Category: sex

Absurdity

At The Risk Of…

Another GOP candidate has stirred the hornet’s nest of women’s rights and abortion by making one of the most blatantly absurd statements— no, that’s inaccurate, mainly because there is no way to gauge “most absurd” in this context.  So many of them have come out and said shit everyone knew they were thinking but till recently had managed to either not say or have couched in more sophisticated and euphemistic language.

Richard Mourdock said that any pregnancy resulting from rape is “God’s intent.”

How to delicately respond to this…?

Oh, fuckit.  This is bullshit.

The basic assumption of Biblical literalism these asshats have been using is a compendium of tribal law no one would approve across the board anymore because we don’t believe that shit anymore!

Did you know that, per the Old Testament, if a woman is raped and does not immediately scream and accuse the man, she is presumed guilty of adultery and is to be stoned to death?  (All the various sexual rules related to this can be found in Deuteronomy 22.)

What is wrong with this is that it all—all—reduces a woman to property.  I don’t care how you dress it up, interpret it, or reconstitute it, the reason we no longer regard Old Testament morays as valid is that they treat so many categories of people as property.  It condones slavery, chattel bondage, the rights of fathers to kill children.  They are rules, sure, and it does not give categorical rights to the father, but that doesn’t matter because it is all based on a construction of human rights we no longer support.

At least, most of us don’t.

Here is the basic problem and the reason I have always supported a woman’s right to choose.

It is her body, her life, her choice.  Period.  It’s not yours, it’s not the state’s, it doesn’t belong to the man who fucked her or her father or her husband and certainly not her rapist.  It belongs to her, to decided what to do with.  If people did not own their own bodies, then we wouldn’t have to get permission from them as individuals for organ donations (even after death).

So at what point does this cease being true?  How does becoming pregnant alter that fundamental fact, especially if said pregnancy was not her choice?

I’m sorry if you think that embryo/zygote/fetus is a human being, it does not by its simple existence trump a woman’s right to decide if she is willing to serve as incubator to it.  It does not trump her right to determine how she wants to live her life from that moment on.  It does not trump her right to be able to say yes or no to a situation that will irrevocably alter any course she may have set or predetermine what options she may have in the future, regarding career, partners, and personal matters having nothing to do with other people.

Because it doesn’t trump any of these things for a man, who can walk away and have nothing further to do with what he has left behind.

The argument that, among certain seriously neurotic types, that if she didn’t want to be pregnant she should not have had sex is nothing more than a different set of constraints to tell her what she can or cannot do with her own body.  Besides, she invited him inside, she never said he could leave any relatives behind.

I base my support on a lifetime of privileged autonomy, knowing that this was not something I, as a man, would ever have to deal with, so any pronouncement on my part would be at virtually no risk that my life would ever have to change.  Realizing that, I knew that I rather liked that autonomy and would never deny it to anyone else.  I see it as the epitome of hypocrisy for men to dictate this to women.  They would have to enforce a situation on women that they themselves would never be subject to.  This is the basis of discrimination.

I, were I a woman, would damn well insist on being able to live the life I want to live and determine my procreative future entirely for myself.  No one should insist, through law or any other means, that a woman do something not of her choice.

But we have been seeing the naked assertion of male privilege in all this, of men insisting that women should not have the same choices they do.

Well, to be perfectly blunt, fuck that.

Unless you are willing to embrace all of the rules in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, your presumption of speaking for Biblical morality is a sham.  If you do embrace all that nonsense, then you have no place in the government of a democracy, because all of it is born out of an autocratic mindset that has no problem predetermining what people are—master, chattel, slave, outcast.

Now.  This is all, ultimately, a major distraction.  The GOP was never serious about rolling back Roe v. Wade—why would they give up such a wonderfully effective campaign issue by fulfilling the implied promises they’ve made since the 80s and actually outlaw abortion?  Furthermore, they know very well the shitstorm that would create.  Most of the antichoice movement is leery of discussing legal redress—punishment—for what they claim is murder.  Most don’t want to talk about it.  The leadership very well knows why—because the fervent hope of most of these folks is that abortion simply go away.  If you punish people for it, it will never go away.  It will be in the courts forever, until one day the tide reverses again and it is once more legal, and maybe after that it will remain so because we will have really locked down this argument over who owns a woman’s body.

But now all it does is serve to obscure other issues and delude a large segment of the voting population into thinking this is something that will really make any difference.  By this tactic, they have you all voting for people who while touting “family values” have just been picking your pockets and diverting your real power into the hands of oligarchs.

I have one parting question for all you people so bent on ending abortion.  How come none of you advocate mandatory vasectomies, not even for dead-beat dads?  I never hear anything like that, even as a theoretical argument, from any the antichoice folks.  Nothing that would shift the focus to the man.  You don’t want people getting shot (pregnant) don’t take their guns away, just the bullets.

That was rhetorical, yes, but the question is legit.  Why is this all put on the woman, every time?

I think I may write nothing more political till after the election.

Vote!

Art

It Was Fifty Years Ago, Mr. Bond

“Do you expect me to talk?”

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

The exchange between Bond and Goldfinger may sum up the attitude of many who are tired, offended, or otherwise ambivalent or disinterested in the absurdly long career of the improbable James Bond, 007.  Even those of us who have been more or less unable to let go our adolescent attachment to the character have doubtless wondered why he hasn’t just died.

He should have, certainly after the criminal treatment he endured toward the middle and end of the Roger Moore years.  All due respect to Mr. Moore (he didn’t write the films, he had probably less control than most leading men), I for one never quite accepted him as Bond.  He was always a bit too pretty, a bit too sophisticated, a bit too…light.

But the movies were popular, he kept signing on, and we endured, waiting for the next incarnation of Sean Connery.

The iconic Bond image of Connery with the long-barreled Walther (yes, that thing was a Walther, but it was an air gun because the actual prop hadn’t arrived for the photo shoot) which was never seen in any of the Bond films is not the one that summed up the character for me.  Rather it was this one:

The first real good look at Bond, at the L’Circle club at the beginning of Doctor No.  This is the image that made me want to be Bond— utterly unconcerned, cool, detached, and completely confident within himself.  He’s playing a fairly expensive game of bacarat and he obviously could care less whether he wins or loses.  (Of course, this is not true—Bond always cared about that, but not over trivial things.  The trivial things simple fell in line when he walked into the room, and this was another characteristic that made him, to a clumsy, hormone-laced adolescent, such an enviable figure.  How badly I wanted to simply not give a damn and how thoroughly I gave a damn about not being able to do that.)

I saw that first Bond film on first release. I was eight at the time and it wasn’t the women that got me, it was that dangerous cool he had at his disposal.  Later, as I reached puberty, the women became important, but till then it was being lethal—and not using it—that was the thing.

And dressing well and talking well and comporting yourself as if you knew why you were there and what you were doing.  It was a total package that was the only viable replacement for the stoic gunslinger in the westerns.  In the scope of a kid’s imagination, Bond was doable.

I wrote an essay for one of the BenBella Smartpop anthologies, James Bond In The 21st Century riffing on an imaginary history of the films, with a departure from Sean Connery.  It could have happened, Fleming was not taken with Connery at first, and there were others who could have filled the role.  (Fleming’s choice was David Niven, which, given the physicality of the character, is kind of absurd.  But it explains the subsequent choices, I think, of actors.)  It was also an alternate history of the franchise had it not been the hit that it was.  It was a fun piece to write, but it addressed a serious question.

Why did a franchise that became, for a time, so massively ridiculous continue to be such a big deal?

I think the answer is in the new manifestation.  Daniel Craig (and the writers) has gone back to the source in many ways and given us a Bond more in line with Fleming’s original conception of someone who is genuinely dangerous who wears a veneer of polish, culture, and civilization.

Once again, though, we harken back to that first on-screen look at Bond and see its reemergence in Craig’s portrayal.  Detached, completely in control, cool, and competent.

But with a difference for the films.

He’s vulnerable.

The last time Bond was vulnerable was in On Her Majestie’s Secret Service and Tracy Bond.  After that, he was in all but the Kryptonian origin, Superman.  It became the trademark.  Nothing got through, not really.  He had his empathy boxed up and set to one side, to be taken out on special occasions.

And there’s an appeal to that, to be sure.  We have all been undone by our notoriously fickle and sabotaging emotions, made fools of, acted stupidly.  What would we give to be able to avoid all that?

Well, the price is too high, but we have fantasy characters through which to pretend.

But I think it goes too far and they become so unlikely—not in their actions, the plots that give them a showcase, but in their emotional lives—that we cannot identify with them at all.  All we have then are the toys, the lifestyle, the fashions, and the rollercoaster ride of an action sequence.

Craig has been allowed to open Bond up so we can reconnect, albeit in a small way, with the pathetic human being caged behind the armor.  The fact that Craig is a first-rate actor (possibly better than Connery even in his prime) doesn’t hurt.

Bond has survived, though, because at his base he still represents a level of competence in a fickle, dangerous world we would all like to tap into.  Bond is always centered, he always knows what he’s about and how to act on that knowledge, and that is a very attractive ideal.  When you look at the first three Bond films, you can see that and a slightly vulnerable man, one who doesn’t always get it right, who can become involved, and can therefore be hurt. After Thunderball they became all about the gadgets and some surreal good vs evil drama that actually gave a good shadow-theater representation of the world at large.

The other thing that has carried us through so many really awful Bond films, though, is the myth of the uninvolved sybarite.  He comes in, takes his pleasure, kills the bad guy, and leaves unscathed.  He’s a moral avenger who gets to party occasionally.  His reward for doing the right thing was good food, fast cars, fine clothes, and great sex.  Bond never got fat, never caught a ticket or the clap, never left behind a single mom, and always looked good.  In return, he saved the world.  There was no sacrifice, really—he was a mercenary.

Except that’s not what Fleming wrote.  And when they rebooted the franchise and chose to do Casino Royale, they put that in there.  It may be ignored in subsequent films (I hope not, it’s what elevates Bond above the common), but it was there—Bond is sacrificing his soul.

That first novel, Casino Royale, was about that.  Bond was a new agent, freshly-minted with a 007 license, and fully a third of the book is him in hospital, working through the emotional and moral calculus of continuing to do this ugly, brutal job.  To their credit, the makers of the first Craig film kept that in.  We were even, dimly, shown its conclusion in Quantum of Solace, where at the end Bond has made his choice, and put on the armor.

It will be interesting to see if they continue to keep him human, if only slightly, or if they’ll do what they did before and turn him into the Road Runner getting one over on all the coyotes on the planet.

Happy birthday, Mr. Bond.

culture

Where It Comes Down For Me

I grew up in a sexist culture.

No, really. I was born in 1954. I grew up in the stew of sexism and was made very aware of it because it was being challenged throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I came of age during the heyday of Male Privilege, when the default assumption was that men were the smart ones, the strong ones, the ones who shouldered all responsibility, and women basically came along for the ride because, well, we needed them for babies and cooking and occasional interludes of sex and, well, because they looked good. Strong, independent women were weird, unnatural, and intended to be conquered by a stronger man who, paradoxically, didn’t actually need them but decided, for some reason, to protect them because while they were getting along fine without him, that simply couldn’t last because women couldn’t sustain themselves and it was great that one was independent for as long as she was, but it was really a man’s duty to take care of her, so…

It sounds absurd when you break it down like that, but really, that’s what it was. Women couldn’t do anything without a man.

Except they usually took care of the family finances, maintained the house, made most of the health care decisions, and, oh yeah, raised the next generation of males who thought women were helpless.

Women who insisted on their own sexual needs were characterized charmingly as sluts, whores, trash, “mannish”, or some variation that included unnatural in the mix. Much to the consternation of everyone, Playboy changed all that, for better or worse, by basically putting it Out There that women were pretty much like men in that they liked sex and, oh yeah, had a right to it, just like men. (All the academic and political activism in the world didn’t move the culture half so much as Playboy did, which has caused another kind of push-back, but that’s another story.)

By the time I was in my twenties I’d watched my culture turn itself inside out over this and come to a place where it seemed any sane, rational person would be repulsed by the standards of that quaint and rather scary prior era. I thought—mistakenly—that the debate was settled.

Debate? Women are people.

Again, to some this might sound silly so simply stated, but that’s what it came down to and where it comes down for me. Women are people. First. They have dreams, aspirations, ambitions, hopes, talents, traits, expectations, and rights just like any man. That seems perfectly natural to me. I like that idea, I like the kind of world it implies.

But it seems some folks can’t seem to accept that. The first time I was aware of any counterargument was Phyllis Schlafly, who seemed intent on convincing women that there was something wrong with them if they wanted careers in lieu of families, that they were defying some natural order by refusing to get down on their knees and worship men the way women had been made to do for millennia. The more I found out about her, the more I found her position not only unpalatable but also hypocritical, since she herself never gave up any of her goals or ambitions for motherhood. After a while I realized that this was a perverse form of noblesse oblige, the aristocrat telling the peasant what to do and why they couldn’t have what the aristocrat had.

Still, this was a mere ripple. Things were improving.

And then something really unexpected happened. An argument was found that made the whole issue seem to have nothing to do with women’s civil rights or status as people, but with the entire culture’s responsibility to something that had never heretofore been an issue in this particular way. The argument made it seem like any woman insisting on her rights was in danger of being a murderer.

Well. It became clear after a while that although the rhetoric seemed to be focused on questions of what constituted a human life, the tactics and strategy demonstrated that it was just the same old bunch of ancient, tired arguments from privilege that women ought to have no such rights, that they ought to be little more than incubators and sex slaves.

Here is a video which pretty much sums the issue up for me and afterward I’ll tell you why.

For me, the issue comes down to this. I am a person first, a man coincidentally. Odds were pretty much even up that I might have been a woman—but I would still be a person. And by that token, I have to say that if you tried to treat me the way some people are trying to treat women, I would absolutely be in your face about it. It would be my decision to reproduce, to use my body for that purpose, no one else’s, and anyone else’s qualms about how I conduct my personal life matter not at all. This should not be a political issue. No one has a right to live off the body of another. That would be a gift. Gifts only count if they’re given willingly.

Those who would deny women the right to live as they choose have themselves decided—by proxy, on behalf of people they don’t even know—that history means nothing, that rights are conditional, and that their, for wont of a better term, sense of modesty trumps everyone else’s freedoms. They have shown time and again that what they say is the issue really is not and in the last year have made it absolutely clear that their priorities have nothing to do with the “sanctity” of life but rather with an idealized aesthetic of what they consider “appropriate” behavior.

I just wanted to be clear.

culture

The Other Side

Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War.  It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified.  The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation.  The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play.  Had the reformers, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, tried to assert any kind of racial equality at the time, the United States would have been stillborn.

Instead, they put a time limit into the document—20 years—which forbade the topic from even being discussed in Congress until that later year, at which time, presumably, the issue would come to the floor for some kind of resolution.  History shows that every such attempt was met with denunciations by southern members of Congress and often with threats of secession—which by then were illegal.

Make no mistake, as some revisionists might have you believe, secession was not an option and everyone who voted to ratify the Constitution knew it.  Contrary to popular mythology, the original 13 states locked themselves together permanently.  A couple of later territories parlayed an “escape clause”—Texas was a big one, but the Texas “right to secede” had a limiting condition: Texas could only leave as long as it never took up arms against the Union, which, much to Sam Houston’s consternation, it did during the Civil War and forever lost that right, despite what Governor Perry might wish people to believe—but by and large, joining the Union was a binding act that could not be reversed other than by armed rebellion.  The South was in the wrong, legally speaking.

Another bit of modern revisionism that has become popular is that the South did not secede over slavery but over “states rights.”  This is patent nonsense and any cursory perusal of the declarations of secession shows that issue number one for all of them was slavery.  They were not going to let Abraham Lincoln and his Republicans take away their property.

It’s difficult to imagine how it must have felt to be caught between the two sides.  Philosophically, I mean.  And where you lived didn’t make much difference.  There were riots in New York and other places in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Many Northerners who had supported Lincoln in the war effort turned on him when the issue changed from preserving the Union to freeing the slaves.  Poor whites were no more enamored of the idea of free blacks than were Southern plantation owners.  As far as they were concerned, it was more competition for already depressed wages.

And the fact is many on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, even among those who didn’t support slavery as such, did not regard Africans as fully human—at least not the equal of white people.

Try as we might to spin it otherwise, the many-faceted nature of the War Between The States turned on questions of what it meant to be human.

We still have not settled that question.  It may be that for many people it is simply not settleable.

I want to be very careful here.  My purpose in laying out the nature of the conflict during the Civil War is to establish a base for what may end up being another civil war if we’re not very careful.  The conduct—philosophically, politically, legally, morally—on both sides of the slave/emancipation divide illuminates aspects of our culture and our nature that are difficult.

There may have been many white people at the time who truly believe blacks were fully human and fully equal by nature to whites.  Most of them did not hold much authority and given subsequent history they did not win the public debate.  African Americans remained second or third class citizens for well over a century after the end of the war and in some ways today still face an uphill struggle for equity.  The bases of the discrimination mutated over time and it might be fair to say problems shifted from nature to nurture and took on sociological contours rather than biological, but the fact remains people do not treat each other as fully human in all circumstances.

It is a salient fact of our history that during the heated debates of the Emancipation and Reconstruction Eras over equal rights, equal status, and equal abilities, one group was not even considered as relevant.  Women.

Certainly the Women’s Suffrage Movement put forth arguments for equality, but the country was not likely to go to war over what people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony asserted—that one half the population lived in conditions of chattel bondage and servitude based on gender.

The list of inarguable facts speaks for itself.  Women did not have the right to vote (federally, that is—some states granted it, here and there, from time to time, in limited fashion) until 1920.

Throughout the 19th Century, a divorced woman lost everything.  As a married woman, all her property belonged to her husband, including the children, and in the instance of a divorce the law said her ex-husband owed her nothing.  She left with the clothes on her back, which was all she was legally entitled to.  Variations existed here and there, but generally this was the case.

A woman was denied entree into the professions whenever possible.  The first woman to graduate with a medical degree in the United States was Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849.  She was barred residency in a hospital due to her sex.  The struggle continued, but by 1920 women represented only 5% of the entire medical profession as doctors.   Elizabeth Bragg graduated from Berkely in 1876 as a civil engineer, but it was not until 1965 that a woman was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.  In 1869, Arabella Mansfield graduated law school and applied to the bar in Iowa.  Iowa law forbade any but white males from taking the bar, but an exception was made.  She passed.  (A year later the law was repealed, suggesting that she was allowed to take the bar examination with an expectation that she would fail.)

You get my meaning.  The numbers were low, the exceptions more or less famous.  Most women in the professions generally had to give them up when they married and there was no social space for a career woman to live her life with the same expectations of free conduct as her male counterparts.  The professions for women were very much like taking vows.

The Civil War seemed to settle the question as to the humanity of slaves, but did nothing for women.

Of course, had you phrased it that way at the time, many people, including many women, would have looked at you like you had just stepped off a spaceship speaking High Arcturan.  Of course women are human, they might answer.  But, good heavens, they’re women.

As if that explained anything.

At the time, it sort of did, though.  Women had a clearly-defined function as far as society—and most people—were concerned.  They were to be wives and mothers.  Anything else was vanity at best, offensive at worst.  Women should be what they were “made to be” and aspire to nothing more.

It didn’t seem to occur to most people that the prohibition on aspiring to be more implied that women did aspire and aspiration was a wholly human trait.

But I digress.  The fact is, any attempt to question this basic assumption was met with disdain and often the full force of the law.  The Suffrage Movement itself split over the nature of female aspiration—most thought it enough to simply get the vote, while others intended that women be granted the full rank and privilege of being human as expressed by the lives of their male counterparts, with all that entailed.  It might be that this was more a tactical issue, but I don’t doubt that for many it was philosophical as well.  In an instance of political expedience, the Suffrage Movement repudiated the ambition to make women wholly their own agents and decided to stick to the more “sanitary” program of achieving the vote.  They didn’t want to frighten potential male supporters by arguing for their right to be anything other than what they had always been—wives and mothers—only with the right to vote.

Of course, even after gaining suffrage in 1920, women remained second-class citizens because society treated them that way.  Educational opportunities were harder to gain, access to jobs and careers more difficult (and when gained, advancement and recognition delayed or denied), and economic shackles remained.  Up till the 1990s, a woman’s credit history belonged to her husband, and often, even after a divorce, she would find it very difficult to establish any credit on her own without her (former) husband’s history making it awkward.  As the 20th Century progressed, it became clear that the vote simply wasn’t enough, that equality was made up of much more than the franchise—it entails respect, agency, and an assumption of individual worth and merit, none of which can be gained by casting a ballot but only by being allowed to live as one chooses.

I think it came to a real head after the Second World War, when all those women, who had been working in industry, building the machinery with which we waged that war, were told to go home and forget all about self-sufficiency, because the men were coming home and they needed not only jobs but pliant females who wouldn’t compete with them.  It wasn’t just the jobs, but a massive change in the educational system—classes that had opened up to women in the 20s and 30s were suddenly closing down again, women who wanted to pursue careers were castigated as unnatural, the whole weight of cultural expectation that characterized women as essential sex toys and brood mares fell on them in the 1950s and turned that decade into one of the strangest periods of American history and set the stage for all the emancipatory movements of the Sixties and Seventies.  June Cleaver was the cultural icon women were supposed to aspire to.  This to women who had been  and whose mothers had been building tanks, airplanes, and ships in the 1940s, running assembly lines, driving trucks, farming, and so much more.  They were expected to just forget all that and return to a condition of simple-minded obeisance all for the boys coming home.

As patriotic as this sounded, this was an instance where sacrifice becomes a form of slavery.

Yes, there were many women who were probably perfectly happy with this state of affairs.  But their happiness was built on the shattered dreams of women for whom this was simply unacceptable.  The one cannot be justified by the desire for the other.

By now, it may be obvious where I’m going with this.  We are facing the possibility of another civil war, one I’m not sure where the lines will be drawn, but one that could be brutally destructive.  We joked about the War Between the Sexes back in the day, but that’s not what this is.  This is going to be a war over the exact nature of agency.  The flags have now gone up the poles on the one side and I think it has taken a lot of people by surprise.  The blowback is coming.

Here is how I feel about this.  One side in this conflict wishes to privilege potential life in such a way as to deny self-determination and agency to half the population, the half that still has a solid argument that it has not yet been granted full equality with the other half.  That for the sake of what may be they will have to surrender themselves to conditions of servitude that the other side simply does not have to suffer, purely by dint of biology.

It is not sufficient to argue that all the one side wants is for things to go back to the way they used to be.  The way things used to be was not acceptable—that’s why we changed it.  The way things used to be was built on hypocrisies and legal fictions that privileged a status quo which, as long as certain people exhibited no aspirations at odds with the publicly accepted norms, everyone pretended was equal and fair and just.

Well, we all know how often that is actually the case.

What disturbs me—appalls me, really—is how little the Other Side really knows, not only about our history, but about any history, and how they are so easily manipulated by the agents of regress.  There are certain arguments we should have been done with that we’re having to have all over again because people—many people—don’t have a clue what has gone before.

They’re the sorts who believe the revisionists who tell us that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery but states rights or that the South really did have the right to secede.

They’re the sort that believes that any woman who has the temerity to talk publicly about her right to have sex is a slut.

A word to the wise—it’s not temerity; it’s self confidence.

See you on the barricades.

culture

Any Time They Want

I sometimes wonder who Rush Limbaugh is speaking to anymore, but the evidence suggests someone tunes in.  I wonder how many think it’s a comedy show, sort of a political version of an old Andrew Dice-Clay routine.  (Remember him?  No?  Well, there’s hope after all.)

In the wake of Rush’s remarks about Sandra Fluke he has been losing sponsors, a few Republican politicians have been condemning him, and everyone seems to want to keep as far from him as possible.  No one but a few academics are talking about this in historical terms, though, and I think that’s a mistake.  Because this is so typically male-dominant behavior, the kind that feminists— the ones Rush has had it in for lo these past decades— point to when describing cultural oppression that someone should be raising a banner and saying “See?  This is what we’re talking about!”

 

Here’s a conversation.  I’ve scripted it, but it is based on reality, and if we’re honest we have all heard something like this.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a fundraiser for an NGO.  We operate in twelve developing nations trying to implement grass roots reforms in education.”

“Wow, that sounds really interesting.  How do you get work like that?”

“Well, after I earned my Masters from Stanford, I went into private sector work for a big agro firm. Part of what I did there was coordinate large scale testing of new cultivation methods in order to improve yield per acre in a variety of conditions.  At first I was pretty hands-on with the researchers, but more and more I took over the actual negotiations, which meant a lot of PR work.”

“You traveled a lot?”

“Oh, I’ve been to China, Japan, Indonesia, India, plus a good part of the EU.”

“Must have been a lot of language barriers.”

“Some, but I speak Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and a bit of Urdu.”

“Sounds like a full-time job.  Do you do anything for fun?”

“Oh, sure.  I really like climbing and whenever I get the chance I do whitewater canoeing.  I also play piano, but to really unwind I cook.  I did a semester at a culinary institute, so…”

“Your husband must like that.”

“Oh, I’m not married.”

“Too bad.”

“Not really.  Maybe someday, but right now I just don’t have time for a full-time relationship.”

(Significant pause.)  “Is there anyone special in your life?”

“There are a couple of men I see fairly often, but most of the time it’s just casual dating.”

“Hmm.”  Goes away thinking: slut.

A joke?  Unfortunately not.  Seems sometimes no matter what a woman does professionally or otherwise, no matter what her achievements might be, if she is in any way nonmonogamous, for many people that’s the only thing that matters.  Whore, slut, garbage, trash, scum.  More than one penis gets in there by her choice, everything else is worthless.

But with a man?  The more successful professionally, the more it seems expected that he has had a string of “conquests.”  It’s part of the perks that come with virile masculinity.

Yes, I know this is not a universally held attitude, but it is the majority default reaction, so the more thoughtful “good for the goose, good for the gander” attitude does not hold sway.  We pander to the concept of the Man Who Lays Many.  It’s cool, whether we like to admit it or not.  We feel sorry for the male virgin and we have a variety of labels for him that are not particularly nice, the number one being Loser.  (Yes, Loser appends to many other traits, but even the millionaire computer geek who can’t get laid is seen as pathetic.  Money’s nice, but come on!  And then there’s the second-tier attitudes toward men who use prostitutes: “You have to buy it? Jees!”)

The double standard, in other words, is not only alive and well, it’s stormed into the party and is wrecking the buffet.

There are many causes of this, it does not emerge from any one source—if it did, we might be able to do something about it more effectively—but all sources have one thing in common—fear.  It’s not that men fear women as such.  They fear being irrelevant, and at the end of the day success with women, especially passive, noncompetitive women, is balm to the savaged ego of many men.  To have women compete directly or even (gasp!) exercise the right to indulge their sexuality the way men do (or are supposed to) is an intolerable threat.

This is sexual politics 101 and why we have to go over this again after the Sixties and Seventies baffles me.  Unless the lesson simply didn’t matter.

There has been a growing tsunami of reaction since the Women’s Movement broke down the walls into what had been seen as an exclusively male domain.  It has washed up on the beach now and into the halls of power where it is being made a Cause by men who, try as they might to spin it some other way, just can’t stand having women live independent lives.

So, yes, this whole nonsense over contraception is nothing less than an attempt to put women back in “their place” and people like Rush Limbaugh seem to think there is traction and resonance in labeling women sluts because they have sex “any time they want.”  Of course, what is implicit in that “any time they want” is that they can say No any time they want.

And that’s probably what bothers the Rush Limbaughs the most.

culture

Trust In Your Message?

There’s an aspect of this flap over Obama’s insistence that health care policies offered by institutions with religious affiliation cover birth control that I don’t see many people discussing.  All the posturing over how this is anti-religious and a blatant slap at religious freedom, blah blah, is both predictable and irrelevant.  For one, it’s not.  For one thing, it doesn’t even approach the kind of infringement of a basic freedom that Bush’s infamous “gag rule” on abortion information represented, which Obama overturned.

But there is a common link between both that Bush-era ruling and the current stance taken by the Catholic bishops.  Namely, a complete lack of confidence in their message.  What it comes down to is a denial that people have not only the right but the ability to make decisions for themselves based on good information.

It’s simple.  The Gag Rule assumed that if people never found out about certain options, then they wouldn’t use those options, but that if they did learn about them, they would.  It represented a complete lack of confidence that people could both hear all the options and then make decisions in their own best interest, some of which would be consistent with the policy Bush’s administration was backing.  Likewise here.  Just because birth control is covered by an insurance policy purchased for the benefit of employees does not automatically mean that all these people will start using birth control.  If the Catholic message is sound, if it has merit, that option will never be exercised.

But no.  Safer, they must think, to restrict access, to keep it off the table, to ban the pamphlet, and remove the service than to trust that people will do what the Catholic Church wants them to do.

For all the posturing about what is or is not “American,” this is as unAmerican as it gets.  Honored more in rhetoric than practice, the right of the individual to decide for him or herself is supposed to be at the heart of what makes us who we are.  So how does barring choice square with that?

Granted, we do it all the time.  We do it in drug use, we have age-specific restrictions dealing with movies, bars, driving, we have all manner of qualifying rules and regulations that keep people away from certain options, and a lot of it makes perfect sense.

But this is not one of them.  If we were going to ban coverage of birth control from all insurance policies, then there would be no controversy over religious issues.  It would be controversial for a different reason, but since the ban would be universal it would not be liable to the kind of ideological argumentation we’re now seeing.  But if you’re going to offer it to some and not others based on where they work, then you have a basic civil rights question.

Look, this isn’t even about making churches provide birth control.  It’s about church-affiliated institutions with large employee payrolls that are not denomination-exclusive—like universities and hospitals—being required to serve that employee base in accord with the standards every other employer must meet.  Despite the association with a religious institution, what we’re talking about is workplace rules where the institution and the community interface on the level of employment.

But that argument will be made in court, no doubt. What strikes me about this is the so far unremarked tendency in this country to not trust in our own messages.  We do this all the time, suppressing certain ideas, barring certain speakers from addressing certain audiences, criticizing open discourse over things which we fear—it’s arguable that most Americans had no idea what communism actual was back during the Cold War, debatable whether we do now, but we so feared it that we wouldn’t even talk about it—and frankly that’s not us.  It’s not who we claim to be, not who we’d like to be, but there it is.

Of course, in this instance the Catholic bishops have a real concern.  According to studies, 98% of Catholic women use or have used birth control.  Obviously, the message the Church wants delivered doesn’t have as much traction as they’d like.  By that token, taking a stand on this is clearly in response to evident failure.

But it’s still a matter of personal choice, something the Catholic Church—or, for that matter, any church—has never been comfortable with.  Trusting an individual to make a decision like this for herself has always been fraught with the likelihood that they will make the right choice—but not the one desired.

This is vestigial moralizing.  If we accept as a concept that all people should be considered equal, then it follows that the opportunities and privileges available to everyone should be equal.  At one time, that equality was meted out based on the notion of a family unit.  The family, represented by the man, enjoyed the rights and privileges of the community.  With changes in technology and the economy, the focus has shifted more narrowly on the individual, which has eroded the primacy of the male as women have become more and more able to act independently*.  If we are serious about equality, then it should come as no surprise that we have to make adjustments for those things that enable the expression of equality.  That is the American message and all this political posturing over birth control is exactly apposite that message.

In the wake of the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood kerfluffle, it seems finally enough people are waking up to the fact that if we do not assert the primacy of that message, we could lose what equality we’ve gained since—

Well, since the 1920s when you could receive a prison sentence for distributing pamphlets about birth control.  Or since the 1940s when women were forced out of jobs they had held all during WWII and were told they were incapable of doing those jobs by virtue of their sex.  Or since 1965, when finally the Supreme Court declared that couples had a basic right to contraception.  Or—

The Catholic Church obvious doesn’t trust its people to heed its message.  It may be that the message is flawed.  Or maybe Americans are beginning to trust their own message.

_____________________________________________________________

*I am talking here about the way society was structured, not the right or wrong of the distribution of rights and privileges.  It is an unfortunate fact that the basic biological reality concerning reproduction has placed women in a vulnerable position in regards to power relations.  My belief is that there has never been a excuse for the disenfranchisement of women, but until effective birth control and the subsequent changes in economic life that resulted, the initiative has been with men to set the rules.  Even so, it took a long time for men as a group to accept equality as a reality, never mind as a principle, and I do not for a minute believe that the majority of men who now take it as given are of sufficient numbers to guarantee we would never return to a culture of female subjugation.  The attack on reproductive rights strikes at the main foundation of contemporary political freedoms for women.

culture

Invisible Women

I’m taking time out (already) from all the rewriting I have to do to complain and restate a principle.

Here’s a lovely little bit of misogyny.

Read the article?  A newspaper took the photograph of the ready room where Obama and his cabinet received the news of Bin Ladin’s death and photoshopped out the women present.  For reasons of “modesty” they claimed.  They then apologized but asserted they have a First Amendment right to have done this.

Inadvertently—and I am sure they didn’t think about this when they did it—they gave Bin Ladin a small cultural victory out of his own death.  The religious view Bin Ladin asserted, supported, and fought for includes the return of women to second class status, to the status of property.  By doctoring that photograph, the editors of Di Tzeitung tacitly approved this idea.

Modesty.  Really?  They erased Hilary Clinton and a staffer in the background.  You look at the photograph in question:

2011-05-02t220238z_01_was100_rtridsp_3_binladen.jpg

Is there any way to look at that and perceive immodesty in the way we usually use the term?  I don’t see any scanty clothing or alluring, over-the-shoulder glances at the camera.  No legs, no cleavage, no hint of sexualization, which is what is normally meant by use of the term, even—especially—within the context of religious censure.  This sort of attitude is intended as a guard against titillation and “impure thoughts”, but I’m having a hard time seeing anything like that here.

In fact, this has made clear what the real problem is and has been all along.  Rules about “modesty” have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power.  Secretary of State Clinton—the Secretary of State of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on Earth, is a woman!—is a female in a position of power.  She is the boss of many men.  She is instrumental in setting policy, which affects many more men, men she doesn’t know and will never know.  She wields power and that is what is feared by these—I’ll say it because I’m pissed about this—these small-minded bigots.

And in their effort to make sure their daughters never grow up with the idea that they can have power or any kind, not even in the say over what to do with their lives (because they don’t even have any say over how they dress, who they can talk to, where they can go, what they can aspire to), these “proper” gentlemen handed Osama Bin Ladin a final supportive fist bump of solidarity.  “Yeah, brother, we hated the fact that you blew people up, but we really gotta keep these females in their Place.”

Cultural relativism be damned.  I’m one hundred percent with Sam Harris on this.  Subjugating half the population to some idea of propriety and in so doing strip them of everything they have even while hiding them head to toe and keeping them out of the public gaze is categorically evil.  The fact that this is resisted so much by otherwise intelligent people—on both sides of the issue, those who perpetrate it and those who refuse to outright condemn it for fear of being seen as cultural imperialists—is as shameful as the defenders of slavery 150 years ago.

Now, at least, they’ve made it hard to miss.  This wasn’t a photograph of some beauty pageant or a spread in Playboy or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue; this wasn’t a still from the red carpet runway at the Golden Globes or the lurid front page of a Fleet Street tabloid.  No, this was a photograph of powerful people doing serious work and two of them do not have a penis.  This is the issue—power.  Women the world over have no say in their lives.  They are wives, concubines, prostitutes, slaves.  If they wish to change the way they live, they are forbidden, sometimes killed for their ambition.  In many places still their daughters have their sex organs mutilated so they won’t ever fully experience sexual pleasure and, theoretically, never want to stray from the men who own them.  They are denied the vote, denied a voice, denied even the courtesy of Presence in life.  They are made background, wallpaper, accoutrements for  the men who are set against yielding even a token of consideration toward the idea that “their women” are people.

People who happen to be women.  People.

I am sick of this crap.  I am sick of people who don’t understand the issue.  I am sick of the tepid response among people who should see this as an unmitigated evil who won’t speak up to condemn it outright.  By their reluctance to condemn they allow this sickness to grow in their own backyard.  There are groups in this country who but for a few “inconvenient” laws would—and in some cases do—treat women exactly the same way.  I am sick of the constant onslaught on family planning services and the idea that women should not be in command of their own bodies.  I am sick of the feckless insecurity of outwardly bold and inwardly timid males who are afraid of the women around them, that if these women actually had some choices they would leave.  I am sick of men who can find no better use for their hands than to beat women, no better use for their minds than to boast of their manliness, and no better use for their penises than to keep score.  I am sick of women who are made to appear at fault for their own rapes because of the way they dress or walk or talk or because they thought, just like real people, they had a right to go anywhere they chose, free of fear.  I am sick of seeing the human waste of unrealized potential based on genital arrangement and the granting of undeserved rights and authority based on the same thing.  I am sick of being told by people who obviously haven’t stepped outside of their own navels that this is what god wants because some preacher or imam or shaman told them and they like the idea that there is someone who can’t say no to them no matter how abusive or failed they are as human beings.  I am sick of seeing women pay the cost of men deciding for them what they should be.

For those of you who read this and agree, excuse the rant.  Shove it in the faces of anyone who gives even lip service to the idea that women are somehow other than and less than males and that maybe a little “modesty” would be a good thing.  Modesty in this context is code for invisibility.

Back now to our regularly scheduled Wednesday.

culture

People Who Have No Money Should Have Nothing

I’m a tad upset.  The House just voted (all the Republicans and ten Democrats) to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

Why?

Planned Parenthood has been the target for the Right since it was founded in the 1920s—during a time, it should be stressed, when you could go to jail for distributing information about contraception.  Jail.  Because such information was seen as destructive of public morals.

Again, why?  This should be a no-brainer for Conservatives.  Privacy.  The ability to control your own person.  The responsible management of your own life.  But time and again we keep running up against this perverse negative reaction to anything that smacks of responsible sexuality.  I have said this before, but I think it bears repeating, that the right wing jeremiad against abortion has little to do with abortion—it is a war on sex.

Planned Parenthood is the number one provider of gynecological services for poor women, under and uninsured women, women with few other options if any.  The fact is that no federal dollars have been spent on abortion since the Hyde amendment was passed in 1976, and yet—and yet—this persecution continues.  It only makes sense if we stop thinking that this has anything to do with fetuses.

There is a very silly movie from 1964 called Kisses For My President.  It starred Polly Bergen as the first woman president of the United States and Fred MacMurray as her hapless husband.  You can imagine what the bulk of it is about—he has to fill the role of First Lady.  It’s a comedy.  Ostensibly.  As the frustrations of his position mount (I choose my words carefully) he clearly resents his position and decides to do something about it.  His solution?  He gets his wife pregnant.

Now, for some reason which today would be head-scratchable, she has to resign as president.  On this occasion, she yields to the inevitable and MacMurray is beaming like a man once more in charge.

Does anyone not see the horror in that scenario?

In 1964 businesses were still firing women who became pregnant.  There were no laws to prevent this.  The idea that a woman might want some say over her own life was still bizarre.  The sexual revolution was just underway and most Americans didn’t like it so much—not because they minded the idea of more sex so much as they hated the idea that their kids would be doing it.  Once it was well underway, though, it became far clearer that underlying all the cheesy jokes and Playboy aesthetics was the very serious issue of providing half the population with the ability to manage their own lives, their own dreams, their own futures.  Roe v. Wade was the capstone of this movement because—

This must be stressed today because we have generations that have grown up not knowing this history, not having to live under these conditions.

—because the inability of women to say no in matters of personal sexuality and to control their own fertility trapped many of them in cycles of dependence and poverty.  The fruits of the sexual revolution were not that boys got to get laid a lot more but that women have the final say in whether, when, if, how, and with whom any laying was going to take place.

For women who yearn for a baby and live in circumstances in which such an advent is welcome, wanted, and cherished and is not a crushing weight and a drain on small resources, it may be difficult to understand what a calamity an unwanted pregnancy might be.  But for any woman who wants to have a say in her own procreative decisions, there should be no question today that the Right, through the instrument of the Republican Party, is trying to turn this country back to a time when the movie cited above makes perfect sense and offers a welcome message.

What it really means is that if you don’t have the means in hand, and you’re a woman, these people want you to be silent, subservient, and second-class.

The reality is that women with money have always had access to abortion.  The euphemistic “time in the country” mentioned in so many mauve novels meant just that.  If you were poor, you went to a butcher in a dirty room and took your chances whether it was successful or you ended up with an infection that would kill you or a hemorrhage that wouldn’t stop.

The Republican Party is tied to a constituency of moneyed interests and moral morons who care nothing for average people.  Why we continue to vote them into power is a testament to a propaganda machine that has worked tirelessly to convince us that our interests are best served by having all protections stripped from us if we live below a certain income level.  They are marching us forward in our goal to become the wealthiest third world nation on the planet.

culture

Because Things Are Forgotten

This is a completely personal anecdote, so take it for what it’s worth.  This is about a defining moment for me in my education as an egalitarian.

Equality is something we talk about, we assume to be the case for everyone, and never really question.  Here, it’s the air we breathe.  It’s not true.  We are not all equal.  And in spite of our all our lip service to the idea of equality under the law or the equality of opportunity, we all know, if we’re honest, that we’re still trying to get to that level.  Probably it’s a function of how well we think our lives are at any given moment.  “If I’m doing all right, there’s no problem.  What are those people over there complaining about?  I don’t see anything wrong with my life.”

Well.

This is about gender equality.  It’s one of the most under-considered things in our present world. When I say that, what I mean is that here, in the West, where we have all but won that particular war, where it is normal to see women in roles that 50 years ago would have caused near-scandal, we have so normalized it that it has become a political topic for talking heads instead of a heartbreaking reality of barriers and stigma and sometimes death, as it is in many places still throughout the globe.

I saw a PBS special last week about early television and on it Angie Dickinson was talking about her series Police Woman.  Breakthrough television.  It had been the first dramatic tv show since the mid-60s to be headed by a female in prime time.  It was shortly before Charlie’s Angels and a decade after both Honey West and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.  During the interview, Dickinson commented that the feminists had been angry with her because she hadn’t used the show as a statement for the cause.  She defended herself by declaring that she was feminine not a feminist—as if being a feminist were somehow a bad thing, a dirty word, a slur.

Which seems to be the case these days among a certain segment of women, many of them too young to remember what it was like when women couldn’t do anything they wanted to.

Here’s my belief—any system that works to stifle an individual’s dreams and goals and sense of self simply because of a biological condition of being (gender, race, etc) is a system in need of reform at best, overturning at worst.  If you say to someone “You may not do this or that because you’re (a) a girl, (b) the wrong color, or (c) differently abled that an assumed norm” then you are being a bigot.

Back in high school, I took a fancy one year to the idea of becoming an architect.  I took mechanical drawing one year, then the next architectural drawing.  I ended up dropping it.  But both classes were entirely male.  This was 1971 and 1972.  I didn’t question it.  Probably like a lot of boys then, I kinda sorta had the notion that girls didn’t do certain things because they didn’t want to.  I don’t know where I got that idea, but to my unformed mind it was the only thing that actually made sense to me.  The only reason I didn’t do things was because I had no interest in them.  All the cultural referents supported this rather passive belief and I didn’t question it.  Not really.  I’d already dismissed the idea that girls were incapable of doing the same things as boys because I’d been reading Heinlein and Schmitz, but that was science fiction and the future.  I hadn’t made the connections yet.

I said both those classes were entirely male.  That’s not quite true.  My architectural drawing class had one girl.  But I didn’t know about her for nearly half of the first semester.

The classroom was a long room with four ranks of drafting tables, all facing the front and the chalkboard.  At the rear was a small room that probably had been a cloak room at one time but now acted as a supply room for the class and was also where the blueprint machine was set up.  Our class was taught by a Mr. Hoppe, who was a short, energetic man with an almost comic stentorian delivery that reminded me a bit of Don Adams.  He liked to roam the aisles, lecturing us about having something when we left high school that would “put folding money in your pocket!”  I liked him.  Everybody liked him.  He was about five-foot-four, dark hair, cleanshaven, with bifocals.

What I did not know was that he was teaching a female.  He had her set up in that utility room with her own drafting table.  I thought this was odd.  What, she didn’t want to hang out with the rest of us?  Was she stuck up or something?

Then one evening I had to go to his classroom to drop off some paperwork, after school hours.  Mr. Hoppe wasn’t there, but three other guys from the class were.  I heard them laughing from the utility room.  I went back and there they were, with this girl’s work spread out.  One of them was sitting at the drafting table reworking some of the drawings while the other two were laughing at what he was doing.

What was he doing?  He was ruining her work.  This wasn’t the equivalent of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.  No, he was meticulously redoing her drawings and inserting mistakes.

Let me say right here that her work was superb.  I have a talent for drawing and a good imagination and I thought I would make a good architect, but there were some things that just made that unlikely.  One was neatness.  My drawings were generally a mess—smudged, bad lines.  The other was lack of patience, but that’s a problem I have with everything.  But her work was pure art.  Clean, easy to read, detailed, just….beautiful.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I blurted out.

Two of them just stared at me, but the one doing the reworking said, “Teaching the bitch a lesson.”

“You’re gonna get her a bad grade,” I said.  I still didn’t get it.

“Yeah, well, she’s got no business doing this.”

And I still didn’t get it.  I left and the next day I reported it to Mr. Hoppe.  All hell broke loose.  The three guys were booted from his class.  One of them—the one who’d been messing with her work—vowed to get even.  (He tried later, it didn’t work.  It cost him a black eye and a sprained ankle.  This was during my physically fearless period and he frankly never saw what was coming when he called me out.)

This went on all the time, I found out.  Mr. Hoppe was delighted that someone had finally said something, because he told us all, that day, that this girl was his best student, he knew she wasn’t making those boneheaded mistakes, but he’d never been able to catch the vandals.

He actually gave us a feminist lecture.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect it was.  Not because he was a feminist, I don’t think, but because he respected ability above all else.  And she had it, he said, and we should be ashamed of ourselves if we thought it was right to stand in her way just because she was a girl.  He’d been forced to keep her out of the regular class room because time again she would not be left alone to do her work.  The “guys” always sabotaged what she did, either by flirting or by making fun of her or by insulting her.

I admit I was innocent.  I didn’t understand this at all.  It completely overturned what I thought had been going on.  I mean, I knew a lot of girls who didn’t want to do “guy things” and made a show of it, so it just didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t their choice.  That it wasn’t always their choice.

What changed for me that day took years to fully manifest.  As I think back on it, there were a few other girls who had wanted to do certain things that girls “just didn’t do.”  I knew one who wanted to take shop. The whole school denied her access to the courses.  One girl I remember raging at the administration and then a week later announcing to us that she was transferring to a private school where she could pursue what she wanted.

Young women today have different experiences with the world, so often you find them raising their eyebrows at old-school feminists railing at some injustice.  An electric crawl goes up my back when I hear some young female proudly declare that she’s not a feminist and would never be.  I know on some level they’re equating it to fashion, that feminists don’t dress well and never use make-up.  The superficiality of their reaction is probably based on something not much deeper.

It does get tiresome to listen to some old fart going on about how things used to be.  But I hope the old farts never stop.  How else are we to remember what we’ve gained?

My feminism eventually became a marrow-deep belief that we must treat each other like PEOPLE first, male and female maybe not quite second, but never let the gender distinction override our common humanity, and likewise with every other distinction you can name that makes no difference.  We all have dreams and ambitions and no one has a right to tell us we can’t have them because we were born with the “wrong equipment.”

This personal reminiscence has been brought to you by a triggered memory.  Have a good day.