bloodygranuaile

I belatedly (because it was again for a book club) read bell hooks’ Feminism Is for Everybody, which I have been wanting to read for a few years now. And I don’t know if I’m just in a bad mood lately or what, but I was kind of underwhelmed? I might just be tired of “primers” and other 101-level material for subjects I already have some familiarity with–I got occasionally bored with Gender Queer for some of the same reasons, even though I’d hardly consider myself an expert on genderqueerness–but also I’m just not sure how much Feminism Is for Everybody really works as a primer as opposed to a manifesto. It’s extremely short, but it’s subject matter covers the entirety of the feminist movement from the early 1960s through the 1990s, so it necessarily runs full of generalizations and its treatment of any given feminist subtopic tends to be a bit sweeping. But I’m not sure this means bell hooks did a bad job given that structure so much as I don’t like that structure and am no longer the audience for it.

That said, I’m not sure that today it’d be the best book for the absolute beginners who are its intended audience, either–it’s intended to be accessible but it’s certainly got its share of academic writing tics. The bigger issue is, I think, just that it’s a bit dated; we’re now as far away from the ‘90s as the ‘90s were from the beginning of the second wave, and I think some of it might be confusing to a current audience if you either aren’t old enough to remember the ‘80s and ‘90s backlash or at least read Susan Faludi’s Backlash. Then there’s stuff that is apparently confusing to other readers that seemed perfectly clear to me and I’m not quite sure what in my background reading makes it not-confusing to me but apparently very confusing for other readers (mainly the language around women involved in the second-wave movement “choosing” lesbianism or bisexuality, like, yes, people make choices about what terms they identify with and what relationships and activities they’re going to pursue and generally, like, how they are going to live, more modern writing might have said “exploring” here instead but I’m really not sure where people are getting the idea that hooks thinks you can choose your attractions).

I also bounced a bit off the bits about spirituality and love. Some of this is because I’m not very spiritual and I’m also definitely not a big love person. Some of it is also because I’ve lately become very wary of generalization-riddled leftist language that spends a lot of time talking about doing nebulous inner work on yourself as being the horizon of change, as opposed to showing up and doing organizing, and then developing whatever interpersonal skills are required for you to organize with other people without driving each other out of the room. The fact is that you can talk about love til you’re blue in the face, and organizing will still consist mostly of boring hard work that’s only bearable to do on a sustained basis if you can stand to be in a room with the people you do it with, and politics is mostly full of people who come to public meetings because otherwise nobody would stay in a room with them.

Anyway, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in this book, if not very in-depth-ly. A lot of it is definitely, like, bell hooks’ personal take on the second wave of the movement, and you may agree or disagree with her takes (or, if you are truly the beginner the book is for, have absolutely no idea how to go about testing them). It definitely touches on a number of the important common failure points and stratifications within feminism, especially racial and class division. The bits on sex works are a bit yikes but blessedly limited to a handful of sentences. Idunno, it’s an interesting collection of thoughts and high-level analysis about a variety of things related to feminism and the feminist movement, but I just didn’t find it as meaty as something like Women, Race, and Class, which is also fairly short but is also more specifically a history with a lot more concrete detail.

This weekend I read the third in the trio of Alternate Historical Witch Books About Terrible Religious Men that I’d wanted to read. The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow I think is as good as The Year of the Witching, making them both a bit better than The Witches of New York, although all three books were enjoyable, particularly if you like the sorts of elements they have in common (which I do). It’s got driven young witches and some dreadful religious zealots and even a mysterious plague.

One thing that makes this one a bit different than the other two is that it has three protagonists. Our main characters are Bella, Agnes, and June, a trio of sisters who, at the time the action takes place, end up fitting neatly into the archetypal roles of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. They all grew up on a farm under the thumb of their dad, who was a batterer and a drunk. For various reasons they all wind up in the city of New Salem (Old Salem, the one that is meant to be the alternate history version of Massachusetts’ now-beloved Witch City, was essentially smote out of existence by Inquisitors in this version of the witch trials). New Salem is going through some political unrest–there is a mysterious fever sweeping the city, and people are also getting all upset and scandalized by the extremely bourgeois and respectable suffragist group that is agitating very politely and entirely legally for the vote, and a factory with the absolutely fictional and original name of the Square Shirtwaist Factory has recently burned down, killing numerous garment workers.

In the middle of all this, the three sisters finding each other again–after having been estranged for seven years, due to a complex sequence of meddling and misunderstandings–kicks off some magical shenanigans, which inevitably causes a panicked backlash among the more uptight sectors of the city, which is most of it. Thus do the sisters decide to actually do the thing they keep getting in trouble for, and form a secret society of witches with the goal of bringing back the lost power of real serious business witching into the world, via the semi-mythical lost tower of Avalon, put together several hundred years ago by the Last Three Witches of the West (known only as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone) and hidden until such a time as it is called back. From here the shenanigans get wilder and more dangerous and start pulling in all other sorts of issues of political repression and social injustice–you’ve got the secret society of witches of color who are sort of dubiously watching the antics of the secret society of mostly-white witches to see how much trouble they’re going to get everyone into, the union men who secretly use bits of “boys’ magic” to rust railroad tracks and tie people’s shoelaces together, the remnants of the city’s Underground Railroad from before the war, immigrants and natives and queer people.

For all that it leans heavily into the “magic as a power fantasy of the oppressed” thing, it’s not a light or fluffy story; it’s a power fantasy for morbid weirdos like me who want to read brutal, violent, high-octane stories where characters have to continually choose between the crushing pain and mortal danger of being attached to other people and the crushing pain and mortal danger of being alone. And it delivers the blood and guts and existential despair in spades, tempered with more wholesome witchy favorites like the Power of Librarianship and the Power of Fashionably Cross-Dressed Lesbians.

I liked the depiction of the tensions between the respectable suffrage association and the more militant witchy types, and I appreciated that it wasn’t portrayed as quite as simple as “the respectable ones are dumb and small-minded”--the strengths and pitfalls of each strategy, as well as reasons why someone would wind up supporting one over the other, are shown pretty sympathetically. The costs of even respectable activism are high; the costs of magic are higher.

I’m not sure there’s anything real deep or insightful for me to say about this book since part of how it winds up at 500 pages is that it definitely makes all its viewpoints very explicit. This is fine as I am in agreement with basically all the viewpoints, and the book doesn’t come off as thinking its own viewpoints are a lot more radical than they are, the way The Witches of New York occasionally did. But it was a great 500 pages to spend a bitterly cold January weekend with.

I wanted to read some nonfiction next but I did not want to read anything too long, too dense, too serious, or quite frankly that I would have to think too hard about how to operationalize in my organizing. I figured Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us would fit the bill, since I’d heard it’s fairly theatrical and entertaining, and it was published in 1994 (meaning written in probably 1992, 1993) so it’s not expected to be the most current how-to re: Not Being An Ass About Trans People Existing anyway.

I was fortunately correct in all my assessments, and got through the book in one day. Some of it was clearly kind of dated, occasionally in ways that were a bit cringe (the use of “shaman” in particular is apologized for in the afterword, written later) but mostly in ways that were funny (the use of “electronic bulletin board” to describe where Being Very Online happens was quite a blast from the past). The changes in the language around trans issues were the most interesting to me; there’s a part where Bornstein laments that there is no word for the oppression of trans people, then mentions that the neologism “transphobia” is in vogue among certain sets and that it might have possibilities. “Transsexual” was still in use in the ‘90s in a way that is out of favor now, which I expected, but I also spotted a “transgendereds” (as a noun), which I think at the time might have been Bornstein just playing around with how to say things, but if I hear that these days I’ll swell up like a Jigglypuff in anticipation of having to fight somebody.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff I could nitpick based on what I understand now but I’m not going to, based partly on the fact that it was 1994 and discourse evolves, but also because Bornstein is very clear that she’s speaking for herself. She also has quite a lot to say about intra-community discourse–or, at the time, the lack thereof–and that trans people often disagree with each other and with her specifically, so it seems a bit besides the point to object to the bits in this book that flout what has since become the Not Being an Ass consensus now that there’s any consensus to flout. The most obvious example here is how much of the book is focused on bottom surgery, a thing that there’s been a pretty concerted effort to get people to stop fixating on. But also the book is very clearly intended to be funny, and it’s Bornstein’s bottom surgery, so she can make as many jokes about it as she wants.

While the book is largely lauded for its observations on gender in the culture we all live in, Bornstein herself has had a really wild and unusual life that I found quite fascinating to read about: repressed postwar childhood, hippie phase in young adulthood, had some kind of naval career, got sucked into Scientology for a bit, transitioned in the ‘80s which just seems like a weird decade to do have done anything whatsoever in. The book is full of photos from various stages of her life, including several under her deadname as a handsome young man with a very unfortunate ‘70s mustache and even more unfortunate eyebrows. She’s a really excellent main character.

I had no problem with the creative page layouts, the screenplay spliced into the second half of the book, or any of the other general artsiness; at this point I think I have a fairly good ear for when queer people are attempting to lay out theoretical models seriously and when they are shitposting and when they are doing both at the same time (which is often). Chapter 4, “Naming All the Parts,” is probably the most straightforward theoretical part of the book, attempting to articulate a model that separates out the various things that get lumped into the term “gender” and how they relate to each other (assignment, identity, and attribution; the types of cues that influence attribution, etc). In much of the rest of the book she goes back to using “gender” in ways that are a bit fuzzy about what precisely she means, or are deliberately absurd. Bornstein is also often clearly writing from a gender abolitionist standpoint, and it’s very interesting to examine the points of departure between pro-trans gender abolitionist arguments/theory and the ham-handed bungling thereof that results in things like TERFdom and its even more nonsensical Internet descendent, the “gender critical” movement. (Why I torture myself by trying to examine the arguments of mindless hate mobs like they’re actual arguments, I do not know.)

Overall, Gender Outlaw was an interesting and entertaining read, mostly for its actual content and a little bit as an artifact of its particular time.

I picked up a copy of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble at the LPC recently and said something along the lines of “I’m probably not going to get around to actually reading this book until one of my book clubs makes me” and then, lo and behold, one of my book clubs decided to actually make me.

As has traditionally been the case when I try to read philosophy instead of just watching PhilosophyTube videos, this book left me simultaneously going “I really need to read more philosophy” and “Help I am never reading philosophy again.” For me, the problem with reading modern philosophy is that it’s always in conversation with older philosophy that I’m not familiar with, and the problem with reading older philosophy is that it’s complete nonsense that I can’t stand actually reading and it makes me want to skip right to the bit where more modern, less bonkers writers critique it into something sensible. So basically every philosophy book I read is just a very slow process of trying to work around my lack of background in Lacanian symbolism or whatever and going “Ugggh I should probably actually read Foucault one of these days instead of just reading about Foucault, shouldn’t I?” That said I actually find Butler to be a very sharp, precise writer, and the stuff they write that isn’t all poking logical holes in the arguments of weird French people I’ve never read is always quite clear and readable.

The copy I have is the tenth anniversary edition, which is fun because the introduction gives a quick recap of about ten years’ worth of critiques, expansions, and other intellectual developments on the ideas developed in Gender Trouble, and I know there’s been another 20 years of developments on top of that, so before I’d even gotten to the book itself my “I should read that too” list had already noticeably grown.

While the critiques Butler discusses in their introduction make sense once they’ve introduced them, really the biggest “issue” with this book is the same as affects most serious theoretical works--it uses a lot of very specific and technical language in order to say some very specific and complicated things, much of which you need at least some background in “what are we talking about” to really grasp the specifics of, and many of those words have since been ripped from their context of an actual field of trying to study stuff seriously and started being thrown about in general conversation, where formerly very specific language is made as capacious as possible in order to maximize the frequency with which people who have no familiarity with the subject in question can throw them around to make it look like they’ve done the reading when they haven’t. Hence the current vogue for using “performative” to mean “empty symbolism,” basically the opposite of what it actually means in speech act theory, the thing Butler is drawing from when they use it to talk about how gender is constructed (oh, and don’t get me started on how people think “constructed” means “exists solely as a half-assed idea that you can then drop the minute you realize it’s constructed and has no real impact on anyone or anything unless you are insufficiently enlightened,” like personal belief in God). This is of course not Butler’s fault anymore than the use of “emotional labor” to mean “any labor I have emotions about doing” is Arlie Hochschild’s. It does, however, make me extra cranky about it, now that I have put in the effort to work through all these challenges to the various theories of sexual development put forth by weirdos like Freud and Kristeva in order to get to the conclusion, which reiterates all of Butler’s major points and what they believe their political implications to be fairly clearly.

The bulk of the book is essentially a genealogy of other philosophers’ ideas about what gender is and how it works and how sexual identities develop, and boy is it a wild ride. Some of these folks had some very weird shit to say about how a person winds up gay and frankly even weirder shit about how a person winds up straight. There’s a pretty obvious strain of complementarian thinking through a lot of these theories, which posit heterosexuality as some kind of necessary precondition for anchoring a sense of self as a woman or a man. I’m sure this is true for some people, but as an ace woman I really can only be like, dang, that sounds like a dreadfully stressful way of existing. Imagine actually internalizing that shit; couldn’t be me. There is a lot of stuff about Lacan that I cannot follow at all because I have no background in Lacanian philosophy whatsoever. Other parts were easier to follow; Butler’s dissection of Foucault’s take on the life and writings of Herculine Barbin was interesting partly because Herculine Barbin was a real person with concrete autobiographical details to discuss, but also partly because I’d already read Julia Serano’s take on Foucault’s take on Barbin in Whipping Girl so I wasn’t starting from zero there and was interested in comparing the two critiques.

I’m really glad I read this, even though I kind of wish I’d read it at a time when I had less other stuff going on so I could really give it the full attention and focus it deserves, which I feel like I’m not quite up to right now. I think the discussion next week will be really good; I’ll have to remember to take another look through the chapter and section headings first to refresh my memory about what stuff I want to talk about since it did take me almost three weeks to work my way through it.

 In my politics book club (now one of multiple politics book clubs, but whatever) we decided to read Julia Serano’s 2007 classic Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, even though books that came out when I was in college being “classics” now makes me feel old and creaky. I was not the one who suggested it, but I had recently picked up a copy because I’d started following Serano on Twitter, so it was a well-timed suggestion.

CW: Extremely personal

Despite my intention to cool it on purchasing books for a bit, I absolutely had to order myself a copy of Angela Chen’s recently published ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. I am not a big one for reading books on sexuality, although I have found the last few I’ve read to be worthwhile, though on the other hand this might be because I only read one every year or so when a book club makes me. But this year’s book I decided to read on my own and then managed to find a book club invitation for--by the New England Aces meetup, a group I am not a member of and have never interacted with, though one of my friends is one of their lead organizers--because this one was personal, but promised a higher level of discourse than, say, Tumblr, which is where I go when I get sick of the allo world’s bullshit and, apparently, wish to change things up by getting sick of Tumblr’s bullshit instead.

For the politics book club for March, we wanted to read something about #MeToo, but were stymied by the fact that the #MeToo movement is like two months old and so nobody has written a proper book about it yet. But it turns out there is indeed a recently published book that touches on a lot of the issues being looked at with #MeToo, and that I already had a copy of it, because back in December, Annie and I went to see Jaclyn Friedman talk at the Cambridge Public Library and had thus gotten signed copies of Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All.

So, I have seen a bunch of commentary lately about the term "Mary Sue," and how it has turned into a generic term for "any female character ever who I dislike, probably because she did something or was good at something or didn't get hit by a bus on Page 1 and I think this is terribly unrealistic (because we all know that real girls are never good at anything ever), and also, I detect some hint of wish fulfillment somewhere, which is self-evidently bad."

Many people smarter than I have discussed the massive, massive problems with the first parts of this definition, including such awesome ladies as Holly Black and Seanan McGuire.

But I also want to mention something that keeps cropping up about "wish-fulfillment characters," and that is: When the flying fucksticks did "wish fulfillment" become a dirty word? Especially in FANTASY? Ask nearly goddamn anybody who reads about the stories that inspired them and stuck with them and meant something to them as children and they will, at some point, mention some aspect of the story that they wished they could have in their own lives. Using storytelling to imagine fulfilling one's various wishes is a very, very old and, apparently until quite recently, fairly well respected part of the whole stories thing.

And I know that GRIMDARK and UBER GRITTY and ALL THE READERLY PAIN is very in right now, which I adore, particularly when it is done well, but even the edgiest and grittiest and grimdarkiest of stories that you can actually manage to get through and read have at least one part that makes you go "I wish I had that!" or "I wish I could do that!" Even A Song of Ice and Fire is full of food that you want to eat until you get sick (and now you can!), and witty one-liners from Tyrion that you wish you were clever enough to have thought of, and Brienne kicking so much ass and having so much strength and discipline that you only wish you could ever be that badass except you can't even get off Tumblr and go to the gym. Wish fulfillment can work perfectly well in a story and be all sorts of fun, particularly if it's supposed to be a more or less fun or fluffy story to begin with, and especially particularly if the author's wishes that they are fulfilling are similar to yours.

If they are not similar to yours, then just don't read the book/watch the movie/cosplay the lead from the TV show. Even some kinds of stories that have literally nothing what the fuck ever at all even a little bit to them except wish fulfillment can still be deep and meaningful to the people with those particular wishes. Example: Spiderman. Spiderman has, no joke, been a very important and formative and inspiring and hopeful story to legions of awkward nerdy dudes who like science and do not feel they have enough awesome to attract their sexy lamp of choice and do not feel particularly special or like they have the power to fix any of the various things in this world that need fixing. Spiderman makes these dudes feel that they can be special and powerful and fix things and acquire their preferred female-shaped life accessory. If Spiderman is not the fulfillment to your particular wishes, however, it is possibly one of the dumbest and most vacuous stories ever told. Particularly the movie version that my ex made me watch. (Watching it caused me to actually lose a lot of respect for that particular ex. He strongly believed that he was not stupid and did not like stupid things, because only stupid people like stupid things (this ex did not really believe in fun, as you can probably tell already), therefore, everything he liked was smart and objectively good, because he was a smart person with objectively good taste. So you can imagine how surprised I was that Spiderman turned out to be the most across-the-board straight up fucking stupid movie I had seen in about ten years at that point--literally nothing about it was "good" in any way outside of the wish fulfillment. It did not have clever dialogue, or a surprising plot, or good acting, or pretty costumes, or any understanding of basic physics, or ANYTHING.) The utter lack of anything whatsoever going on with Spiderman outside of the "It would be cool to be Spiderman!" aspect has not stopped it from becoming a well-beloved classic superhero and a household name. And do you know what? THAT'S OKAY. That has always been okay.

But suddenly now it is so not okay that people aren't even bothering to argue WHY it's not okay; they just say "Wish fulfillment" and everyone gravely nods that yes, truly, that is a terrible, terrible thing that shouldn't be happening anywhere near storytelling of any kind. (I suspect the not-okayness of wish fulfillment may have something to do with the increased visibility of stories wherein it is ladies' wishes that are being fulfilled, and if our wishes are fulfilled in fiction, maybe we will want them to be fulfilled in real life next, and then we might turn into feminists or something! Quelle horreur!)

I would like to posit that there is actually only one wish that is incompatible with good storytelling, although it is, sadly, a common one: The wish that everything be easy and free of conflict.

This is a problem because conflict is the basis of all stories. Non-completely-shitty English classes will teach you this somewhere around fourth grade.

This was also one of the major problems with Mary Sues back in the day when Mary Sue was a term only used in fanfiction to describe author self-insert characters who fulfilled all of the author's wishes at once, including the one to just have a nice time farting around in the fandom-land of choice and not having to go through the stress and mess of actually having the adventures. The problem with Mary Sue wasn't that she had powers, it was that she had such awesome and outsize powers that she was able to instantly neutralize the entire plot. And while I sympathize with the wish to be able to clean shit up quickly and not spend a lot of time fighting and worrying and being miserable, that is also fucking boring to read. Back before the flood of specifically female self-inserts by young writers into largely male-populated fandoms (I am looking at you, all the LotR Tenth Walker fics) gave us reason to come up with a speshul name that implied this was some sort of ladies-only thing, this was called "immature writing" or simply "bad writing," as it is an extremely common mistake of young writers to make their heroes super awesome but their villians/plots/marine-life-filled-tornados really wimpy, so the hero beats them too easily and there is no tension and basically a weak or nonexistent plot. I have read quite a few dude-authored original fiction pieces by teens where the hero was too awesome to get or stay in enough trouble to make any kind of story, particularly in my time as a school literary magazine editor. I rejected them all for being boring.

So, as Holly Black points out, there are some major issues with applying the term "Mary Sue" to any non-fanfiction character, but if we're going to do so, I wouldn't ask "Does this character have power/talent/the ability to get out of bed in the morning without concussing herself?" or "Does this character have anything going on that would be fun to have going on myself?", but "Is this character's power so disproportionate to everything else in the universe that it cuts the plot off at the knees?" because that is basically where any of this "wish fulfillment" or "has powers" or "is special" stuff becomes a problem.

I do think the last Twilight book runs close to Mary Sue-ness not just because it's hip to bash on Twilight or even because, as cleolinda says, Bella Swan Vampires Better Than You, but because the plot is resolved pretty much by the main characters being so awesome that their mere existence causes their enemies to stop being their enemies anymore, because nobody can resist their total awesomness, and that shit was boring. I remember when Breaking Dawn came out there was a pretty big outcry of disappointment from the fanbase because it was so anticlimactic; like, the whole book was gearing up for a big showdown, and the fight just never happened because they were too awesome for anyone to fight them, and the only reason the book was as long as it was was apparently because it takes the Volturi forever to get their immortal asses to Seattle.

In contrast, I have heard some people complain that Daine from Tamora Pierce's The Immortals Quartet is "a bit of a Mary-Sue," by which they mean that they think the rare and exceptionally strong magical powers and divine background are a bit much. However, I think this is rather bogus, because Daine is far from the only absurdly super-powered entity running around the Tortallverse. Her big antagonist through the series, Emperor Ozorne, is a well-matched adversary in terms of absurd superpoweredness: he is one of the most powerful mages in the world in his own right, AND he is the emperor of a very large and wealthy empire, meaning he has large numbers of other powerful mages at his disposal, plus money, armies, ships, etc. And he never gives up on making everybody else's lives hard. If Daine had showed up in Carthak at the beginning of Emperor Mage and just been like "Ozorne, sweetie, could you stop being a power-mad murderer and just, like, abdicate your throne to a democratic parliament and go play with your birds?" and Ozorne said "Of course! You're so amazingly persuasive, and the purity and goodness that shines out of your face has caused me to repent my villianous ways, and also I would do anything to make you happy because you've been here for thirty whole seconds and that is just more awesomeness than I can take"... well, that would be some bullshit Mary-Sue-ness. (And one of the things people forget when calling published characters Mary-Sues is that the fanfics that inspired this term REALLY WERE THAT BAD, because writing is hard, and therefore a lot of the young and inexperienced writers mucking about in fanfiction are veeeeeeeeeeery bad at it, and that is okay, in the same way that it is okay that the picture frame you made out of popsicle sticks for your mom in third grade is of inferior woodworking quality to the beautiful, useful, and sturdy dryhutch that my adult uncle with the carpentry hobby made twenty-five years ago and that I am still using as furniture.) But instead, we get two ridiculously high-powered characters who never give up on trying to defeat each other, and Ozorne keeps managing to put Daine into shitty situations that she actually has to work to get out of, like when she thinks he killed her best friend and teacher and she goes on a destructive rampage with her army of resurrected dinosaur skeletons, which, on the one hand, is conflict-ful and unpleasant for Daine because she is REALLY UPSET ABOUT NUMAIR in that scene; I hope to not have to be that upset about anything anytime soon!, but on the other hand, I challenge anyone to look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that they do not wish to be able to command an army of rampaging dinosaur skeletons.  Rampaging dinosaur skeletons ARE AWESOME, and their awesomeness should not be a complaint, unless you are straight up allergic to fun.

So I say, BRING ON THE WISH FULFILLMENT! Just don't leave out the plot while you're at it, and mix it up with plenty of readerly pain.

http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/891365.html

This is everything I try in a muddled fashion to explain to people who don't understand why Twilight is popular even though it's dumb.

Dr. George Tiller Shot And Killed In Church

Dr. Tiller has been specifically targeted for years because he provided late-term abortions, which are the abortions least likely to be entirely elective. So even if you're a rabidly sex-negative wingnut who thinks nobody should do more than hold hands unless it's for the specific purposes of having a child... late-term abortions have nothing to do with that. Women get late term abortions if they wanted the kid and complications arise/are discovered late into the pregnancy. Nobody just goes "Actually... d'ya know what, never mind, frak this" seven or eight months into a pregnancy. Which is why Tiller's clinic did useful shit like provide counseling for the patients and religious ceremonies for the fetuses (if the patient desired), while all the wingnuts were standing around outside slut-shaming already traumatized women (and, of course, not saving any of the slut-shaming for when the abstinence-only sex 'education' screed takes their own daughters to the clinic... 'cos somehow, the unwanted pregnancies of pro-lifers are always "exceptions" to the women-who-get-abortions-are-murderous-sluts rule, but developing eclampsia or something is not).

Pro-life, my ass.