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Tag: Are you serious?

First U.S. Female Genital Cutting* Trial

A father in Georgia is accused of cutting his two-year-old daughter’s clitoris with a pair of scissors. The article isn’t specific about what exactly he cut or cut off, but Type II genital cutting (clitoridectomy, wherein the entire clitoris and sometimes part of the labia are cut off) is the most common form practiced in Ethiopia, where the man is from.

The father denies that he did the cutting, but the fact remains that someone either cut or cut off a two-year-old girl’s clitoris with a pair of scissors. This is horrifying, and keep in mind that this procedure has been performed on some 140 million women and girls world-wide. More than 90 percent of women in countries like Egypt, Ethiopia and Somalia have undergone it.

While we’re prepared (rightly) to prosecute people who cut the genitals of girls in this country, we’re also fully prepared to send at-risk girls back to their home countries to face abuse there. We aren’t doing enough to support organizations abroad that combat FGC in their own communities. And we’re too busy imparting our own anti-woman policies abroad, which kill and maim tens of thousands of women, to really take much of a moral high ground on this one.

If this man did indeed cut his daughter’s clitoris, he deserves to be punished for it (and this is a pretty good example of the idea that feminism/human rights ideology and cultural relativism become incompatible at some point). But we shouldn’t assume that this is an isolated case. Nor should we ignore the experiences of the hundreds of millions of women and girls who have had their genitals cut, and the 2 million girls who are at risk for genital cutting this year alone.

Thanks to Raging Red for the link.

*The article refers to it as “female circumcision.” I don’t believe that this term is at all accurate to the facts of this case, and I will not use it.

Michael J. Fox: 1, B-List Godbag Celebrities: 0

The Republicans are bringing out the big guns to respond to Michael J. Fox’s incredibly moving ad promoting candidates who support stem cell research: James “Movie Jesus” Caviezel, Patricia “Feminist For Life” Heaton, and a couple of Missouri football players.

Let’s get this straight: Because there won’t be cures for 15 years, stem cell research is useless. Because fertility clinics can pay women for eggs (which they already do), stem cell research is bad. Because proponents of stem cell research spend a lot of money on ads, it’s a lie. Because Movie Jesus tells you in a foreboding tone that “You know now. Don’t do it,” you shouldn’t.

Strong arguments you’re presenting there, guys. Maybe next time you should just invite Rush over to give his two cents, and perhaps hear a little bit from Dr. O’Reilly.

(Anyone here speak Aramaic? What the hell is James Caviezel saying at the beginning of the video?)

More Bad News for Repro Rights

Nicaragua will likely ban abortion today. Leaders in the Catholic Church have helped to draft and promote the new law, which outlaws abortion even to save the life of the pregnant woman. Women who have abortions, and people who perform them, could face up to 30 years in prison.

The current Nicaraguan abortion law (fyi, link is in Spanish) allows for a rape and life exception, and gives abortion providers a maximum of 10 years in prison.

“The current law allows a small door in which abortions can be performed, and we are trying to close that door,” said Dr. Rafael Cabrera, an obstetrician and leader of the Yes to Life Movement. “We don’t believe a child should be destroyed under the pretext that a woman might die.”

Some pretext.

Only 24 legal abortions were performed in Nicaragua last year — compared to an estimated 32,000 illegal ones. World-wide, a woman dies every six minutes from an illegal abortion (includes a graphic, disturbing photo and is probably not work-safe). Abortion is one of the most common medical procedures in the world — 46 million abortions are performed every year. Almost half of them (20 million) are illegal. Every year, approximately 80,000 of the women who have illegal abortions in unsafe conditions die from complications of the procedure. Thousands more are injured, maimed, and treated like criminals for exercising their right to bodily autonomy.

Of course, we know which laws kill women and which ones don’t. Conservatives here and abroad, however, are taking us down a dangerous path which values fetal life over the lives of born women — and does almost nothing to lower the abortion rate. Just consider which countries have the highest rates of abortion, and which have the lowest. Brazil, for example, has a higher abortion rate than the United States (which is notably high), even though the procedure is illegal there. In many Scandanavian and other European nations, abortion is widely accessible and free — and yet, because of comprehensive sex education and birth control access, they have the lowest abortion rates in the world. Another example:

Rumania provides a unique case study of the factors that influence the use of unsafe abortion: in 1966 legal abortion was restricted and the abortion-related maternal mortality rate increased sharply, ten times higher than the average for the rest of Europe; in 1989 abortion was again made available on request and the number of maternal deaths fell sharply. By contrast the Netherlands has the lowest reported abortion rate because of a non-restrictive abortion law within a comprehensive framework that includes universal sex education in schools and easily accessible family planning services and the provision of emergency contraception. Of the 29,266 abortions performed there in 1997, the complication rate for first trimester treatments was 0,3% with no resulting deaths whatsoever.

But it’s not about the woman’s life, or even preventing abortion. It’s about asserting social control over and through women’s bodies. And it’s not just in Nicagragua.

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The Good Body

And here I thought it was sex that made a woman lose “the flower of her body.” How foolish. Everyone knows that it’s during pregnancy when women go from being acceptably fuckable objects to vessels which no longer exist solely for male pleasure (now they exist for promulgation of the male seed, obviously) and are therefore not worthy of fucking. Or something.

Despite Charles Mudede’s bizarre assertion that “if a woman’s pregnancy is far along the way, having sex with her must mean having sex with the baby” (I think someone needs to repeat 7th grade biology), I can’t help but suspect that perhaps his argument hinges on the ever-popular view that women’s bodies exist solely for male use and definition. Charles Mudede doesn’t find pregnant bodies attractive because that body has run its course of usefulness in his life — it’s been “used up,” as he pleasantly phrases it:

The body that had the sex that resulted in the pregnancy is not the same as the body that is in the process of producing a whole new life. The first body was attractive (like a flower is attractive); the pregnant body, on the other hand, is used up by the function of the pregnancy.

Because Charles doesn’t find the pregnant body attractive, the pregnant body is objectively not attractive. Because Charles views women’s bodies as means to an end (first for his sexual pleasure, then for birthing “his” child, and useless thereafter), women’s bodies are a means to an end.

Entitled much?

And any of you who think differently are just fooling yourselves. Plus, you’re having inauthentic sex if you’re fucking while pregnant.

He does have a point about the sheer hideousness of pregnant women, though. What beasts:

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Posted in Sex

I met Harold at the Playboy Party!

Holy mother of god. There are so many things wrong with this ad, I have no idea where to begin.Witness this Tennessee campaign ad. It’s an RNC spot against Rep. Harold Ford.

Included, we have a play on fears about interracial sex, the claim that Ford supports terrorism, that he’s in the pocket of pornographers, and hooks up with women at Playboy parties.

The dialogue of the ad after the jump.

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Women, Girls and Abortion

The Oregonian is doing a great series on Measure 43, their state’s parental notification statute. They take a different tack than the traditional news article on abortion, which inevitably involves an interview from a Planned Parenthood representative and an interview with an anti-choice leader. The Oregonian instead talks to the very people who this measure would most affect: Women and girls.

The articles aren’t perfect, but they offer a good balance of perspective. And I’m happy to finally see a publication listening to women.

Suzie McHarness, 50, of Southeast Portland, knows exactly what she would do differently, had it been possible. “If I had had an abortion, my life would have been very different,” she says. That’s why she opposes Measure 43.

Instead, McHarness says, she became pregnant at 15 and was forced to deal with an angry, abusive mother and shame from her mother’s friends from church.

As the morning sun streams into her kitchen window and catches the tears pooling in her eyes, McHarness says she was raped at a party by a friend of a friend.

“I was devastated,” she says.

She was afraid to tell her mother, so she waited until she couldn’t wait any longer.

Abortion wasn’t an option. It was 1972, before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal. Plus, McHarness says, “my mother never would have agreed to that.”

The baby was a boy, born with a facial defect. McHarness says she moved out of her mother’s house. She dropped out of high school and struggled to raise her son on her own. He needed a series of surgeries, and McHarness remembers hitchhiking to the hospital to be with him.

McHarness decided when her son was 14 months old that their life was “horrible” and “unfair to him”; she gave him up for adoption.

The two were reunited 16 years later and are working on a relationship. McHarness keeps her son’s picture on the wall beside her computer. She volunteers at least twice a month at a Planned Parenthood clinic, helping women and teens prepare for abortion and staying with them during the procedure.

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Sorry babe, my cartel of virtue got hijacked

From Rachel Kramer Bussel’s interesting look at virginity, via Dawn Eden, I give you Wendy Shalit:

“Being hostile to virginity is the ultimate misogyny. It means sneering at the innocence of children, and laughing at women who want sex to mean something more than just a hookup.”

She’s approaching something that could be considered a rational thought, but doesn’t quite make it. I’ll help her out: “Being hostile to women’s sexual choices is misogynist.” See? Being hostile to virgins is silly. It’s just as silly to be hostile toward sexually active people (note my use of the term “people,” since unlike Shalit, I am of the opinion that the male of the species can too be virginal).

“We need to get back to a single high standard for women and men,” argues Shalit. “Right now we seem to be going for a single low standard—let’s all imitate the most adolescent male, and make him our ideal.”

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Posted in Sex

So Sue Me.

This outing thing is really getting out of hand.

I have been made aware that Ann Bartow considers the comments I made here and here to be defamatory, and she’s asked Jill for my mailing address so that the First Amendment specialist she planned to consult could contact me.

Well, unless I apologize. Though for what, I’m not entirely sure. Because she’s not asking me for an apology, she’s asking Jill to tell me that she wants an apology.

She’s asking Jill, mind you, because she refuses to contact me directly, even though Jill has made it clear that she does not want to be the go-between. This is the same way she informed me that she’d figured out who I was.

And she has. Congratulations, Ann, you guessed right. You know who I am, and where I work. And you’ve been very clear that you don’t like pseudonymity, and you’ve been just as clear that you don’t care for me. You’ve also made it clear that you’re not above threatening to out people you don’t care for when you’re angry. So, what’s your next move?

You could sue me. Of course, as my Civil Procedure professor used to say, “You can always sue. The question is, Can you win?”

So you file suit. Now you have to serve me in another state, which presents certain practical problems since you don’t know my home address. You could try to serve me at work, but security doesn’t let just anybody into the building. This *is* post-9/11 New York, after all, and we’re within spitting distance of a landmark.

Let’s say you get me served. Fine. Then we have the whole in personam jurisdiction issue, because I’ll assume, for shits and giggles, that you’ve filed in a South Carolina court.

Then you have to get over the hurdle of surviving a motion to dismiss, which, let’s just say, you can expect.

And if that happens? Then we get to discovery. Which goes both ways, as I’m sure you know. Anything relevant to your claims, and my defenses, and your damages, will be up for grabs here.

Discovery over, we’ll have dispositive motions, negotiations, the works. Possibly trial.

And what do you hope to recover after all that? A few bucks? A little vindication? Any victory you might have would be singularly Pyrrhic, I would imagine. Your reputation will suffer more from a suit than it would from my comments.

All at a cost of thousands of dollars in legal fees and costs on both sides. More likely tens of thousands of dollars.

And all because you couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to find out who I was. Because it’s pseudonymity that you find so appalling, that you think can be abused.

Bra fucking va, Ann.