthurt and overly literal out of the way, it's time to make the real point. This isn't about religion but about gender. That really came out in the stories about the behind the scenes wrangling over this. The lines weren't drawn religiously, but by gender.
The White House has been skittish from the start about the new rule, which was announced last month only after internal debates at the White House that, to some extent, pitted women - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is Catholic; Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the deputy chief of staff, on one side, arguing forcefully in favor of the rule, administration officials said.
On the other side, cautioning that the administration tread carefully and look for ways to minimize another major break with the church, they said, were several Catholic men who are close advisers to Mr. Obama: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and William M. Daley, the chief of staff at the time. Also weighing in, administration officials said, was Denis R. McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, whose purview does not naturally extend to health issues, but who is a Catholic.
You'll notice that even though the Catholics were sprinkled on both sides of the divide, the framing that this is about religion isn't relinquished easily. But look past that and see what's really going on here. Female advisors to the President supported the mandate; many male ones didn't. Some men felt so strongly about depriving women of their contraception coverage that they weighed in even though this has nothing to do with their assigned job. All of these men should be ashamed of themselves. This is the height of mansplaining assholery, telling those with uteruses what they do and do not need, even though they've never had a uterus and probably have spent no more that a few minutes of their lives even wondering what it must be like. It's been 40 years since women started crashing government meetings regarding the potentlal liberalization of abortion laws and threw a huge fit because there wasn't a single woman invited to speak on the topic, much less one who had had an abortion. Why are we still fighting this fucking battle?
Part of the problem is that contraception is still framed in many ways in our culture as if it were a sex toy or aid, like dildos or porn. This is doubly true of the only contraception most men have direct experience with, i.e. condoms. And overall, I don't have a problem with that. I'm of the mindset that the sexier we make safe sex seem, the more likely it is that people will practice it. But it's also an important and necessary part of women's health care, at least if they're sexually active with someone who can get them pregnant. Which is still the vast majority of women at some point in their lives.
Breaking down the numbers: A big chunk of people, both men and women, who oppose this mandate are just anti-health care, anti-government nuts. That number probably lingers around 25% of the electorate, so about half the men who oppose this and 2/3 of the women. I think the rest of them have just bought into this framing of contraception as a toy, a sexual plaything, and therefore not properly the concern of insurance companies. You hear this kind of thinking a lot in right wing media in everything from "jokes" about how women could just keep their legs shut to Bill O'Reilly whining that if he has to pay for contraception he might as well pay for dinner first to roughly every comment ever from Dana Loesch about this. (Seriously, listening to her talk about sex is like listening to someone who has never seen "The Wire" try to bullshit their way through a conversation about it.) The way some people talk about contraception, you get the strong impression that they think you pick it up at Victoria's Secret.
I think this is where you get the 15 point spread between men and women. 15% more of men think of contraception as a sex toy. You can just hear the gears grinding in this 15%: "Why should I have to pay into insurance so she gets her contraception covered? It's not like I'm using it. Where's my fair share? When are they going to start paying for my porn? Pout. Whine. Boo hoo."
This came up a lot in my discussions with people on and offline about this; a lot of men oppose mandated contraception coverage because they don't think it's "fair" because they don't use it. Every man who says this needs to be asked if it's because he's gay or if it's because he's a lifelong celibate. Because if the answer is "neither", you are the biggest asshole on the planet, since you do, in fact, benefit from contraception. Like one woman on my Facebook said, "Yet a majority of men who did not favor contraception coverage still agreed that they liked putting their dicks in the women." Part of the problem is that our culture has made it socially acceptable---in fact, desireable, as a proof of one's manhood---to shun lady things and demand that women go out of their way to conceal the workings of vagina maintenance from you. Tampons are to be carefully concealed, and asking a man to buy them if he's at the grocery store is considered beyond the pale. I suspect that for a lot of people, this mentality extends to contraception. Birth control pills, doctor's visits, things like that; I suspect for a lot of couples, the woman simply does all these things and never shares the details with her man, for fear it's a turn-off. Many men may not even see women take their pills. There's a lot of pressure on women to present men with seamless, fantasy-level sexual experiences, to go through a lot of trouble to make sure that the nitty-gritty realities of biology never pop the fantasy bubble. I can easily see how contraception use, like leg-shaving and other forms of lady prep for sex, is hidden behind closed doors so he doesn't have to think about it. Thus, a 15 point spread in support for this mandate.
The good news is I suspect this is getting better. This "hide the contraception from your man whose sexual fantasies are delicate and need protection" mentality is less prevalent each generation. It's clear from all the clothes-rending from men in the punditocracy about this that it's older men who seem to think insurance coverage of contraception is like insurance opening up a credit line for women at Babeland. Just by dint of younger men being a lot more likely to have had it drilled into their head to use condoms, the idea that sex is pleasure and responsibility is shared by the genders more in younger generations. Of course, that makes all this wailing and moaning worse, because it's coming from a bunch of older men who are trying to roll back protections that the rest of us need and will need going forward. The whole situation is unbearably disgusting.
Mark Oppenheimer has a long but well worth reading profile of Maggie Gallagher, the avid opponent of same-sex marriage, up at Salon. His read on her personality coincides with the observations of a lot of us who've had to deal with her, which is that her self-absorption in her own pain makes her weirdly oblivious to the idea that other people also have feelings and lives that matter. Oppenheimer really spells out something that's well-known in activist circles around gay marriage, both pro and con, which is that Gallagher's hostility to gay marriage is rooted, bizarrely, in her endless bitterness that her pregnancy in her sophomore year resulted not in a proposal of marriage, but in being dumped. This wound is the one her entire life is about tending (not healing, because she really scratches at it and keeps it nice and raw). Really, she's about the closest thing that modern life has to one version of the movie villain, the person whose profound evil is rooted in a single trauma, and who without that might have been a really good person. Darth Vader, all vampires, you know the kind of villains I'm talking about. What that has to do with gay marriage might not seem immediately obvious, but Oppenheimer manages to convey the way I've heard it explained to me by various people in the know about this:
“I’m a revert,” Gallagher says. “I was raised Catholic. When I was 8, my mother left the church, and she ended up doing a lot of spiritual seeking … I was an atheist from the youngest age. When I was 16, I became a Randian. Becoming a Catholic began as an intellectual thing. In college, I reasoned my way into the pro-life stance. I could not come up with any good reason why the person inside a woman was not a person. Also, I had completely separated sex from procreation, and after I got pregnant, I realized that was a mistake. All the smartest people in the world, draped in all their Ph.D.s, were saying that sex and procreation were separate things, and of course that was just completely not true. The Catholic Church was the only institution that was saying that was not true. On the big issues, I began to realize that on all the issues I thought most deeply about, the church was right.”
The great trauma of Gallagher’s youth, her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent alienation from the father of her child, was rooted in failing to understand that sex and procreation are connected. It is understandable that, having grasped the truth, she is intent on emphasizing its importance. So it follows that gay marriage and, above all, gay parenthood, more than gay people themselves, presents a real challenge to her belief system. Same-sex marriage advocates offend her hard-won wisdom in two ways. First, they imply that sex and love can in fact be separate from procreation, and no less valid for it. Second, and perhaps more troubling for Gallagher, the increasingly visible column of attentive, loving gay parents — gay male parents in particular — mocks her own romantic choices. It mocks her own son’s good-for-nothing father. There must be something wrong with these gay dads, something contrary to the natural order, such that even when they appear to be splendid dads themselves, their agenda is the cause of poor parenting in others.
What's fascinating about Gallagher is that she has always maintained that it was liberalism and feminism that failed her. But as she admits here, she was no liberal feminist when she got pregnant. Far from it. She was a prominent campus conservative, a member of Yale's Party of the Right. The guy who got her pregnant was also in the Party of the Right. She wasn't soaking in feminist values when she got pregnant and was, by her measure, abandoned. They were self-professed right wingers that believed in conservative values. Thus, it seems the only logical set of values to blame is the conservative ones.
I'm happy to make that case. Gallagher is a big time anti-choice nut, and soaked completely in anti-choice narratives and myths. One of the most important, prominent myths the anti-choice movement pushes is that babies turn reticient men into loving husbands and fathers. The shotgun marriage is probably the central fantasy of the anti-choice movement, I'd argue. Anti-choice groups like Feminists for Life put most of their energies into pushing the myth that a mercurial lover will, when you tell him you're pregnant, glow with love and immediately fall to his knees and ask for your hand. They have a lecture series where women who got pregnant in college tell glowing stories of boyfriends who joyfully embraced the pregnancy and married them immediately, even though they were still college students. Abortion is often fingered as the reason that women marry later or not at all, again because of this rock solid belief that unintended pregnancies turn carefree bachelors into worshipful grooms.
Hey, I'm not in Gallagher's head, but it seems likely that the reason she's so bitter is she bought the myth that patriarchy is about providing and protecting women, and that as long as you're a good girl who refuses to separate sex from procreation, you'll be rewarded with a handsome husband and a beautiful wedding gown. But what she got instead was a swift lesson in how patriarchy is actually just about men dominating women. (Well, and it is also about creating a pecking order amongst men, often by using women's bodies for status.) You can lead a man to engagement water, but you can't make him drink.
No, the problem wasn't feminism, but not enough feminism. One of the nice things about feminism is that it teaches that women are full human beings and that we have value outside of being wives and mothers. And that you should get married because you want to, not because you "have" to. To be blunt, you're not going to meet many feminists who have whoopsie pregnancies and then flip around expecting the ring to be produced, and then are angry if it's not. Giving women rights means also imbuing women with responsibilities. If indeed one of the trade-off of having reproductive rights is that we forsake the right to pressure a man into marriage with pregnancy, then that's fine with me. Those marriages tend not to be too happy, anyway, and as Gallagher learned, an oopsie is no guarantee that a man is going to cough up the ring. We're better of being empowered to care for ourselves instead of depending on men to do it.
If you've been listening to cable news for the past few days, two things immediately leap out at you. The first is that there are a lot of pundits who are willing to speak for lay Catholics' simmering sense of outrage at the Obama Administration's decision to mandate contraceptive coverage for Catholic hospitals and other non-clergy religious employers. The second is that this decision violates the free exercise rights of Catholics guaranteed under the First Amendment.
As Michelle Goldberg points out, it's hard to argue that the Catholic Church is somehow suddenly burdened by a rule virtually identical to the rules it complies with in twenty-eight other states. Currently lacking our future moon republics promised by Newt Gingrich, that's easily the majority of states.
At a more fundamental level, though, the HHS rule simply doesn't violate a cognizable free exercise right. In 1990, the Supreme Court decided a case called Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). Two men, members of the Native American Church, used peyote in their rituals. They were employed in Oregon as counselors at a private rehab clinic. Oregon outlawed peyote, with no exception for religious use. The men were subsequently fired once their drug use was discovered, and applied for unemployment benefits. The state of Oregon denied them benefits because - guess what? - they were fired for committing a crime under state law, and had committed work-related misconduct.
The case found its way to the Supreme Court, where the court set down a new rule. The standard for determining if a regulation burdened the free exercise of a religious adherent or organization was whether the law was neutral toward religion and generally applicable, lacking any pretext designed to obscure a hostility toward religious practice. The court even stated that to permit otherwise under the First Amendment "would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."
The author of this religion-destroying opinion? Noted Catholic Antonin Scalia.
And you know what? This makes perfect sense. If a private citizen or organization can escape laws that incidentally burden their religious practices, religion becomes a literal "Get Out of Jail Free" card. The purpose of the Constitution wasn't to subsume the rest of society to the wishes and whims of religious practitioners, it was to provide those practitioners a safe space to practice their faith free from direct government interference or mandates.
The burden on the Catholic Church is incidental, at best. The Church is required to provide health insurance coverage to their employees in the same manner as any other employer hiring the same people to perform the same jobs. That it offends them to do so is not unconstitutional.
Whatever the political fallout, the Obama Administration is on the right side of this, legally. And they've got lovable ol' Antonin to thank for it.
UPDATE: Via Felwith, in comments:
It makes perfect sense, but unfortunately it’s no longer the law of the land, at least as far as the federal government is concerned. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in 1993 which required laws that restricted free exercise of religion to pass strict scrutiny, and while the Supreme Court ruled that it couldn’t apply to the states, in 2006 they did rule that it did apply to the federal government. So if this does go to court, I don’t really like their chances.
It’s bullshit, though, since there are many Catholic institutions that already provide contraception coverage to their employees without whining about it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the administration can successfully argue “But that’s not *really* a Catholic belief” in court, even though it’s the truth.
The government would then have to show that it had a compelling interest in its regulation of Catholic hospitals and charities, and that the means of achieving the interest were narrowly tailored to the goal.
Thanks for negating my post, law. And Felwith. Hrmph.
So far, I have no takers on the question of why it's okay for the city of NYC to force private buses that serve the public to stop making women sit in the back of the bus, but acceptable for Catholic-owned hospitals and universities to do the same thing by requiring women to pay out of pocket for preventive health services. I have my own theories about this, the main being that contraception use is private and so there's not a shocking visible representation of how unfair it is to treat women's medical care so differently than men's medical care. Which is why I think it's time to come up with one.
Basically, what the Catholic bishops are doing is demanding a right to fine female employees of Catholic-owned institutions for fucking.
After all, that's what this amounts to, a fucking fine that's leveled against women.*
It's clear that the Catholic bishops really just wish the government would ban contraception and abortion and force those foul sluts to endure unwanted pregnancy as punishment, but since they're not getting that any time soon, they're sure going to find other ways to punish them. And while they can't extract a monthly fucking fine out of all women, they---being conservative fuckwits---appear to believe their employees are theirs to control. They legally can't fine them directly for fucking, but they can create a de facto fine by manipulating the insurance system. It's worth pointing out that this fits neatly into the overall practice of Catholicism, where sin is rectified by basically paying fines. Most of the time, the currency is praying and maybe good works (since the majority of Catholics don't actually bother with the sin and redemption stuff, but just use the church as a marriage-and-baptism center, I'm a little hazy on this, since I've never heard any of the bazillion Catholics I've known talk once about repenting for sins in the real world), but in the history of the church, that has easily translated to money on many occasions, and I think we're seeing similar logic in play here now. They can't make you do the rosary to repent for your fucking, since that's overt religious discrimination. But they will get you to pay a monthly $50 fine for it.**
Maybe the compromise is allowing Catholic hospitals and universities to put up a version of the swear jar, except in this case it's the ladies fucking jar, and every time you have sex, you toss some coins in it. That way, at least the employers get to keep the money. The best part is that it really is up to your conscience; if you feel as bad about fucking as the church expects, put some cash in, but if you don't, you can just roll your eyes and say that it's none of their damn business what you do in your free time.
Of course, I suspect that means the jars will go completely empty,and not just because these institutions hire a whole lot of non-Catholics. (For instance, me for many years---I worked part time at a Catholic university while I was in school there.) It's also because no matter how much dudes on my TV wring their hands and talk about what "Catholics" think about this, the reality is that Catholics aren't really any different than the public at large. They fuck, they don't feel bad about it, and they use contraception. In fact, Catholics support this new contraception policy at higher rates than the public at large.
I really do hope someone tries to mount an argument about buses vs. hospitals. The utter lack of serious attempts to address the question is making me kind of sad.
*Interestingly, I'm pretty sure it's against men who want vasectomies, too, but men's contraceptive needs tend not to go mentioned in this, except by anti-choice apologists who imagine themselves benevolently "allowing" couples to use male-controlled condoms.
Women who ride the B110 bus in Brooklyn can't sit where they want unless they're okay with being berated by Orthodox Jewish men, even though technically the B110 is a public bus.
The B110, which travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park is open to anyone, has a route number, and goes to city bus stops. However, the line is run by a private company under a decades-old agreement with the city, and since the bus is designed to serve the Hasidic community in the area, a board of rabbis sets the rules. They've decreed that women should sit in the back and men should sit in the front to avoid contact betwen members of the opposite sex.
When it was exposed that a bunch of religious fanatics were doing this, the city came down on them and said, "God or no god, you can't discriminate against women if you're serving the public."
Catholic hospitals and universities are public institutions that serve the public and hire from the public, unlike private religious institutions. As such, they are being held to the same standard as all other public institituions in that they aren't allowed to deny their female employees the right to full health care coverage, no matter how much the Pope is mad that you're fucking and he's not. (Seriously, he didn't have to take a vow of celibacy. Why do the rest of us have to pay for his choices?) The Obama administration told them they aren't allowed to metaphorically send their female employees to the back of the bus. That supposedly serious people are treating this like an issue is baffling to me.
What I want to know is where are all the concern trolls on this bus issue? If waving the Bible around is reason enough for a public instititution, even those that take federal dollars like universities and hospitals do, to discriminate against women, then I want to see some consistency here. I want E.J. Dionne to claim that New York's Jewish population is going to rise up en masse in protest because a very small minority of religious fanatics want the right to treat women like shit. I want all the liberal dudes hand-wringing right now about how Obama went a step too far to expand that argument, and talk about why certain buses that serve the public should be able to force women to sit in the back to appease the fanatics' religious sensibilities. Riddle me this: if giving Catholic-owned businesses the right to discriminate against women is freedom of religion, then why isn't it okay when bus companies have signs requiring women to sit in the back to appease a small segment of the Jewish population?
As usual when women complain about sexual harassment and sexist wankery, there's a lot of bullshit excuse-making. Todays theme is, "It's only scary, uncomfortable and offensive to women to say sexist shit to them because women choose to feel bad!" It's the sexism apologist's version of "The Secret". Lots of it on this thread, with examples like:
The “C” word is another example of investing a word with much more power than any word deserves. It has now become the taboo word for women (feminist or not), like the “N” word or the “F” word. Only members of the group to which the words describe can use them. I don’t miss them but giving words such power to hurt gives too much power to people who would hurt you.
And the more illiterate and egregious:
But what I’m saying is that simply calling a woman you hate a ‘cunt’ is not necessarily sexist. It should really only be like calling a man a ‘bastard’ or a ‘twat’. But because our society (and sometimes feminism) infantilizes women it’s seen as worse.
And you see it all over this situation. TL;DR: A teenage girl who is an atheist activist posted a picture of herself with an open-mouthed "gleeful" face on Facebook. A bunch of men whose brains are addled from spending way too much time looking at porn saw an open female mouth on the internet, and confused about why there wasn't a cock in it already suggested to this 16-year-old that she would be doing everyone a favor contributing her image to a catalog of erotic images. When told, rightfully, that they are creepy motherfuckers, they whined and complained that people who believe that one should remember that women are more than sperm-draining machines are, to steal a phrase from Sady Doyle, trying to snatch away their boners.
All of which is why I'm not going to bother to argue any of this crap down, but instead to post this video, the premiere episode of "Fridays at Galweather", a new web series about management consultants on the one day a week they spend at the office. Maybe coming from a bunch of male comedians, the point will go down easier than having to listen to some stupid bitches with their constant yakking about how unfair sexism is.
In round one bazillion of the "man, atheists really need to deal with the misogynists" problem, we have Penn Jillette. I know, surprising that he's got a wide misogynist streak, right? I mean, I try not to judge a book by its cover, but if there were cash prizes for correctly guessing which celebrities are still bitter about not getting laid in high school, he would definitely be on my ballot. Now there's a kerfuffle because Jillette is a big fan of everyone's favorite C-word.
As you can imagine, his defenders are trotting out the "just because you call someone a cunt doesn't mean you're sexist!" argument. This is why I get a little frustrated with trying to prove sexism or racism on a single word. It has this tendency to narrow the playing field, make it all about "proving" whether this word or that word is an Official Utterance of -Ists, which distracts from the larger issues and encourages -Ists to use coded language for better ass-coverage in the future. ("Food stamp President" is a good example.) In this case, "cunt" was just the icing on the cake of an explosive bit of inexplicable misogynist diarrhea. You see, this is the piece that caused Jillette such profound anger. As you'll see, it's a harmless bit of goofing on Super Bowl ads, clearly written for an audience looking to pass some time while they're eating a sandwich at their desks, i.e. the bread and butter of freelance humor writing online. I would rate it as funnier than most of these pieces, because it has a clever conceit (marketers are worried about the apocalypse) and because it's breezily written and made me smile. In offensiveness terms, I would rank it somewhere between that video of otters holding hands and Kitten Covers.
In addition, the complaints the Jillette are trotting out are very much of the "those in glass houses" variety. I don't know that someone whose career started because he thought card tricks were first rate entertainment is really in the position to be judging whether or not something is quality sandwich-eating-time-passing material. As for the accusation of strained, repetitive comedy, well, when I think of that, well certainly I'd never think of "Bullshit". I mean, coming up with thin excuses to have naked ladies walking around and being able to say curse words on a TV show is a fresh joke every time, amiritefellas? Most importantly, my eyebrow raised at the accusation that someone is trying to "be superior". This from a man who, you know, has a show called "Bullshit". Within the tweet, he makes a pointless bid at superiority, bragging about how he didn't see any Super Bowl ads. Between the outsized reaction and the incredible double standard for himself and some female writer on the internet, we're already talking about 90+% chance that he's got issues with women. If men allow having sex, being arrogant, or making silly jokes for themselves but flip out on women for doing the same, it's almost surely sexism, and Jillette hit two out of three. (There's far more, of course: being slovenly, drinking, you could go all day with the list of things sexists allow for themselves but not for women.) The fact that he used the word "cunt" just makes it a near-certainty, hovering around the 99.9% region.
With that in mind, I made a list of things people can say, and potential totally non-sexist Penn Jillette reactions. All of them guaranteed to get a "nuh-uh, that's not sexism!" response from his fanboys.
The forecast for today shows clear skies and highs around 55 degrees.
Who does this bitch think she is with her weather predictions? Just because you have a map and a meterology report doesn't make you the queen of the fucking weather, sweetheart.
I'll have a skim latte and a blueberry muffin, please.
*snort* Jesus Christ, what a fucking diva. An ordinary muffin isn't good enough for you? You have to have blueberries? What, is your pretty princess tongue unable to choke down your breakfast unless it's all blue and fruity?
I was happy that the Giants won, but it would have been cool to see the Patriots pull it off at the last minute.
Useless fucking cunt. Hey, lady, instead of offering your pointless opinion on football, why not do something useful with your mouth and stuff a cock in it?
I like to sit around scratching my balls while writing blog posts insisting that unregulated markets, which have been shown to repeatedly fail when tried in the real world, are the one true path to peace and prosperity.
Carry on, good sir. Perhaps you would like to come on my show to pass off your anti-government crankery as if it were scientific fact?
Spoilers, for people who struggle maintaining the maturity levels not to hold the entire internet responsible for your inability to work through what's saved on your DVR.
Last week, I published a piece where I adopted the role of the bearer of bad news: TV's silly-but-loveable feminist Leslie Knope is getting defanged by NBC, probably in a last-ditch attempt to get the ratings up. Since the show is a spin-off of "The Office", which started off as a sharp satire of ordinary American work life but devolved into an unfunny but typical sitcom about the glories of the patriarchal family, I wasn't particularly surprised. Americans love the comfort of unfunny sitcoms that romanticize this stuff. It's our comfort food. Applying sharp comedy to gender role-playing is especially unwelcome; we don't want to come home after a hard day's work and have some snooty TV writers make us all uncomfortable with the sexism we perpetuate and rationalize by wrapping it in a blanket of romance. "Parks and Recreation" has shitty ratings, and as I've pointed out before, they clearly have no desire to blow a raspberry at the almost-inevitable helpful network suggestions that they dumb it down a little like "Community" did, so seeing them move in the direction of "The Office" isn't surprising.
However, my article, which came out the same day that the Valentine's Day episode came out, was controversial, with Maya at Feministing offering a rebuttal. This didn't surprise me, so I wasn't upset. The evidence that the show had taken a turn was far from conclusive, and my hope in writing the piece was to start dialogue, not offer the final word about it. At the time I wrote it, the show's direction was ambiguous enough to really allow for multiple readings, as it were.
But the episode that aired on the same date that my piece was published, titled "Operation Ann", removed all doubt. That episode was a fundamental betrayal of both the characters of Leslie and Ann, and of the show's quiet but persistent feminism they're now selling down the river in a desperate bid for ratings.
Since when is Ann Perkins one of those women who has so little going on in her life that the mere idea of being single sends her into a spiral of self-loathing? As far as I remember, Ann has never once suggested that being single is such an awful thing that one should seriously consider lowering your standards to rectify the situation. As recently as last year, in fact, Ann was having a fun time tearing through every dude in Pawnee, having fun sleeping with them but refusing to settle down. Nor was Leslie ever Ms. Everyone Should Have A Boyfriend. Sure, both characters like having boyfriends, but they've never considered it more important than having a full life with lots of friends or meaningful work. Nor have they ever thought that having a boyfriend is so important that considerations like compatibility or attraction should be shoved aside. Old Leslie, if Ann had been in a funk about being single, would have bucked her up like she did to Chris in this very same episode: reminded her that she has a lot going on and there's no rush. But now the show has a double standard. If Chris is sad about his single status, he needs to just cheer up and remember life goes on. Ann, however, should hurry up and settle down with the first person that she can have a halfway reasonable conversation with. Who turns out to be Tom. You know, the resident douchebag of Pawnee. I love Aziz Ansari, of course, but the whole point of Tom's character is that he's an insufferable douchebag.
Maybe the show will right itself. But right now, I'm skeptical. While I doubt that they're going to capture a bigger audience by abandoning the feminist subversion for more mainstream sexist romantic cliches, I can see that it might seem like the only hope of getting ratings up.
By the way, it's just telling that we live in a world where Zooey Deschanel has her own show, but no one can ever figure out what to do with the beautiful and talented Rashida Jones.
Komen has fallen to their knees and begged for mercy, and Planned Parenthood is doing a victory lap. So am I: I wrote a piece for The Guardian about what Planned Parenthood did right, and what it will take to replicate their success in the future. But not so fast!, say some on the left. If you read Komen's statement, it's clear that they're just retreating for now and will probably kill off the $700,000 in grants to Planned Parenthood in the near future, when they create a better excuse. This is true, and they should be called out for it. There's no reason to return to supporting Komen; they were already an iffy organization that crossed a line they can't uncross. It's clear their management is awash in anti-choice nuts who really do think there's something dirty about Planned Parenthood, and that this wasn't just a cave. No reason to support them.
But that doesn't mean those of us who are declaring victory and doing a victory lap are wrong. Even if the grants are eventually cut, we can safely say we won this one. Because this wasn't really about the money. Planned Parenthood is a billion dollar organization; cutting this extra service from some clinics, while horrible and regrettable, wasn't going to tank them. This was a proxy fight, and it was standing in for the larger fight over women's rights and women's health care. Shelby Knox had an awesome tweet explaining this:
This was a battle about values. Specifically, whether or not we value women as human beings or not. Anti-choicers are trying to marginalize comprehensive health care for women basically to put us in our place, to demote us from the status of people and return us to the status of objects. Saving breasts is all good and well---they are decorative, after all!---but health care for dirty sluts who go around having sex as if they have a right? I think, and said in my Alternet piece, that one reason this really hit home is anti-choice objectification of women had gotten to the point where they were pitting our own body parts against each other, creating a war between wholesome, all-American boobies and evil vaginas. A couple of astute writers put it really well.
In American politics, women’s bodies are not bodies, but parts. People like to talk about some parts more than others. Embryos and fetuses are the most charged subject in American political discourse. Saying the word “cervix” was the beginning of Rick Perry’s end. In politics, breasts are easier to talk about. I first understood this a few years ago, when I was offered, at an otherwise very ordinary restaurant, a cupcake frosted to look like a breast, with a nipple made of piped pink icing. It was called a “breast-cancer cupcake,” and proceeds went to the Race for the Cure.
I don't know if some people can understand how dehumanizing this is. Obviously, there are a fair number of both sexes who don't see it that way. But to me, this gets to the real gist of the issue, one I've only vaguely been able to grapple with by using hyperbolic phrases like "gestation vessel." But it's more than abortion or childbirth, although the desire to control that vital human function lies at the heart of this. It's about reducing women to their various body parts. "You get to control this bit, but we'll control that bit, and we like this part but don't want to talk about that part and ... are you complaining again?"
The obsession with fetuses and uteruses and birth control, the fetishization of breasts (in all ways, not just Komen's breast cancer branding) and the ongoing double standards in political and public spaces like this commonly forgets the human being who happens to own those body parts. I think that's what women commonly feel --- and one reason many of us are so adamant about this. It's not just about a discrete set of issues. It's about women being treated as fully human.
The debate over health care is basically about this ultimate fight over whether or not women are people. Conservatives see women as objects. Sex and reproduction the way the objects are used, and like with any other property, how and who uses it is the whole point. That's why abstinence-only classes compare sexually active women to lollipops that have been opened and licked, or toothbrushes that someone else has used. Taken to its extreme---and anti-choicers are nothing if not extreme---this view means that a woman who has sex before marriage is broken and useless, and providing her contraception and STD prevention/treatment is like putting a new paint job on a totaled car. But even for less extreme conservatives, they tend to see sexual health care as "condoning" sex, and just as you don't keep buying your kid a toy if he keeps breaking it, they think taking it away will cause women to stop "damaging" themselves by using those vaginas as we please instead of keeping them nicely wrapped for the true owner---a hypothetical future husband---to have. That married women also need these services is an inconvenient fact that tends to get brushed off. Some times, when you squeeze anti-choicers, they'll say that married women have no need for these services because as long as no one never has sex outside of marriage, STDs and unintended pregnancy just go away. Mostly, however, it's not a well-thought-out position, just a frantic panic attack at the idea that women---these objects---are making decisions for themselves like they're real people. More importantly, they're afraid that if this trend continues, it's going to occur to the public at large that women are people, and things will shift accordingly.
That's what this fight was about. By pressuring Komen, anti-choicers were basically trying to make "women are people" the pariah position, and trying to make anyone who holds the "women are people" position without apology seem like they were out of the mainstream. Having people scrambling to disassociate themselves from you is a really great way to discredit you and your ideas, and that's why so many people with what I consider poor morals really love a witchhunt. So the fight was over who basically owns the mainstream: anti-feminists or feminists, people who think of women as expensive sex toys/gestation machines or people who think of women as people? That's why everyone was so upset. And that's why the feminist win was so meaningful.
The reason that emotions were high around Komen is they position themselves as an organization that exists to save women's lives. Claiming to be pro-woman (or pro-black people or pro-poor people or even increasingly pro-gay people) while objectifying and dehumanizing women is a common tactic on the right. By making Komen squeal for mercy on this, we won a major moral victory. We said loud and clear that being pro-woman is about more than a bunch of empty homilies. You have to believe women are people, and like people, they have a right to have sex and have a right to full health care and a right to make their own damn choices. Anything less isn't pro-woman. It simply isn't.
We won a major public battle over values. We sent the message loud and clear that feminist values are mainstream values. We should be proud.
Komen for the Cure's decision to break with Planned Parenthood over a Congressional investigation based on doctored videos was, all things being told, a bad one. Bad for women, bad for Komen's credibility, and, as TBogg points out, bad for Komen's future viability.
TBogg points out that Komen's new fellow travelers are about as concerned with women's health as I am with NASCAR standings, which is part of the problem. But Komen has a deeper issue here: the impetus for those anti-choice conservatives flocking to their side in the first place.
Komen brings in substantially north of $300 million in revenue. Its grants to Planned Parenthood totalled roughly $600,000. This means that Komen's new friends were withholding support over .2% of its funding going to an organization that performed abortions with entirely separate money. Now that they've made the political decision to side with people whose main source of political knowledge is the archive of false e-mails at Snopes, there's a larger and far more precarious issue: anti-choicers' invariable tendency toward rubedom.
Within a month, there will be an e-mail or a WorldNetDaily article or a Washington Examiner column. And the column will allege, through a vastly simplified chain of events, that Komen is once again engaged in the perfidy of tangential liberalism. People for the American Way once co-sponsored a 5K, Komen let halal companies use the pink ribbon, Hillary Clinton gets mammograms; something is going to set them off.
Eventually, Komen's not going to be able to placate them, probably because the actual controversy will make no sense whatsoever. After a few weeks of trying to understand why it can't partner with Campbell's Soup, the donations rewarding this week's decision will dry up. The Planned Parenthood investigation will go away. All Komen will be left with is a vastly reduced donor pool, and a large group of former donors that either remember Komen's actual betrayal, or will spend every minute looking to manufacture betrayals.
The internet is awash in memories of "Soul Train" this week, because of the loss of Don Cornelius, the host, who died from an apparent suicide. A little-discussed fact of the internet is that watching YouTube clips of "Soul Train" is a surprisingly effective form of stress relief.
And so is partying down at the Panda Party! So come join us and spin some tunes. Sadly, we can't create a "Soul Train"-style line with our cute avatars, but you can play at home.
RIP, Don Cornelius. My memories of that era are really dim, since I was a little kid, but I remember that well into the 90s, every dance party occasion would burst, at some point, into a "Soul Train" line. Now it's more like a circle thing, where people are pushed into the middle to show off their moves. I am fine with both methods, though feel the line version was less pressure-intensive. Share your memories in comments! Or come into Panda Party and share them there.
Or, to be more thorough, this is something I've been thinking about ever since anti-choicers managed to get Komen to join in their crusade of shunning Planned Parenthood for what I've deemed below-the-belt health care.* The "breasts good/vaginas icky" divide that rules a lot of wingnut thinking on this is typical of why they obsess over sex. Sex and gender provide lots of opportunities to label people and divide them into categories. This in and of itself isn't bad. Labels are useful things that can clarify, as long as they're kept in their place. But conservatives---being black and white thinkers---see different groups labeled and imagine they must be total opposites. And that they therefore must be constantly at war with each other.
And boy do they like that! Nothing works better for conservatism than encouraging people to exaggerate their differences, minimize their similiarities and then imagine themselves as in constant struggle with each other. While we ordinary people are fighting each other over our supposed differences, we're not looking working together on issues that matter to all of us. There are a lot of places where differences to fight over can be found, but sex and gender strike so close to home for people that it's a well of opportunities for divide-and-conquer the right just drinks from constantly and frankly instinctually. You can probably think of the most prominent examples. There's the What's the Matter with Kansas? issue, where working class white people are encouraged to obsess over the dirty sluts that are supposed so different from them, and to bring us back in line, and this obsession keeps them voting Republican even as doing so hurts their pocketbook. Of course, the attempts to make straight people think LBGTQ people are foreign and subversive and strange is another example, and luckily one where the public is slowly beginning to stop buying what conservatives are selling.
Of course, the most consistently important artificial divide conservatives want to stoke, at least when it comes to sex, is between men and women. The idea that men and women might realize that we're not, in fact, complete opposites and that in fact our interests overlap the vast majority of the time terrifies conservatives. They need men and women to see ourselves as enemies who constantly struggle over power and sex, and definitely don't want us to look at each other as friends. That's one reason there's so much hostility with regards to reproductive rights. It's critical to conservatives ideology to imagine sex as a source of power struggle between men and women that prevents equality and friendship. They want a world where men are always trying to get it, and women are always trying to avoid having to have it, which makes platonic friendship impossible (because of suspicions that he's trying to get one over on you) and makes sexual relationships fraught. Reproductive health care changes that completely, giving women an opportunity to explore our desires without worrying too much about unwanted childbirth or disease, and when we do so, we realize that actually, we're just like men. And now instead of sex being the source of friction between men and women, it can bring people together. (Also, platonic friendships are a lot easier because people who are sexually satisfied aren't injecting sex into every interaction.) There's a reason that the same people who violently insist that men and women are complete opposites cringe at the idea of women having full reproductive health care; they fear men and women learning that in fact, we're basically the same. Nothing distracts from how alike men and women are like making women subservient to our biology while men are allowed to be free.
Feminism is dangerous not just because it can bring men and women together as allies. If anything, conservatives are just as terrified at how feminists have indicated that women are oppressed as a group and has encouraged women to stand together to resist that oppression. Turning women on each other is a major part of reactionary politics, and sex is a great weapon to use for that purpose. Women are still treated like the sex class, and that creates a lot of opportunities to divide women in various ways according to perceived sexual behaviors and desirability. There's a reason that conservatives are starting a "OMG GIRL SCOUTS ARE DIRTY SLUTS" campaign; it's about dividing women into "good girls" and "bad girls" and pitting them against each other, even before they even really have any kind of sexual urges at all. I think that's one reason they went after Komen so doggedly. Breast cancer is considered, inaccurately, as more of an older woman's concern. You start your mammograms just as your fertile years are winding down. Below-the-belt health care is considered, inaccurately, more of a younger woman's concern.** It's clear to me that they see this as another divide-and-conquer strategy, trying pit these two groups against each other. For antis, especially, they want to get more older women to snarl at younger ones that we shouldn't be clamoring for health care resources, but instead should just keep our legs shut.
This is bullshit, and I suspect won't work as well on older women as anti-choicers might think. My experience tells me that very few women go through menopause and then turn on their younger sisters who still have the needs of fertile women. On the contrary, I tend to find that older women are often more thoughtful and nuanced, having had enough experience to see that the division between "good girls" and "bad girls" is a lie, and that we're all bad girls. Sure, there are plenty of middle-aged and eldery church ladies, wagging their fingers at the sluts, but I suspect most of those women have been church ladies their entire lives, and have always preferred to throw stones at other women than see that we're all in this together. But since finger-wagging church ladies are a huge portion of the anti-choice movement, I could see how they'd see this as a way to beef up the divide between younger and older women. But even though I don't think this will work as well as they might hope, it's good to be mindful of it. And ask ourselves when we're getting all bent out of shape about the nerve of some people being at a different place in life and having different sexual and health needs, we have to ask why are we letting ourselves get riled up like that?
*Seriously, how long is it before fundie women start bragging about how they don't go to filthy gynecologists at all? On the fringes, you already have Christian fundies who believe that god wants women to give birth at home with a midwife, so I guess they're already there, looking for a way for women to go their whole lives without having a doctor address below-the-belt care. With the extremist turn as of late, I won't be surprised to see these sentiments spreading. Anyway, you can read my piece about the above/below divide wingnuts are carving out, and how to hold corporations who are coddling this accountable.
**I'm not an expert by any means on breast cancer, but I do know that the assumption that you don't need protection after you go through menopause means a lot of people being diagnosed with STDs when they thought they were too old for that.
As I noted last night, I have a blog post up at Slate about Susan G. Komen---who purports to be a women's health charity---abandoning their alliance with Planned Parenthood, even though 17% of Planned Parenthood's services are cancer screening and prevention. They claim that it's because Planned Parenthood is under investigation, but it seems that excuse was ginned up because it was easy cover for caving into anti-choice nuts. The investigation has been launched as a nuisance investigation by an anti-choice congressman, and is not compelled by any sincere concern that Planned Parenthood is violating the law with its funds. It's completely obvious that they're caving into anti-choice activists, and specifically, as I noted at Slate, into the ridiculous idea that you can separate "good girl" health care from "bad girl" health care, the latter being everything from cervical cancer prevention and treatment to abortion. And yes, before we forget, it's all lumped together with the anti-choice movement now. That's how they made the HPV vaccine an issue in the Republican primary, because it's widely believed that preventing cervical cancer gives girls "license" to be sluts.
In other words, a supposedly anti-cancer charity just threw their lot in with people who believe that cancer shouldn't be prevented if it's linked to sexually transmitted diseases. Objectively pro-cancer, at least for women they deem slutty, i.e. about 95% of us.
Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, doesn’t buy the foundation’s explanation, either. “That’s specious,” she said. Instead, Pearson says, “Komen’s chicken. Komen’s caving to pressure.” This is what antiabortion activists do so well: “They will target the providers and the people who relate to the providers,” she says. That’s because “they can’t make Planned Parenthood stop providing abortions” and “they can’t find any evidence that Planned Parenthood is inappropriately using federal funds.”
That's when I realized that anti-choicers do this so well because the war on reproductive health care is basically a witchhunt, and the religious fundamentalists behind it are the modern day version of medieval paranoids of old who believed that women who didn't conform to their exacting standards were consorting with Satan. In fact, considering the span of time and cultural change, the fact that the argument hasn't changed at all---they really do believe pro-choice health care providers are consorting with Satan---is almost startling. It's like they lifted it directly from their medieval ancestors. Except, instead of condemning witches to the stake, they simply want to keep them from doing their jobs, and allowing the other witches, i.e. women whose sexual choices they disapprove of, suffer from various afflications ranging from forced childbirth to death from cervical cancer as a warning to others to stay away from the devil's playground of sexual pleasure. And like traditional witch hunters, they have lurid imaginations, and project all their strange fantasies onto their targets, which is why abortion providers or even just pro-choice clinics have been accused of everything from running sex trafficking rings to instigating genocide to putting fetuses in food. And that's on top of the lurid accusations flung at the kinds of women who might visit a Planned Parenthood, especially unmarried young women. Those women are accused of creating sex cults around Plan B, organizing orgies for the strange purpose of getting really colorful penises in the room, and of using abortion as "birth control", i.e. preferring the no-doubt unequalled pleasures of a good uterus scraping to boring old pill use. I've definitely seen some medieval-style flights of fancy aimed at me personally, including a blogger putitng up a picture of me in a red sweater to make insinuations about the kind of woman who wears red. No, I'm serious.
But the most salient feature of a witch hunt is that the witch hunters, in their paranoia, are always looking to expand the circle of "guilt". They imagine demons in every corner, and vast conspiracies promoting what they believe is evil that need to be rooted out. In medieval witch hunts, if someone who didn't like you remembered you buying a chicken from the accused witch, you better fall to your knees and start accusing the accused of putting a curse on your family, or you might be assumed to be guilty, too. That's basically what's going on here. Because of the witch hunt logic, it does seem to be that more and more of women's health care is being rolled up under the word "abortion", which is why anti-choicers blithely claims that's all Planned Parenthood does. You can point out repeatedly that 97% of its services are not abortion, but in their mind, that's like saying that the accused witch spent some of her time not doing witchcraft. In their minds, while she slept she was consorting with Satan, and time spent with her pet cat now is her consorting with a familiar. I can't tell you how many times I've been called a "baby killer". Even if you are stupid enough to believe that abortion is killing babies, that accusation doesn't make sense; I've never had nor performed an abortion. But that's the point. The word "abortion" for anti-choicers long ago ceased to mean "terminating a pregnancy". Now it's just a catch-all scare term to be flung around whenever you want to whip people into a frenzy of hatred over women's liberation, especially women's sexual liberation.
Anyone who thinks breast cancer can be neatly cordoned off from this growing circle of hate for all things women's health care is fooling themselves. That's not how witch hunts work. The fear here is not about fetuses or babies per se, but a deep-set fear of female sexuality. Already anti-choicers have scooped breast cancer under the umbrella "abortion", claiming that abortion causes breast cancer. (It doesn't.) Komen would rather side with people who see breast cancer as god's judgment on you for having an abortion rather than side with people support comprehensive health care for women. That tells you all you need to know about their organization. I'm all for picking up your sneakers and taking up running as a hobby, but recommend now you do it for you, and not for the ever-elusive cure for cancer.
As usual, Jesse and I will be tweeting coverage of the Florida primary tonight, which you can check out here for me and here for Jesse. If you're not watching Twitter already, however, I highly recommend it. People are freaking out about the decision of Susan G. Komen to drop their support for Planned Parenthood. I'll be dumping links as fast as they're being created on this breaking story. It may seem like a small thing, but today was a big loss for women's health and a big loss for science.
