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

Tag: Culture Of Life

Facts, myths, and blankety-blank lies about Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation

As the furor over Komen’s de-funding of Planned Parenthood continues, more and more myths about PP, its mission, and the impact of this cruel and foolish decision are getting thrown around. Frequently, those myths get lost and go uncorrected in the presence of bigger and more ideological arguments.

That’s really not fair.

Alas, this is merely the tip of the bullshit iceberg. As the Komen debacle is nowhere near coming to an end, we can expect new and exciting myths and lies to arise, like the head of a Hydra, as others are debunked. To that end, watch this space, and by all means contribute your own debunkings in comments.

Women refuses to give raped daughter EC, brags about it on internet.

Ah, the kindness of pro-lifers: [trigger warning]

My Dark-Haired Daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder and limited cognitive abilities, went missing last Monday. For more than 48 hours, we had no idea where she was. Without all the gruesome details, after she was found, it came to light that she’d been brutally and repeatedly sexually assaulted. She’d been taken to the local women’s shelter, where (at least in our area) they do the exams in such cases.

Heading Toward Menopause, Still Caring About Abortion

By Andrea Plaid, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine.

I’m not an aberration because I’m a childless, employed, divorced, college-educated Black cisgender woman — regardless of what the promulgated stereotypes undergirding the media stories about women like me say. At this point in my life — I’m in my early 40s –I’m drumming my fingers waiting for my first hot flash. And I still deeply believe in keeping abortion legal.

Even with this profile, statistics about abortion render my realities invisible — which may lead some people to think that I may be an aberration.

When I researched the numbers about middle-aged Black women and abortion, I found very, very little — and I found even less on Black trans men and non-binary people and abortion. At most, I found alarmist and slut-shaming articles about 40-something women in the UK and Australia getting abortions and how, said a Sydney Morning Herald piece, “It was concerning that older women were either underestimating their fertility and pregnancy risk or failing to choose more effective methods of contraception, such as uterine devices.” These articles don’t have the racial breakdown of the older child-bearing people.

I asked members of the Women of Color Sexual Health Network Facebook page, and one person suggested AARP’s study, Sex, Romance, and Relationships: AARP Survey of Midlife and Older Adults. Though the 2010 study did a great job breaking down race and gender as far as sexual attitudes of people my age and older, it has nothing about Black women and abortion — how often we obtain them, what are our reasons, whether we seek them at private practices or go to Planned Parenthood. The same person suggested using scholar.google.com, but access to those articles requires academic privileges that I simply don’t have as someone outside academia and professional organizations who may offer such things to its members.

When I researched statistics on abortion and 40-something Black cis (non trans) women at reputable sites like Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the most apparent fact is that the highest age accounted for is the late 30s. I saw very little mention of the abortion needs and reasons for women over 40 beyond this: “Women over age 35 had lower abortion rates (7.7 abortions per 1000 women aged 35-39; 2.6 per 1000 women over 40).”

The Guttmacher Institute studies — another good source about abortion — rarely mention any numbers about women my age, except for this: “At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, one in 10 women will have an abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.” A more accurate — and interesting — reflection would be stats on the numbers of abortions broken down by age group, like “women from 40-50 have x number of abortions.” Other than that, one would practically have to be a statistician to parse the actual numbers implied in Guttmacher’s study.

Our Bodies, Ourselves For a New Century, the venerable feminist-based health book, says this about middle-aged women and abortion:

If you are sexually involved with men, remember you can still get pregnant; keep using some form of birth control until you haven’t had a period for one year. Some midlife women consider the chances of pregnancy to be so low that they rely on abortion as a backup. But if you are certain you do not want a child and would not consider abortion, continue to use birth control for two years after your last period.

A post on Babble.ca explains this through numbers: Biologically speaking, my opportunities to get pregnant each month lessen as I age. My chance goes from 20 percent in my 30s to five percent in my 40s. However, that statistic does not mean that I can have sex without protection, as Our Bodies, Ourselves for a New Century advises.

Caring Goes Beyond The Numbers

Though more information is available about Black women and abortion in general, these numbers rarely reflect the ages of the women seeking the procedure.

  • 67 percent of Black women have unintended pregnancies. (Guttmacher; unfortunately, this statistic does not state if the Black women are non-Latina or not.)
  • 30 percent of non-Latina Black women obtain abortions. ( Guttmacher)
  • When it comes to the numbers, Black women have a higher ratios and rates than white women and other women of color; however, white women make up the largest percentage of women obtaining abortions. (CDC)

      • So, you may wonder why I still care about abortion when my story isn’t statistically reflected.

      Though I’m not in the numbers, I’m in the reasons why some Black women seek the procedure, and why quite a few cis women — in solidarity with trans men, trans women and non-binary people of many races and ethnicities — fight so hard to keep it legal.

      My mother did an excellent job of both encouraging me to get my education and discouraging me from having children while I was a teenager. My mom failed to convince me in my 20s and 30s to “have children.” My co-workers failed, too. The rare co-worker nowadays still tries to talk me into it — and yes, even my mom still tries — appealing to some notion of an impending spinsterhood if I don’t essentially create my future caregiver and “someone who’ll love me.” As I had to remind Mom, having children is, essentially, a crap shoot as far as their “loving you” and you “loving them”: how many stories have we heard of people who give birth but who don’t form that “nurturing instinct” with their newborns? How many stories have we heard about children disowning and getting disowned by parents, let alone loving you enough to want to take care of you in your old age? (The resentment and burnout of grown children taking care of elderly parents are real.)

      My long-held reason, I tell them all, is that I simply do not like children enough to gestate or adopt and rear one (or two or more). I don’t have the patience to provide that long-term emotional support and don’t wish to share my material resources with a child. This is very much in line with a study cited by the Guttmacher Institute in August, 2011: “The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.”

      Now that I’m entering the middle part of my life, a colleague summed up my new viewpoint about children: “She’s not just running down her biological clock. She’s taking the clock and throwing off the Empire State Building.”

      So, I support abortion rights because I want keep my options safe and legal so I can continue running down my clock. And, on the real, I support keeping abortion — and other reproductive technologies — legal because I deeply, passionately believe that all potentially child-bearing persons have the right to chart their own life course, whether that means bearing children or not and being able to access those options.

      At whatever age.

      Filming Against Odds: Undocumented Youth “Come Out” With Their Dreams

      By Anne Galisky, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine.

      “Papers”is the story of undocumented youth and the challenges they face as they turn 18 without legal status. More than two million undocumented children live in the U.S. today, most with no path to obtain citizenship. These are youth who were born outside the U.S. and yet know only the U.S. as home. The film highlights five undocumented youth who are “American” in every sense but their legal paperwork.

      Personhood Amendments and the Pro-Life Long Game

      I’m writing in the Guardian today about the real purpose of personhood amendments. A taste:

      Pro-lifers don’t actually believe that a fertilised egg is the moral equivalent of a newborn baby – if they did, there would certainly be major pushes for research on why more than half of all these cellular human beings are flushed out of the body and die. (Imagine if more than half of all three-year-olds suddenly dropped dead – we wouldn’t just shrug our shoulders and say, “Well that’s nature!”) What they do believe is that birth control has given women too much freedom. And they realise that if they can change the terms of the debate – just as they did when they rebranded an embryo as a baby – they might make some headway in the long run.

      Enter personhood amendments. It’s a great strategy: you say that birth control kills fertilised eggs, then you try to pass a law that would make killing fertilised eggs murder, and then your opponents (logically) respond by pointing out that the proposed law is purposed to outlaw many forms of birth control. Voilà, you’ve just made the fantasy that birth control kills fertilised eggs a political truth. The Mississippi personhood amendment might have lost, but the anti-choice pseudo-science machine had a big win.

      Read it all over there.

      Common Sense Time.

      So Congressional GOP members want to extend Mississippi’s asinine personhood amendment to the whole country. Caperton wrote about the Mississippi bill, and detailed many of the ridiculous ways it will interfere with basic rights — one of the goals of the bill is to outlaw many forms of birth control, and it will undoubtedly be used to criminally prosecute women who miscarry. Jessica Valenti also wrote a must-read article for the Washington Post.

      Oh but it gets better! In a very good Mother Jones article about the bill, Nick Baumann (whose coverage of this has been excellent) explains:

      Sixty-three House Republicans, or over a quarter of the GOP conference, are cosponsors of HR 212, Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-Ga.) “Sanctity of Human Life Act,” which includes language that directly parallels that of the Mississippi personhood amendment. That bill declares that “the life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent…at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.”

      Read More…Read More…

      The Female of the Species*

      Through some miracle of the Fates, I had not one but two male teachers in high school who happened to discuss women’s issues on the same day. One of them, an aging hippie who had us read Hemingway but who gently nudged us to consider Hemingway’s treatment of his leading ladies, referred to the characters as women. The other—who, in a semi-unrelated matter, had tried (and failed) to have me serve detention for not standing up during the Pledge of Allegiance**—kept talking about females when discussing the “women’s lib” movement in our American history class. I kept sensing a mild contempt on the second teacher’s part—but he was discussing feminism, after all, so I brushed it aside, just glad to be learning this stuff at all.

      But the ensuing years have shown me that I wasn’t imagining his ever-so-slightly-curled lip. Inevitably, when I hear the word female repeatedly used as a noun in speech, it’s either from someone who isn’t used to talking about sex and gender issues (in which case I try to look past it, assuming the person is in good faith)—or, more frequently, from a card-carrying misogynist who, intentionally or not, manages to make every utterance of female sound like he’s spitting directly onto our collective ovaries.

      Common wisdom and cultural and etymological research shows that the prevalent objection to female as a noun is because it’s a term used to generically describe the egg-producing party of any species, not just our giganto-cranium intelligent species that includes, you know, women. Hell, it’s used to describe plants. There’s something about dwindling our womanness down to our biology that explains both why it’s used by misogynists (many of whom have a hard time seeing beyond biology) and those who are simply uncomfortable discussing gender (in an effort to distance themselves from talking about the people they actually know when delving into topics they see as hot-button, they can talk about females). It’s where Grammar Girl takes us, along with the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s English Usage Guide, and William Safire (who also couldn’t resist a quick laugh about how feminists were rejecting female, so ha ha we’re all going to be womanists soon!).

      Grammar Girl wasn’t the first to bring this up publicly, of course: “Why should a woman be degraded from her position as a rational being, and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe?” wrote critic Henry Alford in 1866. The Oxford English Dictionary is more succinct on the matter: “Now commonly avoided by good writers, exc. with contemptuous implication.”

      And, you know, it makes sense. But in poking into the etymology of female, I was surprised to find two things: 1) female applied first to humans, and then worked its way to other animals, and 2) female is not derived from male. Female originally sprang from the Latin femella and later the Old French femelle; contrast that with masculus from the same period, and it’s clear that unlike woman (which was indeed a compound), female has its own birth. The word only began to seem a counterpart to male in 1375, when the spelling was altered to seem a better rhyme for male.

      Certainly I’m not about to start arguing that because those badass Carolingian femelles didn’t have a problem with it that any of us should shrug off the chill that might come with hearing ourselves called females. But female has its uses: For one, it covers both women and girls, thus functioning as a word of solidarity. There are also cases in which a clinical allusion is helpful: Discussing biology, for one (though of course this also comes in handy for evolutionary psych types, who are frequently misogynist, to put it mildly), or trying to paint a picture free of gender bias by using the word woman, which does imply humanness and therefore carries more personal weight and connotation. There’s something equalizing about female that woman in some situations can’t quite have—the very distance that makes female troublesome may also hold some liberation.

      Besides any logical argument therein, there’s a part of me that’s tempted to respond to the idea of using language to reduce me to my reproductive system with a sort of oh yeah, buddy? approach. Like, is your pathetic and probably subconscious (but maybe not really?) linguistic method of attempting to cut me down to size really helping you out in this conversation, dude?

      I’m guessing that most Feministe readers aren’t terrifically keen on female as a noun. But I can’t help but wonder if there’s an argument there for reclaiming it. Hell, if we’re reclaiming slut, let’s go hog-wild! (Sow-wild?) Like many (ahem!) say about hello, it’s an ostensibly harmless word whose meaning varies wildly upon who’s uttering it and in what fashion—yet unlike hello, unless my experience has been atypical, it’s not a word that’s often used by women’s well-wishers. Is female beyond redemption?

      *Shock shock horror horror shock shock horror!
      **Is it true that other countries don’t really have a Pledge of Allegiance, i.e. a group recitation in front of a flag done at public assemblies? We had to do this every day in school when I was growing up—is that still the case? Now that I’m really thinking about it, it’s sort of weird, right?

      The Politics of “Hello”

      One of the stumbling blocks I repeatedly have over discussions of street harassment is that much of the time, on paper, it’s doesn’t look like harassment. Hell, much of the time what makes me uncomfortable isn’t harassment.

      Much of the time, what makes me uncomfortable is hello.

      Hello doesn’t get a lot of attention in discussions of street harassment. And why would it? When women get to hear gems like “I can smell your pussy” (that’s a link to Clarisse Thorn, not a link to l’eau de pussy) or even the cries of “beautiful, beautiful” that might seem like compliments but that take about two seconds to deconstruct as male occupation of public space, hello seems relatively harmless. Hello seems innocent, polite, open—even welcomed in a sea of harsher interactions. Hello seems friendly.

      But as many women in urban spaces well know, hello isn’t always as friendly as it seems. I’m not talking about the kind of hello that helps build community; for example, hello has a history of functioning as a sort of verbal handshake in tight-knit urban neighborhoods—particularly neighborhoods largely consisting of traditionally marginalized people. Hello can serve as an understated way of saying: I see you, and you see me, and we’re in this together. (I should make it here that I am talking about urban environments, not rural or suburban ones in which it may be common to greet one another even if you’re strangers.)

      That’s not the hello that bothers me. I’m talking about the hello that has an undertone of You, Woman, owe me, Man, your attention—an undertone that’s usually so subtle as to be difficult to define, leaving me wondering if I’m just being a misanthropic New Yorker who can’t play well with others. I’m talking about the hello that slides up and down the scale, the echo of a wolf whistle, its tone indicating what its denotation cannot. I’m talking about the hello that happens just as I pass a man on the street, the hello that is not a greeting but a whisper, the hello that puts me in a position of reaction—to turn my head in good faith to acknowledge the existence of a fellow human…or to hurry past, knowing full well that there’s a good chance it’s not my human existence, but my female existence, that’s being acknowledged.

      The potency of hello relies upon its seemingly benign face: It’s a worldwide greeting, after all, and few of us want to live in a world where we can’t acknowledge one another’s existence. But the word itself originated as a call for attention (from the Old English holla, meaning to stop or cease), not mere politesse—and when directed from Anonymous Man to Anonymous Woman, you’re not always sure which hello you’re getting.

      Therein lies the problem of hello: It’s not like I can’t be bothered to mutter a singular word to my fellow citizens, right? Nor do I believe that my presence on planet earth is such a gift to humankind that anointing a passerby with a mere word of my precious attention is some great act of grace on my part. Unless a hello was one that was spoken directly at my breasts with a wolf-whistle slide, whenever I sail by a hello-man without returning the greeting, I often have a moment of: What, you’re too good to say hi to him? At the same time, over the years I’ve learned that sometimes hello indicates you’re willing to have a longer conversation—and that often that longer conversation quickly enters the realm of what is unquestionably street harassment. (And even street harassment can bring conflicted reactions, as I examined at The Beheld earlier this year.)

      So hello leaves me unsure, constantly second-guessing myself, not wanting to be all “uppity” but not wanting to leave myself open to uncomfortable situations. When I hear a vulgar comment on the street, I know how to react (or, rather, not react). When I hear hello, I feel caught. For as much as hello is a greeting, hello can also draw the lines clearly. Hello can mean: I am a man, you are a woman, and I am saying hello to acknowledge not your humanness but your womanness. Hello can mean: I feel I have a relationship with you, even though we’re total strangers, and the entire extent of that relationship is that I am in a role in which I am allowed to try to start a conversation and your choices are limited to appearing to ignore me or to play along with this conversation you made no indication of wishing to start. Hello assumes a familiarity; hello asks for acquiescence.

      Sometimes I’m happy to acquiesce, even when I sense that it’s the kind of hello that wouldn’t happen if I were a man. (I asked some New York men about hearing hello on the street, and men who live in primarily Black areas said they exchange hellos in the neighborhood—other than that, it was a rare occurrence, I’m guessing about as frequent as when a woman I don’t know says it to me. Which is probably annually, not daily as with the hellos I’m addressing here.) My neighborhood is home to a bevy of elderly Greek men, and if returning their hellos means that I can bring a smidgen of joy to their day…well, in my personal calculus, the cost-benefit analysis of a silent schooling on the politics of public space loses out to a shared moment, a mutual smile. One skill I’ve cultivated over years of having a friendly, open, female face is sensing loneliness in people, and soothing that loneliness for a split second with a hello feels somehow morally compulsory.

      And, of course, it’s that moral compulsion to be a “good girl” that has put me, and a lot of other women, in situations where we’re easily cornered, badgered, harassed, and endangered. I’m not arguing that a simple hello is harassment, but I also know that it’s often not simple or benign. And even when it’s nothing more than an old Greek man putting in a bid for a morsel of attention, I’m tired of—literally, I am emotionally exhausted by—feeling as though I need to parcel out attention to people merely because they’ve asked. And because it’s not people but men who make up the vast majority of the askers—and women their answerers—it becomes a feminist issue.

      So, Feministes, I ask you: What is your reaction to hello?       What cues do you look for that indicate how simple a simple greeting really is? Do you say hello to strangers? Do you say hello back to them? What are the dynamics of hello in non-urban environments, or in urban environments that don’t live as publicly as New York?