feminist blogs

Announcement: Tomorrow is the big day for some very exciting changes here at Pandagon. Unfortunately to make those changes, Pam, Jedmunds and I have to refrain from updating the blog until tomorrow evening so our webmistress/dominatrix/swifter-picker-upper can put everything together. We won't be going dark, but if you leave comments from here until we fire the blog back up, they probably won't be surviving the transistion.

I'm hoping everyone likes the changes as much as everyone here in the dark cavern inside a volcano we call the Pandagon Home Offices do.

In the meantime, the Brooks-bashing continues and boy howdy, this shit is funny. I almost feel sorry for John Tierney. His woman-bashing really wasn't nearly up to snuff like Brooks'. He should consider just digging old reactionary pamphlets, changing the wording slightly and calling it a day as well.

Alright, while I'm trying to liven shit up below with a really unnecessary infight amongst leftists, I can't resist taking a potshot at Dennis Prager again today. After writing a series of definitive columns on what the exact moral beliefs of all Americans (from here on known as the "Judeo-Christians") are, and a couple of definitive columns on how to have a happy marriage that he published directly before ending his own no doubt deliriously happy marriage, Prager is taking on his biggest task yet.

Explaining Jews, part one: What is a Jew?

Apparently, Prager has correctly assessed that his target audience may need a lot of help in this department. Some topics he plans to address:

Do Jews control Hollywood?

Why do Jews shun "Jews for Jesus"?

Sadly, he doesn't ask the question that's really burning on the mind of your average Townhall reader. Possibly because Prager could deny that Jews have horns and tails in one swift sentence, which is no fun for a blowhard like him.

Well, not around here, the real life world I inhabit. Here on my balcony I'm surrounded by all sorts of noise because it seems that everyone in a 3 mile radius but me is loudly screaming at the Rose Bowl. I've got some pent-up aggression to let out and a quick scan of the wingnut side of the internets just isn't cutting it out. I need a real fight. A pie fight kind of fight. The sort of nastiness that can only come from one leftist picking on another. So here goes.

This is completely inexcusable. I don't even know how Chris can look at himself in the morning, much less call himself a liberal. I've had it up to here with this wussy, centrist, treat feminists like we're the red headed stepchildren of liberalism shit. Chris, you've lost yourself a reader.

Update: Geo-bigot Clarke thinks that misspelling my name and taking swipes at Texas is a proper response to my well-reasoned arguments. Really, why call yourself a liberal when you're stealing argument styles from Pr*tein W*sdom, Chrissy Boy?

Update, Pt. II: Now I'm forced to remind Clarke that not everyone has the same definition of "patriotic" that he does. Or "sane", for that matter.

Two Carnivals of note today--the 6th Carnival of the Feminists is up at Reappropriate and it's a doozy. Jenn called for submissions on the intersection of gender and race, a topic that definitely needs way more discussion. I hope the fine blog posts here help spur it. Feministe is hosting the next one, and I don't know if they've come up with a specific topic yet to try to write about, but you can submit any feminist post to them at web@feministe.us.

The other Carnival is the Carnival of the Liberals #3, hosted by coturnix. Some very impressive blogging there as well and one in particular I'd like to single out because the argument in it is new to me at least. The Executioner's Song takes on the belief that people become more conservative as they age and wonders if this is true and if so, why? I've often wondered this myself, whether I really wanted to or not, because I think I've been officially teased by every male member of my family by a variation on the adage that if you're not liberal when you're young, you don't have a heart and if you're not conservative when you're older, you don't have a brain. (Yes, I still get this even though I'm no idealistic college student anymore, not by any stretch of the imagination.)

The blogger Greensmile has an interesting theory, one that I think fits the current hiding-from-the-scary-terrorists brand of conservatism well--people become more fearful as they age and conservative (and to my reckoning, reactionary) politics become more and more appealing the more fearful you are. I think there's a lot of validity to this, because there's a good number of reasons to believe that age makes you more fearful--Greensmile points out that a few brushes with death and a lifetime of watching alarmist television programs are both big factors.

My pet theory for this change has always been tied into my interest in identity politics. I assumed that people, especially middle class white men, just get more protective of their privilege as they get older. With the aforementioned middle class (and wealthy, actually) white men, you also tend to accumulate more privilege as you get older, especially if your family keeps growing and you take on the role of the top patriarch. And of course, women play along, especially if they are in marriages based on "traditional" values--the stats bear this out, with married women voting for Bush in much higher numbers than single women. Of course, married women also are privileged over single women, meaning that even without there being a coercive element to political inclinations, married women too have privileges they are protective of, making them more conservative. Race has similiar effects, though Republicans are trying really hard to make people think of their religious beliefs as a privilege worth getting protective and conservative over instead of their race, because of demographic changes.

The way that conservative men I know like to browbeat me with the quote about hearts and brains only strengthened my conviction that identity politics and feeling protective of male privilege is central to a lot of men's identification as conservative, especially as they age and stop viewing themselves as boyishly charming and start viewing themselves as the bearers of male authority. While the situation of an older man condescendingly telling a younger woman that as she ages she'll grow a brain and learn to agree with him is drawing on the stereotype that older people are more rational than younger people, there's also a subtext that's unmistakeable in a man lecturing a woman about how he is the rational person and she is irrational and emotional. The self-indulgent argument that conservatism is more "rational" is a function of stereotypes about gender as well as age.

I think Greensmile's post and my pet theory do dovetail nicely together, though--a lot of the fears that are articulated by conservatives are at their heart the fear of losing a privileged status. No where is this more evident than when you look at why people keep fighting against a universal health care system even if they know on a rational level that it'd be better all around for the nation and for their own self-interest. But all opponents have to do is invoke the dreaded word "socialism" and they dredge up that fear of losing a privileged status as one of the people who is "worthy" of having health insurance. What else is all the hand-wringing about the possibility of having to wait in line about if not a symbol of loss of privilege? First your self-important white middle class is subjected to having to wait in line behind people you feel superior to in the grocery store and now they actually think they can get health care on a first come, first serve basis instead of on a basis of social privilege? Perish the thought. So yes, there are a series of fears that feed into the conservative mindset and I definitely think the fear of what it means to lose privilege is a biggie.

I knew I'd have to write something actually thoughtful and serious about this post that Jill wrote the other day about getting called names like "fat" and "ugly" by a bunch of morons on the internet who are afraid of feminists. This is a sticky issue because there's a surprising number of complex and distressing feelings get teased out when people start talking about the delicate issue of someone's appearance and what it means to judge them by it. Add to the whole soup that a large part of feminism is critiquing the way that women's appearance is considered the most important thing about us, alongside our ability to be compliant, in a patriarchal society and you have a huge can of worms that I for one am often wary to open.

Well, Jill wrote a follow-up post today clarifying that it wasn't just the name-calling that wigged her out--a lot of the comments were creepy as hell, with students at her school talking about sighting her and making jokes about raping her, which puts this incident into a different stratosphere from your run-of-the-mill running around and saying that feminists are bitter because we are ugly and/or can't get a man. The rape jokes are of a different degree of awful, but I think it's safe to say that those comments come from the same impulse that causes people threatened by feminism to make assertions that feminists are ugly/bitter/lonely--it's a desire to retaliate against people who speak out against the injustice of male dominance by telling them, in so many words, that as far as you're concerned women exist only as sex toys for men. It's just the amount of overt hostility that varies from comment to comment.

Initially when Jill posted about this, a lot of us immediately responded by saying that the assertions that she's ugly simply aren't true. This response was critiqued, and reasonably so, by others who point out by making it a fight over whether or not Jill or anyone else is pretty, we're feeding into the assumption that the only thing that matters is a woman's looks. If Jill wasn't conventionally attractive, attacks on her looks still would be baseless since they aren't addressing her actual arguments.

Still, in defense of those of us whose first inclination is to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to call Jill ugly, I think the thought process is a little more complex than "Yes she is, no she isn't!" For a lot of us, it's an attempt to dismantle the insinuations behind the insult with one blow. I spent a lot of time wringing my hands over this when I made the move to Pandagon because with the larger audience came a shitload of abuse aimed in my direction, most of it sexually aggressive, and of course the standard issue Amanda-is-fat-and-ugly blather all over this board and others. At the time, I didn't have a Flickr account and I think most people had no clue what I look like and my inclination at the time was to try to shut down this argument by making my image available so at least the bloviaters wouldn't be spreading rumors in a vaccum. Cooler heads than mine talked me out of it.

What I noticed about my feelings during that whole dust-up was that I had two distinct thoughts going on at once--on one hand, I had the base level desire not to have people think that I'm unattractive. (I'll get back to this feeling in a minute.) On the other hand, I wanted to cut off the Limbaugh-esque argument that feminism only exists to benefit "ugly" women at its knees. Calling feminists ugly is actually shorthand for a longer thought process that goes something like, "Women's most important quality is their looks, so good-looking women have everything they could want. The only reason a woman could be dissatisfied is if she isn't good-looking, and so feminism is the last resort of women in denial that they are failures as women." That argument falls apart if you show that conventionally attractive women also feel like second class citizens, and that being eligible for being a well-regarded sex object doesn't mean that you aren't still being treated just as a sex object. Or it should in theory--as the cooler heads that stopped me from trying to retaliate with my picture months ago pointed out to me, this assertion that feminism is an expression of dissatisfaction at being a bad sex object is basically faith-based anyway--the people making it are just being petulant brats, you can't actually argue with them, since most are impervious to reason.

So, I'm not saying the tactic to argue against the "feminists are ugly" statement by showing pictures of pretty feminists is the best tactic available, but I do think there is a logic to it, and people who do it really don't intend, most of the time, to imply that not being conventionally attractive means that you're less worthy or that your arguments don't hold water. We don't intend it, but I think it comes across that way and as such, I'm going to cautiously agree with the critics that the, "She is too pretty!" retort shouldn't be used, or only in very limited circumstances.

I'm troubled, however, by feeling like there's something seriously wrong with having the more base reaction when someone calls you ugly, which is having your feelings hurt because you've been insulted. This is where it gets really complicated for me and I chatted with Lauren some the other night about it, because being called "ugly" is an insult that works on two levels, especially when wielded against women. On one hand, it's shorthand for, "You are a complete failure as a woman by patriarchal standards." But there's also just the garden variety use of the word, when it means, "I think you're unattractive." I'm going to go out on a limb and say in the latter case, it's pretty much understandable by people get hurt by that--the desire to liked and be found attractive isn't really a bad one, unless you want to argue that vanity is a really bad thing, in which case I hope you're prepared to argue that one shouldn't want to be considered witty, smart, pleasant or any other quality that is generally perceived as likeable.

That's what stuck with me when I read Lauren's comment in the original thread.

We don’t put our pictures up to be considered fuckable, we put our pictures up so that people can put a face to our writing. I appreciate this as a reader of many blogs and I’m sure others feel the same. While that does leave us open to be judged on our appearances, I never expected to be commented upon in such a wide sphere.

That gave me one of Hugo's "yes, no, and maybe" moments for sure. (As an aside, Hugo blogged this whole thing well. Highly recommended.) I put my picture up to put a face to my writing, which, as a lot of people at Hugo's place note, is a useful thing to do. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't care at all if people think I'm attractive or not. But definitely, when I think about it, that's not the main motivation or else I'd probably get a some modeling shot and put that up instead of a bunch of snapshots. Wanting people to consider you attractive when you present yourself honestly seems okay to me--not a super-honorable desire, but not really a bad one, either, just human.

But that's where the anxieties lay--how can you tell the difference between the authentic desire to be liked, the authentic pleasure people can take in each other's various qualities, including how they look, when we live in a culture where all those things are blown way out of proportion and male entitlement is such that any one man is free to reduce any woman to a sex object and declare her fit or not? To add to the layers of complication, this male privilege isn't always grabbed at by making crude insults--witness this article where Joel Stein dedicates his entire column to bitch-slapping Maureen Dowd, mostly because he's mad that she did a better job than he did impressing a singer they both like. Stein's way too clever to pull this stunt by calling her un-fuckable. Instead, he pulls a wittier version of Allah's "the pretty girls are always crazy" comment and while ostensibly complimenting her looks is actually complaining that she isn't being a good woman and immediately complying to his whiny demands that she pretend that it's okay that he mock her sex life because he's jealous of her writing.

I'm not sure what the answer is. Most of the time it's pretty easy to tell the difference between routine admiration or not admiration of someone's appearance and when these compliments or insults are being used to assert male dominance. But not always, like when people call on patriarchal beauty standards to "prove" someone is pretty or not, even when those people are well-meaning as most of the people telling Jill that the jokes about her looks are demonstrably untrue. And I just wrote a long, meandering blog post and I'm realizing that I may not be even an inch closer to figuring out what I really think about the subject.

This Washington Post profile of Marshall Wittman does have one good use, I suppose--it neatly disproves the conservative mythos that the major media is a) partisan and b) partisan for the Democrats. According this article, Wittman is to be admired because he quip abilities neatly distract from the need to analyze an issue and because for some reason it's considered admirable to have no actual political convictions, since they get in the way of snaking around D.C. and making money. If anyone wants to know why most Americans tune out politics most of the time, you could do worse than show them this article, where switching sides and political convictions for the sake of convienence and a paycheck is considered by the profiler to be less troublesome than an athlete following the paycheck from city team to city team.

But Bush lost in 1992 and Wittmann was out of a job. By then, he had a young son and his wife was pregnant with their daughter. He was desperate to find work and when he heard that Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition was hiring, he thought, " Hmmm, a Jew goes to the Christian Coalition, that might be interesting."

He was savvy enough to figure that the Christian Coalition might want to hire a Jew just to show it wasn't bigoted. He wrote to Ralph Reed, the group's executive director, and asked for a job. Reed took him to lunch at Bullfeathers and hired him.

"I said, 'Great!' " Wittmann recalls. "And then I thought, 'Oh, God, now I have to tell my wife.' "

She wasn't thrilled. Neither were the other members of their liberal Jewish families.

"She never told people I worked for the Christian Coalition. She told them I was a political consultant," Wittmann says. "It became a big issue with the family. Nobody felt too comfortable with it."

You think? This is the sort of logic that most of us find a tad troubling, where it's acceptable to throw your lot in with a group that is actively working to create a legal system based on a religion that teaches that your own people are heretics that are going straight to hell, a legal system where your own people are almost surely going to be considered second class citizens. Wittmann has unsurprisingly worked for the Heritage Foundation, as well, an organization known for digging up members of disempowered groups and giving them jobs bashing other members of that group--go to Townhall on any random day and you'll find black columnists bashing black people, female columnists bashing women, Jewish columnists ranting about how Jews need to fall in line with Christian conservatives who can barely conceal their loathing for Jews, and even college professors bashing academia. They're kind of a one-trick pony at this point.

Of course, now Wittmann works for the DLC, which is just one more reason I don't trust them at all.

Stories like this where the ability to set aside any notion that politics have real world consequences in a quest to be perfect political player is exactly why a lot of Americans don't give two shits about politics--why should we if real world consequences aren't considered important by politicians themselves? We have lives to lead, jobs to hold down, families to take care of. We don't have time for horse races and articles praising people for ridding themselves of convictions.

Back to the blogging about books before I've even gotten close to finishing them portion of this blog. My sister gave me God vs. the Gavel for Christmas (no, polinerdism isn't genetic, why do you ask?), and so far I've enjoyed it, though occasionally I find myself wondering if the author isn't overstating her case that certain leniency towards religious institutions is always granting them special rights and unconstitutional. We'll see; so far I agree with the basic premise that the law should honor the 1st Amendment by being careful to treat religious institutions like everyone else, instead of assuming that they have some kind of special protections, and especially that laws should be analyzed with the idea of the social good in mind, and not with any sort of prejudice towards one's religious beliefs, even though that might be really hard for most people to do, since your religious beliefs color your idea of what the social good is, whether you want them to or not. But that's not what I'm going to address here so much as narrow in on the chapter I just finished where she criticizes religions mucking around in marriage law, or to be more specific, legislators who think that religious beliefs should be incorporated into crafting marriage laws.

She contrasts two arguments for changing marriage laws in her chapter to illustrate why it is exactly that she thinks religious influence needs to be scrubbed out of legislative thinking when it comes to looking at marriage laws. At first glance, the two arguments--one in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage and one in favor of legalizing polygamy--seem basically identical, which is to say that the people advocating for these changes feel that the marriage laws as they stand discriminate against them. But Hamilton argues that if you take a realistic look at the way religion factors into these arguments, then you start to see a much different picture emerge, because both controversies have someone arguing that their religious beliefs should dictate the law, but with same-sex marriage it's the opponents who are arguing this and with polygamy it's the proponents. If you start with her basic argument that it's antithetical to the 1st Amendment to allow law to be dictated by religious belief over other concerns like the greater social good, it's clear that these two reform movements are completely different--same sex marriage proponents are using a social good measure for their arguments and polygamy proponents are arguing that social good isn't a factor because their religious belief trumps it. To keep it simple.

I have to admit, I hadn't thought about it that way--so used to thinking in terms of strict human rights issues, I hadn't considered the larger social good as an important pro-gay rights argument, except insofar as human rights are part of the social good argument, though not all of it. Anyway, Hamilton's argument that there's not really a good argument for forcing the government to start issuing polygamous marriage contracts is pretty tight, so long as you start with the basic assumption that competing religious claims shouldn't be a factor, which is something I agree with. The arguments for polygamy are mostly that people who want it believe it gets you into heaven. People against it argue that polygamy is inherently anti-social because it discriminates against women and breeds abuse. Hamilton points out that even without these arguments against it, it's a legal nightmare because of inheritance issues, but she thinks that the abuse/inequality arguments are the strongest against it.

The United Nations agrees. From the book:

Polygamous marriage contravenes a woman's right to equality with men, and can have such serious emotional and financial consequences for her and her dependents that such marriages ought to be be discouraged and prohibited.

That there is a statement from the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a UN creation. Reading that, I was honestly floored, because it occured to me then and there how rarely I hear women's equality invoked baldly as something that is a fundamental social value. I have no doubt that's because of the "fair and balanced" nature of our media--it's not nice to have one person arguing from a point of reason and the other side making ridiculous claims there's no logical argument for, as you have in the struggle between feminists and promoters of "tradition", when we all know the tradition is male dominance. On one hand, you have a side that is arguing that in order to measure a social good, you have to take all members of society into account. On the side of "tradition", you have....well, it's really hard to make an argument that disempowering slightly more than half of society and making them subservient to the other half is a general social good. Which of course is why anti-feminists are prone to making arguments about how loss of freedom and equality is actually good for women, from anti-choicers arguing that taking women's reproductive choices away is actually helpful to women to David Brooks arguing that domestic dependence is actually good for women. They can't even muster the strength to openly argue that women shouldn't count as members of society, so they openly lie about the effects of their belief systems instead.

All this made me think about what it is that we, as a society, want marriage to exist for, and where same-sex marriage fits into it all. As any patriarchy-blamer worth her weight in water and cat hair can tell you, marriage has existed throughout most of history in societies where the concept of the social good barely included women at all--women were another commodity and a means of production for men, who were the only real members of society. (Leaving the weighted values assigned to members of different classes aside for a moment, lest this get unwieldy.) Now it's fair to say that in this country we believe, in theory, that a woman is an equal member of society to a man and that promoting women's equality is more important than enshrining men's dominance over women. The question then is why do we even have marriage?

Well, Hamilton touches on the pro-marriage arguments, and I think they're pretty sound. Even if you admit that marriage existed primarily in the past as a tool of women's oppression, there are a lot of social benefits that one could reasonably argue we still need. There's no reason not to make the side benefits of traditional marriage--family, stability, etc.--the centerpiece of marriage now. Of course, as has been pointed out a million times before, if you want "marriage" to be an institution that is about partnerships and families, that removes all reasons for it to be a male/female institution, which it was in the past, when you needed different genders so you could know who was the owner and who was the property.

But all this made me wonder--if a government issues marriage licenses to promote the general welfare, which is the justification for it, and you define achieving equality between men and women as a critical goal, then aren't same-sex marriages something that should be actively promoted instead of merely tolerated? I think most of us who are proponents of the right to same-sex marriage argue that it's a social good because it helps gays and lesbians without creating any harm. But it's also an important step towards eradicating traditional marriage, which is in fact an important social goal, because traditional marriage is a huge obstacle in the way of creating equality not just between straights and gays but also between men and women. I understand the political importance of tip-toeing around this critical point, but it's also time to stop beating around the bush--any society that genuinely values the net social good is going to be opposed to traditional marriage, because traditional marriage is about subjugating half of society to the control of the other half.

Redefining marriage as a partnership instead of a way to maintain property rights over women's bodies should be a major social goal. I completely agree with conservatives who think that same-sex marriage would send a powerful signal that society doesn't respect traditional marriage anymore, though the process of dismantling traditional marriage has been underway for a long time now, with women gaining property rights, the right to divorce, etc. Hell, in my perfect world, we'd just ban "marriage" and replace it with civil unions for everyone, straight or gay, as a signal that society's priorities have completely changed and now we value equality, not ownership.

Anyway, my exercise for myself from here on out is to read arguments against same-sex marriage and look to see what principles they're arguing from. Assuming, as I do, that it's the tacit agreement across society that equality is in fact a goal, I'll throw out any arguments that are based on the idea that some people should simply have control over others. Any and all arguments from mere tradition go into this box, because that's what the tradition is. And all arguments based in religion go into the discard box as well, because there's no justification for a religion getting to boss everyone around, or else I can declare myself god and demand everyone has to put disco balls in their bedroom and that's good enough to make it law. We'll see if anything's left over. Commenters? Refresh me on if there is anything I'm forgetting.

Jill Soloway has a blog! I don't know whether to throw a one woman party or drown my sorrows in jealousy and tequila. I mean, read this:

All we have to do is be wonderful, be mothers-- of their children or not-- be happy, be joyful be brilliant, be productive and STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT MAKES A MAN WANT US. If you want a kid buy sperm. If you want a hard cock buy a dildo. If you want a live cock go get one and sit on one. But my GOD can we just stop stop stop putting them in the position to weigh in on anything, weigh in on us?

You know, just as I was cutting and pasting that, I realized that these three activities she suggests are all ones that the culture warriors are desperate to make inaccessible to women--evidence being bans on sex toys, attempts to separate women from birth control methods that make the above-described jumping on live cocks unpractical, and or course, the bellyaching about "fatherlessness" is a not-clever disguise to whine about single mothers. Think someone feels threatened? Wants to force of government to keep women dependent on men so they have a reason to feel important?

The strange thing about the fear that drives that is it's absolutely insane to think that if women aren't dependent on men, that men are poorer for it. What is there to fear?

Most of us, I'm sure, perceived Dennis Prager's recent two-part series telling us how to make a good marriage to be his run-of-the-mill bloviating, your standard bullshit written in a such a way that it's clear he hopes that you'll mistake his authoritative tones for actual words of wisdom. Well, we were wrong. It was actually a thinly disguised lament for the end of his current marriage. (Via Tbogg.)

I was totally going to gloat about this, quote the lyrics to "Schadenfreude" or something, and then my conscience got the better of me. I mean, I'm going to bask in the glow of schadenfreude, make no mistake, but I'm going to keep the tone down a little, but only because I'm sure that Prager wasn't actively trying to fuck up his marriage. So I can't actually say he's an out and out hypocrite.

But damn, that two-parter was straight up gasbaggery, which makes me wonder about 8 million parter about "Judeo-Christian" values--does that mean we're fixing to hear that Dennis Prager is actually an atheist and he thought he'd pop that one off before the entire transistion was complete?

Anti-choicers had the party hats and the paddy wagon to haul away women who want abortions (for their own good, of course) all ready to go in Australia when a rash of stories came out about a study "proving" that abortion causes depression. (Tigtog sent me the original story and has a post about the media spin of the study.) This is just the sort of thing anti-choicers want, because it's the official line now that they wish to force childbirth on women who don't want it for our own good. There is evidence that women who have abortions have higher rates of depression than women who don't, but of course, that doesn't mean that abortions cause depression.

And now the rebuttals are coming out.

REPRODUCTIVE and mental health experts have moved to dampen concerns over the mental health effects of abortion, saying research published yesterday did not offer definitive proof that terminating a pregnancy would cause depression.

They said the small number of women in the study who had abortions, coupled with the lack of information about the context in which they decided to have their pregnancy terminated, meant it was inconclusive on the issue.

"It may be that making the decision to have an abortion was a traumatic one made without support, or the abortion experience may have been difficult because it was difficult to access (or) difficult to pay for," said Christine Read, the medical director of the NSW family planning group FPA Health.

"We think that this is a credible study, but it is drawing a long bow to say that this study means women who have an abortion will have a depression subsequently."

I'm not surprised that some women feel like shit after getting abortions. God knows there's enough people out there to tell you that you're an evil baby-killing slut not fit to call herself "woman" if you don't submit to giving birth as frequently as possible, which is something that can weigh on a person. But that doesn't mean the alternative--having a baby when you don't want to--is a lot better.

The anti-choice argument that evidence that abortion is linked to depression should be a reason to ban abortion is what I call the Lubbock Fallacy--the idea that banning something is the answer to all your problems, even though the evidence demonstrates that the ban is just going to make the problem worse. I named it after Lubbock, TX, which is a town that is notoriously run by Bible-thumpers and has banned things like sex ed and drinking inside the borders of the city. The idea is that without sex ed and booze for sale in the city, one can reasonably expect the end of sex and drinking. What actually has happened is that Lubbock has one of the highest STD transmission rates in the country and people drive to the county limits to a bunch of bars that are right on the other side, get drunk as skunks and then drive back into town. So bans of sex ed and drinking have actually made problems like STDs and drunk driving much worse than they would be.

Same with pretending that banning abortion is going to be good news for women who have mental health issues that get pregnant when they don't want to be. Unsurprisingly, there is reason to think their mental health problems will get worse when they have the abortion--not only are you subject to a bunch of unnecessary guilt about it, you probably have feelings of failure for getting pregnant in the first place. The answer is not a ban on abortion, though, because there's no reason whatsoever to believe that pushing women into situations they adamantly don't want is going to just make those problems go away. Unfortunately, we're going to have to be grown-ups here and realize that the lesser of two evils is sometimes the best you can do.

Granted, I don't imagine my argument will hold much sway over the hardcore anti-choicers, many of whom are known to straightforwardly assert that women are only sad because they aren't fulfilling their reproductive capacities that they were put here on earth to fulfill. But luckily, people that fucking crazy are still a minority in this country and presumably also in Australia.