But true feminism, with the understanding of equal rights and equal dignity, did not come until the 1960s, until women were well and truly able to control when and if they would have children.
Reproductive rights are the foundation of women’s rights. Any attack on reproductive freedom is an attack on the rights and dignity of women. Period. You cannot deny access to birth control without denying women’s rights. You cannot mandate ultrasounds without attacking women’s dignity. The only way our daughters and granddaughters can have real choices about the lives they want to lead and the sort of women they want to become is for reproductive rights to move forward, never back.
Ladies and Gentlemen: the single most misogynistic statement of our time:*
You actually don’t need context to understand how appalling that is (though this is a great source if you want it). You don’t need to know that Betsy Andrea is the wife of one of Armstrong’s former teammates, or that she has maintained for years that she heard Armstrong tell a doctor that he used performance enhancing drugs, or that Armstrong retaliated by trying to destroy her credibility and end her husband’s career in cycling. You don’t need to know that she was labeled a bitter, vindictive psycho just because she wouldn’t lie for him. Even without knowing who the hell Lance Armstrong is, that is some pure-grain misogyny right there. It’s textbook:
Yeah, I did call her crazy – Sure, I admit that I suggested she was irrational, unhinged, emotional, not to be trusted. Yeah, I attacked her intelligence and her understanding of the world around her. So? Doesn’t every guy who has conflict with a woman call her out for being psycho? So what if I implied that nothing she says or feels is valid, because it comes from her disordered, fevered imagination? Chicks, man. They’re nuts.
Yes, I called her a bitch – Yeah, I said she was vindictive, cruel, mean, petty, and selfish. I suggested that she’s emotionally deficient, cold, despicable, a castrating shrew, a nag, a scold, an ice-queen. BITCHES, amiright?
But I never called her FAT – So it’s okay! I mean, I know I said she was insane, and a terrible human being, but it’s not like I said she isn’t conventionally attractive! That would be mean, I would never attack her like that! I’m a nice guy!
Betsy Andrea is Not Impressed
Watching that clip, it’s obvious that smirking jerkface Lance Armstrong is being a complete douchebag here, and it would be easy to dismiss this simply as a terrible person being terrible. It goes beyond that, though – “crazy bitch” is far too common in our culture; it’s our favorite way of dismissing inconvenient women. It bears mentioning, too, because Betsy Andrea calmly and rationally asserted that Armstrong doped, for years. Even though it seems transparent now, for years the media happily bought into – and perpetuated – the slander that she was just some “crazy bitch.” (I’m sure it’s no consolation to her that if the media ever said she was fat, well, that didn’t come from Armstrong, who obviously thinks that’s the worst thing he could say about a person woman.)
~
You know who was neither fat nor a crazy bitch? Lennay Kekua.This story has been everywhere; examined from countless angles. Jezebel and Feministing both did a great job pointing out the hypocrisy of the media being all over Manti Te’o's imaginary girlfriend’s imaginary death, while largely ignoring the very real suicide of a very real woman who was raped by a Notre Dame football player. Still, for all the coverage this scandal has generated, I haven’t seen any discussion of how sexist the whole construct of Lennay Kekua was in the first place.
The media bought this story unquestioningly – Lennay was held up as Manti Te’o's inspiration, her death as a heartwarming reminder of the power of love. Lennay Kekua was beautiful. She was devoted. She was so in love with Manti that she didn’t need his comfort, his company, or his time – no, as she lay dying of cancer, all she wanted was for Manti to win football games. Apparently, no one found it odd that he was the love of her life, but she never asked him to be at her side.
Photographs of women are so much less demanding than the real thing…
Fake Lennay fake died in September – months after the fake car wreck which led to the fake discovery of her fake cancer. Their inspirational love and her tragic death were the subject of countless news stories: on ESPN’s College GameDay, Fox Sports, and CBS, in Sports Illustrated and the New York Times, the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times… and yet the truth only came out last week, ten days after Manti’s football season ended. “Te’o's knowledge about the details of his girlfriend’s life was often murky, including her majors in school, occupation and extent of her injuries after an alleged April 28 car accident with a drunk driver.” Why didn’t that set off alarm bells with reporters? All this media around him, all these outlets repeating this heart-warming story, but even while she was “alive” no one needed to talk to her – and after her tragic (fake) death, it seems no news outlet tried to get a fuller picture of this woman.
After all, who cared what she did for a living, or majored in in school? That was all beside the point. Lennay Kekua had been the perfect girlfriend: a beautiful empty vessel whose only concern was that her boyfriend succeed. She was as undemanding in death as she was in life, telling Manti to skip her funeral so that he wouldn’t miss any football games. She didn’t have messy emotional needs, or thorny contradictory ideas, or passionate competing dreams of her own… because Lennay Kekua didn’t exist. Conveniently, not existing made her the feminine ideal. After all, imaginary girlfriends are never fat, crazy bitches.
*Excluding every single thing Rush Limbaugh has ever said about women, of course.
(I hope that this will be a resumption of regular blogging. Lord knows there’s been enough happening politically to keep me busy writing outraged entries daily, but my post-election crash ran into the holidays which ran into illness which went straight on through to a much busier new year. I think I’ve got it under control, at last.)
I received a reader request (!) to address the hateful theology of Richard Mourdock. Praisewhore that I am, how could I say no?
Mourdock, of course, is the Republican Congressional Hopeful (and Tea Party Wingnut) who recently explained in a debate why he believes abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape: “And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” The Onion already responded perfectly to the idea of a god so hateful he would will that women be raped to make babies to the Glory of His Name; I can’t do any better at addressing his twisted theology. But I can say this:
I haven’t seen the question Mourdock was asked, but even if he was specifically asked about his faith, this is the wrong answer. The right answer to that question is always, “While I try to live my own life in accordance with my faith, I recognize that the First Amendment specifically prohibits me from making laws to impose my (weird, misogynistic, uncharitable) faith on the people I represent.” (See Biden, Joe, in the Veep Debate). It doesn’t matter how violent or rapey or baby-lovin’ Mourdock’s – or any politician’s – god is; that’s a moot point when you’re talking about policy. Any time a politician talks about what God ordains, the proper response is, “Fascinating – but what does that have to do with the Constitution and laws of the United States?” It’s right there in our Bill of Rights – no one gets to make their own God’s Law the law of the land.
Honestly, I’m stunned that Republicans haven’t realized they need to shut up about rape. The more they talk about rape, or abortion for that matter, the more I realize they simply have no empathy for the women involved. This first hit me during the bizarre conversation over requiring ultrasounds before an abortion. It occurred to me that the whole purpose of requiring an ultrasound was to try to force empathy from the woman – LOOK AT THE BABY! LISTEN TO HER HEARTBEAT! – as if she had no concept of what abortion is. As insulting as that was, it was even more jarring when I realized that the entire debate happened because these lawmakers have absolutely no comprehension of what this debate means to women. NONE. Exceptions for rape are the easy part. Republicans can’t even get this right, and they think we should trust them to handle the larger issue?
So Mr. Mourdock, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Akin, and all the other Republican Mr.’s out there, Right Honorable and otherwise, listen up:
Not everyone believes that a fertilized egg is a person. Not everyone believes that an implanted embryo has any rights, let alone the full rights of a person. Women – and their families – come in all different shades of faith or atheism, agnosticism or narcissism. Your faith and your god do not usurp that, cannot usurp that. But putting that all aside, even if we all agreed that an embryo is a person, that doesn’t end the discussion. Because you know who else is a person?
THE WOMAN.
Every time you open your fool mouths to talk about abortion, you completely fail to recognize this. The woman is a person, whose rights are every damn bit as sacred as the rights you want to grant the fetus. When a woman is raped, it is a fundamental violation of her person beyond anything the Santorums of this world can comprehend. If she gets pregnant as a result of that rape, that pregnancy is a continuation of that violation; her body is being used against her will. Even if we all agree that this will be the cutest, sweetest, most blessedest rape-baby ever, we have no right to ask that of the woman. Whatever rights you ascribe to the fetus, THERE’S A WOMAN, an honest-to-god fully-formed human being, involved too. Making the embryo a person doesn’t make the woman NOT a person, and if you cannot conceive of how wrong it would be to force a rape victim to continue to carry her rapist’s child, then there is something fundamentally broken in you – so broken that it should disqualify you from office.
With birthdays come reflection, looking back and looking ahead. I have been blessed in many ways, but perhaps in none so much as this: the only time I’ve been pregnant, I wanted to be pregnant. I was emotionally and financially secure enough to welcome a child. As for my personal “beliefs” on abortion, I am what I call a pro-life pro-choicer. Personally, I find abortion horrific, and don’t think I could ever make that choice. But I also know that I have absolutely no right (or desire) to substitute my judgment for another woman’s – and that the State is even less qualified to do so.
As I said, I have been blessed never to face that choice. I know several women who’ve had abortions – who had been raped, who were very young, or who were simply not in any position to provide for a child. I also know women who made the other difficult choice – to have a child while still in their teens, or to give birth to child knowing that it had a genetic disorder which meant it would only live for a few days after birth. In every single case, the woman wrestled with her options, and what her choice would mean for herself, her partner, her family. None of them made their choices blithely.
In the current round of state-sponsored misogyny, several states have adopted or are considering “compulsory ultrasounds” for women seeking abortion. I am not going to address the obviously grotesque suggestion that women in their first trimester be forced to undergo “transvaginal” ultrasounds – Rachel Maddow and Garry Trudeau have said all that need be said on the subject – but I want to take a moment to question the basic premise of any ultrasound requirement. The politicians who advocate for it always defend ultrasounds as necessary for “informed consent,” as if a woman seeking an abortion just is too feeble-minded to understand her choice; as if doctors who provide abortions don’t have other means of ensuring that their clients understand the procedure fully without the State writing the script for them. Every woman I know who has grappled with this choice – whether she was a teenager or in her forties – understood intimately exactly what was involved in her specific case, in a way a room full of male legislators never can.
In reality, the Republicans see ultrasounds as a way of rubbing a woman’s face in her difficult decision, as if she were being a bad dog. Why not just require women seeking abortions to initial every page of an Anne Geddes’ calendar? Just as ineffective, almost as humiliating, and far, far cheaper!
“If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
– Justice Brennan, writing for the majority in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S.438, 453 (1972)
I’ve been meaning to post about birth control, but the issue seemed to die down after the Blunt Amendment failed in the Senate a couple of weeks ago. That bill would have amended the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to allow employers not to cover care that was “counter to the[ir] religious beliefs or moral convictions.” It was clearly aiming at birth control, though the wording left it open for someone who finds over-eating to be morally offensive to refuse to cover Type 2 diabetes care. The House GOP retreated from pushing anything similar, because they finally realized that it was not a winner for them, and the media emphasis switched to Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke and it seemed birth control might be safe for the time being…
Then this happened: Arizona proposed a measure that not only allows employers to decide whether birth control will be covered, it also allows them to fire employees who use birth control at all, even if those employees pay for it out-of-pocket. Wrap your brain around that for a moment. If the government has no right to intrude into your decision to use birth control, what possible argument could be made for your BOSS having that right?
Birth control is fundamental to women’s rights. Contrary to pop-culture mythos, women have worked outside the home since the dawn of specialization. Poor women, at least, have always worked. Middle class women in the U.S. joined the work force in droves during World War II, and never looked back (in part because the economy shifted enough to pretty much require two incomes for a family to survive, but that’s another post entirely). Women had the right to vote from 1920 onward. Yet the massive change in attitudes and expectations for women didn’t happen until the late 1960s, early 1970s. You don’t have to trust the accuracy of Mad Men to know that even 40 years ago, blatant sexism and sexual harassment were casually accepted. What changed? Women finally had access to effective contraception. The pill was introduced in 1960, and two Supreme Court cases, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v . Baird (1972), ensured that no state could outlaw the sale of contraception. That one, incredibly important, change allowed women to finally imagine – much less attain – lives that weren’t defined by their roles as mothers. We could choose when we wanted to start having sex, and when we wanted to stop having babies. We could, finally, fully express a sexuality that didn’t fall into “good girl/mom” or “easy girl/slut” paradigms. The pill gave us ownership of our sexuality and our bodies.
You and me both, lady...
There is a loud and powerful fringe in the Republican party that honestly wants to go back to the “simpler” time before the sea changes of the sexual revolution. Whether because of true piety or misplaced nostalgia, they see only excess and licentiousness, where we see the foundations of women’s equality in and out of the home. Women have used birth control for thousands of years. We have understood that sexuality is a fundamental aspect of our being, and that it demands expression even when having a child is out of the question. It just took 4,000 years before birth control was reliable enough to change the world. We cannot let politicians pander that away.
In the 1960s, the debate was over whether states could make it illegal for a married couple, or unmarried persons, to purchase birth control. The conversation now is about who pays for it. If highly effective birth control were available over-the-counter, this would be a very different argument. Ridiculous medical costs and the requirement of a prescription mean that many many women cannot afford the pill if their medical insurance doesn’t cover it. Restrictions on insurance coverage act as very real barriers to women’s access to birth control. Planned Parenthood cannot carry the burden alone, especially when its funding is also under attack. The Blunt Amendment, and the insane legislation proposed in Arizona, both underscore the ridiculousness of our current healthcare system. Why should your boss have anything to say about what coverage you have? Haven’t we passed the era of the company town? Corporations already buy and sell our politicians. They already decide our fates in so many ways, large and small. Are we really going to let them control our sexuality, our relationships, our families?
For some reason that defies logic, the Republican party has decided attacking women’s rights is the way to go in this election year. This leaves me in the uncomfortable predicament of having so very many things to say that my words trip over one another and tangle into knots, and then none of them make it to page or the screen. I’ve finally decided to try to tackle this hydra of misogyny one hateful head at a time, though it’s all the same monster. Republicans aren’t conservative anymore, they’re regressive. They want to roll back social change to 1950s, only without that pesky labor movement making sure the middle class could afford to live the American Dream….
Where to start? Obviously, with the loudest and most obnoxious misogynist (this week), Rush Limbaugh.
Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student who’s also president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice, testified before Congress about the impact of her Catholic university’s decision not to include birth control in insurance coverage for students. If you haven’t read her testimony, you might be surprised by it. She talked about the cost of prescription birth control, and about the dire consequences faced by women who need the pill for other medical reasons. She noted that Georgetown students themselves pay for this insurance, and overwhelmingly support a plan that would cover birth control. She pointed out that women’s health clinics cannot meet the demand, and that the same members of Congress who oppose requiring insurers to pay for birth control also oppose funding for clinics that might provide the services at an affordable cost. She never talked about her own sex life, and did not mention whether she herself used birth control, because this was not the issue. The issue is that women, and families, are being asked to shoulder a cost that the insurance they pay for should be covering.
Enter Rush Limbaugh, doing what Rush Limbaugh always does – slandering people who disagree with him, name calling, belittling, and jeering. Ms. Fluke, he informed us, wants us to pay for her to have sex. This makes her a slut, and a prostitute. He continually joked, over days of air time, that Ms. Fluke is ”having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception” (as if the pill doesn’t cost exactly the same amount for a faithful wife who has passionless sex .75 times a month as it does for the Whore of Babylon). Lines down the block, Rush said, “sex-addict” numbers of partners, “having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight.” Ever the class act, he even asked, ”Who bought your condoms in the sixth grade?”
I’m not an expert on feminist theory, but this pretty much a textbook example of “slut-shaming.” Never mind that Rush has no information at all about Ms. Fluke’s sex life; she is a confident woman who wants autonomy over her choices. She has the audacity to speak publicly about women’s reproductive health. Burn the witch! Rush attacked her – because attacking is what an “entertainer” like Rush always does – with the slur as old as time. Scarlet woman! Wanton whore! SLUT….
But this time it didn’t work. At least, not as it usually does. Rush’s advertisers are fleeing him. The backlash is swift, and organized. Maybe we as a society are finally past that. Maybe the sane majority is disgusted by the spectacle. Maybe Rush actually finally found the limits of our tolerance, and careened over them. My fondest hope is that the right is seriously overplaying its hand. The Republican party had big wins in 2010, due in large part to the Tea Party’s ability to rouse the rabble. This is their base now, and they keep leaning ever further right to appease it, seeming to forget that 2008 had lessons, too. Whether the right believes it or not, this country doesn’t want to be stuck in the 1950s. Racists can’t seem to understand that white Americans voted for Barack Obama, but we did. Homophobes cannot wrap their brain around the idea that straight people can support gay marriage, but most of us do. Misogynistic asshats like Rush Limbaugh can’t grasp that most Americans, even most men, don’t think it’s acceptable to try to discredit, demean, and slander a woman for standing up for reproductive rights. Maybe, just maybe, we aren’t that country anymore. Maybe we don’t want to be. Maybe we want to be – maybe we ARE – something better.
