Today in "Men Hate You"

[bloodygranuaile]

You have no rights

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Gyaaaaaaaaaaah.

Pandagon also has a good discussion on why this sucks.

I also saw that Bridgestone Tires ad that aired last Superbowl for the first time yesterday: the one where Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are driving down the road (Mr. Potato head is the one driving, like in every media representation of a couple driving somewhere that I have ever seen in my entire life), and Mrs. Potato Head is talking, and then Mr. Potato Head brakes really suddenly and Mrs.' mouth flies off and bounces down the mountain so she can't talk to him anymore, and Mr. looks really happy. So the tires have served their purpose as tires to... make the wife shut up! Because, as everyone who's been around those chatty women BUT HAS NEVER EVER EVER FOR A SINGLE MINUTE IN THEIR ENTIRE LIVES BEEN IN A PUBLIC OR SOCIAL SITUATION WITH A MAN knows, those wimmins sure do talk a lot!

Sure, it's not really quite as important as the idea that, if the wingnuts keep managing to get their way because the Dems will throw half the population under the bus at the slightest indication that said wingnuts are up for another fun game of Lucy-pretending-to-hold-the-football, I may one day lose coverage for my not-getting-cramps-and-bleeding-and-dying pills and start having to pay upwards of a hundred dollars a month instead of thirty (assuming I stay exclusively in states with pharmacists who usually don't have religious objections to doing their jobs, which I plan on doing) just because some insecure old d00ds are afraid that some woman, somewhere, is being a slut!!!1!!1!!1111!!1!11ohnoez!!!!! But that "women talk more than men" meme just drives me completely motherfucking bananas. I don't know what men these people think they're hanging out with, but pretty much all the men I know are loudly opinionated pompous windbags. Sure, some don't have "pompous windbag" be the very FIRST thing you think of to describe them (although plenty of them do), but they all talk a lot, usually loudly. Half of the dudes I know never even developed the "inside voices" that they try to teach you in kindergarten. I mean, most of the women I know do talk a lot too, but NOBODY'S PRETENDING THEY DON'T. It especially drives me bananas that pretty much EVERY SINGLE stand-up comic in the history of standup comedy, except Eddie Izzard (who is awesome), has at least one spiel about how their wives or gfs sometimes try to talk to them, and that's really stupid and obviously they don't understand anything about Teh Menz, because Us Mens Do Not Talk, because they Do Not Think About Stuff, and Don't Have Opinions! Which is why the standup comedy industry is over 90% dominated by MEN MAKING ENTIRE CAREERS OUT OF TALKING FOR HOURS AT A TIME, TELLING PEOPLE THEIR OPINIONS ABOUT SHIT.

(Ordinarily, that would look like a massive failure in logic. However, that is impossible, because Men Are Logical. If the logic in question is "circular" or "faulty" or "does not remotely resemble" logic, that is still a type of Logic if men think it.)

(Yes, because I did need to put in a dig at my #2 Least Favorite Sexist Trope Ever as well. If I'm venting, I'm gonna vent out as much of this shit as possible, dammit!)

Women should band together and start our own political party called the It's Getting Fucking Crowded Under This Fucking Bus Party.

Anyway, I need to go finish my paper on a three-hundred-page novel with a cast of dozens, in which there are three female characters total, exactly one of whom has any lines at all (fewer than six, though).

Anyone who can name me a three-hundred-page novel with a cast of dozens, in which no more than three of said characters are male and no more than one of them talks (total lines must equal one page of text or less), gets cookies.

Comments

[agentclaudia.livejournal.com]

I don't buy the "no excuse to get pregnant" argument. Affordable and accessible birth control does a lot to reduce abortion rates, yes. But sometimes, even when you do it right, it fails. And I think that when it fails, that's not a sufficient justification for nine months of state-sanctioned torture. Refusing an abortion to someone who used whatever resources and knowledge were actually available to her (whether that's the pill and a condom, if they're educated, wealthy, and live in a liberal area, or standing up and washing with bleach if they're in some back-asswards fundie hellhole that's far more likely to be the places where they succeed in making abortion difficult to obtain), is more akin to refusing to treat injuries sustained in a car accident because, y'know, they made the decision to get in a car, and cars are dangerous.

And they are.

But we still don't sit around and let you bleed out if you crash, and the *reason* we don't sit around and let you bleed out if you crash is because sometimes men drive too.

I would like to reduce the abortion rate. I would like to do this by reducing the demand for abortion. Attempting to reduce it forcibly by making it harder for that demand to be met, however, is inhuman. Period.

Even if you believe a small clump of cells is a person, in no other aspect of medical law is somebody legally mandated to give up their body to save someone else's life. You might think they're a huge douchebag if they don't, but nobody is allowed to force them. If I'm dead, the state isn't allowed to use my organs to save someone else's life unless I give my express permission. Why should I have fewer rights when I'm alive than I will when I'm dead?

[agentclaudia.livejournal.com]

I think it would be ideal if we could reduce the unwanted pregnancy to rate to 0.00%.

However, for as long as we can only get it down to numbers that are still numbers, no matter how small, those women need resources, not punishment. If we can develop a way to remove the fetus or embryo and keep it around until we can grow it later, that would be awesome. As long as we can't do that, that's not the mother's fault.

The notion that someone with an unwanted pregnancy should "just" stick it out for nine months and give it up for adoption is unrealistic in the extreme. Do some people get abortions and regret it? Yes, any decision a human being can make comes with the possibility that they will wish they'd made a different one at a later date. It's a consequence of having a mind. Pregnancy, birth, and post-partum adjustments take a much more extreme toll on people physically, though, and have at least as much likelihood to affect them emotionally. I may have a little bit of a personal bias here, since I don't have any friends or relatives have that spent time in mental institutes for post-abortion breakdowns, but I've seen what happens when a woman gets railroaded into letting other people decide what to do with her body for a year. I don't want to see what being legally obligated to do so would do to people.

The Church teaches that a one-celled egg becomes a full, living human being at a point before the medical community would even class a woman as being pregnant, and the Church can continue to teach that. However, it's fundamentally unconstitutional to use that as a basis for public policy. And there aren't really any non-religious reasons to decide that the dividing line between "person" and "not-person" comes at the earliest possible moment that we can make ourselves see as a distinct and quantifiable "moment". Because, while people really like to divide things into binaries, and tend to get really wiggy about things that fall into the anomalous spaces that don't clearly sit in one of the binaries (the general coping methods are making them sacred, making them profane, or rationalizing them into a binary anyway), it's still unfair public policy to institutionally punish people for making our brains hurt by being associated with things that are not clearly one thing or the other. There is no dividing "line" between personhood and nonpersonhood. Pregnancy is the process by which a cell develops, gradually, over the course of nine months, into a person. Even science is a process of deciding where the lines are more than finding them. It's mythmaking. And humans need some sort of mythmaking in order to function, but that doesn't mean that anything we can come up with is nonproblematic, and the mere fact that we make myths certainly doesn't tell us which myths should be made law.

The Church didn't always think life began at conception. Some theologians believed it began when one could first detect movement, some believed life began with the first breath, some believed that a male fetus gained its soul after some number of days and a female fetus gained its soul after some number of weeks (I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but girls got their souls later). I'm still pretty certain that they finally decided on the earliest possible moment they could think of because it's the moment between when creating a baby is the work of both parties and when it becomes the work of the woman, and male-dominated institutions tend to devalue women's work, but I don't think they explicitly admitted that anywhere.

But that's a question for Catholic theologians. Not insurance companies, not House Representatives trying to regulate the insurance companies, not the jurors and judges at the trials of people who vandalize abortion clinics and shoot at doctors, nobody shaping governmental or economic policy. It's the government's job to fix public health problems by adding as many lines of defense as they can--or at least allow its citizens access to as many lines of defense as they can--not to sit around and wring their hands about how if certain lines of defense fail, it's really unconscionable for women to want a contingency plan instead of being endlessly self-sacrificing.

[agentclaudia.livejournal.com]

No hard feelings. ;) It's actually quite refreshing to debate the subject with someone who has an informed opinion that I disagree with. Since most of my social circle is pro-choice, most of what I hear from the pro-life side is from either activists/reports on activism or people who deliberately run around trying to find pro-choicers to insult. They tend to be somewhat less understanding about stuff like birth control. And, um, science. (Except Representative Ryan, who is my number one reason for considering moderate pro-lifers and the pro-life movement as not being related entities.)

You're awesome too!