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

Month: February 2008

Words mean things

In my fantasyland, public figures attached to progressive causes would not run away from certain adjectives just because the Republicans have been very good at saying them with a sneer. And they would especially not do so when the adjective, in fact, fits. Behold Amy Sullivan, whose mission in life is to get Democrats to talk nice to the white evangelicals (even as more and more Americans run from organized religion):

You’re pro-choice. Does that interfere with being an evangelical?

Well, I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.

Actually, Amy, there is a label for you: Pro-Choice. You wouldn’t choose to have an abortion, but you don’t want to make it illegal because other women might make other choices. See how easy that was? By the way, you’ve been hanging out with Will Saletan, haven’t you?

There’s really no argument about whether it would be a good thing to reduce the abortion rate. That’s been something that’s been standard policy with the choice groups in addition to everyone else for decades. The problem is, I’ve been talking to these folks for a long, long time, and they say, “Of course we want to reduce abortion! Don’t people know that?” And I say, “No, they don’t know that. And you don’t get any credit for it if people only hear you talking about a right to choose.”….

And so the people Democrats need to speak to are those people in the middle who are kind of queasy about abortion but who don’t want to see it outlawed. Democrats never mention reducing the abortion rate or the rate of unplanned pregnancies, and so they lose that opportunity to reach out to voters who are less sure about their position on abortion.

Um, you have heard of “Safe, legal and rare,” right? Democrats aren’t exactly running around talking up abortion on demand up to the moment before birth, as some of the trolls around these parts would have it.

In other quarters, would it kill Democrats to start embracing the “liberal” label again proudly instead of running away from it? And even if you don’t want to reclaim it right now, maybe just, you know, stop trying to define it away?

But what do I know? I live in a fantasyland.

Good Reads for Today

If the AlterNet self-promotion starts to get old, just say the word — but I spend about 20 hours a week gathering great content to post over there, so I figure I should let you all know when there’s really good stuff up. You can still sign up for the weekly newsletter (it goes out every Wednesday) by going here and entering your email and zip cope in the upper-right-hand box.

My favorite stories today are Leveraging the Power of Race and Gender, about how the candidates should be talking about the impact of identity on global politics; and The Medical Right Falls Hard for Ultrasounds — Often at the Expense of Women’s Health (also at RH Reality Check). Ultrasounds are the latest in anti-choice activism, and I often have a hard time articulating why it’s bad that pregnant woman should be forced (or coerced) into viewing an ultrasound of their fetus if they’re considering terminating a pregnancy. This article does a great job of explaining why it’s not only unnecessary, but dangerous — and another example of anti-choice groups disregarding women’s health and well-being in the name of ideology.

But there are lots of pieces worth noting and checking out, so I hope you’ll head over there and give it a look.

Some Numbers.

afghan woman
An Afghan woman at a protest in Kabul against the death sentence passed on the student Pervez Kambaksh for downloading allegedly blasphemous material.

–87: The percentage of Afghan women who report suffering physical abuse, half of which is sexual.
–60: The percentage of marriages in Afghanistan that are forced.
–57: The percentage of Afghan brides who are under the age of 16.
–88: The illiteracy rate amongst Afghan women.
–5: The percentage of Afghan girls attending secondary school.
–1 in 9: The number of women in Afghanistan who die in childbirth — that’s the highest in the world, alongside Sierra Leone.
–1 Million: The number of Afghan widows who have no rights, including no right to work — leaving them to beg on the street.
–£800 to £2,000: The price of a child bride if Afghanistan.

And Afghanistan is the only country where the suicide rate is higher for women than for men.

Just a few things to think about today, and every time you hear politicians talk about how we “liberated” Afghanistan and Afghan women.

Those fickle faithful

Interesting study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.

What’s interesting about this is that most Americans who call themselves religious probably couldn’t tell you much about the actual beliefs their church or denomination subscribes to, which probably makes it easier to jump from church to church. And in some cases, the churches deliberately play down the more intolerant aspects of their faith in order to attract members who are driven by a need to belong, not a need to subscribe to a strict Pentecostal theology or scary Apocalyptic revenge fantasies (yes, I’m looking at you, Rick Warren). Though I’m sure that there are people for whom the consigning-all-those-other-sinners-to-hell (because we are godly and we are saved) bit is the main attraction.

And then there’s the Catholic church, which is what I left. And lookee here:

The percentage of Catholics in the American population has held steady for decades at about 25 percent. But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

The Catholic Church has lost more adherents than any other group: about one-third of respondents raised Catholic said they no longer identified as such. Based on the data, the survey showed, “this means that roughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.”

That means there are about as many ex-Catholics than there are, say, Southern Baptists. I don’t suppose that the fact that the Pope and the Bishops, theoretically celibates all, are out there telling Catholics not to use birth control, and how to vote, and all kinds of fun things like that, has anything to do with it. Losing one-third — ONE THIRD! — of cradle Catholics is a pretty big deal. It would be interesting to find out how many of them left after the Church began its rightward lurch under JPII after many years of liberalization, cracking down on liberation theologists, stopping cold the expansion of the role of women in the Church, and reinvigorating the office of the Inquisition (which was Papa Ratzi’s last job). I’ve often thought that JPII shrunk the Church to the point where little other than abortion and regulating female sexuality* is its focus.

Another interesting finding is that the religiously unaffiliated have been growing, although those that do not belong to a particular religious affiliation are not necessarily nonbelievers:

In the 1980s, the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center indicated that from 5 percent to 8 percent of the population described itself as unaffiliated with a particular religion.

In the Pew survey 7.3 percent of the adult population said they were unaffiliated with a faith as children. That segment increases to 16.1 percent of the population in adulthood, the survey found. The unaffiliated are largely under 50 and male. “Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13 percent of women,” the survey said.

The rise of the unaffiliated does not mean that Americans are becoming less religious, however. Contrary to assumptions that most of the unaffiliated are atheists or agnostics, most described their religion “as nothing in particular.” Pew researchers said that later projects would delve more deeply into the beliefs and practices of the unaffiliated and would try to determine if they remain so as they age.

Thoughts? Does this bode well for the country?

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* Regulating male sexuality? Only when they’re gay. Or when they’re priests who get caught, but that’s blamed on either Teh Gay or on the wanton temptingness of 12-year-old boys.

Gardasil for Boys

Apparently the idea of vaccinating boys against HPV is a tad controversial — even though the vaccine is already approved for girls.

At issue is the fact that HPV is a major risk factor for cervical cancer, which women can get but boys can’t. So parents are wondering why they have to vaccinate their boys for a “girl’s disease.” What the article doesn’t get to until halfway down the second page is that the strains of HPV prevented by Gardasil are the ones that cause genital warts, penile cancer and anal cancer — and I’m relatively confident that boys can get all of those. But that doesn’t stop the reporter from writing an entirely sexist, condescending and obnoxious hit piece about vaccinating boys against HPV:

HOW cool are those Gardasil Girls? Riding horses, flinging softballs, bashing away on drum sets: on the television commercials, they are pugnacious and utterly winning. They want to be “One Less,” they chant — one less victim of cervical cancer. Get vaccinated with Gardasil, they urge their sisters. Protect yourselves against the human papillomavirus, or H.P.V., which causes cervical cancer.

But someone’s missing from this grrlpower tableau.

Ah, that would be Gardasil Boy.

Has Jan Hoffman never seen a pharmaceutical commercial in his/her life? They all show shiny happy people going kayak or mountain-climbing or doing whatever else they couldn’t do before they had medicine to treat genital herpes / arthritis / heart disease / whatever. That’s the schtick. Although I suppose it’s more fun to mock the “Gardasil Girl” than it is to deal with the actual issues; and it’s more interesting to paint a picture of a controversial vaccine than to recognize that most people are a-ok with preventing cancer.

I understand the hesitancy to give your kids a new vaccine. I haven’t gotten the HPV vaccine largely because I can’t afford it and it’s not covered by my insurance, but I’ve certainly weighed the potential risks of getting injected with a relatively new product, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me nervous. That said, I tend to be personally averse to medical treatment in general, so it’s more a weird individual thing about me being a paranoid scaredy-cat than it is about Gardasil. And at the end of the day, watching more than one friend go through HPV-related health problems has convinced me that the vaccine is the way to go.

Point being, I understand parents’ hesitancy. But vaccines aren’t just about your own personal health — they’re about public health. And that understanding is missing in this piece.

Thankfully, a few parents seem to get it:

That’s good enough for some mothers. “If there was a vaccine I could take that would get rid of prostate cancer, why wouldn’t I?” said Lisa Lippman, a Manhattan real estate broker with three sons. “If there was a vaccine that sons could get that would get rid of breast cancer, most parents wouldn’t hesitate. But cervical cancer is the ‘sex cancer.’ ”

Unfortunately, the reporter doesn’t — and s/he plays right into sexist stereotypes by only talking to mothers, as if moms are the only family members who care about their children’s health.

The article is kind of infuriating, but this quote was my absolute favorite:

A few prescient pediatricians are already laying a foundation. The other day, during Cathy Anderson’s 11-year-old son’s annual check-up, the pediatrician mentioned that Gardasil might become available for boys.

“He talked about taking responsibility for controlling a communicable disease,” said Mrs. Anderson, a stay-at-home mother in West Lafayette, Ind. “My first reaction was: ‘Well, that makes sense.’ Then I told my son he wouldn’t have to worry about the disease, because he wouldn’t be having sex until he’d been married for a long time.”

So now you don’t just have to wait until you’re married, you have to wait until you’ve been married for a long time. Beautiful.

Lots of diseases disproportionately affect one community or another. But when those diseases are deadly, and when we find a way to prevent them, we do. This isn’t about “vaccinating boys for girls’ sake;” this is about a public health issue that we need to nip in the bud. And the fact that “lots of women die of this disease and almost all of them get it from men” isn’t enough reason to vaccinate boys too is a pretty good indicator of just how misogynist and backwards our society can be.

Finally, why the fuck is this article in the Styles section?

Take Action for Women in the UK

Conservative UK politician David Cameron is calling for the time limit on legal abortion to be lowered. There hasn’t been an official suggestion as to what the new limit would be, but conservatives are suggesting that it be decreased by a full month. It’s important to emphasize that none of the major British medical organizations support the legal abortion cut; neither the British Medical Association nor the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists believe there is a case for changing the existing limits.

Concerned pro-choicers in the UK have a voice on this one, though. You can contact David Cameron directly and let him know that attacking choice is not a vote-winning strategy.

Thanks to Liss for the link.

French parents can name fetuses

Interesting holding:

France’s high court has ruled that parents have the right to officially name, register and bury a fetus that is stillborn or miscarried regardless of its stage of development.

Parents say the ruling will allow them to deal with their loss. They say their loss has been compounded by their inability to register the death or keep the fetus for burial.

But critics say it chips away at abortion rights because it puts no age limit on when a fetus can receive a name and a burial.

Before the ruling only a fetus that had developed beyond the 22nd week of pregnancy could be legally recognized in France. That standard is based on the World Health Organization’s definition that a fetus is viable after 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Thoughts?

Thanks to Abby for the link.

A suggestion

When one is lamenting, a la Phyllis Schlafly, where all the feminists have gone, and bestowing the mantle of “real, pure feminists” on one group or another, it’s a good idea not to refer to women who don’t agree with you as “anti-women.”

Just a thought.

P.S.: Elizabeth Cady Stanton died over a hundred years ago. The world has changed a bit since then; it’s really not necessary for feminism to remain trapped in amber.

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