The Girl Scouts Will Teach Your Girls to Be Awesome, Full Stop.

I am convinced that there is a swath of people on the right who have just decided to act like cartoon villains to see how long they can get away with it.  Today's Maleficent wannabe is Wendy Wright, who is an asshole.

On Parshall’s show, Wright said parents should call for an investigation into whether the money from Girl Scout cookie sales goes to teaching “young girls to be activists and advocates for a radical sexual agenda.” She blamed the Girl Scouts leadership for supporting a “radical, feminist, pro-abortion form of activism and training these girls up to be feminist activists.” Wright urged parents instead to have their daughters join a “wholesome, pro-God, alternative to the Girl Scouts” called the American Heritage Girls. The American Heritage Girls was founded by Patti Garibay, who, according to CNS News was “motivated to leave the Girl Scout organization when the group decided it would take no position on homosexuality” and to encourage instruction in “traditionally feminine skills, such as sewing, cooking and laundry.” American Heritage Girls bills itself as a “Christ-centered” group that denounces “moral relativism.”  (source)

So let's have a talk.

A lot of feminists talk about an "aha moment" or a "click moment," where they realized, in a beam-of-light-style revelation, that they were feminists.  I did not have one of these moments.  I can't remember the first time I said aloud that I am a feminist.  But I can tell you why I am a feminist.  I am a feminist because being a woman is fucking hard.  I am a feminist because it is bullshit that my body is considered constantly available for public discussion, be it from cat-callers or politicos.  I am a feminist because I should never have to justify my decision to work, or to not have children, or to have children, but I do, on a weekly if not daily basis.  I am a feminist because it's ridiculous that people assume that I can't possibly be a "real" sports fan.  I am a feminist because I am sick of explaining that I can be good at cooking and also not like doing it. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family and an environment where by and large the people around me were okay with me doing whatever the hell I wanted, and who saw me as a person first, and a woman later.  However, this is not the norm, and once I left that environment I realized how unusual it was.

I had a weird relationship with the Girl Scouts.  I was in Montachusett troop 101 in Worcester, Massachusetts as a Brownie and a Junior, and I attended both Camp Neyati in Spencer and Camp Green Eyrie in Harvard.  I didn't really love the weekly troop meetings.  I liked hanging out with my friends, obviously, and I had a good time, but for me, "Girl Scouting" meant lots of canoes and fire, and there wasn't a whole lot of that on a weekly basis.  There was a lot of sewing and crafting and stuff like that, which I also liked, but...you know.  No fire.  It was when I started going to Camp Green Eyrie that I really started loving Girl Scouting, and it was in those tents and under those trees that I came to understand the power of women, and the limitless potential for all of us.  I made friends there with whom I am still in touch, and did things I never would have expected to do.  I'll never forget rolling up to the mess hall at the end of our Voyager unit, having hiked and canoed for a week, covered in mud and scrapes and running five minutes late for dinner, feeling so damn awesome because we all did the hell out of that trip.  That was when I knew I could do whatever I wanted to do.

That's what Girl Scouting taught me.  You'll notice there's nothing in there about hating God or about abortion or about radical feminism.  Shocking, I know.  It was about achieving awesomeness as a human first and a woman second, and having a damn good time while we were at it.  Also?  Fire.  And sometimes canoes.

And let me tell you something, Wendy...the Girl Scouts are not the ones pressing an agenda on the young women in their organization.  It is YOUR attempt to politicize their day to day activities that forces the political into what is a simple, healthy environment for young women.  You take an entirely unrealistic view of how organizations work, on top of this.  Would you like to know how much of a fuck I gave about what the Girl Scouts of America's upper echelons were doing when I was a Junior?  LESS than zero.  I cared about the girls in my troop or my camp unit, and I cared about what we were doing that day, and maybe if I still had time to zone out a little bit, I might have cared about some residual shit from school or my friends.  But when shitbags like you force political issues to the fore of organizations whose primary services have nothing to do with political action, you make it political.  And frankly, had someone like you come out shame fingers a-blazin' when I was having a good time being outside and canoeing and getting dirty and learning how to sew AND start fires and talking about how to be a good citizen...well, Wendy, I might just have thought that maybe people like you were the ones pushing a shady agenda worth avoiding.

But I will thank you, before I let this go and return to my radical feminist life.  I'd like to thank you for inspiring me to rejoin the Girl Scouts today.

Books Yay!: Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I've never really been a big Saturday Night Live fan.  I like the best of clips and such but for whatever reason, I've just never felt compelled to watch it every Saturday night.  I have the same relationship with standup comedy specials; when someone says "watch this, it's funny," I do, and it's always funny (assuming the recommender has good taste which...you know who you are, people who tried forcing me to like Dane Cook), but I still click past those specials when I'm looking for something to watch.  However, despite my SNL apathy, I love Tina Fey, not only because of the brilliant Mean Girls but for her willingness to be outspoken about women and feminism in the media.  What I particularly like is that she is a very real manifestation of feminism at its core.  I often say to people who claim to not be feminist that feminism's essence is about women having social and political equality to direct their lives as they see fit, and anything else that a feminist claims it is about is laid over that foundation as a result of that feminist's desires.  Feminism is not a monolith.  Instead, it means that some women will choose to work construction and buzz their hair short and some women will choose to have dinner on the table by 5:30p in heels and pearls, but that society has pressured neither group into feeling they must do those things.  I appreciate that Tina Fey exemplifies this reality; she speaks openly about feeling pressures one way or the other, and talks about the existence of those pressures while also making choices for herself that line up with all kinds of different forces.  Having that conversation is important, and having an intelligent, well-spoken woman like Tina Fey to guide that conversation is a real asset.

Bossypants is a combination of memoir and general observations about life in comedy.  I appreciated that it didn't lean too heavily one way or the other.  It seems like many people feel like a memoir has to Say Something or have some kind of self-help-y underpinning to it, and that seems silly to me if the author isn't an actual self-help-dispensing person.  If some publisher thinks you're saleable, it's because people like you and want to know about you, and I don't think that necessarily means they want to know how you got to be you.  Tina Fey has written a kind of memoir of her young life and the progress of her comedy career, and the advice she does give is not about how to make it in comedy necessarily but how to apply the lessons that she gleaned from comedy in your life.  I particularly liked her descriptions of her youthful awkwardness, because for once - for once! - it was framed as "man, everyone is so awkward when they're kids," which is true, instead of that stilted "don't hate me because I'm beautiful" apology-cum-compliment-fishing way so many famous beauties tend to lean towards.  It might just be better writing, but it's nice that the "...so we're cool, right? I'm just like you!" tone is absent there.

I really enjoyed hearing a woman who I think most people see as very together and balanced as she Does It All explain that it is incredibly challenging to do It All, no matter how it comes off to observers.  She's not bemoaning the challenges of being a mom in a competitive and time-consuming field, but rather acknowledging that those challenges exist.  She is obviously happy with her choices even though they certainly contribute stress to her life, and I think that's a healthy thing to show people.  Not to return to the "other memoirists are doing it wrong" place, but I do think people often breeze over big and persistent challenges without admitting that they complicate and strain their lives, and that makes the reader feel inadequate, like they should somehow feel bad about feeling pressure from challenges in their life.  I don't think celebrities exist to make people feel good about themselves or anything, but I think that too much pretending success is just a walk in the park is what has given us a world where children say they want to be "a celebrity" when they grow up and where we have deranged programming like Jerseylicious.

This is a great read, and Fey's writerly voice is wonderful.  This would be a great pick for a short day trip, and I think it would also be a good audiobook to pick up.  It would be a good choice for young people, too.  Fey does a great job of stressing the value of continual striving and hard work, and she's so relateable.  I think it would really help a lot of kids realize that they can do what they want, but that the world is not just waiting outside their door to hand success over without a fight.  Pick up a copy!

Styrofoam and Social Context, OR Captain Planet Would Not Be Having This

I went camping a week ago up in Ontario and I forgot to bring a cooler.  I wasn't bringing any food across the border, so I guess I just x-ed cooler considerations off my list of things to remember altogether.  But since there was beer in play, we needed a cooler, which was annoying because my house is like, 50% coolers and I didn't really need another one.  I remembered, though, that you can often get those styrofoam cooler things that you can't take to the beach because they ALWAYS wind up blowing into the water, and then you have to chase them and this always happens when you're at Hampton Beach or whatever and you're kind of pushing the whole "summer has arrived!" business so it's -17 degrees in the water and the second you put a foot in the water you start having cardiac events and then by the time you get over the shock, the cooler is halfway to the Cape, so you swim out and get it, drag it back, fill it with sand and sit on the beach in the glorious sun unable to appreciate a beautiful summerish day because you're trying to stave off hypothermia. 

Styrofoam's a jerk.

Anyway, the reason these things continue to exist is because the human brain can block out trauma, so in Ontario when we headed out to get supplies, I said we could just get one of those things, to which Canadian Friend Ben replied, "we could, but we don't have those up here."  I reacted to this with what I would probably class as glee, because...that's sound policy, right?  Styrofoam is basically a giant punch to the face of nature, and nature doesn't deserve that.  So in Canada, they're like "don't punch nature in the face, guys."  I like that a lot.  Ben thinks this is an overreaction, because he lives in a place where this is rightly accepted as common sense and it's not a point of contention in public discourse, whereas I live in a place where the people elected to run the country recently decided to replace the biodegradeable flat- and silverware in the Congressional cafeteria with styrofoam out of spite, because the point is definitely pissing on your political opponents, because only your political opponents have to live on the planet Earth. 

So whatever we worked it out and I got a new cooler to keep our beer cold and all was well.  This week, the same friend has gotten me hooked on watching old Captain Planet episodes on YouTube, and we've been reflecting on how great it is that someone made these.  The beauty of Captain Planet and the Planeteers is that the power to make a difference is always clearly on the Planeteers.  Captain Planet helps out when shit gets real - and as Ben pointed out, it always does - but it's the Planeteers that do most of the seeking out of polluters and combating them.  Each episode closes with a little PSA about how you can make small differences that add up to big change.  This wasn't seen as filthy pinko-Commie brainwashing, it was just...common sense.  Why wouldn't you teach kids about not littering?  Why wouldn't you tell them that if you are considerate of other people and the Earth, everyone wins?  Why wouldn't you teach that to EVERYONE?

Earth! Water! Fire! Wind! Heart!

It can be hard to quantify and explain social context to people.  Ben thought I was losing my damn mind over the non-existence of styrofoam coolers, but what that represents is a society that accepts and in fact defaults to ideas that I have to argue with people about on the regular.  I've been trying to write for a couple days about the valley I'm in as a feminist right now; I'm in one of those phases where everything just feels very oppressive, like even though I have wonderful people around me who believe in equality, there's just too much to do.  Sometimes the reality that I will probably die without the best hopes of feminism being realized being accomplished weighs very heavily on me, and that can be tough to wade through.  The idea of social context is very present in discussions about feminism, because there is so much of our society tinged with our concepts of gender and sex.  Feminists willing to talk feminism in public often find themselves on the receiving end of charges like "you're taking this too seriously" or "if you weren't so hostile, maybe people would listen to you."  I understand where this is coming from.  We're groomed to privilege "passionless," logical, academic arguments and devalue emotional presentation of arguments.  However, the reason people get upset is a disparity in perspective: for the feminist, this is a discussion of a woman's right to occupy equal space in society as a man, and for her debate opponent, it is a thought experiment that can exist in the abstract without affecting their life*.  In this stance, you often see backlash to attempts to get people to make room in discourse for equality or awareness.  I understand that too.  Changing the status quo is weird and uncomfortable feeling.  The thing is, it only feels that way for a short while.  After the adjustment period, everyone benefits. 

This is why I'm sad that there doesn't seem to be a new Captain Planet, and that our discourse is couched in terms of extreme individuality and reinforces various -ist concepts that divide and injure us all.  There's a sense that without sexism or racism or homophobia, there can't be humor, and we can't enjoy our coexistence.  Not to overwhelm you with the various media I'm watching these days, but I was watching Golden Girls this morning, and the episode was one where Sophia finds a Cuban boxer, who she is going to pay fight fees for.  He seems like a total Hispanic caricature, and the ladies sort of treat him as such.  One night, right before the fight, they find that he is missing.  They locate him in a practice space...playing violin.  It turns out that he is auditioning for Julliard, and needs the fight purse money to attend the school if he gets in.  He gently points out that the ladies assumed he was just some ignorant Hispanic, and lapses into a little monologue about how Cubans are people too - "if you cut us, do we not bleed?" - and then after a brief pause, says he thought about acting, hence the dramatics.  It's funny and makes the point without shaming; you're aware of the stereotype, you have to think about it, but you think twice about it.  That's all it takes - awareness of the dynamics we see and the fact that they intersect with a wealth of dynamics we don't see because we don't live the same life as everyone we encounter. 

We'll always be different, and that's why conversations about how you're "colorblind" or what have you are unconstructive.  It's not as easy as pretending that no one is different.  Reaching the best of social structure means creating a common space where we can explore each other and make room for one another.  That means protecting common resources - the earth, infrastructure, governments, political structures - so that we all have equal access to this space and can achieve our own best lives.  We begin with building context. 


*  This probably sounds like only men oppose feminism, but that's only true if we presume that gender disparity only hurts women, which is not the case.  For every expectation of women in society, there is an opposing pole of expectation for men, locking everyone into certain spaces.  Sexism limits everyone, but our society is influenced it, so that's what we know how to navigate.  This is why women, who may not be anti-feminist in reality, may defend sexist or oppressive concepts, because it's a known quantity. 

Beyaz Needs to Stop Telling Me What Being a Woman is About

If you are a TV watcher, you probably know more about erectile dysfunction, tampons and birth control options than you would ever have chosen to know left up to your own devices; those ads are everywhere and insist on being either weirdly coy or SRS BZNZ about it, which always throws me.  There was one ad a while back that I found particularly irritating.  It was for Yaz, and the premise of the commercial was that when women get dressed up and go out to a fabulous cocktail party on some kind of rooftop lounge, they immediately start talking about their birth control, not just in the kind of "I use X, it is good/bad" way that does occasionally happen, but in a detailed manner.  It was the least subtle thing in the history of ever and started with Generic Woman #1 saying something like "HEY GENERIC WOMAN #2, LIFE MUST BE BUSY WITH ALL YOUR DOCTORING!  WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THAT NEW BIRTH CONTROL FROM BAYER?"  The first time I saw it, my eyes nearly rolled out of my face, out the door and down the driveway.  There's something about the way these women are portrayed that just set me on edge - I got the feeling that the ad people were kind of like "a lady doctor!  Heeeeelarious!  It's okay though, it's for lady medicine."

As it turns out, taking Yaz basically turns your blood to one giant clot or something (????), and also can cause something called hyperkalemia that leads to cardiac arrest and kidney failure, so it's been recalled.  [NB: In the process of this recalling, it turns out that even the FDA took issue with the commercials, though not for the annoyingness quotient.  They said that the ads "were overstating the benefits of Yaz while distracting viewers from the risks by playing fast-moving images and music while risks were read out loud or displayed on the screen."  See previous link.]

I recently found myself chasing my eyeballs down the driveway yet again, this time thanks to an ad for something called Beyaz.  I thought to myself "hmm, "60% of 'Beyaz' sounds like that stupid Yaz pill, and the other 40% sounds like its maker's name...mayhap this product verily be similar."

Oh hey, it's totally the same thing with a folate supplement. 

So Bayer is basically trying to get one over on women, which is like, totally great, because it's not like it isn't a pain in the ass for women to get hormonal birth control in the first place in this country, so why not ALSO lie about its risks?  Nice one, Bayer.

That's offensive, but luckily Bayer was also able to maintain its record of marketing this pill with revolting fuckery swaddled in tokenism and then baby-slinged to its stupid corporate chest with like, a million yards of gender roles.  They also did me a solid here because while the Yaz commercial was offensive in a hard-to-articulate way, the Beyaz model is pretty clear.

Ladies walk into a store, because women be shoppin', amirite?  Needless to say there are two white ladies in the foreground, followed in by a light skinned black woman and a Japanese lady.  The premise of these commercials is that Beyaz leaves you free to do what you want to do, instead of being crippled by PMS or PMDD.  I can get behind that, except Beyaz has a pretty clear and bullshit concept of what we womenfolk want. Let's take a look at what's on the racks at The Lady Store.

• Grad school.  I am a grad student.  Hooray for grad school!  However, this is the only occupation oriented (and it's definitely oriented, grad school isn't a career) option in the store.  You could probably stretch it to a "women are nuturing educators" stereotype, but I am more inclined to take issue with the suggestion that women supposedly only want to go to grad school, and not for instance, run a company or work in a lab.
• The Significant Other section.  All of them are male, and all fit Maxim/Cosmo-type tropes: there's a rocker, a prep, an athlete, a crunchy looking guy, etc.  I sometimes have difficulty explaining to men that gender roles are harmful to men as well, but this makes it abundantly clear, which I guess...is nice?  Not everyone fits in a box, and the more we try to define masculinity and femininity, the more limits we place upon ourselves.  It bears mentioning that all of the SOs are, again, male, because lesbians or bisexual women don't exist in Beyaz World.   BONUS GROSSNESS: the Japanese woman swipes one of the SOs (who is not Asian) from under the fingers of the white woman, which to me suggests a creepy racist angle centered on Asian women stealing away white men. 
• A Picnic by a Waterfall/Trip to Paris.  Because women like romantic things, you see. 
• A Stork.  You know this was coming.  I actually cut them slightly more slack here because it is a birth control ad and they need to demonstrate that taking their pill won't permanently disable your reproductive organs.  However, having a stork as a major part of the store suggests that all women have babies on their list, and that is not the case.
• A House (with a White Figurine in Front).  Not everyone wants a house, and not everyone wants a picket fence.  This presumes a level of aspirational-Stepfordiana that I just find boring as hell.  Not all women are homebodies and not all homeowners are white.  Shocking, I know.

You might ask here, "what's the big deal? So what if they have girly things in the girly store?  It's a pill for women!"  To a certain extent you might be right - the objective of the ad is to market a pill to women, not to provide career counseling to them.  However, the "what's the big deal" card can cut both ways.  Why NOT include a woman in the significant other section?  Why NOT include a motorcycle?  Why NOT include a corner office?  Why NOT include a lab job?  What would the cost be to Beyaz of including these things?  Surely it would not be any more expensive than the ad already is.   The problem here is that the ad suggests that Beyaz allows women to do anything they want, and that everything a woman could possibly want is found right here in this store.  It reinforces the idea that women only want these things, and when an ad supporting this idea runs on national TV, it entrenches oversimplified ideas that box both men AND women into gender roles. 

It costs nothing to avoid reinforcing gender roles in media and carries a huge social cost to promote them. 

The Challenges of Social Justice

I have a tumblr, which is not very exciting since I mostly use it as a reader with a minimum of posting, but it does provide me with a lot of great opinion and thought, interspersed with some really wonderful art.  One of the people I follow is a guy named Michael Wood, whose tumblr is called "Capitalism Kills," and he posted a thoughtful article about being a male feminist recently, and I think he raises some essential points.  You can read the article here.  His closing paragraph reads thus:

"The battles haven’t been picked wisely by feminists. It still astonishes me that I have been attacked the way I have in previous discussions. You shouldn’t berate, belittle, label and slander one of your own just because they occasionally have a mild disagreement with something you have said. It’s not positive, it takes focus off of the real issues at hand, and it doesn’t promote the cause. I hope this will one day change. I am still and always will be all about equality for women and I hope that one day there is no judgment passed or oppression dealt based on gender. But now I have no choice but to take a step back from the feminist movement. This has to be done solely by women, because men—especially if they are white or appear to be a “white male” as I do—aren’t allowed to have opinions because they are, in fact, men."

There are a couple problematic things here, not least the impulse to tell people how to conduct their fight for rights, but I think it's understandable here and highlights one of the great challenges of social justice movements.  I try very hard - and am sure that many other people do as well - to not let people who don't represent the core of a movement or group dissuade me from the movement's principles.  However, there is a real question of how often one can encounter the same viewpoints before assuming that the fringe represents the whole.  The fringe is often louder than the center, because the center attempts to quietly incorporate their concerns for social justice into their lives, whereas the fringe's efforts tend to take more active and extroverted approach.  This should be a call to the center, to voice our feelings about the issues we hold dear, and not to assume that the rightness of our position will speak for itself and somehow drown out those who contort the centrist message to something we do not support and cannot be sold to the general public.

However, at the same time we must understand that if we are to fight for freedom, we must accept that freedom may mean that people do things we don't like.  In feminism's case, it may mean accepting that some people want to cook dinner for their husbands in pearls and heels, that some women want to stay home with their children, that some women want to swaddle their lives in pink.  Feminism is about the ability to make that choice, and to suggest otherwise is to do violence to the most essential part of the movement.  It is a reluctance to understand this that leads to the loss of men like Michael Wood, who otherwise would serve as articulate, active, and enthusiastic allies in the progress towards feminism's goal of equality for women.  Feminism fights the patriarchal social structure all day, every day, and this means that men's voices are privileged above women's all day, every day.  Would that it be otherwise, but that's what we're dealing with right now.  With that in mind, what better weapon in the fight for female equality could there be than a loud, male voice unafraid to declare "I am a feminist, and the patriarchy is wrong"?

I Feel Personally Victimized by Regina George.

A while back, I was reading Feministing every day, and it was great. It was truly satisfying to have a place where you could check out some feminist dialogue without someone inevitably bringing up some idiot-tastic "but what about reverse sexism, did you ever think of that?" point, and to see a site that highlighted women's issues in politics, the media and society.

And I had to stop reading it.

I had to stop reading because I was seeing potential sexism everywhere and defaulting to the "must be" position. It's not that the sexism wasn't there, but I was interpreting pretty much all of is as egregious and intentional, rather than resting on a sliding scale and being accidental. Even if I read an article and went "well that's a reach," I'd still have it bouncing around in my head. The thing is, sexism IS everywhere. It's all over the place and it should not be minimized. However, I also think that the bulk of sexism is institutional and social; I do believe that most people can identify overt, intentional sexism as douchetastic behavior. The problem is when no one feels inclined to speak up - that's the insidious effect of passive sexism. It's actually much harder to eradicate, which is why feminism is still relevant and important.

Unfortunately - what with it being 2011 and all - it's getting increasingly important and relevant right this very moment. A Republican House majority* was voted in this cycle on a platform focused primarily on reducing unemployment and government spending. I think these are great goals, although my assessment of Obama's work on both differs significantly from the GOP. However, instead of starting the legislative session off with bills geared towards reducing unemployment or government spending, the GOP has been bringing bills to the floor that work to reduce...access to abortion and women's health services.

HR 3 includes a heinous limitation of public abortion funding for cases of rape to "forcible" rape, which is the least common and least underreported type of rape. This provision says that if you want to be able to get an abortion because you were raped, you'd better make sure you get beat up, too, and that your rapist isn't your husband, or your date, or your relative. This kind of language is predicated on the simple belief that women lie about rape, that it's not "REAL rape" unless you're brutalized by a stranger, that rape is just a scare word women use because they regret their sexual experience from the night before. Because, you know, women can't handle sex and need to be protected from it. This infantilizes women and begins with the assumption not that the rapist is innocent until proven guilty, but that the victim is full of shit until proven violated. We do not take this stance towards any other kind of crime...but we take it towards a crime that happens predominantly to women.

Speaking of victims, Georgia has a charming bill on the floor of THEIR House - HB 14 - that would change the term "victim" to "accuser" in criminal proceedings pertaining to rape and domestic violence. Again, we have crimes in which the victims are predominantly women, and again, there is legislation that attempts to reduce the status of the victim. The argument in this bill is that before conviction, the criminal activity has not been proven, which makes a certain amount of gender-neutral sense...IF the statute related to all crimes. But it doesn't, because again, fairness is not the point or the objective. This bill is another discounting of women's ability to "handle" full rights in society, based on the presumption that women are lying or overstating their accusations of violation.

Returning to the national stage, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has been continuing his assault on Planned Parenthood, and his efforts - shot down in 2009, but now renewed - are now paired with a recommendation from the GOP that all Title X funding be eliminated. Title X concerns funding for family planning, which by the way is the BEST way to reduce the number of abortions, since more information about sexual health helps people make better choices and avoid unplanned pregnancies, NOT that this will ever completely eliminate the need for abortion, since birth control has a failure rate and there will always be devastating birth defects and pregnancy complications. The real target here is Planned Parenthood, of whose services only 3% are abortion, while the other 97% of those services are cancer, STI and HIV/AIDS screenings, birth control provision, gynecological exams and other sexual health services for women in a safe space. This particular item has a nice little side of classism, since PP is most important for poor women who cannot afford these services otherwise. (In case you're wondering, yes, it's expensive. I have insurance, and my birth control - NuvaRing - is still $30. I can afford that - barely - but for women in lower income brackets, $30 is food for a week or a utility bill.). Never mind that taxpayer funding for abortion is ALREADY restricted to cases of rape - does that sound familiar? Oh right, it sounds familiar because HR 3 is trying to restrict that it's own right. - so taxpayer money is mostly going to the 97% of services that have nothing to do with abortion.

I'm sure I sound like a broken record by now, but this attempt to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood once again shows that the GOP at best does not care about women's health and at worst wants to restrict their access to it all together. What it shows clearly regardless of your take on the preceding array of priorities is that their desire to keep women from abortion trumps any consideration of women's health. That this is even up for public debate shows that we do not trust women to make moral judgments about their health. While I understand that some consider a fetus an independent human being even from the moment of conception, we have to consider that we do not simply give access to parts or the use of our bodies simply because another human wants them; we have to consent to donate organs, for instance. But most importantly, the anti-abortion argument tends to be predicated on a bevy of presumptions about what drives women to seek abortions and their consequences - that people who get abortions use it as birth control, that abortion is always more emotionally draining than giving birth, that women wait through most of their pregnancies before suddenly deciding to get a late term abortion for shits and giggles...the list goes on and on, and not one of those items on the list is anyone's business but the woman's and her doctor's. It all comes down to thinking women are not responsible, smart or competent enough to engage in moral considerations and make decisions about their own health.

Let's also be clear about this - no one thinks abortions are awesome. No one WANTS an abortion, and no one hopes for an abortion, and no one wants to force abortions on anyone else. However, as I mentioned above, there will always be a need for some abortions. They need to remain legal so that women have a way to obtain them when they are necessary. Of course, to see that realized in legislation, people first need to accept that women are fully capable of making decisions about their health.

In the couple days between my starting this post and it's publication, one more charming bill has come up at the state level, this one in the lovely state of South Dakota, home of mandatory scripts for doctors that include outright lies about women's emotional health after an abortion. This bill - HB 1171 - adjusts the definition of justifiable homicide to include an allowance for the defense of a fetus. Though the proponents of the bill are putting out some rigamarole about "oh no, it's so super not about making it easier to kill abortion doctors," this is once again a case where the intent is shown clearly in what it DOESN'T apply to, or in this case, its superfluousness. There are generally provisions accounting for the death of a fetus in the murder of a woman, but this bill goes a step further and separates the death of the fetus from the death of the mother, using an "or" clause rather than an "and" clause, thus making it possible for a person to kill another person in defense of the fetus exclusively, without necessity of a threat to the mother as well.

Legislators are not going after men's right to have a vasectomy, nor do they consider men's reproductive behavior so needing of regulation that it trumps men's overall health. Men's health is largely a non-issue for legislators, and it certainly does not involve the hostile debate that women's health does. So yeah, I interpret this trend of aggressive attempts to restrict women's access to healthcare as an assault on women generally. The premium placed on abortion restriction at the cost of women's health shows just how little the GOP is concerned with the rights of women, and the Democrats' lukewarm defense of these rights is almost as bad. I agree that we should strive towards less abortions, but the way to do that is not by banning them or making them wildly difficult to obtain, but by increasing our sexual education, providing access to birth control, by researching MALE birth control (which has been chronically difficult to obtain funding for; drug companies have cited a marked lack of interest from men, because surprise, having to take a pill daily or get a shot quarterly that screws with your hormones is a pain in the ass), by allowing women easy access to pre-natal and gynecological care, and generally creating a healthier sexual dialogue in our society. Women will always need abortions, and desperate women WILL find a way to end their pregnancies. Adopting bans of abortion will not be the end of abortion; it will only be a decree that we would rather have women resort to dangerous terminations that put their lives in danger. In short, it's saying that we care less about women's established lives than the potential and uncertain lives of fetuses. I want no part of any political party that would put my life secondary to anyone else's - particularly not a possibly non-viable anyone else - nor of a party that thinks I can't make decisions about my own sexual health. I feel personally victimized by this legislation, and so should all women.

Call your Representatives and Senators, and let them know that you are not a feeble-minded idiot who needs supervision and constant direction, but that you are an autonomous human being with the capacity for ethical thought and personal action.


* Could I also ask Democrats to stop acting like such moody children about this, since Dems still have control of the Senate, and, you know, the Presidency? Stop acting like someone kicked your puppy.