February 2008 – Page 3

Masculinity Crisis

via Ecdysiasm I came across this op/ed in the Seattle Times that illustrates pretty damn well why feminism cannot be separated from other gender-justice issues, and why women’s rights will never be fully realized until we also get rid of narrow masculine roles and homophobia. The op/ed starts out discussing the new “men’s movements” in conservative churches, aimed at re-establishing masculine roles as a way to deal with what church leaders perceive as a masculinity crisis. The result?

Personally, I have no problem with the effort to make church work better for men or challenging men to step up and do something with their lives. I do have a problem with it when it means, as it sometimes does, putting down women or insisting women play only secondary roles in church or family. And I have a big problem with the guy emphasis when it relies on making gay men objects of derision and ridicule.

Such appears to be the case in remarks made by Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland. Hutcherson has gotten headlines for his efforts to pressure Microsoft on gay issues. He has a right to his views — views he supports with texts from Scripture. Reasonable people can disagree over whether gay marriage is a good idea.

But Hutcherson goes beyond reasonable, at least to judge by the report of Seattle psychologist Valerie Tarico. Tarico, a former staffer at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, was raised in a fundamentalist church. In recent months, she has made it her business to attend services at many of the large, conservative churches in the Seattle area, including Hutcherson’s, to see what’s going on.

On a Sunday when Tarico was present, Hutcherson was preaching on gender roles. During his sermon, Hutcherson stated, “God hates soft men” and “God hates effeminate men.” Hutcherson went on to say, “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”

Emphasis mine. Unsurprisingly, Hutcherson later defended himself by saying that it was a joke.

There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity premised on violence. There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity that sees femaleness as so insulting that men should react with full outrage if someone treats them like a “woman” by holding the door.

Hutcherson’s misogyny and his homophobia are not separate issues. He doesn’t just dislike homosexuality for the sake of it; he dislikes LGBT people because being queer challenges traditional gender roles. If penises and vaginas were just body parts without superiority attached to one or the other, and if sex was just an attribute like any other, two women pursuing a romantic relationship wouldn’t matter all that much. Two men getting married wouldn’t be any bigger a deal than a man marrying a woman. A person saying that their genitals don’t match their understanding of themselves, and taking steps to change that, wouldn’t be a threat to the social order.

These are not separate issues. And yet there are far, far more people in this country (and perhaps even reading this blog) who support women’s rights, but not gay rights or trans rights or the full destruction of traditional gender roles. Hopefully, comments like Hutcherson’s will at least help to convince more feminist-leaning moderates and progressives that all of us have a dog in this fight.

Get over it.

Says James Wolcott to the legions of white dudes who are up in arms about uppity bitches invading “their” spaces, from the golf course to the factory line to the White House:

Lunch room, locker room: the trash talk is still being batted around about women as if everything’s the fault of a few feminist bitches with frigid temperatures and Tilda Swinton hauteur who insist on being where they’re not wanted, going where they don’t belong. And underneath the trash talk is the even more unattractive noise of white men whining because things aren’t like they used to be. No, they are not. This news should have reached you by now and soaked in. Things haven’t been like they used to be for about thirty years now, hell, maybe forty. So set your inner Pat Buchanan free in that patchy stretch of woods along the interstate and accept the reality of women’s equality without being such a bullying baby about it.

Read it all. Thanks to Lauren for the link.

The Issue That Shall Trump All Others

Democrats may be against wars that kill millions, in favor poverty alleviation, and supportive of international policies that save millions more, but so long as they don’t think women should be forced into continuing pregnancies, they’re going to Hell. And you’re going with them if you vote for Obama or Clinton:

Now the bishops have raised the stakes: It’s not only lawmakers and candidates who risk damnation, 98 percent of the U.S. bishops agreed last November, but the voters who put them in office. “It is important to be clear,” the bishops said in a 44-page statement titled “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” “that the political choices faced by citizens[emphasis added] not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity but also may affect the individual’s salvation.” Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, chairman of the committee that drafted the statement, put those high-minded sentiments into plain English earlier this month. Support for a candidate who “espouses policies that are gravely immoral” is possible “only under exceptional circumstances that are hard to imagine,” he told the Cathedral Club of Brooklyn.

And apparently the Church couldn’t just condemn progressive voters; it had to compare them to Nazis:

“In our country we have, for the most part, allowed the party of death and the court system it has produced to eliminate, since 1973, upwards of 40 million of our fellow citizens without allowing them to see the light of day,” wrote Rockford, Ill., Bishop Thomas Doran in 2006. “No doubt, we shall soon outstrip the Nazis in doing human beings to death.” He continued, “We know . . . that adherents of one political party would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people.”

I’m sure that the many people whose family members were killed, tortured and/or imprisoned in the Holocaust appreciate having their suffering compared with a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy. And given that many of those people live in the United States, and certainly some of them vote Democrat, I’m sure they’re thrilled to hear that they’re just like Nazis.

I’m also sure that all the people who are suffering and dying as a result of our international policies (preemptive war, “pro-life” health care, etc) will be just thrilled to hear that God is on the GOP side.

Abstinence 4 Life

I’ve mentioned before that no “pro-life” group in the United States supports contraception access (despite the fact that contraception is the most effective way to decrease the abortion rate), and we’ve detailed dozens of instances of “pro-life” groups taking active stances against contraception, even though doing so inevitably jacks up the demand for abortion. Now that it’s spring break time, anti-choice groups are again up in arms that Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups are giving out emergency contraception. Now, I suspect that a lot of the “College students are having crazy promiscuous spring break sex!!!” headlines are overblown, but whether or not spring break action is as heated as the scaremongers claim, it still makes sense to prevent unwanted pregnancy. The “pro-life” folks, though, would prefer to just tell college students to knock it off and not have sex til they’re married — a scheme that has not worked in any society in the history of the world, but that’s not stopping ’em from trying. Who knows, maybe 2008 will be their year.

(Of course, they’re also telling us that using the word “vagina” is “live porn” and that masturbation enables violence — it “breaks down the concept of relationship, and thus promotes radical individualism, which is adamantly opposed to community building, which is necessary for the eradication of violence” — so perhaps their understanding of sex and human relationships is a tad off. And no I could not make this shit up if I tried).

So we know that “pro-life” groups are all about increasing the abortion rate in order to promote their no-sexual-pleasure-without-punishment agenda. But what about married folks? To hear anti-choicers talk, marriage is the magic bullet: Sex, which was once dirty and disgusting and shameful, is magically transformed into something beautiful and pleasurable and perfect, and you apparently never need condoms, contraception or abortion, because God has your back. But what about married people who only want two or three or six children, or none at all? What about women who have health or life-threatening conditions that make pregnancy dangerous — and what about men who don’t think their wives should have to sacrifice their lives at the altar of “pro-life” politics?

The solution is simple: Take up Scrabble or something, because you’re gonna need a hobby to make up for all the sex you aren’t having:

It is possible to enjoy, and I mean enjoy, a sexless relationship.

My husband and I married and both agreed that sex meant little to either of us.

We did want a family. But once we had our children, we did not feel the need to continue to have sex.

That doesn’t mean we are not very affectionate towards each other. I believe it helped we are both strong Christians. Neither of us liked the idea of contraception. Sex should, after all, be about having children so instead of any pill or other method distasteful to us, we chose celibacy.

This year we will celebrate our ruby wedding so, at least for us, it worked. I think like the lady who wrote to you, that it can make a relationship stronger.

If you don’t want to have sex, more power to you. If contraception isn’t your bag and you want all acts of copulation to be open to babies, good on you. Do your thing, and I promise 100% that I will not interfere. But that’s the problem with the “have as many babies as God gives you” crowd; since they aren’t satisfied simply having as many babies as God gives them, they want to make you accept their version of God’s plan too.

Anti-choicers argue that birth control is bad because it’s medicine that doesn’t “heal;” there’s nothing disordered about fertility, they argue, so why try to control it? So I wonder, are pro-lifers allowed to take Zicam and AirBorne? I mean, if God wants you to get sick, don’t you think you should accept His gifts? What about vaccines? Preventative medicine in general?

If you don’t want to have sex, don’t have sex. If you think sex should only be for baby-making, then baby-make away. If you think masturbation is murder, then keep your hands above your waist. But can you at least let the rest of us enjoy ourselves?

Bitches get stuff done.

So very, very true:

thanks to Deanna for the link.

Huckabee Equates Abortion With Slavery

Nope, nothing problematic there.

But thank God that John McCain — that maverick, totally moderate, not-a-politician-like-the-other-guys, different kind of candidate — would never ever pick a guy like Huckabee to be his running mate. Because, you know, he’s such a maverick and not beholden to the religious right nutjobs. Right?

What she said

I had plans for writing a long post on why withholding your vote in November is a perfectly rational, defensible and principled stance if you’re offended by racist dogwhistles coming out of the Clinton camp or sexist dogwhistles coming from Obama. Why? Because it’s not the voter’s job to just suck it up and vote for someone who hasn’t worked for your vote; it’s the candidate’s job to make sure that he or she doesn’t turn off voters. And all the bullying about handing the election to McCain and losing Roe v. Wade isn’t going to change that one simple fact.

But then I saw that Portly Dyke has pretty much said everything I wanted to say, and said it better. So go read her post.

Abstinence-Only Driver’s Ed

So good.

Please note the other poster, above the door there: DON’T WANT TO DIE? DON’T TRY TO DRIVE. It’s just that simple.

Fear not, kids: there’s a time in your life when driving a car will cease to be an evil and disgusting shame-riddled experience. That happens after you’re married. My husband got me a Corvette for our anniversary. How sweet is that? And take it from ME: NO premarital driving could ever have felt as good as the driving my husband and I do together.

…

And for those of you wondering if it’s OK for you to learn to drive because you’re gay and can’t get legally married, well, don’t worry your troubled minds about that, because there’s no driving where YOU’RE headed. Everyone in Greenwich Village takes the subway.

Just say no, kids. JUST SAY NO.

Another Gender Non-Conforming Person Murdered

Simmie Williams, a 17-year-old kid, was shot and killed this morning. Simmie is alternately being referred to as a “cross-dresser” and a “transvestite” in the (already limited) press coverage. I’m having a hard time finding out details about what happened, since the news stories are simply telling me that Simmie was “dressed like a woman” and “he” had a verbal argument with two men (no info on whether Simmie identified as male or female, but the press is apparently comfortable choosing for Simmie). No quotes from Simmie’s family or friends. None of the usual humanizing comments or tidbits from people who knew Simmie. Just the usual identification of a freak, an impostor “dressed as a woman.”

Wonder why that could be.

You know, we could actually decide to do something about the Simmie Williamses and the Sanesha Stewarts and the Bella Evangelistas and all the victims whose names never make the papers, but instead our news media is bloviating about boys in the girls’ room. So you’ll forgive me if I kind of feel like throwing something right now.

Instead, I read Holly and I read Little Light and I cry. And I feel so, so ashamed of being part of a society that does this to people.

Thanks to Tatiana for the link — and for the simple statement that “People are assholes.” That just about sums it up.

Friday Random Ten – the Too Much Snow in New York edition

This basically been my life lately.

1. Radiohead – All I Need
2. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – One Good Son
3. Death Cab for Cutie – Company Calls Epilogue
4. Les Savy Fav – Fading Vibes
5. Yo La Tengo – Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo
6. Tom Waits – Ruby’s Arms [live]
7. Guided by Voices – Motor Away
8. MC Solaar – Solaar Pleure
9. The Pogues – The Sunny Side of the Street
10. Miles Davis – So What

Today I’m on a crazy apartment-cleaning and errand-running spree, and I’m listening to Girl Talk while I do it: