In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: March 2007

File Under: Get pregnant, lose your civil liberties

Ah, the things politicians will do in the name of protecting babies! Now, we all know that the term “protecting babies,” when uttered by a “pro-life” individual, is usually code for “reminding women that they are simply vessels who, once occupied,* cease to possess the basic rights that non-vessels are entitled to (non-vessels being “men,” otherwise known as “actual human beings”) .”

There’s the classic example of the pregnant drug addict being prosecuted after she gives birth, despite the fact that neither being a drug addict nor being pregnant is actually a crime. There’s penalizing low-income women for giving birth by limiting their welfare benefits if they have more children. There are state laws which require that pregnant brain-dead women be kept on life support until they give birth, even if they have living wills which specify that they wish to be taken off under those conditions.

In other words, stripping women of their rights as soon as they become pregnant is nothing new. So Georgia’s proposal to require that doctors offer HIV tests to all pregnant women — and make a note in their medical records if they refuse — should not surprise us.

At first glance, this bill doesn’t seem all that egregious — after all, who doesn’t support cutting the risk of HIV transmission? But this puts pregnant women in a unique category of people who must be offered the test, and who will be on record as to accepting it or not. If we’re really worried about HIV transmission, why not require that doctors offer an HIV test to every sexually active boy or man they treat, and make a permanent note if he refuses? After all, men are pretty good at spreading STIs to their partners (far better than women). But we don’t do that because men, as a class, are assumed to be responsible enough to request a test if they feel they need it. Unless they’re men who are part of a social underclass and whose liberties have already been largely taken away, like prisoners — and even then we hesitate (thank God).

Of course doctors should be telling all of their patients about the risks of any medical condition — including telling pregnant women that HIV transmission to their fetus is a possibility if they’re infected with the virus. Of course they should offer a test. But mandating that a test is offered, and recording the results or the refusal, is part of a dangerous pattern taking shape, which considers pregnant women to be a class that deserves fewer rights, fewer liberties, and fewer social protections than full-fledged human beings.

*Of course, in a conservative anti-choice utopia, once the occupier is born and exists as an actual human person, s/he would be automatically entitled to fewer rights than s/he had while in utero. Like health care, which is under federal law given to fetuses but not to pregnant women. Or the right to use someone else’s body without their consent to sustain your own existence.

…when you’re a woman

Way to go, WaPo:

When is $4 million really $2.8 million?

One answer is “When you’re a woman,” as the Labor Department has repeatedly found that women earn about 75 cents for every dollar that men earn for the same work.

But this week’s answer is “When you are the Office of Women’s Health” within the Food and Drug Administration. That office, which was at the center of a politically damaging storm over the emergency contraceptive “Plan B,” just had more than one-quarter of this year’s $4 million operating budget quietly removed, insiders say.

Now that is a beautiful lead.

The fact that the Office of Women’s Health is being quietly under-funded is not an accident, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s happening now. It’s the FDA’s way of telling the little ladies to step down and shut up:

Women’s health advocates inside and outside the agency suspect they are witnessing, at least in part, a long-anticipated payback for the trouble the office stirred during the prolonged debate over nonprescription sales of Plan B. Taking a position that chafed the administration’s conservative base, the office had stood up for scientific research that had backed the safety and appropriateness of such sales.

Standing up for science and appropriate healthcare in the face of the virginity-or-death crowd does not go over well. I hope that the FDA gets taken to task over this underhanded move. And I hope that progressive politicians don’t let this one slip under the radar.

Great, now I can jab rusty nails in my feet!

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When choosing between sex and death, conservative religious nuts will choose death every time — so long as it’s women and girls they’re killing.

Bill Maher gets on my nerves for a lot of reasons — his blatant sexism, for one — but when he’s right, he’s right (even if he can’t help himself from making the requisite hot-chicks-in-a-hot-tub and wives-don’t-put-out jokes). His op/ed about the HPV vaccine calls “pro-family” groups out on their hypocrisy in valuing their daughter’s hymens more than their lives:

Now for the bad news: Not everyone is pleased with this vaccine. That prevents cancer. Christian parent groups and churches nationwide are fighting it. Bridget Maher — no relation, and none planned — of the Family Research Council says giving girls the vaccine is bad, because the girls “may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”

Which is really a stretch. People don’t get the vaccine for typhoid and say, “Great, now I can drink the sewer water in Bombay.” It’s like saying if you give a kid a tetanus shot she’ll want to jab rusty nails in her feet. It’s like being against a cure for blindness because it’ll encourage masturbation. It’s like being for salmonella poisoning in peanut butter because it’ll discourage weirdos from spreading it on their ass and calling the dog.

Of course, as Bill knows, the right-wing anti-vaccine logic is entirely divorced from reality — and the wingnuts making that argument don’t care. Because it’s not really about protecting girls. It’s about punishing them:

But let’s be frank: These Christian groups aren’t just against the HPV shot; they’re against family planning and condoms and morning after pills — they want to make sure sex is as dangerous as possible, so that kids know, if they sleep around and get an STD, that’s God teaching them a lesson. And the lesson is, you should never have tried out for “American Idol” in the first place.

Bill uses gender-neutral terms, but the fact is that far-right religious organizations aren’t interested in hurting “kids,” they’re interested in hurting women and girls — and gay men, who, in their estimation, are pretty much the same thing.

Now, there are legitimate criticisms to be made of Big Pharma and Merck’s push to mandate the vaccine, especially after Vioxx. But this is hardly the concern of “family” organizations. Their emphasis is on “protecting” girls by letting them contract diseases, become unintentionally pregnant (and then legally compelling them to give birth), and die of cancer.

That’s wingnut morality for ya. Kind of like how saying “fuck” should get you fired from your job, but spending hundreds of billions of dollars to kill 165,000 people (and counting) is totally applause-worthy. Fuck that.

I Hate… well, everyone

Kenneth Eng is a real piece of work. A columnist for the San Francisco weekly AsianWeek — “The Voice of Asian America” — Eng recently penned a column titled “Why I Hate Blacks.” This follows other articles of Eng’s, “Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us” and “Why I Hate Asians.”

I’m embarrassed to say that Eng is a former NYU student who says he experienced racism after he “expressed my negative views on America, religion and African Americans.” Huh. Among Eng’s reasons for hating African Americans:

— “Blacks hate us. Every Asian who has ever come across them knows that they take almost every opportunity to hurl racist remarks at us.”

— “Contrary to media depictions, I would argue that blacks are weak-willed. They are the only race that has been enslaved for 300 years.”

— “Blacks are easy to coerce. This is proven by the fact that so many of them, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, tend to be Christians.”

Many in the Asian-American community are speaking out against Eng, and against the editorial decision to run this piece in the first place. Others, though, are making comments like “Rather than refute and bury this, we should be calling for a community dialogue to address this.”

Which is an interesting point. Yes, there are festering racial tensions between Asian-Americans and African-Americans, and among other racial groups as well (hello, Do the Right Thing). Yes, it would be valuable to have a productive conversation about these issues, and to flush them out and shine a light on them.

But columns like “Why I Hate Blacks” are not the way to start that conversation. What makes me nervous is that having a townhall discussion in response to hateful screeds lends those screeds a degree of legitimacy, and suggests that these kinds of conversations will only happen after an attention-hungry hate-monger kicks over a hornet’s nest. It justifies outrageously racist actions, from writing columns like this one to holding a Find the Illegal Immigrant hunt.

On the same token, it’s entirely possible to “refute and bury” off-the-wall hatred and still find a way to productively discuss issues of race and racism. I hope that’s what happens here. And in the meantime, I hope Eng is removed from his position and the editorial staff at AsianWeek uses better judgment in the future.

Thanks to Rizzo for the link.

UPDATE: An anonymous WSN source tells me that when Eng went to NYU, he applied for a position at the newspaper. One of his plans was to turn the opinion page into the science section, and run articles about issues like posthumanism, dimensional theory, string theory, and god knows what else. More than a year later, when the editorial staff had changed, he pitched the exact same column idea. The editor-in-chief rejected it, and Eng began making threatening phone calls to the office, calling her a “dumb white bitch.” It got to the point where security had to bar Eng from the building.

And according to his bio, he is the “youngest published sci-fi author in America.” For writing this. And yes, that is a dragon with an uzi.

Liberal Capitalist Pigs

I try and avoid posts about how you should all go out and buy stuff (except when I’m promoting the Feministe store — which, btw, I’m working on moving to a more socially-conscious site; please be patient — and my favorite environmentally-friendly feminist line, AuH2O), but I will give a shout-out to Radical Rags. I discovered them a few weeks ago, and ordered two shirts — this one and this one. They’re well-fitting and they look great. And once I make some money, I’ll be ordering myself this:

shirt

Check out their site. Lots of great stuff.

Wise up about drinking and rape

Finally, a feminist op/ed about drinking and rape that I can get behind. Jaclyn Friedman gets away from the finger-wagging “girls who drink will get themselves raped” lecturing that even feminist commentators too often fall back upon. She recognizes that, first and foremost, we must hold men responsible for their actions. She encourages promoting a pleasure-affirming message — which I would take a step further and say needs to also emphasize that sex should be fun, enjoyable and desired by both parties, not something that men always want and women have to stop, and not something which is inherently about humiliation, pain or disempowerment. I would also add that we need to get away from the knee-jerk response to mentioning self-defense techniques (actual self-defense classes, not drinking heavily, etc) every time the topic of rape comes up. Obviously, suggesting self-defensiveness makes sense in the context of Jaclyn’s article. But I’m not sure it fits as cleanly into a conversation about an actual rape, or a story about an actual rape survivor.

So I hope we can move away from the model of always holding women accountable for our own victimization, and start focusing on how we can raise boys and girls who have positive views on sex, who own their own sexualities, and who can imagine sex as something positive instead of dirty, shameful, or violent. Until then, read the whole article.

Help Us Help Ourselves: March 2007 Edition

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image via smiteme.

The Background: Help Us Help Ourselves is a project started by Lauren, where bloggers across the ‘sphere are asked to contribute their suggestions, advice and tips on how to do anything and everything. There’s an emphasis on saving money, but HUHO can offer help on just about anything. Round-ups happen roughly every month. The last one can be found here. Now, reader Arriana has created a HUHO Wiki, which is still awaiting approval, but which I think will be fully fabulous.

The March Carnival: We’ve gotten quite a few submissions, and they’re posted below the fold, divided into several categories. Check it out, and start thinking of ideas for next time. If I missed something, email me.

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