Pro-Choice Slip and Slide

Things that make you go WTF!?

“Well, if you apply that preventative medicine universally, what you end up with is you’ve prevented a generation. Preventing babies from being born is not medicine.”

OMG, Obama is forcing sterilization on people!

Oh wait, no. Obama is just requiring health insurance to cover birth control as a preventative heath measure. Because, as we all know, once a woman takes any measure to prevent pregnancy they will never be able to conceive again.

That was some sarcasm for the uninitiated.

Maybe I missed something, but is the world in the midst of being underpopulated? No?

Considering I know more women who have had children as the result of failed birth control versus either those who have never taken prophylactic methods to prevent pregnancy OR those who have purposefully remained childless* I’m thinking population isn’t really a concern. In fact what I am thinking is that this is actually pretty racist. Kind of like you get the feeling he’s worried about the ‘coloreds’ outbreeding whitey.

The statement was made by Rep. Steve King from Iowa and surprise, surprise. He’s white, catholic and has a problem with minorities. He’s for racial profiling, against equal rights for gays and wants to kick all illegal immigrants out of the country. He’s also been particularly charming about the US President, suggesting that Islam extremist would applaud his election and that Barack Obama’s policies, “demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race – on the side that favors the black person.” C-LAS-SY!

The we have the crazy religious perspective from Jeffrey Kuhner of the Edmund Burke Institute.

“In short, liberals want to create a world without God and sexual permissiveness is their battering ram. Promoting widespread contraception is essential to forging a pagan society based on consequence-free sex,”

OK, seriously? Who the heck uses the phrase battering ram when talking about sex(ual) permissiveness? It’s just begging to be taken out of context. “Oh dear, Winston’s idea of foreplay was “Effie, brace yourself.”♠

Besides that? So. Many. Questions! Like: How come pagan religions were a their peak LONG before the creation of over-the-counter hormonal contraception? More seriously: Who actually believes in “consequence-free sex”? Those who promote comprehensive sex education, encouraging individuals to be safe from disease and to choose pregnancy when they are ready for the commitment that entails? Or those who think having a dozen kids will be all hunky dory as long as you’ve signed a marriage certificate regardless of health and financial stability?

Trust me, those who encourage access to birth control generally have a much better handle on the effects of sex.

What worries me however, is not only the increasing amount that reproductive choice is being attacked but how more and more things we take for granted are being attacked. Abortion was always a sticky issue but then they went after comprehensive sex education in schools and now birth control?

“Slippery slope” is considered a logical fallacy but the world isn’t logical. As social conservatives gain ground chipping away at abortion rights in the USA they become more embolden to attack other areas of women’s reproductie lives.

* Which may be because I’m still fairly young in the grand scheme of things
♠ I wonder what rating this movie would have had without the William’s ad-libs.

 

Actually, Words Do Have Meaning

Self-Portrait

Some guy hit my fender, and I told him, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ but not in those words.

Woody Allen

Slate (Double X) did a big piece asking their contributors (and some others) to define “Who gets to be a feminist?” Let the equivocating begin!

What the conversation actually centred around was whether or not Sarah Palin can call herself feminist. Which of course she “can” but that doesn’t mean she has freaking clue as to what it actually is. Sarah Palin is about as feminist as I am dragonfruit.

Many suggested that there are no criteria for what a feminist is or that, if there were, being pro-choice was not one of them.  And North Korea is really democratic because it says so right in the name, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Um, no. Just like Kim Jong-Il cannot call himself a democratic leader because he does not believe in the tenants of democracy, Palin cannot call herself a feminist when she does not believe in the tenants of feminism.  Sadly, the whole telling other women what to do with their uteruses* is the least of Palin’s problems in this regard.

Palin’s sole contribution women has been coining the term “mama grizzly.” The women she chooses to support in the political arena are just other women who don’t really care about women.# Instead these are women who are anti-sex, women who are anti-environment, women who are anti-minimum wage, women who are anti-welfare, women who are anti-gay, women who are anti-science, women who are anti-immigrant. These are the platforms they run on, there is nothing pro-equality about them. These are women who are anti-feminist.

So let’s cut the bullshit. Feminism is a club and if you don’t pay your dues you don’t get to be a member. There is a lot of variety, but you have to actually care about women’s equality, and that means respecting whatever they decide to do with their uteri.*

If Palin actually starts caring about women, we might review her application. Until then… be fruitful and multiply.

*Apparently both are correct.
#Seriously, wikipedia has listed 23 female candidates that Palin has endorsed. One! Just one, bothered to do anything caring about women’s health, economic opportunities, or safety. This groups does more to advance the rights of rifles than women.

Prostitution: Take 2

I ended my last post with this little tidbit:

Those who would argue otherwise care more about appearances than reality.

The “otherwise” being the idea that striking down all the the gotcha laws surrounding prostitution in this country’s criminal code would somehow be damaging to our society.

Well folks allow me to introduce you to Mr. George “Cares More About Appearance Than Reality” Jonas.

In general his article is complaining about judges doing their job, sorry, interpreting the law and then making a judgement on it. Susan G. Himel is only a judge in the highest court of Ontario, I mean what could she possible know about the law? Right?

However the overall thread running through his writing is outright denial of the way things actually are. Like suggesting that Canadians don’t actually have issue with sex workers but if we have brothels we’re going to be concerned about the hygiene issues. (?!)

The probable answer is that prostitution doesn’t bother us very much. Questions of public hygiene do, tenderloin districts do, occupational hazards to hookers and johns do, but prostitution as such doesn’t.

Is this more condoms in the street? Because I’m telling you, your prime suspects are the teenage boys. The real translation however is, ‘I don’t have a problem with prostitution, as long as I don’t have to know it exists or hear about sex workers being assaulted or raped or trafficked; all problems that we could help prevent if we started treating sex workers like people instead of criminals.’

See shallow people like these laws because they keep strict divisions; as long as prostitutes are punished in some way, they are the ‘bad’ people. If we stop punishing them how will they know they are bad? And then those poor shallow people will have no one to look down upon. It’s called dehumanization; tough on crime crackpots do it quite well.

And it’s all about the superiority complex.

Let me approach it this way. When I was young, “nice” girls didn’t. (They did, of course, but nowhere nearly as often or as casually as in the last 40 years.)

Ah, revisionist history! This is then used to segue-way into the fact that even though girls are giving it away for free there is still rampant prostitution. Of course anyone with the most basic of google-fu skills knows this to be utterly false. Teen pregnancy in the United States peaked in 1957, there was plenty of sex going on, there just happened to be a lot of shotgun marriages as well.

Let’s face it; no matter what period in history, if people wanted to have sex, they had sex. Even if they were wearing a poodle skirt.

But that would be reality when people just want to keep up an appearance. Right now the appearance everyone wants is the idea that there is no problem with the way we deal with prostitution. The truth is our laws put sex workers in danger and at risk.

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