Category Archives: politics/class inequality
Markets Must Be Free; Women Must Be Constrained
Right wingers adamantly proclaim that free markets are necessary for freedom. So why do so many of these liberty lovers insist that women be constrained?
The right has been relentlessly pushing laws that limit women’s autonomy. The most extreme measure is on the November ballot in Mississippi. There, voters may amend the state constitution to define a “person” as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.”
If this law passes, a woman would not be able to get an abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or if her life were in danger. Miscarriage could become a police investigation. And at least some (possibly all) forms of contraception would become illegal.
Similar measures are being planned for future elections in Florida, Montana, Ohio and at least five other states.
Slate’s XX Factor reports on the consequences of such a law being passed in Mexico:
The main result has been a doubling down in the criminalization of women who have abortions, or even miscarriages… The penalties for a woman who has an abortion range from six months to four years.
XX Factor goes on to report that one woman got a 23 year sentence for what she says was a miscarriage. Now consider that about one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage. (In the U.S. today women are prosecuted for stillbirths, even when prosecutors lack direct evidence linking poor health choices to the stillbirth.)
Personhood activist, Ed Hanks, says society isn’t comfortable yet with punishing women and their doctors for abortions, “because abortion has been ‘normalized.’” He hopefully adds, “As the Personhood message penetrates, then society will understand why women need to be punished just as surely as they understand why there can be no exceptions for rape/incest.”
When women aren’t being limited by penitentiary walls – or by their own deaths – another prison arises when contraception is banned – a goal pushed by plenty of conservatives. Some abusive men even destroy contraception hoping to trap wives or girlfriends into dependency by their need to care for children.
Last summer I wrote of despots who controlled women’s reproductive rights. But it bears repeating:
The 20th century’s most loathsome regimes focused on controlling women’s reproduction. The Nazis closed family planning centers and outlawed abortion, eventually making it a capital offense, says Steven Conn, Associate Professor of History at Ohio State. Stalin banned abortion. Ceausescu outlawed contraception and made miscarriage subject to criminal investigation. Today China forces abortion and sterilization. Conn observes:
The day after the evil Ceausescu had been executed, the National Salvation Front issued two decrees; it lifted the ban on the private ownership of typewriters, and it repealed the laws that policed pregnant women.
America’s right-wing extremists look eerily similar to these despots, lending an ironic twist to their claim of being all about freedom through free markets.
Markets must be free. But women must be controlled?
Reposted on Daily Kos November 7, 2011
Also republished in Daily Kos by Feminism, Pro-Feminism, Womanism: Feminist Issues, Ideas, & Activism, Pro Choice, and Community Spotlight.
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Virtually Attack Women, But No Nudity
A gamer creates an avatar resembling himself and plots to kill a three-dimensional, lifelike woman. The avatar grasps an axe and raises it to strike. He hears the thud as the axe slices her head. He hears her cry out in pain. He sees her split skull and feels the sensation of blood on his hands and face.
I’ve just paraphrased one part of Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito’s opinion on whether video games of this sort should be protected as free speech in sales to minors. Yes, he uncomfortably concludes.
In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wonders why Playboy is off-limits to thirteen-year-olds, yet interactive games that allow those same boys to actively, if virtually, bind, torture and kill a woman are perfectly fine – so long as she’s not topless.
Justice Antonin Scalia counters that violent scenes have long been part of the American tradition.
True enough. One Super Bowl Sunday America went ballistic over Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple. Justin Timberlake’s choreographed battering beforehand went unremarked. No nudity on the national networks, but Law & Order: Special Victims Unit weekly dwells on the rape, battering and torture of sex victims.
Developmental psychologist James Prescott looks to America’s preference for sexual violence over sexual pleasure with wonder. “Apparently, sex with pleasure is immoral and unacceptable, but sex with violence and pain is moral and acceptable,” he reflects.
But why?
New York Times columnist, Timothy Egan sees prudery at base. “Ultimately, the back-and-forth by the high court reinforced the notion of a nation that will always be a little skittish about sex, while viewing violence as American as apple pie,” he writes.
Naomi Wolfe’s The Beauty Myth adds insight. In the 1960s pornography portrayed beautiful women playfully and joyfully enjoying sex. By the 70s this sort of imagery suggestively seeped into popular culture.
As Wolf described it, mainstream beauty pornography looked like this:
The woman lies prone, pressing down her pelvis. Her back arches, her mouth is open, her eyes shut, her nipples erect. The state of arousal, the plateau phase just preceding orgasm… for Triton showers, a naked woman, back arched, flings her arms upward… for Opium perfume, a naked woman, back and buttocks bare, falls face down from the edge of the bed… The reader understands that she will have to look like that if she wants to feel like that.
But later, something shifted as beauty pornography was replaced by a glorification of violence against women. Again Wolf highlights the imagery in advertisements, which sound very much like those we see today:
In an ad for Obsession perfume a well-muscled man drapes the naked, lifeless body of a woman over his shoulder… In an ad for Hermès perfume, a blonde woman trussed in black leather is hanging upside down, screaming, her wrists looped in chains, mouth bound.
By the 80s violent sexual imagery centering on abused females had surged. Film titles like Dressed to Kill, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and 9½ Weeks filled movie theaters while female corpses, in sexy bras and panties, piled up in thrillers. By ‘89 The New York Times was discussing sadomasochism in kids’ comics.
Why the shift? Wolf maintains that sexual imagery follows politics. As women gained power as a result of the feminist movement, male anger and female guilt about taking power created a backlash. Something “needed” to be done, like socialize and eroticize male dominance.
On the one hand, depictions of women’s freely given and enjoyed sexuality was restrained. On the other, men were reassured that women weren’t so powerful. And everyone got the message that women were most attractive when they were dominated and powerless.
Wolf points out that court rulings have enforced these values from the top-down. Women taking pleasure in sex has been named obscene, while sexualized violence against them has not – so long as they are clothed.
Wolf makes an interesting argument.
Oddly, even as more and more women and men today have taken on values that support women’s equality, this way of seeing has become such a taken-for-granted part of American life that it has come to seem natural and normal to most of us, including many feminists.
Something to think about.
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What Abusers and “Pro-Family” Conservatives Have in Common
Birth control sabotage has been revealed to be a common form of partner abuse. In a report released earlier this week by the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 25 percent of women callers to the hot line, who voluntarily answered questions about birth control and pressure to get pregnant in their relationships, reported some form of reproductive coercion.
The callers said their partners hid birth control pills or flushed them down the toilet. Some refused to wear condoms or poked holes in them. One woman’s partner became furious when she recently got her period.
The study’s authors state firmly that reproductive coercion is a form of abuse. Family Violence Prevention Fund president Esta Soler says, “While there is a cultural assumption that some women use pregnancy as a way to trap their partner in a relationship, this survey shows that men who are abusive will sabotage their partner’s birth control and pressure them to become pregnant as a way to trap or control their partner.”
And physical and emotional abuse go hand-in-hand with birth control sabotage: Another study on reproductive coercion found that one-third of women using reproductive health clinics (of five studied), whose partners were physically abusive, also said their partners had pressured or forced them into pregnancy, often hiding or destroying contraception.
This tactic should alarm feminists and anti-domestic-violence workers. It also suggests a revealing political analogy.
It seems these ostensibly “pro-family” men, who are busily destroying contraception in pursuit of children, have a lot in common with the “pro-family” (read: anti-reproductive rights) political agenda.
So why aren’t we willing to call the anti-choice agenda abusive, too?
The conservative political agenda is anti-women working outside the home, anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and once upon a time, anti-battered women’s shelters (the better to keep women inside the home and attached to intact nuclear families). Each of these stances, in some way, disempowers women.
It’s easy to see how restricting shelters keeps women under the thumb of abusive men: It’s a no brainer. If there’s no safe place to go, you’re trapped.
The same holds for denying women access to birth control or abortion. If you’re pregnant with this man’s child, you’re attached–you’re trapped, again, by an unwanted pregnancy.
And women who don’t work outside the home tend to have less say within it. Not to mention that a lack of income makes it hard to leave an abusive partner.
The “pro-family” political agenda may claim to uphold “traditional” American values, but for for many young men claiming to want “normal” nuclear families, pregnancy coercion is a form of abuse and control. What kind of “family values” are those?
Georgia Platts
This post originally appeared in the Ms. Magazine Blog, February 18, 2011
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Are You Pro Life, Or Do You Just Want To Control Women?
When I was young I heard feminists say that “pro-lifers” were more concerned with controlling women than preventing abortion.
That line of reasoning didn’t make sense to me at the time. Now it does. I don’t think that everyone who is prolife is disingenuous. But some are.
The Food and Drug Administration recently approved new emergency contraception known as ella, aka “Plan C.” Unlike the emergency contraception currently available, Plan C can be taken up to five days after unprotected sex, and is 98% effective when properly used. The drug stops fertilization by preventing eggs from being released.
Some pro-lifers protest that Plan C brings us one step closer to “over the counter abortions” – though medical studies prove otherwise.
These same folks say stem cell research equals abortion. Yet they don’t worry that fertilized eggs are thrown in the garbage if they aren’t used for research. Garbage isn’t constantly publicized while breakthrough science is.
Pro-lifer, George W. Bush, didn’t seem to have a problem sending young men to die in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as one cartoonist put it, “No stem cells were hurt.”
I once heard Christopher Reeve pose the following question: if you were in a research lab with a two-year-old and a fire broke out, would you save the child, or would you leave her to die so that you could save thousands of stem cells? I suspect most of us would save the actual child.
Utah Senator, Orin Hatch, says it’s fine to use fertilized eggs for research. But destroying eggs implanted in a woman’s womb equals murder. In one case a woman’s body is controlled. In the other, it isn’t.
Pro-lifer, Pat Robertson opposes a woman’s right to choose abortion in America. But he supports forced abortions in China. Once again controlling women is the only common denominator.
Pro-lifers don’t seem to be too concerned with making sure poor women get prenatal care, or that their babies have food once they are born.
Pro life? Sometimes it’s all about controlling women.
Georgia Platts
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Bias on the Supreme Court?
Supreme Court nominations bring worries about bias, “left” and “right.” But only women and people of color are thought to have gender or ethnic biases. When white men are nominated the issue never arises. The upcoming vote on Elena Kagan and the nomination of an Asian woman, Tani Gorre Cantil-Sakauye, to the California Supreme court have got me thinking about this.
What is the record of a white man who was not thought to be biased and a Latina woman who was: John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor?
Discussing the issue, one of my women’s studies students politely raised his hand to say, “Well, Sotomayor did say that a wise Latina would make better decisions than white men.”
Her actual quote is as follows:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
So I asked, “Do you think biased judgments would more likely come from someone who is aware or unaware of her bias? If a person is unaware, she won’t be able to take it into account or assess it. But if a person is aware of a bias, she has the possibility of checking her thinking.
The student nodded his agreement.
So what is the record of Sonia Sotomayor? Prior to joining the Supreme Court studies found her to be moderate in her political leanings with 38% of her opinions liberal and 49% conservative. Clearly her experience as a Latina woman did not show a clear bias. Still, after a year on the Supreme Court she has voted with the liberal wing about 90% of the time.
But John Roberts, a white male who has lived with great privilege, and who was never questioned on the matter, has fared no better. John Roberts has shown a clear partiality for the privileged side of society. Court watcher, Jeffrey Toobin, has noted that, “In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff… Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.”
Yes, there is bias on the court. I find I can generally predict with great accuracy how the Court will rule, and who will vote with each side. Even when it turns out 7-2 I can figure out which two.
At the very least we need a diversity of experience and opinion on the court – and hopefully dialogue, with people sharing their differing ways of seeing – since it is likely impossible for anyone to be unbiased. This can happen. Sandra Day O’Connor talked of how much she learned from hearing Thurgood Marshall’s perspective.
Today we can only hope.
Georgia Platts
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