feminist blogs

Imagine, for a moment, that the United States was militarily occupying a country where a certain kind of ethnic prejudice was endemic among traditional segments of the population. Imagine that as part of its occupation plan, the U.S. was allowing these traditionalists to assume greater political control. And imagine that one of the things the traditionalists were choosing to do with their new power was to enforce heavy restrictions on the ethnic group they despised.

Imagine that members of the despised ethnic group were now barred from holding most jobs. Imagine that they were being denied basic legal rights. Imagine that members of the ethnic group were no longer allowed to drive or to be outside after dark. Imagine that if they did go outside (during the day only, of course) they were required to wear an identifying piece of clothing — perhaps a yellow star or a bag over their heads. Imagine that the penalty for breaking these rules was beating or death.

Imagine that a wave of terrorizing murders was taking place, with members of the despised ethnic group kidnapped, tortured, maimed, killed, and then left with notes pinned to their corpses explaining that the same fate awaited any other rule-breakers.

Got all that pictured in your mind? Good. Now, imagine hearing something like this as an explanation for why the U.S. wouldn’t be getting involved:

“In terms of what they’re doing within their own culture, I don’t think we’d intervene in that.”

My family is trying to talk me into coming back to life. They liked having me alive — I guess it’s some kind of love thing — and with the holidays approaching they’ve been pressuring me pretty heavily to climb back into the ol’ meat suit. My mother keeps calling me up in the Smoking Lounge, talking about Thanksgiving dinner and Molly and Christmas trees and the various advantages to being alive as opposed to dead in a tent with an ex-parrot who has a pumpkin for a head.

Last night I got online again and cruised around the blogulofeminewsosphere, trying to reacquaint myself with the world. Having spent the past several weeks in a kind of self-induced psychotic break, it was a bit of a shock to be plunged back into the harsh glare:

• A gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia is sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail because she was out without a male guardian. Her husband protests the ruling yet still claims that Saudi society — in which women have virtually no legal rights and are the wards and chattel of their male relatives — is “very respectful of women.”

• Christian fundamentalists in the U.S., no doubt jealous of the Saudi success story, are brainwashing their daughters from birth to think of themselves as the property of their fathers.

• Some freak in Texas editorializes that the wearing of pants and unveiled hair has “led to the slow whorification of ladyhood.”

• An 11-year-old gang-rape victim in Georgia (U.S.) is accused of being a lying slut.

• Rape victims in Hungary are denied justice by courts and police who maintain that women who are raped are really just prostitutes or (you guessed it) lying sluts.

• Western expatriate sexist creeps in Moscow are thrilled to discover that “women’s lib never happened here.” Indeed: violence against women in Russia is so pervasive that 70% of married women are abused by their husbands. Political will and funding to deal with the problem are virtually non-existent. Moscow, a city of 10 million, does not have a single shelter for battered women.

• At Jets games in New York male fans form gauntlets and demand that any passing woman expose her breasts; the women are spat on and pelted with beer bottles for refusing. (One woman who cooperated was subsequently threatened with arrest for indecent behavior — yes, she was reprimanded, not the hundreds of men surrounding her.)

• The Australian teenagers who gang-raped a girl and then sold the video of it as homemade pornography are released without serving any jail time.

• The rape nightmare in the Congo continues unabated; many hospitalized victims are so badly injured their internal plumbing no longer works.

• A feminist activist in Iran is sentenced to be whipped and imprisoned as punishment for advocating women’s rights.

• Less than 60% of Americans believe unequivocally that women should play an equal role with men in public life.

• Maureen Dowd refers to Hillary Clinton as a dominatrix, Chris Matthews calls her a she-devil, and a McCain barnacle calls her a bitch. (I believe “lying slut” is reserved for rape victims.)

• The U.N. reports that most of the 800 million illiterate adults in the world are women; most of the 100 million children not in school are girls. Women earn three-quarters of what men do and their unpaid labor would, if calculated, equal trillions of dollars. Women hold only 17% of the parliamentary seats in the world, but they constitute 70% of the people living in poverty.

Yep, the world is still a shit pie for women. And that’s by no means a systematic survey; it’s just what caught my eye in the hour or two I spent getting caught up around the tubes. My reaction is twofold:

1. I want to go back into the tent with Raoul.
2. We need more feminism in the world. A lot more.

On the first point I need not elaborate; long-time readers will have observed that I have a tendency to disappear (into a tent, the Smoking Lounge, France, what have you) when The Horror Of It All starts to be too much.

I don’t need to belabor the second point either, but I do have something to add. Look again at that list of news items. That’s why I have no tolerance for anti-feminists. None. Zero. Feminism is the belief that women are human; it is the movement to secure their full human rights. It’s about stopping the rapes and the lashings and the mutilations and the oppression and the abuse. If you think that the best way for you to spend your time in this world is by working against feminism, then I’ve got no time for you.

And that goes for all anti-feminists, whatever the variety. MRAs with miniature dicks? Check. Christian fundamentalists who think Saudi Arabia sounds like Big Rock Candy Mountain? Check. So-called liberal dudes who become annoyed every time they’re asked to consider women’s rights? Check.

And the women, too, alas — though I don’t mean those true believers who have been Stockholmed into accepting their own God-ordained inferiority. No, I mean the women who cynically capitalize on the popularity of anti-feminism for the sake of their own self-aggrandizement. (You know the shtick — from Ann Coulter to Wendy McElroy to Toni Bentley to the trolls who haunt the blogosphere posing as “feminist critics.”) Since they are also women under patriarchy I usually hold my fire, but do I have time for them? That would be no, Bob.

So the next time some anti-feminist goblin shows up here and I promptly zap its tiny ass into a smoldering cinder, you’ll know why. I got no time for those people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Ann Coulter was in the news last week for making the following statement while plugging her latest asinine book:

If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.

It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’

Ann Coulter is a circus act; we all know that. She’d balance a beach ball on her nose if she thought it would sell books. And so the perennial problem is whether to ignore her (because, for chrissake, she’s just doing this for the attention) or to denounce her. The temptation to denounce is strong, if for no other reason than to point out that she is the id of the modern conservative movement; the fear and hatred she articulates is what’s driving that bus. The mainstream media plays the role of enabler, tolerating the hate speech, rewarding it, giving it the imprimatur of respectability. And so the poison seeps and spreads and pollutes everything. Not that pointing any of that out ever seems to change anything.

Coulter’s opinion on women’s suffrage isn’t new. She’s been saying it for years, and it’s never stopped the TV people from inviting her onto their shows (Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, etc.). But then, nothing stops them from inviting her onto their shows. This is the woman who wrote:

I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.

That’s just one choice quote among many; I’m sure you each have your own favorites.

I don’t know if Ann Coulter believes anything she says, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the people she’s talking to believe it. I’ve been nosing around on conservative websites (bog help me) and the reaction on the women’s suffrage thing is the usual misogyny/Stockholm Syndrome psychosexual clusterfuck:

Men: Well, she shouldn’t have said it, but of course she’s right. Sorry, lay-dees.
Women: Ann is so pretty and smart and right about everything 99% of the time, but I do kind of disagree with her just a tiny bit on this one little thing.
Other women: No, she’s right. We’re intelligent, but most women are stupid twats. Better for none of us to have the right to vote.
Men: If only all chicks were as cool as you!

But the most interesting reaction, at least to me, is this one from the Catholic Pillow Fight:

I agree… This sort of dovetails with a fabulous article via Et Tu?. This is a transcript of a speech by Roy F. Baumeister entitled “Is There Anything Good About Men?”

Baumeister! Remember him? He’s the misogynist freak at the APA convention who thinks women are lizards!

The Catholic Pillow continues:

And the problem with women voting is that they are taking the skills and motivations appropriate to the narrow sphere of intimate relationships and trying to apply it to the much borader [sic] arena of national politics….The “mommy state” is unworkable. It hasn’t worked in the Soviet Union, it is not working in Scandanavia or Europe, and it hasn’t worked for almost 50 years here.

It’s time to get back to the “daddy state” (”male pattern”) as is was designed when the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Grab a beverage of choice and read Mr. Baumeister’s speech from top to bottom. Read it slowly, try not to let your knee jerk. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Misogyny is an actual hobby for these people, isn’t it? It’s not just a point of view or a deep-seated prejudice; it’s something they take time to savor and enjoy. Stretch out in your Barcalounger, pop a cold one, and spend some quality time thinking about how stupid women are.

It’s a curious thing about the God of the Universe, the Creator of All That Exists, the Ground of Being: He (and it is a “He”) is utterly transfixed by human penises. It is His burning focus. You would think that He might have bigger fish to fry, maybe a nebula to look after, perhaps some singularities to manage. But no: in this universe that is billions of light-years across and contains billions of galaxies, each one of which in turn contains billions of stars and billions of planets, God’s most pressing concern is what Earth hominids do with their penises.

This is why God is very unhappy that Pakistan has passed a new law removing rape cases from sharia jurisdiction. Sharia law stipulates that a woman can only prove that she’s been raped — that is, that a penis has entered her body against her will — if she can present four penis-bearing witnesses to the act. Otherwise she’s liable to be convicted of adultery, which is to say she willingly allowed the penis to enter her body, an act punishable by death. This might seem a strange way to prosecute rape, since most rapes are probably not committed in the presence of four innocent witnesses who would then be willing to testify to the crime. But the purpose of the sharia law isn’t to prosecute rape so much as it is to make sure men don’t put their penises into women who don’t belong to them, whether by consent or force. God hates it when that happens. He wants penis-bearers to respect each other’s female property. The sharia law is good because it tends to keep women from moving about freely in the world: leaving their homes unattended, holding jobs, going without full-body Hefty bag coverings, etc. God knows that if women do those things then the opportunities for men to put their penises in the wrong women are magnified. He also knows that it’s almost always the woman’s fault when a penis goes astray like that, and so it’s appropriate for women to bear the punishment. By abandoning His rules, Pakistan has secured itself a place on God’s shit list.

On the other hand, God is very happy that His law is still being faithfully observed in Iran, where earlier this week a man was publicly executed in front of cheering crowds for the crime of putting his penis into another man’s bottom. God really, really hates for penises to go into other men’s bottoms.

Catholic leaders in Nicaruaga are pushing through a law to block abortion in all cases, including those where the life of the mother is at stake:

“The current law allows a small door in which abortions can be performed, and we are trying to close that door,” said Dr. Rafael Cabrera, an obstetrician and leader of the Yes to Life Movement. “We don’t believe a child should be destroyed under the pretext that a woman might die.”

That’s because the Catholic Church is pro-life, you see. Every life is sacred…except a woman’s.

Meanwhile, the senior Muslim religious leader in Australia blames women for being raped:

“If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat?

“The uncovered meat is the problem.”

The sheik then said: “If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.”

Stories like this fill my heart with hope that someday the great world religions will be able to put aside their differences and join hands in peace and brotherhood, united by their common hatred of women. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Think of it: no more fundamentalist terrorists, no more quarrels over holy places, no more sectarian disputes. Just a world of devout men working together happily and quietly in the name of God to abuse, rape, and/or murder every woman they can get their hands on.

A letter to a young feminist:

Now after hearing a lot about you from our American brothers, I strongly believe that each of you feminists deserved to be anal-fucked and gang-raped and then we will cut your boobs and empty whole magazines of 16 bullets into your vaginas. Then post live digital videos of the rape+executions on all men’s sites around the world for our AAA entertainment.

Misogyny. It’s thousands of years old. Men are human, women are sub-human chattel. Beasts of burden. “Women are our natural slaves,” said Napoleon. “God gave them to us to serve us.”

Women denied citizenship, denied humanity. Denied souls. Women mutilated. Women raped, then buried in sand up to their waists and stoned to death for the crime of being raped.

Misogyny is a lot rarer in some places nowadays, except of course for those laws denying women control over their own bodies, and the death threats against women who have used contraception, and the rapes that go unpunished because the woman must have been asking for it, and the crazed killers who dream of torturing and murdering girls and then go out and do it.

But here’s the funny thing. When feminists say (and this, basically, is all feminists ever really say, this is the whole enchilada right here) — Enough! Enough of this! Enough of the raping and the enslaving and the oppressing and the hating! — you know what they hear in response?

“Why do you hate men?”

Remember Biting Beaver and the condom that broke and the emergency contraception that was withheld because BB’s an unmarried slut? When last we checked, BB had secure a last-minute dosage of EC and was hoping for the best.

The best did not happen.

Now pregnant, Biting Beaver is trying to deal with her situation as bravely as she can. Part of that bravery is in continuing to post about what’s happening, because it seems that in this country just admitting to using EC is enough to get you death threats.

Here are some of the comments BB received after her post about the emergency contraception:

you dumb slut

Stupid whore. You spread your legs and now you want to murder a baby. I hope you get raped and murdered. Maybe then you’ll feel what that innocent life felt

And that was just for taking the morning-after pill. God knows what’ll happen now that BB’s announced her plan to abort.

This, people, is the Culture of Life. This is Christianity. The Christians, they just care so much about the sanctity of life, doncha know.

Amanda at Pandagon has linked to a post over at Biting Beaver’s that is just astonishing. Astonishing because for all the talk about how The Handmaid’s Tale is coming true, it’s still difficult to grasp that it’s really happening.

Biting Beaver has been denied emergency contraception. She committed the heinous crime of having voluntary sex while unmarried, and now, by God, she must pay — by getting pregnant.

Friday night the condom broke; Saturday morning BB called her doctor to get EC. The doctor — a female — refused to prescribe it, though at first BB didn’t realize this because instead of refusing point-blank, the doctor blew her off by telling her she needed to go to the emergency room instead. Having never asked for EC before, BB thought this was standard procedure.

Actually, her doctor could have just prescribed the stuff to be dispensed through a pharmacy. I myself once needed emergency contraception, back in 1999 when we still called it the morning-after pill. I telephoned my ob-gyn’s office and they called the prescription into the local drugstore. No big deal. But I lived in a very blue city in a very blue state, and 1999 was a long time ago.

After being told she had to go to the emergency room, BB called the local hospital and the slut-shaming began:

“Well see,” he begins, his voice dropping a little, “the problem is that you have to meet the doctor’s criteria before he’ll dispense it to you.”

“Criteria?” I question.

“Well,” the nurse sounds decidedly nervous as though what he really wanted to do was hang up the phone completely, “Yes, his criteria. I mean…ummm…well, are you ok? Is there any, ummm….trauma?” he asks me.

My face changes expression and I hurry to explain, “No, no” I said, “No. I haven’t been raped. This was consensual sex.”

“Oh…” he trails off.

I wait expectantly.

“Well, ummm….*clears throat*…So you haven’t been raped?” he asks again.

“No. I have not been raped. The condom broke”. I state, becoming very frustrated at this point and wondering what the hell is going on.

“Ok, well ummm….Are you married?” he mumbles the words so low I can barely hear them.

Suddenly I get this image of the poor nurse standing at the hospital reading from a cue card that was given to him by a doctor.

“No.” I state plainly. “I am not married. I’ve been in a relationship for several years and I have three children, I don’t want a fourth.” I respond tersely.

“Oh, I see.” He says and then he hurries on, “Well, see. *I* understand. I want you to know that I understand what you’re saying. But see, the problem is that we have 4 doctors here right now but only one of them ever writes EC prescriptions. But see, the thing is that he’ll interview you and see if you meet his criteria. Now, I called the pharmacy but I also talked to him and well….*clears throat*….you can come down and try to get it. You know, if you meet his criteria he’ll give you a prescription, I mean, there’s really no harm in trying.” the nurse trails off, his voice falters as I realize what I’m being told.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Well, actually it’s horrifying, but in a clinical, objective kind of way we can view this as a chance to dissect the godbag mind. Contraception is okay for women who have been raped and women who are married. As Amanda says, “What these two groups of women have in common, at least from the traditionalist point of view, is that both have had their agency taken from them, by force or by tradition.”

I opened the phone book again and called the Urgent Care in my county. Who knows, maybe they’ll do it for me. “No,” the nurse said, “We don’t prescribe the abortion pill here”.

“No, wait I’m not asking for the abortion pill. I’m asking for EC!” I say, “It’s not the same thing.”

“Well, we use the words interchangeably here. Sorry, we don’t prescribe it”. She all but races to get off the phone with me.

I start looking through the telephone book, dialing hospitals from counties all around me. It seems that nobody will prescribe it to me. None of the hospitals are willing to touch me, of the ones that will prescribe it I am asked a series of questions to ’screen’ me before I come to the hospital. The results aren’t good. I’m not married and wasn’t raped, so there’s very little they can do for me.

Right. Not Married + Not Raped = Slut. And sluts mustn’t be allowed to get away with their sluttishness!

At the end of her post, the maybe-now-pregnant* Biting Beaver asks rhetorically what the moral of the story is. The moral of the story is that the anti-contraception/anti-choice movement doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with making the world safe for little baby blastocysts. The whole point is to control women. We feminists already know that, of course, but cases like this illustrate it with blinding clarity. If Biting Beaver were married, no problem — the sex happened because a man was in proper legal control of her body (which is how conservatives understand marriage). If Biting Beaver had been raped, no problem — the sex happened because a man physically seized control of her body, albeit illegally. BB’s terrible crime was having sex of her own free will, without being owned or coerced by a man.

In a few months EC will be available over-the-counter, but I see no reason to expect that these shenanigans will stop. The obstructionist techniques will simply shift from the doctors to the pharmacists. It’s my understanding that EC won’t be out on the shelves but will be kept behind the counter, so that customers will have to ask the pharmacist to hand over the goods. Godbag pharmacists all over the country are already refusing to dispense prescribed birth control when the voices in their heads tell them to; there is nothing to keep them from refusing to dispense EC.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have believed that the godbags could gain so much territory and that women could lose so much. But then, I wouldn’t have believed that my country would become a world-leader in legitimizing torture and unprovoked war. I don’t know how much more of this “culture of life” I can take.

*As of 2:00 on Monday afternoon, Biting Beaver announced that she’d finally found a clinic (an hour and half away) that would dispense the pill. I hope it’s not too late.