“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.

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.

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.

Of course, they never explain why this will happen. Pluto will align with Saturn and the gravitational pull will suck the US into stratosphere… or something.

Sitting in Canada, with all our gay marrying, looking around and… Yeah society pretty much still intact.

Which is why it’s extra funny when Canadians try to pull the same line, but again, we already have the whole gay marriage thing. So where do you go from there? Well normally I would say pot (oh noes!) but right now it’s prostitution on everyone’s mind.

The provincial government and the federal government want to appeal a decision by the Ontario Superior Court that struck down several laws related to prostitution.

Prostitution itself wasn’t technically illegal, because, truth be told, that law never would have withstood a charter challenge. So they tried to make it illegal by proxy; you can’t broker a deal regarding prostitution, you can’t keep a house used for prostitution, you can’t live off the money made from prostitution etc.

So you can be a prostitute, we’ll just make it really dangerous by forcing you out on the street and making sure it’s impossible for you to not break a law. Charming.

But somehow allowing prostitutes to get off the street will destroy our moral fibre. (Psst! Amsterdam! With your red light district and your pot cafes, you are in the middle of an apocalypse and you didn’t even know it!)

So what will be the horrible consequences of allowing bordellos? Well there may be licensing… and condoms…

“I hope that all the naive fools who support this ruling will be gifted with the task of picking up the used condoms in their own nice neighbourhoods.”

So aside from confusing prostitutes with teenage boys I don’t see a whole lot of problems.  Which is to be expected, because the truth is removing these laws will get sex workers off the street and make them safer. Those who would argue otherwise care more about appearances than reality.

The books are trying to encourage girls to get active in mathematics; by telling them that being smart and learning math is the sexy thing to do.  The interviewer shows concern that sexing up math may be damaging to girls, although equating intelligence and sexiness is probably pretty far from the worst thing we can do.

It’s basically a new way of saying math isn’t cool, so let’s make it seem like it is. So the theory goes, if the kids think it’s cool they won’t be afraid to learn it, and to excel. McKellar just happens to be using sex.

But that really does not explain why the gap happens in math. Math isn’t cool, but I don’t remember the English nerds being all that popular either. (If they were… boy did I miss that boat). If it just wasn’t “sexy” to be “smart” the issue would be seen across most school disciplines, but it’s exclusive to math.

McKellar touches on the really issue but doesn’t linger long.

If you ask a boy who’s getting a B-plus how he’s doing in math, he’s likely to say, “Oh, I do great.” You ask the average girl who’s getting an A-minus how she’s doing, she’s more likely to say, “Oh, I dunno, I don’t really get it.”

No confidence in one’s ability to actually perform with mathematical skill.  Is there a lack of confidence because it’s not sexy? No.

There is a problem with stereotypes here but it has more to do with gender essentialism than ‘cool’. Why are girls not confident? Because we consistently undermine the ability of girls to learn math.

Math is a man thing.  In days long ago it was simply too tough for us feeble minded females and up until extremely recently it wasn’t that we were feeble, no, our brains were just better equipped for other things.

Of course now females are outperforming in the classroom we apparently just aren’t getting interested in the sciences because our brains don’t adjust to that type of work. Yeah, talk about the ever changing goal posts.

Here’s another Salon article interview* another author, only a few days before, discussing the ‘differences’ of the male and female brain, or the lack thereof. They bring up some examples of gender-izing skills and intelligence; how we assume men are better at all those ‘technical’ things and women get the ‘emotional’ stuff.

Of course time and again these “pop-culture” theories are debunked, but that doesn’t mean they are not harmful.

For a woman doing a math test, she has an acquired stereotype threat that if you do badly, people are going to judge you because you’re a woman and that you’re going to confirm what everyone already “knew,” that women are bad at math. It creates a whole host of harmful psychological effects in people’s minds. And psychologists have discovered if you make gender seem not relevant to a task, then men and women perform equally well.

So if sexy math gets girls more interested in the sciences, it’s not the worst but it misses the main point. What’s important is making sure they are confident in their skills and know that women are just as capable.

* I strongly recommend this one.