Related Links

Broad City on holiday parties

Why didn’t UVA investigate a gang rape claim?

UVA getting serious about rape

Elizabeth Lauten resigns over Obama daughter criticism

Eugene Robinson on the Obama daughter story

Laura Ingraham pulls the “silent majority” line

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll speak to a former virginity pledger about why she changed her mind. The University of Virginia rape story gets huge and what was the deal with that congressional staffer who attacked Sasha and Malia Obama?

Y’all, I am so excited about the next season of Comedy Central’s Broad City, which debuts in January. To help advertise it the two main characters, Abbie and Ilana, did a guide to holiday parties.

• Broad *

The show is really raunchy but that is why it’s so brilliantly feminist. It shows women can do the same kind of raunchy humor as men, but it never feels forced or trying too hard. Plus, the satirical stuff about being young in the big city is dead on. You can watch the first season on Hulu Plus.

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The campus rape issue just seems to be getting bigger and bigger. Last month, the Rolling Stone published an article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely about the campus rape problem at the University of Virginia, which is getting the highest level of investigation for purported Title IX violations that you can get. Erdely went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to talk about her article.

• UVA 1 *

At this point I must break in and acknowledge that the rape apologists have gotten involved, and because there is no such thing as a rape story they will believe, they are accusing the anonymous girl in this story of trying to frame the unnamed men who she describes raping her. But even on the exceedingly rare chance that this woman is lying for whatever reason, it doesn’t even matter. The story wasn’t about this particular rape and whether it happened or not. The story was about the school refusing to even investigate it. Unless rape apologists are actually willing to come right out and say they think that rape reports should never be investigated, hand-wringing about this case is a red herring. In those exceedingly rare cases where victims are lying, an investigation will likely show that to be the case. It’s funny how rape is the one crime where the fact that a small percentage of complainants are lying is wielded to support the idea that we shouldn’t even investigate the complaints at all.

And the lack of any interest in investigating is what Erdely was interested in.

• UVA 2 *

The issue here isn’t whether this is the exceedingly rare case where a woman is falsely accusing a man. The issue here is that a girl is standing in front of you, telling a story that is 99% likely to be true, and you, the university officials, are pushing her in the direction of just dropping the whole thing. The university is on the hook for this regardless of what the actual facts of the case are, which weren’t flushed out because of the lack of investigation. Which is why, after this whole story came out, UVA apologized to the student in question. Indeed, the public shaming has created quite the reaction, as the school also, in an effort at getting good PR, shut down the frats until January. Of course, as many students pointed out, that means that most of that time is during the holiday break, meaning that it’s barely a blip. But it’s more than just a brief break to try to buy good will with the public, according to NPR.

• UVA 3 *

I went in feeling skeptical, but these comments make me feel better. A lot of the time, the discussion of alcohol and rape centers around scolding women not to drink so much. While drinking too much isn’t good, of course, that scold suggests women are bringing this on themselves while ignoring the way that sexual predators deliberately use alcohol in order to incapacitate women. Which includes behaviors like pressuring women to drink more, deliberately obscuring how much alcohol is in a beverage, or targeting freshmen girls who have little to no experience drinking, knowing that it’s likely their inexperience will lead to overdoing it. In many of these cases, telling women to watch it is ineffective. How can you “watch” how much you drink if you don’t know how much you’re drinking? Beyond that, of course, it’s just ridiculous to think that the price someone should pay for a victimless misdemeanor crime like overdrinking should be violent sexual assault. A hangover, okay. A ticket for public intoxication, sure. But not rape.

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Interview

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Okay so here’s a story that seemed like a silly little thing to me at first but gradually I began to realize speaks to much bigger issues that it might seem at first. Elizabeth Lauten, the comms director for Republican Rep. Stephen Fincher (TN), decided to get all judgmental on Sasha and Malia Obama for how they were dressed and acting at the Thanksgiving turkey pardon. For those didn’t see the pardon, let me be clear the girls were acting and looking just fine. They were wearing skirts and sweaters and looked like normal teenage girls of 16 and 13, which is their ages. There were occasional moments of eye-rolling, which is expected because this is a very stupid tradition that really deserves more than a little eye-rolling. To normal people, it was cute to see our president get the dad-is-a-dork treatment from his kids. Wholesome family fun. But to Lauten, it was a travesty.

• Lauten 1 *

My initial take on it is simple: Part of the conservative mindset is that there’s nothing more satisfying than lecturing teenagers to stand up straight and wipe that smirk of their face. Lauten may only be in her early 30s, but she is really getting that church lady act a-going. But reading some takes on Twitter and elsewhere, especially from women of color, I was really educated in how this had many layers below that surface. After all, the girls were dressed in exactly the kind of modest dresses and sweaters you expect kids to wear to a family holiday event. They looked like they were straight out of a Thanksgiving spread in Martha Stewart’s magazine. The only way you see their sweaters and skirts and think “bar skank” is if your racist assumptions about black women’s sexuality overwhelms your ability to accurately assess even something as simple as what a sweater looks like. So it’s true that Lauten is someone who really loves scolding teenagers, it seems that there’s a deeper, even more troubling angle to it all.

Which is why I was glad to see this story get the full blown Rachel Maddow treatment, because I do think that it speaks a lot about race, gender, and conservative attitudes about female sexuality.

• Lauten 2 *

I’d like to take a moment and reflect on how far we’ve all come that this is even happening, that the discussion is getting deeper on this level. Just a few years ago, it was a truism in most media circles that in-depth political analysis was impossible on cable news, and yet here we have Rachel Maddow inviting Eugene Robinson on to explain, in no uncertain terms, exactly how this attack was both racist and misogynist. But, of course, you usually don’t get that kind of discourse because the second you start to point this stuff out in most places, you get the defensive nuh-uh reactions from people who refuse to see racism or sexism unless someone is being so overt it’s undeniable. So in most media spaces, the line was that Lauten had to go because she was rude to children.

• Lauten 3 *

I think that’s part of it. Dehumanizing minor children simply because they belong to a different political party than you is really bad form for a congressional staffer. But I am a cynical person and frankly, I think there’s more to it than this. Right now conservatives are doing everything in their power to take away women’s reproductive rights, often in attacks that disproportionately affect women of color. Make no mistake; this is due entirely to the belief that women generally, but especially women of color, are out of control sluts and that we need to have our rights taken away to get us under control. But they know they can’t say that out loud, because they’re already fighting off the “war on women” narrative. So they claim that these attacks are about “compassion” or “religious freedom” or whatever, anything but admitting it’s all about their paranoid fear that women are out there being all sexy. Lauten, by spinning her bizarre racist and sexist fantasy about Sasha and Malia Obama, gave the game away. So she had to go away. I think that’s what happened more than the hands-off-the-kids thing.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, self-serving racist denial of obvious reality edition. Which of course means that the conservative du jour is Laura Ingraham, who is a real champ at just making crap up.

• Ingraham *

This is the classic “silent majority” nonsense, where you swear up and down that millions of people agree with you but the only reason they aren’t saying so is because they’re scared or busy or whatever. It’s about puffing up your numbers with invisible people. It’s also nonsense, as anyone who has tangled with conservatives can tell you. They are not a group that is prone to keeping their opinions to themselves. And they love protesting! Ask anyone who has heard the term “Tea Party.” Or anyone who has tried to walk into an abortion clinic.

The post UVA Rape Story Goes Viral, and a Virginity Pledger Explains Why She Changed Her Mind appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Invisible benefits of gaming while male

Tammy Bruce insinuates people want to be rape victims

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“Princeton mom” interview

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Kat Stoeffel will tell a story that shows how hard it still is for people to deal with sexual assault appropriately. The UVA story causes the mainstream right to become a bunch of rape truthers and parents in Northern California throw a fit over sex education.

Gamergate is sputtering out as members are beginning to realize no one buys that ethics in journalism line, but the whole thing has had the side benefit of bringing attention to the issue of sexism in gaming. Feminist Frequency brought together a number of men to help highlight the ways that they are privileged in gaming, just by being male.

• Gaming *

To be clear, no one is saying it’s wrong to be able to have these experiences, by and large. We just want women to have the same right to fire up a video game without immediately being told to prove yourself or show your genitals off.

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Over the years I’ve been doing this podcast, there’s been one trend that I actually kind of find surprising, and, of course, very, very troubling, which is the mainstreaming of fringe so-called men’s rights thinking into the mainstream conservative movement. To be clear, mainstream conservatism has always been brutally sexist. And there’s always been a few characters in it, like George Will, who are quick to make excuses for rapists and sexual harassers. But by the early 21st-century, some of the really grotesque misogyny of the right that openly excuses sexual and gender violence had really been pushed to the margins. Most anti-feminist energy was spent attacking reproductive rights and efforts to end workplace discrimination, not in shielding men who commit violence against women. Instead, for that, you had the so-called men’s rights movement, which is mostly relegated online where most of the participants can remain anonymous, which is important when you’re someone who is highly invested in making it harder to prosecute rape and domestic violence. Their “activism” is mostly about flooding spaces where people are trying to talk about feminism to bolster the illusion that there’s legitimate controversy over whether rape and domestic violence are serious crimes. They, for reasons of their own, many of which I suspect are deeply unsavory, want people to believe that many to most women who speak out about being victims are lying. They are sleazy, woman-hating trolls.

But now it seems they’re being treated like a legitimate target demo for conservative pundits. Fox News has generally been drifting in the direction of just more and more unhinged sexist blathering lately, but this UVA rape story situation has really just brought this crap to a boil. The unchecked glee at being given an excuse to push the myth that false accusations are more common than they are is really repulsive. And the way this is being used to discredit the efforts of anti-rape activists generally is appalling. I mean, this is rape. When Todd Akin spouted off about “legitimate rape,” most conservatives were quick to distance themselves from him. Now I worry they’d thrown him a parade. Take, for instance, Tammy Bruce going full-blown rape denialist on Fox News.

• Rape 1 *

“Authentic feminists,” ugh. For those who don’t know, this is a really common anti-feminist tactic, to call yourself the “real” feminist so that people who aren’t up on all the names and personalities in activism and media get confused and think that this is a person who means well criticizing other feminists. You get it with the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-woman, anti-choice organization. Or the Independent Women’s Foundation, which is not actually in support of female independence. Or with personalities like Christina Hoff Somers or Tammy Bruce here who call themselves “feminists,” but think that every argument in favor of women’s equality is bunk. That unwillingness to correctly identify themselves so viewers know what they’re seeing shows the level of honesty we’re working with here, which is at subzero levels.

Anyway, usually you hear the claim that women make up rape to get back at a man for dumping them, but this is a newer strategy. Instead of exploiting the stereotype of the vindictive witch, the stereotype being employed is the attention whore, a phrase thrown these days at any woman who believes she has value outside of being quiet and scrubbing things. Attention is a thing for men only, I guess. What’s frustrating about these stereotypes is that if you point out that they are stereotypes, right wingers simply note that it has happened, once or twice before, that some woman did something wrong. As long as one woman lied one time, then that means that we can throw out the overwhelming evidence that shows most women tell the truth most of the time. It’s idiotic.

On top of accusing victims of lying for attention, conservative commentators were also interested in accusing researchers of inflating sexual assault statistics, because of nefarious, unnamed agendas. Such as Rich Lowry, on ABC News, denying research that shows a one-in-five sexual assault rate on campus.

• Rape 2 *

Squeaking about the police is a way to confuse the issue. Shoplifting isn’t the same as home invasion, but you’d think I was off my nut if I said that means that shoplifting isn’t a crime. This is what I mean by conservatives going full “men’s rights.” We’re not talking about someone trying to sneak a kiss and then being rejected. In fact, the researchers specifically excluded what they call “verbal or emotional coercion” from their definition of sexual assault, so a guy who whines until you kiss him was classified as a creep but not an assailant. The survey also distinguishes by severity of sexual assault, openly acknowledging that being forced to kiss someone is not the same as being raped. So his concerns were addressed, if he had bothered to read the study. But for all that Lowry is accusing the White House and Rolling Stone of having an agenda, I think he has a much bigger and more obvious one.

• Rape 3 *

So Lowry has an agenda, and it’s pretty clearly to conceal the ugly realities of male-dominated campus life, particularly in the Greek system. He scolds about covering bases, but refuses to do it. He told an easily fact-checked lie about the sexual assault research. He argues that a discrepancy in one victim’s story somehow means the overall portrait of campus is wrong, but if you actually bother to read the story, you’ll find there’s multiple accounts that really do show a culture that just that kind of sexist culture. In fact, Lowry himself is an example of this sexist culture, using his perch on TV to shield rapists from justice by scaring victims out of speaking out. So yeah, if you’re against “agendas,” start at home, jerk.

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Interview

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One of the greatest rhetorical coups for the right in the last decade is convincing so many people that Planned Parenthood is not actually a boring old family planning clinic for check-ups and condoms, but some kind of exotic sex emporium where all manner of demented perversions take place. It’s gotten to the point where the mere name of Planned Parenthood sends some conservatives around the bend. It reminds me, honestly, of the way that religious right folks in the 80s were so scared of the game Dungeons and Dragons that merely saying the name would cause them to freak out. Or the way that fear of Satanic messages in music would make people afraid to even touch rock records. It’s completely out of control. And now this hysteria is touching a high school in the East Bay area of California.

• PPFA 1 *

That this has been taught for a decade without problem is your first clue as to what the issue is here. We’re dealing with a relatively recent invention, this new belief that Planned Parenthood is the devil. A few years ago, they really weren’t a particularly controversial organization outside of the abortion stuff. But now every time you turn around, some right wing nut is melting down at the very idea that you might actually bring an expert in to handle sex education. I think what’s going on here, honestly, is that as contraception use improves and pregnancy rates are going down, conservatives are beginning to panic, realizing that attacks on abortion aren’t enough, and if they want people to be punished for sex, they’re going to have to attack contraception, too. And they’re accomplishing this goal by equating Planned Parenthood with sex itself, and sending prudish adults around the bend. And that’s exactly what’s going on here, even as parents claim it’s not about being prudish.

• PPFA 2 *

I don’t even know if I need to add more to this. Really, the notion that one could expect to have a life unencumbered by sexual urges if but for Planned Parenthood showing you what a condom looks like is a theory easily debunked by a brief glimpse of all of human history. Though I do always wish I could get people who say this sort of thing to sit down and tell me about their own sexual histories. Is it that they really truly only had sex a handful of times, for the purpose of procreation, and think that’s a norm that everyone else is deviating from? Or are they just so blinded by their own hypocritical hysteria that it never occurred to them that everyone else is just as entitled to sex for pleasure as they are? I am insatiably curious for answers, but I suspect I’ll never get them.

But you can take heart, folks, because this supposed organization and supposed coalition doesn’t seem to be very big, even as it’s very loud.

• PPFA 3 *

All this fuss resulted in….one parent pulling her kid. One. That’s hardly what I’d call some kind of groundswell. Not that it would be acceptable if it were, of course, because no amount of wishful thinking is going to make kids somehow asexual, but that the parents here are by and large being responsible adults makes this controversy even sillier. But Fox News’ website is trying to keep this alive, unfortunately, and even making a fuss over the fact that the materials emphasize consent. The argument is that by teaching kids to communicate with partners about sex, that is somehow endorsing sex. I guess sex is somehow less wrong in their eyes if it’s shameful and/or coercive. Hey, as long as you’re crying afterwards, it’s a win, I guess? But seriously, good on Planned Parenthood for considering consent as important an issue as contraception. I think this message from a 90s house band LaTour still is relevant.

• PPFA 4 *

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, let’s get stupid edition. CNN decided to spend time interviewing the least relevant person in the entire universe on the subject of sexual assault, so-called Princeton mom Susan Patton. Unsurprisingly, her bizarre hyper-misogyny was repulsive.

• Princeton Mom *

I wish I could say she’s an outlier, but she’s spouting nonsense that’s all too common. Sadly, one of the reasons we have such an ongoing rape problem is just this: Parents who think it’s perfectly fine to teach their boys that forcing sex on women doesn’t count as rape as long as you learn her name first.

The post Fight Over Rape in New Orleans, Anti-Sex Ed Battle in California appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Camille Cosby defends Bill Cosby

Evin Cosby defends Bill Cosby

Joe Scarborough defends Bill Cosby

Eric Bolling happy to assert men are superior to women

Pete Hegseth tries to argue Clinton has no other qualifications but being female

Limbaugh’s worried about “chickified” colleges

Pat Robertson has a theory

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, journalist Allison Yarrow will tell us all about this interesting new DIY fertility movement. The Bill Cosby situation gets uglier every week, and conservative media is ramping up the hostility towards women working and getting educated.

The discovery of discrepancies in the UVA rape story has caused all sorts of grief in the media, but luckily, MSNBC’s Irin Carmon brought a panel of feminist journalists together in order to show how to do feminist journalism responsibly. I like Buzzfeed’s Katie Baker’s discussion of the tensions here.

• Journalism

It’s frustrating that there’s a huge double standard, where accusations of rape are interrogated so hard whereas you can accuse someone of lying without any real fear of being subject to the same interrogation. But Rolling Stone did screw up and the extent of this screw-up has become clear in recent days. Hopefully some important lessons will be learned.

This Bill Cosby rape situation shows no signs of abating, which is both really uncomfortable but probably necessary. After all, if a man who is so rich, powerful, and clearly domineering and entitled as Bill Cosby can’t just make these accusations go away, as he has clearly done in the past, then maybe there’s actual reason to hope that things are changing for the better for rape victims who speak out. But of course a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, do not want this change and want to keep the balance of power right where it’s at, where rape victims are afraid to speak out and rapists can do their thing without worrying too much about derailing their lives or going to jail. And those people are going to push back and try to preserve the status quo. This is entirely predictable, but it’s also really depressing. Particularly when the person doing the pushing back is a woman.

• Rape 1

Sadly, it’s not just his wife, either. Cosby’s daughter has joined in as well.

• Rape 2

This is upsetting, but shouldn’t be surprising. A lot of men who do terrible things to women turn around and present a sunny, happy face to others. Men who abuse their wives will often be the nicest, most charming men to outsiders. And some rapists are princes at home. Often this behavior is a deliberate manipulation, done precisely because the abusive man knows that, if his behavior is exposed, people in his life will have trouble squaring the man they know with the accusations, and will likely choose their own personal experience over even huge amounts of damning evidence. If Camille and Evin Cosby have been manipulated in this way, it’s sad but not even remotely surprising.

In fact, I’d say that if it weren’t for everything being so terrible, the entire process of watching people deny and minimize credible rape accusations is a rather fascinating display of some of the theories of social psychology. Psychologists have long known that people will go to extraordinary lengths to excuse what they want to believe, coming up with incredibly laughable and even surreal excuses. That’s how things like denying global warming happen. Or, when dealing with anti-choicers, their insistence that women will suffer and regret abortions is rooted not in fact, but what they wish were true. And it’s clear that a lot of people wish it were true that rape accusations are a result of women being crazy liars than the likelier possibility, which is that the rapes actually happened. Witness Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, or what I like to call the dumbest show on MSNBC.

• Rape 3

This is the little dance that rape apologists do. If you don’t go to the police, they tell you should be quiet unless you are willing to go to the police. If you do go to the police, they scream and moan about how you’re turning what they characterize as nothing but bad sex into a criminal offense or they accuse you of lying to the police. There’s not actually a way to win with these folks except by coddling their desire to believe that rape isn’t really a thing that happens much, if at all, and the only way you can do that is to be quiet. Which, in turn, means allowing rapists to rape, confident no one will actually try to stop them. And at every point in time, they lean heavily on misogynist stereotypes to discredit women who are alleging rape.

• Rape 4

Whatever choice you make, besides the preferred one of suffering in silence and letting the rapist rape at will without any effort to stop him, will be met with a misogynist stereotype to hurt and discredit you. If you speak out publicly, you get hit with “attention whore”. If you go to the police, you get accused of being a “crazy bitch”. If you went on a date with him and he sprung a rape on you, you’re accused of being a “woman scorned” who is just mad because she didn’t get a phone call. Sue the guy, and you’re a “gold-digger”. And if you are intimidated by all this abuse and sit on the allegations for years, you are accused of being a coward and a liar for not coming forward sooner. The entire system is set up to discourage reporting and to scare women into silence.

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Interview

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So I have this pet theory that one of the reasons that we’re seeing an uptick in attacks on contraception access from the right is that it’s a panic reaction in response to the fact that women’s economic and social gains have really been coalescing in recent years. Yes, women lag behind in many ways. We still make less money than men. We are still underrepresented in positions of power. We are still treated like second class in social life, from having to do more housework to having to endure mansplaining and other slights against our intelligence all day long. We still endure gendered violence that people are more eager to excuse away than to fix. There’s a long way to go.

But, from a right wing perspective, women’s gains have been alarming. Marriage doesn’t feel as mandatory as it used to and women often spend years being single and are far less eager to marry the first guy who’ll take us. Women feel good about committing to their careers with much less worry that we’ll be stereotyped as loveless harridans. If anything, having a good career makes you more attractive to men in some circles. There’s a real possibility that a woman could be elected President. College campuses swarm with women. We aren’t equal yet, but it’s in view and the right is getting scared. That’s why the attacks on contraception, which they rightfully believe had a lot to do with all this.

As evidence for this, I present the various male panic attacks in right wing media over the idea that women might actually, gasp, have ambition and power in the world. Eric Bolling, one of the uglier sexists on Fox News, which is saying a lot, threw a major fit and just straight up asserted that women are inherently inferior to men.

• Sexist 1

Honestly, I prefer this kind of blunt sexism to the alternative of dancing around the issue. As complex and noisy as the arguments over whether sexism exists or not can get, at the end of the day, the debate is actually quite simple. It’s an objective fact that women make less money and have less power in the world. So the only real question is how you explain that fact. And it can only be one of two explanations: Either women are inferior or they’re oppressed. If you deny they’re oppressed, by definition, you are arguing that women are inferior. But most sexists don’t want to say that out loud and so come up with all sorts of smoke and mirrors to try to say that’s not what they’re saying. So Bolling’s willingness to come right out and say it is, at least, a show of some good faith. If you must be a bigot, don’t lie about it.

Realizing that they’re in such an impossible bind of having to either admit they think women are inferior or concede that women are oppressed, however, many conservatives are instead trying to argue that women are actually the dominant class these days, putting men down. Like Pete Hegseth on Fox News.

• Sexist 2

I dunno. I think of merely being a woman was enough to charm people into voting for you as President, then we would have had a woman as President some time in the last 238 years. Okay, being fair I realize the premise of this argument is that sexism may have been a thing in the past but now it’s somehow being overcorrected and people are so eager to show they aren’t sexist they would vote for an unqualified woman. But that’s just an elaborate version of the women-aren’t-oppressed-they’re-inferior argument. After all, the other premise of this argument is that a woman who was both Secretary of State and a Senator from one of the biggest states in the country is somehow obviously unqualified to be President. However, both those jobs are better preparation than, say, being the governor of Texas, as George W. Bush, who these folks all supported, was. His argument only makes sense if you believe that women are inherently inferior and that feminism is about stealing jobs from deserving men to give them to inferior women.

Rush Limbaugh has a less sophisticated version of this argument that women are inherently inferior and that feminism is a misguided attempt to deny women’s inherent inferiority.

• Sexist 3

Needless to say, there’s zero evidence for his assertion. But really the whole “rapist” thing is a fig leaf for the real argument, which is that colleges are “chickified”. Which is a way of Limbaugh saying that colleges, with their insistence on gender equality, are forcing poor, helpless men to rub shoulders with inferior women and even, gasp, treat them like equals. And that men won’t stand for it. The whole thing has the whiff of a threat: Either women return to a second class status or men will stop contributing. And, of course, the folks making this argument assume men are the only people who have contributions worth making. But I think what they’re really afraid of is that if you give women a chance, we will prove that assumption wrong.

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Pat Robertson has some theories about reproduction edition. I liked this one, because it is particularly funny after the subject of today’s interview.

• Robertson

Robertson thinks gays are going to die out because they don’t reproduce. My question is then where does he think current gay people come from? Pods? While plenty of gay people have kids and always had, either through hetero sex or through reproductive technologies, the fact of the matter is that most gay people have straight parents. Pat Robertson’s simplistic views of heritability could be torn up by a biologist, I’m sure, but just common sense should be enough.

The post Cosby Defenders, DIY Fertility, and Overt Conservative Sexism appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be speaking with a representative from Guttmacher about how the anti-choice movement is super selective about when they claim abortion is contraception. I’ll also look forward to the next year in reproductive rights and wonder, sadly, if NPR is back to false equivalence nonsense regarding abortion.

Media Matters named George Will the Misinformer of the Year for 2014, in part because of his B.S. regarding rape. Eric Boehlert spoke about it on MSNBC.

• George Will *

This is especially frustrating when you realize that one reason women are afraid to speak out about rape is that they fear being socially ostracized. Really, he couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

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Happy New Year!

If you read my end-of-year column for RH Reality Check, you’ll know I declared 2014 a terrible year for reproductive rights. In a sense, it’s a little surprising, as overall, I’d rate it a good year for feminism in the culture. More discussion of feminist issues, more positive portrayal of feminism, more celebrities declaring their feminism, that sort of thing. But when it comes to the courts and legislatures, things are not looking good at all. On the contrary, it’s where angry men and not a few anti-feminist women are trying to take away all the gains women have made, mostly by trying to force us to have babies when it’s a bad time for us. Unfortunately, their efforts have been successful in many cases, particularly with Hobby Lobby winning the ability to deny women their right to contraception coverage through their health care plans and Texas successfully defending its draconian anti-abortion law in the Fifth Circuit court.

But that was 2014. What is ahead for 2015? I fear the answer is likely more of the same attacks on reproductive rights, with some anti-choice politicians getting so excited that they overloaded the bill pre-filing window with a bunch of anti-choice legislation. The most notorious was a bill filed in, where else, Missouri, by Rep. Rick Brattin, who was interviewed by a local TV station about it.

• states 1 *

You heard that right: The law would allow a man to legally have ownership over your body, in order to force you to bear a child for him, just because he had sex with you. This is an idea that floats around in anti-feminist circles all the time, though I do think it was best expressed by an obnoxiously offensive Miller Lite ad from a few years back.

• states 2 *

Considering that no one has actually ever carried a glass bottle by sticking their thumb in the top of it, the whole thing was clearly a strained attempt at forcing the “you poke it, you own it” double entendre. But this bill, and people who generally argue that men should have veto power over women’s abortions, are evidence that this idea persists despite the clear misogyny. And I mean, clear, as was evidenced by Brattin’s response to being asked how on earth he justifies handing a woman’s body over to a man as if it were property.

• states 3 *

It’s not a woman’s body. He says it so easily it becomes clear that he has never even considered that women are people, much less people who deserve autonomy. They are simply baby ovens, full stop. He’s baffled at the idea that a woman’s opinion about how to use her body should even register, much less become the deciding factor in all this. The irony is that Brattin defended his bill by claiming, falsely, that the law requires women to sign off on their husbands’ vasectomies. It doesn’t, but goes to show that when it’s his body, the idea of someone else having veto power repulses him. But women? Eh, it’s not their body. It belongs to, uh, the child. By which he means the man who declared ownership over you by having sex with you.

The good news is that his bill is probably not going to go anywhere, because anti-choice forces are trying to hide their misogyny, which is literally impossible with poke-it-own-it bills. But other bills that treat women like we’re stupid children who can’t be trusted with basic health care decisions are still getting passed. And it’s those laws that have already passed that I’m worried about, even though some of them are getting shot down in court.

• states 4  *

And that’s just it. Most courts are striking down these kinds of laws, correctly seeing them both as violations of the constitution and as violations of previous rulings that held that abortion access is a human right. But not the Fifth Circuit Court, which would probably allow it if a state required you to kill your own mother before you were allowed to get an abortion. And these conflicts mean the Supreme Court pretty much has to weigh in at some point. Not just on ultrasound laws, but on even more draconian regulations that require clinics to be shut down for not meeting medically unnecessary pseudo-health standards. And I don’t know that I trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing here.

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Interview

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Man, NPR had a story on recently that really managed to embody some of the worst media failures when it comes to dealing with the abortion issue. They’ve been doing better about this lately, actually using logic and evidence instead of simply presenting “both sides” of the equation and pretending they’re equivalent. But for some reason that baffles me beyond belief, they did a segment on abortion storytelling where they allowed both sides to claim that abortion stories work in their favor, and then presented it as if it were a mystery over which side is right. Here’s part of the segment where they talk to pro-choicers who are pushing abortion storytelling as a form of activism.

• abortion 1 *

So that’s side number one, arguing that one of the reasons that abortion has become so stigmatized is because it’s so hidden, allowing anti-choicers to distract people with their lies. Even before we start to talk about evidence, this is clearly a straightforward argument that has a lot to recommend it, including the fact that one of the reasons that abortion got legalized in the first place is that women had abortion speak-outs that replaced ugly stereotypes with lived truths. But instead of pointing that out or asking if, say, there are any studies to help guide our understanding of this, [NPR] instead let an anti-choicer just claim that all these abortion stories are actually helping his side.

• abortion 2 *

This is a good point to pop in and say that the actual quality of the stories on offer is wildly divergent between pro- and anti-choice sites. Believe me, I’ve read tons of both. With pro-choicers, you have women from a variety of backgrounds, and they can usually explain in lucid terms what the abortion did and did not accomplish for them. With anti-choicers, it’s pretty much all women who are deeply religious and have been encouraged by family and by their pastors to blame everything that’s wrong in their lives on the abortion. With pro-choicers, in other words, you have women that are largely speaking from their own heart on their own terms, whereas with the anti-choice sites, most of the time you are reading stories of women who are echoing what they’ve been told about the evils of abortion. I almost wish the difference weren’t so stark, but there you have it. More to the point, there’s a real difference in tone. Pro-choice abortion stories tend to be aimed broadly at the public, hoping to gain understanding and empathy. Anti-choice stories are really geared more towards the legislatures and courts, giving them cover for abortion restrictions, and it’s much less about trying to actually convince anyone. In a sense, they’re not even particularly comparable. But despite this, they are treated as comparable on NPR.

• abortion 3 *

Actually, it’s very clear. This story implies there are an equal number of stories between women who regret and women who are glad they have abortions, which is simply false, because women who are glad they had abortion vastly outnumber women who regret them. NPR should have noted that, and did not, creating the sense of false equivalence. More importantly, they even admit that storytelling about race and LGBT issues improves empathy, so why on earth would it be a toss-up when it comes to abortion? That makes no sense. But, and this is most important, there is research, however preliminary. A study that was released a full week before this shows this! Quoting from ThinkProgress: “According to a team of researchers led by UCLA doctoral candidate Michael LaCour, when abortion opponents have an in-person conversation with a woman who’s chosen to end a pregnancy, they’re more likely to shift their view about whether the procedure should be legal.”

Look, I think it’s great to do a piece that shows how both pro- and anti-choice folks say that abortion storytelling breaks in their favor. But if you’re going to do that, don’t shrug and pretend there’s no way to weigh their claims against each other. You should point out that research, statistics, and common sense shows that the pro-choice side has the advantage here. After all, why would anti-choicers spend so many years stigmatizing and shaming women over abortion if not to shut them up about it?

***************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, steel overcompensation edition. One of the most fascinating and frankly telling aspects of gun fanaticism is how deeply misogynist it is. Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America was bragging recently about how he upset Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who is clearly awful in his eyes because she’s female and from Brooklyn.

• Pratt *

He’s lying, by the way. He claims she got upset because of his inarticulate wankery he tries to pass off as constitutional analysis, but she actually got upset because one of his members threatened her and he was supportive of it. You can read about it in the show links. But it’s just telling that he tries to write her off with the dismissive sexist stereotype of the “crazy lady.” Maloney is the one here who accurately assesses the reality of this country, where there are 11,000 gun homicides a year.

The post What Is Ahead for Reproductive Rights in 2015? appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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“My Husband Is Not Gay”

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Rush Limbaugh, rape denialist

Dumbest gotcha ever

Greatest “pro-life” argument ever

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a researcher from Media Matters will discuss conservative myths about contraception. The Christian right tries a strange new tactic to replace pray-away-the-gay, and rape denialism continues to get its hooks into conservative pundits.

I’ll be discussing this further during the interview, but here’s a sample from the Media Matters video summarizing the right’s war on contraception.

• contraception *

In reality, as was clearly stated in the Supreme Court decision, this was about contraception, not abortion. The Court found that with contraception—and only contraception—suddenly your boss has a right to let his religious belief dictate whether or not you got coverage. It had nothing to do with abortion, or anything but contraception. Listen to the interview and then check out the video in show links!

***************

For many years, conservative Christians, trying to square their claim to love everyone with their hostility to gay rights, backed something called gay conversion therapy, which claimed that you can somehow “fix” gay people to make them straight. Since then, the psychological establishment has come out hard against gay conversion therapy, decrying it not only as useless but counterproductive, because it can lower self-esteem, which is the opposite of what real therapy is supposed to do. And now even major pray the gay away organizations are admitting that they were wrong and you can’t quote-unquote “fix” gay people, because sexual orientation is not a disease but, you know, an orientation.

But sadly, none of this means that the Christian right is about to give up on the fantasy that every man, no matter how little sexual interest her has in women, should be married to one and making babies. And yes, I said men, because while lesbians do get their share of denunciation from the pulpit, the lion’s share of panic over homosexuality is aimed squarely at men who have sex with other men. The new trend, therefore, is not to tell gay men that they can be “cured” of homosexuality. The new trend is for gay men to accept that they may want to have sex with men, but to marry women anyway and try to live the straight lifestyle. Naturally, TLC has a new show about this, focusing on the Mormons that first came up with the idea of wanting sex with men but marrying women out of duty. It’s called My Husband’s Not Gay. Even though the point is that he is, but is choosing not to act on it.

• TLC 1 *

The fact that this is a solution pushed mostly or exclusively for gay men is telling. It’s hard to imagine many straight men being convinced that they should take one for the team by marrying someone who openly tells you all the time they’d rather be sleeping with someone else, but are sucking it up and touching you as a duty to God. Demanding that women take on gay men as charity case husbands is just one more way conservative churches tell women they’re worth less. I worry that some of them feel like they should be grateful that anyone wants to marry them, which is one of the many ways women are taught to have low self-esteem. Of course, homophobic conservatives also think gay men are worth less, so much so that they’re arguing that it’s better to pretend you’re straight than to be who you really are.

NPR interviewed Allan Edwards, a Presbyterian pastor who is doing the same thing, even though, from what I can tell, the gay-but-dutifully-married-to-a-woman thing started with the Mormons. He and his wife Leeanne, who is expecting a baby, tell a similar story you often hear of the Mormon couples, of a marriage where there’s friendship but not much hope for passion.

• TLC 2 *

You see these narratives a lot. And that’s what makes this a bit hard, because you do believe that there’s affection and friendship there. But here’s the thing: Most of us can have friendships, even close ones, with people we’re not sexually attracted to while also having the opportunity to pursue sexual relationships with people we’re actually attracted to. This supposed solution of marrying straight women to gay men just means that two people instead of one person is being denied that. But the way that Allan and Leeanne Edwards rationalize that away is distressing.

• TLC 3 *

Sorry, but it’s just not the same. There’s a huge difference between not getting everything you want and never getting anything you want. Yes, being monogamous means you occasionally meet people you think are hot and setting that aside for your partner. But most of us are willing to make that deal because we enjoy sex with our partners. So it’s like skipping a snack now so you can have dessert later. But what these two are selling is closer to skipping a snack now so you can eat a piece of cardboard later. This entire gay-but-married thing is an attempt by the Christian right to get around past accusations that they want to stifle people or put them in the closet by saying, no, we are open and not hiding anything. But the stifling is still going on. Worse, this method requires sacrificing a satisfying sex life not just for one, but two people for every gay person they guilt trip out of the quote-unquote “gay lifestyle.”

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Interview

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The anti-feminist panic attack on the right appears to be continuing without a hiccup into the new year. The feminist argument about sex and sexual assault is finally penetrating into the public consciousness, and it has conservatives in a panic. The feminist argument about sexual assault is that it’s not because women choose sex or because men are lustful beasts who can’t be stopped when provoked, but it’s an act of dominance over women. And that women have every right to have as much sex as they want with as many men as they want without getting raped. While conservatives aren’t pro-rape or anything silly like that, I would say that a lot of them are deeply attached to the idea that women somehow bring rape on themselves by being sexual. Or that it’s not really rape if you’re a sexual woman. Basically, conservatives want to keep arguing that the problem isn’t rape but women having sex, and they are in a full-blown panic that this line might actually be less persuasive than it used to be.

Susan Patton, the so-called Princeton Mom, got her start telling women to try to get married in college but now has really blossomed into a full-blown rape apologist who appears only to be brought onto TV anymore to basically imply that you have it coming if you have sex with men willingly. Or, in this case, she was brought onto Fox News to denounce teaching kindergartners basic sexual assault prevention. After denying outright, with no evidence, that sexual assault is as common as the stats say it is, Patton denied that there’s any value to specifically teaching kids how to be aware of sexual predators, because god forbid, that’s a kind of sex ed.

• rape 1 *

This was too extreme even for some of the folks at Fox News. After all, we’re talking about here is telling 5-year-olds to report it to a teacher or parent if an adult or older kid wants to touch them in an inappropriate way. And no, this isn’t just “manners” and sexual assault isn’t a matter of not having good manners. On the contrary, a lot of sexual predators know how to exploit your good manners against you. They know that having good manners often means being unwilling to talk back to adults or being afraid to say no bluntly instead of softly or being afraid of being a tattletale. That’s what these classes are for, to tell kids there are some situations where it’s okay to forget your manners and to scream or tattle or tell someone to leave them alone. But such is the unwillingness to accept the realities of sexual assault that Patton would rather have kids be put in danger because they don’t have the proper education than admit that there’s a problem.

Rush Limbaugh, also a reliable purveyor of the angry conservative id, just went into straight denial mode recently on his show.

• rape 2 *

This is pure projection. No feminist has ever said all moaning is pain or fear. Limbaugh is the only person here saying that all moaning is the same thing, that it’s all consent. That is, of course, a blatant lie. All of us know that what is called a “moan” can sometimes mean pleasure but also can mean fear or pain. Most of the time, we can tell the difference, which is why feminists are rightfully skeptical when an accused rapist claims that a woman’s moans of pain or fear or confusion sounded like pleasure to him. Yeah right, buddy. But hey, even if you were legitimately confused, that’s no excuse. If you can’t tell, then it’s time to stop and ask. But, in order to defend accused rapists, Limbaugh has backed himself into pretending that all moans mean pleasure 100 percent of the time. Which means that, if someone kicks him in the knee and he moans in pain, we have to assume he wanted it, I guess. Since all moans are moans of pleasure.

Of course, outright denial is just one method. Another, more insidious and subtle method, is to try to water down feminist ideas so that they are basically meaningless. For instance, a lot of feminists call it “slut-shaming” when you say that women deserve bad things to happen to them, including sexual assault, if they have sex willingly. This is threatening to many people on the right who think they should be able to try to control women’s sexual behavior through shame and fear. But Kennedy Montgomery of Fox News tried the dumbest attempt at a gotcha ever when it came to the term “slut-shaming.” There’s a proposed law that would require publicly traded companies to share how much more their CEOs make than the basic employees at companies, a bit of useful transparency for unions and investors to have. But Montgomery was against it and tried to steal feminism to denounce it.

• rape 3 *

Nope. Telling a CEO of a publicly traded company he has to be transparent with the people who give him money or labor in exchange for making millions of dollars is not the same thing as telling a woman that she brought rape on herself by having sex. Just not even close. Being able to have sex without being raped or abused is a right. Being able to make millions of dollars without any accountability to people who actually give you the money and labor so that you can be so rich is not a right. Big difference. Huge.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, God won’t let us kill people because we kill embryos instead edition. How’s this for a “pro-life” argument? Televangelist Jim Baker says we’re bad at war now because we legalized abortion.

• Baker *

There’s so much wrong with that argument that there’s no need to debunk it, but I do want to highlight that it’s considered legitimate, in so-called pro-life circles, to claim that God punishes us for abortion by making us less efficient at killing actual living, breathing people.

The post The Christian Right’s New Anti-Gay Strategy, and Contraception Myths appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be talking with Vicki Saporta from the National Abortion Federation about the new slew of federal bills intended to restrict abortion. Texas’ abortion law is back in court again, and feminist-friendly pop stars anger conservatives.

Last week, I did a segment on that show My Husband’s Not Gay, and since then there’s been a lot of criticism of the show for selling a false message about how anti-gay religious beliefs aren’t as harmful as they really are. And TLC is acting really strange about it, as MSNBC reported.

• Gay *

TLC refuses to say why they’re vetoing Jeff Bennion from public appearances to promote the show. So I’m going to speculate wildly here and point out that while Jeff is portrayed as an ordinary Joe just trying to muddle with what he calls “same-sex attraction” while being married to a woman, Media Matters discovered that he is actually a prominent “ex-gay” activist. As I pointed out on the show last week, the “ex-gay” movement is losing steam rapidly and this whole thing about admitting you are attracted to men but being married to a woman anyway is a shiny new tactic to try to keep the whole thing alive. Bennion, in other words, has what Media Matters called “a real professional incentive to use his new, national platform” in order to lure people back into trying to un-gay themselves. Thus TLC’s embarrassed unwillingness to let him do more press.

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The Texas abortion law is back in court again, with the Fifth Circuit Court hearing arguments about a law requiring clinics to meet ambulatory surgical center standards. These standards, which treat abortion clinics like hospitals, are not necessary for most abortions, which are quick outpatient procedures that are safer than colonscopies. Indeed, these standards are so ridiculous that they’re applied to places that only dispense the abortion pill, which means that they want you to have a full surgical suite for the privilege of swallowing a pill and going home to have what amounts to a very heavy period. It’s like requiring you to go to the hospital if you have a bout of constipation, in terms of making any kind of medical sense. It’s clear as a bell that the only purpose of these laws is to shut down safe abortion clinics and drive women onto the black market to punish them for being sexual, but NPR allowed a lying anti-choicer to spout her lies about it anyway.

• Texas 1 *

Ah yes, invoking a man who was in flagrant violation of the existing laws in order to justify new laws. Does this B.S. convince anyone? I doubt it. It’s so clearly dishonest. But let’s be clear. Gosnell was breaking the laws that apply to all doctors, not just abortion providers, and the problem was that no one bothered to check up on his clinic because he served low-income women and women of color. In fact, one reason he had so many patients was that good, clean clinics were being run out of business by anti-choicers like this lady, who think you deserve to go to a rat-infested hellhole for an abortion because they think you’re a bad person who deserves to suffer. So that’s what they do: Shut down good clinics so all that is left is the people running illegal ones, like Gosnell. It’s rich of her to hand-wring about Gosnell when her entire plan is to make sure that’s what women seeking abortion have to turn to. Passing more regulations to shut down Kermit Gosnell is like banning coffee in response to finding out that you have a cocaine dealer on your street. Cocaine is already illegal. Banning coffee won’t make it more illegal.

The new Gov. Greg Abbott was, if anything, even more nonsensical in his blatherings about this.

• Texas 2 *

So on one hand, he admits that the law is about making abortion hard to get and trying to keep women from getting abortions. But then he defends it by saying it’s not that big a deal because you can still get your abortion. On what planet does it make sense to defend a law by saying, oh yeah, we spend millions of dollars to defend this law but that’s okay, because it doesn’t work anyway? But honestly I do think I know what this little two-step is about. Greg Abbott is reassuring conservative voters that they will still be able to get abortions and this is only about taking access away from poor women who can’t afford to travel. The New Mexico thing is just a coded way of saying that. Unfortunately, the Fifth Circuit Court has indicated in the past that they think that it’s perfectly fine to pass laws that are about taking abortion access away from poor women while leaving it in place for middle class and wealthy women.

Carrie Feibel of Houston Public Media went onto NPR to talk about some of the legal issues. She talked about how it all comes down to how far you have to drive.

• Texas 3 *

Basically, what it comes down to is whether or not the Fifth Circuit Court thinks a burden is undue if it primarily affects poor women. The last time this law went before the court, it was clear the judges felt that a law that allows the well-off to get abortions but prevents poor women from getting abortions isn’t an undue burden. It’s really despicable, how much this comes down to treating working class women like they are second class citizens. The whole point of this law is to set the practical price of an abortion out of reach for low-income women while making it accessible to everyone else. Unfortunately, it’s a strategy that seems to be working.

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Interview

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I gotta say, it continues to be fascinating watching how female pop stars these days are becoming more aggressively feminist and giving conservatives heartburn by doing so. I wrote about this at RH Reality Check, but in case you missed it, Nicki Minaj has a new album out and she briefly references a pregnancy she aborted in high school.

• Pop 1 *

Rolling Stone asked her about this in an interview and she’s pretty straightforward about it.

• Pop 2 *

A lot of the focus in the headlines about this has been on the fact that she says the experience “haunted” her, but I thought I’d quote that longer part for context. Much needed context, because, of course, anti-choicers are busy hustling and exploiting her story. Perennial jerk and anti-choice activist Alveda King snootily did an interview where she claimed that Nicki Minaj will eventually regret her abortion and start being anti-choice because, as anyone who listens to this podcast will know, anti-choicers have zero compunction about saying obviously false things all the time. Talking out of their ass is so easy for them that I think they forgot how to talk out of their mouths. Personally, I think Minaj was perfectly clear about how she feels and there is no need to second guess her here.

Beyoncé has been giving conservatives indigestion for years now, both in her enthusiastic support for President Obama and now because she’s come out strongly as a feminist. Mike Huckabee, who is a mean-spirited bully who pretends to be jovial, decided to go on the attack against her recently because she, gasp, has done some records suggesting she enjoys sex. Jinx, the vlogger at the Complex read an excerpt from Huckabee’s new book and I warn you, it is one of the most asinine and prejudiced things that I’ve heard from a supposed presidential candidate in a long time.

• Pop 3 *

Jinx’s take on this is worth hearing.

• Pop 4 *

Racist, sexist, prudish, the whole thing. Really quite amazing. But I also want to flag how condescending it is. Huckabee acts like he’s complimenting Beyoncé by saying she can sing and dance, but really it’s a backhanded compliment, because he’s doing it in service of implying that’s all she can do. He’s denying that she is an artist with a vision and treating her like she’s a wedding singer he hired and so he can tell her what to do. The notion that Beyoncé is just a puppet being pulled by her husband is so ridiculous that it’s actually a bit hard to take as an insult. It’s like it never even occurred to Huckabee that women have thoughts and wills of their own, much less a desire to create art and express themselves artistically. And yes, expressing thoughts about sex is a legitimate form of artistic expression. No, he just thinks she’s a pretty little dancing and singing bird who is being controlled by a man because he can’t imagine women can think for themselves. And this man thinks he’s got the moral and intellectual authority to tell us what to do? He can’t even accept a reality that’s staring him right in the face, which is that women are autonomous creatures with minds of our own.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, I do believe they are deluding themselves edition. Troy Newman of Operation Rescue has a vision, a very self-deluded vision.

• CPCs *

Sure, there are tons of them. That’s because they sit mostly empty, trying to lure women inside by pretending to be abortion clinics. They can afford to have a bazillion of them because they don’t do anything and therefore don’t cost anything. It’s not like women get pregnant and just do whatever the people in the first place they wander into say. CPCs know that women actually want abortions, which is why they pretend to be abortion clinics, which they wouldn’t have to do if they were actually as popular as Newman pretends. The other thing is this: This is not about offering alternatives, but the illusion of offering alternatives. The second abortion is banned in a state, mark my words, all the CPCs will close up shop and go home. That’s because they were there to trick people into thinking anti-choicers offer service, but they do not. They will only pretend to care as long as it takes to take away your rights, at what point they will immediately drop the façade.

The post HB 2 Is Back in Court, and Conservatives Are Criticizing Female Pop Stars Again appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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Completely ineffectual strike called

“Christian sharia”

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Tony Perkins is desperate

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Jeff Teague of Planned Parenthood will explain the fallout from Tennessee’s new abortion law. Roe’s anniversary brings out goofy anti-choicers again, and Obama exposes conservative hypocrisy on the family values question.

If you haven’t seen this awesome Daily Show segment where Jessica Williams interviews an Alabama lawyer who represents fetuses in court, well, drop what you’re doing and watch it. And yes, we mean represents fetuses. In Alabama, it’s legal for judges to basically put teenagers who want abortion on trial and they often assign lawyers to represent the fetus in what amounts to a bunch of adults performing character assassination on teenagers in order to punish them for sex.

• fetus *

Jessica Williams should have a weeklong show where she plays with all the implications of the anti-choice tendency to talk as if fetuses are conscious, choice-making beings who deserve more respect than actual living, breathing women.

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Last week was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which means, of course, a frenzy of activity for the anti-choice movement, including the annual March for Life” in D.C. It’s all very interesting, because anti-choice activists spend much of the year concocting B.S. secular arguments in favor of restricting abortion, claiming that it’s because of “life” or to protect women or whatever nonsense they’re peddling this week. But this time of year, when they are out there motivating the troops, serves as a necessary reminder that the anti-choice movement is actually a religious cult devoted to pushing prudery and rigid gender roles and using the law to punish anyone who defies them. Which isn’t to say that they give up the feigned concern for women, of course, because it’s the only weapon they have to fight back against accusations of misogyny. But I never stop being fascinated by how much this supposed concern for women rests heavily on sexist tropes about how women are stupid or childish and can’t be trusted to make our own decisions. Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich spoke at a Chicago “March for Life event and what is interesting about his speech is he literally assumes an embryo—which doesn’t even have a brain, mind you—has more autonomy than a woman.

• march 1 *

See what I mean? He imagines an embryo having a mind and agency. It wants things. It struggles. It’s somehow a conscious being making conscious choices. But women get no such assumption. He assumes that a woman who chooses abortion is not making a conscious choice. She is being compelled, because he categorically refuses to believe that women are capable of knowing their own minds or making their own choices. Not just about abortion, either, but his last statement made it clear that anyone who uses contraception to avoid giving birth or even just to space births must be doing it not because they want to and they know their own mind. No, they are broken people who cannot be trusted to make their own choices. Only the embryo is assumed to have agency here. Only an embryo, and certainly not a grown woman, has desires that deserve respect.

Father Stephen Imbarrato of Project Defending Life, the group that tried and failed to ban abortion in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has a video out suggesting that it’s not enough to annoy people with creepy fetus pictures and God-bothering. Now he is calling for a strike to end what he calls, repeatedly, “pre-born child killing”, probably because the word “abortion” reminds you that women are involved and they prefer you to think of us as mindless baby ovens.

• march 2 *

I imagine that this strike will be about as effective as their efforts to pass a municipal ban on abortion were, which is to say not at all. In fact, I’d be astonished if anyone noticed. I’ll be even more astonished if someone actually goes on strike, as opposed to just, you know, taking the day off from work to go wave fetus signs at people. Of course, the anti-choice movement already draws heavily on high school students and retired people because they need people who are bored, have lots of time on their hands, and are quick to judge, and naïve teenagers and older people who watch too much Fox News are their best bet. So that makes it even harder to imagine this so-called strike will be noticed by anyone.

Sadly, despite the fact that all these dramatics are silly, sexist, and theocratic in nature, Republicans on the Hill are crawling all over each other to pander to the anti-choice crew. Huffington Post Live discussed how Congress has introduced five new anti-abortion bills.

• march 3 *

Exactly. The March for Life is an annual reminder that what we’re dealing with is a bunch of priests, church ladies, and God botherers who want to impose their ridiculous religious standards on your sex life and your medical care, and are willing to tell lies and engage in absolutely over-the-top theatrics to do it.

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Interview

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Because of Roe’s anniversary, you’re hearing a bunch of malarkey from conservatives about how they want to support pregnant women in having babies. Malarkey not just because they assume, as I showed in the last segment, that the only reason women abort is because they’re afraid, when in fact a lot of women plain do not want to have a baby now. But also malarkey because when it comes to the brass tacks of what it would actually take to make it easier for women to choose to give birth, they meet conservative resistance every step of the way. That much was made clear this month, when President Obama rolled out a plan to push for better parental and sick leave so that people and women in particular can choose to have children if they want to without fearing for losing pay they need to get by.

• family 1 *

Right now, American workers are entitled to up to 12 weeks a year of unpaid family or medical leave, but for most workers who live paycheck to paycheck, that right might not exist at all because they can’t really take it. You’d think that the same people who are always on about how women should be having more babies and how they want to support women to have babies would be rushing to join Obama to push through legislation guaranteeing this. After all, one of the number one reasons women give for getting an abortion is that they can’t afford it. It’s not just about affording medical bills, either. It’s often about time, being able to take it off to give birth or to tend to sick children. If you don’t have that kind of time, deciding against having a baby is something you’re more likely to do. But the people who are passing all these abortion bills and who claim to be doing so for women , what do they do when given the opportunity to actually make it easier on mothers? Well, let’s check into Fox News and see how they responded to this opportunity to put their money where their anti-choice mouths are.

• family 2 *

Nope, the second the discussion gets away from justifying forcing women to give birth, suddenly all that concern for mother’s needs goes right out the window. Pregnant women are now painted as gold-diggers and welfare queens who think they should be paid for their work. How dare they! First they want benefits for working and next you’ll be telling me they want a paycheck. Where’s all that flowery conservative language about how moms in need should get support so they don’t choose abortion? It’s like it’s just opportunistic pandering that they never had the slightest intention of actually acting upon.

Anyway, congressional Republicans are expected, after they pass a bunch of bills trying to force you to give birth against your will, to reject Obama’s plan to make it easier to care for all those babies they will force you to have. And the pundits at Fox are mad because wah, Obama is making Republicans look bad for this bit of hypocrisy.

• family 3 *

Gotta love the indignation there. You get the impression that Stuart Varney thinks Obama is obliged to make the Republicans look good to the voters, even if that means going out of his way to conceal their hypocritical views on so-called family values. That’s not how politics work, dude. Getting mad at a politician for being political is like getting mad at a cat for being furry. But here’s the thing. Obama isn’t making the Republicans look bad. Republicans make themselves look bad. They go on and on about motherhood and babies in order to justify abortion restrictions, but the second they actually have an opportunity to help mothers raise all those babies, they flip out and start accusing women of being money-grubbing brats. Because they want to be paid for their jobs, mind you. We’re not even talking about welfare here, though someone who is actually “pro-life” should support that, too. We’re talking about people who want to be paid a fair wage and benefits for working. But apparently you not only should be forced to have kids against your will, you should be willing to work without getting paid for it too. And then they get fussy when their opponents suggest there’s some misogyny in play here.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, desperate flailing edition. Same-sex marriage is gaining in poll approval by the minute. So homobigot Tony Perkins is throwing a Hail Mary in trying to scare people into opposing it.

• Perkins *

Needless to say, this is a strawman. If same-sex marriage proponents were actually trying to get rid of the government’s right to define marriage, they would petition for the end of marriage licenses for everyone. They simply want to expand the definition of who can get married, just as civil rights leaders did when they pushed to legalize interracial marriage. The definition of marriage changes all the time, now allowing for women to be equal partners instead of treated like property or allowing people to get divorced. That’s why many people are cautiously optimistic that the Supreme Court will do the right thing and strike down bans on gay marriage.

The post March for Life Antics, and Anti-Choice Opposition to Better Family Leave Policies appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Response to “The Apology” video

DRAMA

Melissa Harris-Perry on the abortion bill debacle

“Definitional problem” is not actually a real problem

Kristan Hawkins

What the polls actually say

“Republican females”

“Losing My Lege”

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Andrea Grimes will be on to discuss her new column for RH Reality Check. Republicans yank a bill banning abortions at 20 weeks at the last minute, and I’ll look into the reaction.

There was this weird video that went viral a couple of weeks ago of men “apologizing” for letting women get abortions. Funny or Die responded with their own video of women apologizing.

• video *

The lack of self-awareness that goes into multiple men apologizing for abortions they didn’t actually get is darkly funny on its own, but they did a good job building on it.

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So the anniversary of Roe v. Wade did not go how anti-choicers expected. There’s kind of a dull, predictable rhythm to how conservatives, uh, celebrate the legalization of abortion, which gave the movement to turn American into a Christian theocracy an issue to kickstart its cause. People amasss on D.C., Republican politicians turn out to give routine speeches, organizers wax nostalgic about how great it was in the imaginary halcyon days when women didn’t have sex, and the Republicans bring a go-nowhere bill trying to ban abortion in some way to the floor. This year, it was supposed to be a ban on 20 week abortions that Obama was surely going to veto. This was a big effing deal. They poll-tested this thing and everything, finding that you can trick Americans into thinking women get abortions after 20 weeks because they were too busy getting their nails done to bother sooner, when of course the truth is most women who get abortions that late have medical issues or had financial problems that prevented them from getting abortions sooner. This was supposed to be an easy win: Grand-standing about life while actually implying that women are just dumb lazy sluts who need to be taught a lesson. And then, at the last minute, it got yanked out from under Republicans.

• abortion 1 *

Let’s be clear. The Republican women that stopped this thing are not suddenly growing a heart and thinking that maybe they’re being too hard on women who are facing fetal abnormalities or who just came home at 4 months pregnant to find their husbands have run off with the babysitter. The issue here was rape and the totally legitimate concern that some female Republicans have with their male colleagues tendency to wallow in the whole “legitimate rape” thing, where they imply that most rapes shouldn’t count as “real” rapes.

• abortion 2 *

This entire thing is truly amazing. Let’s be honest here: Ellmers [R-NC] isn’t some kind of champion for women. As Harris-Perry points out, Ellmers furiously denounced regulations requiring that health insurance cover maternity care. She’s a classic anti-choice conservative, in that she wants to force you to have a baby and then she wants to deny you health insurance, family leave, social assistance, or anything else you might need to have that baby. She, like her colleagues, clearly sees forced childbirth and subsequent suffering and starvation as the price you should have to pay for daring to have sex. This is obvious. But she also knows that Republicans at least have to pretend that none of this is about misogyny. And you know what makes it hard to deny that you’re a misogynist? Obsessing over the myth that women are constantly lying about rape for the lulz. Or telling women that it wasn’t really rape when he held you down and forced you because of your skirt or because you were drinking or because you weren’t sitting in a convent knitting or whatever. Or, in this case, claiming your rape doesn’t count because you were too afraid to bring it to the police. All of this just makes you sound like the misogynist you clearly are, and Ellmers was right to gently suggest to her male colleagues that they just let this one go. It wasn’t about loving women, but mostly about managing optics.

And that this is all about misogyny has been definitively demonstrated, and not just because male Republicans were so unwilling to listen to a woman, even when she’s trying to help them, that they ended up proving every lingering suspicion that they’re running a clown car rather than a congressional caucus up there. It’s also because they weren’t willing to budge on this paranoid belief about lying women. It was that important to male Republicans to enshrine the belief that women are a bunch of lying sluts into law, that they basically shot themselves in the foot over this. But sure, let’s hear about how this has something to do with “life” and not just a deep-set hatred of women and desire to control their bodies.

But even this debacle will not cause male Republicans to let this one go and concede that all rape is rape. While speaking at a Family Research Council event, Lindsey Graham [R-SC] spoke about this bill’s derail and, well, yeah, they [Republicans] can’t help themselves.

• abortion 3 *

What’s amazing is there is a simple away around this so-called “definitional problem” with rape. Just admit that all forced sex is rape. Stop trying to say that some rapes aren’t real rapes or legitimate rapes. Stop implying that there are occasions when it’s okay to force a woman to have sex. All they need to do is let go of this obsession with finding a way to make exceptions that allow some rapes to somehow not be rape. That they can’t let this one go speaks volumes.

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Interview

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So how are anti-choice activists and hardline conservatives reacting to the news that some female Republicans would like slightly fewer rape victims to be forced to give birth than anti-choicers would?

• anti 1 *

Let me remind you that Rep. Ellmers was trying to save conservatives from themselves, trying to keep them from having to explain to journalists why they think it’s a good idea to force a 14-year-old rape victim who didn’t know she was pregnant to have her rapist’s baby. She knew the answer too frequently veers toward insinuating that rape victims are dirty lying sluts and was just trying to shut that down. But we’re dealing with extreme misogyny here, and extreme misogynists, in my long experience, do not know how to moderate themselves, even to accomplish basic political goals, such as punishing women for consensual sex with unwanted childbirth. No, they will not be stopped until they can also punish women for non-consensual sex. And so the response from the hardline anti-choicers has been pretty ugly. Jill Stanek, who seems to live not on oxygen but on judging other women, and Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life decided to protest at Ellmers office. Ellmers had justified her decision in part by citing evidence that shows one reason millennials don’t like Republicans is because of the obsession with so-called “social issues.” Hawkins claimed that this was all wrong and attacking abortion rights is totally how to get the kids these days. Her argument, needless to say, is unconvincing.

• anti 2 *

The poll she appears to be talking about was commissioned by a super-conservative group called the Knights of Columbus, and no it does not say the majority of millennials would ban abortion. They asked questions like, “Do you think the abortion rate is higher than it should be?” and assumed that a yes answer meant that you were anti-choice, when it could actually mean that you think people should have more access to contraception. But better polls that ask more specific questions about what laws people would actually support shows that Hawkins is simply wrong wrong wrong. Public Religion Research Institute polling data shows that 60 percent of millennials think abortion should be legal in most or all cases. That’s the issue here. It’s easy to get people to agree that something is “immoral” on a phone poll even if they don’t actually think it is. We live in a culture where a lot of behaviors are characterized as “bad” or “immoral,” but if you really question people about it, they don’t really think of it as bad or immoral so much as a little naughty. Like pot-smoking, drinking, eating chocolate, sleeping in instead of going out jogging, cursing, that sort of thing. They also respond that way to sex, but when it comes down to the actual policy questions, people do not think of having sex as immoral in the sense that they think you should be punished for it. The anti-choice polls are about trying to imply that people who say something is a little naughty are arguing that it’s evil and should be banned, and that is not what people are saying at all.

• anti 3 *

Yeah, no, this bill wasn’t about courage. Nothing is less courageous than pushing for a bill that you know the president is going to veto. This bill was about having it both ways: Giving the appearance of supporting an abortion ban with the full knowledge that you’ll never have to live with the results of your supposed principles. Hawkins is also blowing smoke with this notion that the same millennials who turned out in record numbers for Obama are somehow going to be wowed by a movement whose not-particularly-well-hidden goal is trying to force young people in particular to accept that the price of having sex is getting married at a very young age to someone you aren’t particularly sure is the right one for you and having a slew of kids so that you have a glorious middle age of wondering how your life passed you by. Sure, that’s a strong message, but not really appealing to young voters.

Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas was also incensed by all this.

• anti 4 *

You get the feeling that the “wrong message” Gohmert was afraid of sending was the message that the GOP allows women to have any power at all. What is it about men who insist on using the word “females” instead of “women,” by the way? It’s just so obvious that there’s a dehumanizing going on, a tendency to see women as somehow more animal than men. It’s objectifying, is what it is, which is no surprise when we’re talking about a man who clearly has never even considered for a moment that women are people and that forcing them to bear children for rapists would make them suffer.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, professional victim edition. Erick Erickson is one of those conservative pundits who claims to oppose abortion because of “life,” but he’s so incredibly sexist that it’s clear that he actually has other motivations. We got another reminder when he was on Rush Limbaugh’s show recently.

• Erickson *

You know, it’s funny, I frequently run into conservatives online who rant about how my women’s studies degree ruined me and made me a quote “professional victim.” There’s a lot of nonsense in that line, but I always find it funny because I got my degree in English literature. But obviously, the right gets a lot of mileage out of claiming both that women’s studies is brainwashing and that people with more traditional degrees reject feminism as silly stuff. But it’s really just a lot of wishful thinking on their part and studying women’s role in society is clearly a good use of your time, as we are half the frigging population.

The post House Republicans Just Can’t Help Themselves appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Grandma

Super Bowl domestic violence ad

Laura Ingraham mad at anti-sexist ad

No, let’s not sweep it under the rug

President Obama says vaccinate your kids

Chris Christie plays footsie with anti-vaxxers

Rand Paul makes a play for the anti-vaccination crowd

Just wow

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Rebecca Traister will dig into how much of a disaster our maternity leave policies are in this country. The Super Bowl airs some anti-sexist ads and some people get really mad and is anti-vaccination going to be the next anti-abortion movement?

Lily Tomlin is in a movie called Grandma that shows a woman helping her granddaughter get an abortion. The movie seems awesome. Here’s a clip of the grandmother trying to get half the abortion money out of the jerk that impregnated her granddaughter.

• Tomlin *

Watch the interview with Aisha Harris in show links, because both Tomlin and the director have interesting things to say about how abortion should be in movies, as it’s such a common part of life.

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Five years ago, there was kind of an amazing online revolt against the disgustingly sexist ads that ran during the Super Bowl, which may have been one of the first real examples of how social media can change a conversation overnight. The sexism in the ads during the Super Bowl has been declining every year since then, showing that it did have a major impact. This year, things changed even more as the NFL has a P.R. crisis, caused by Ray Rice and the cover-up of his domestic violence. So giving the appearance of fighting sexism became a priority and there were two ads run during the Super Bowl that did just that. One was an ad about domestic violence, based around a 9-1-1 call, a real one, from a woman who pretended to be calling for pizza so she could summon help without alerting her abuser.

• Super Bowl 1 *

And Always, the maxi pad company, had a pro-feminist ad called “Like A Girl” to reclaim the phrase “throw like a girl” as an empowering one. They show a bunch of people, adult men and women and young boys, acting out what “throwing” and “fighting like a girl” looks like, and they all do this little act of being fey, clumsy, and inept. Then they ask young girls, and they run and fight like, well, normal, because they haven’t yet absorbed the idea that women are inferior.

• Super Bowl 2 *

Neither of these ads should have been really remarkable, because in theory, we all agree that girls shouldn’t hate themselves and men shouldn’t beat women. Right? Right?! And yet, you will not be surprised to find out that a lot of people threw an absolute fit over this, because despite the official agreement that sexism is bad, the reason sexism persists is, well, a lot of people really do think women should be treated like inferiors. The Always ad caused a bunch of babies to whine that there should be a “like a boy” hashtag on Twitter, because, let’s be real, they think women should be shunted to the background and everything should be about boys and men. Laura Ingraham had a fit over the whole thing, and basically proved the argument.

• Super Bowl 3 *

Yes, I would say lack of empathy is Ingraham’s problem. But of course, her flailing proves the point: She agrees that “like a girl” means inferior and thinks that the way around that is not to fight back against the misogyny of that but simply declare she’s an exception to the rule and basically an honorary man. It’s sad that these little girls have more maturity than her in this regard. But then she continues to make the ad’s point for them by wailing about how the only people who really deserve care and attention are boys and men.

• Super Bowl 4 *

Yes, she literally argued that boys need a boost to stay ahead of girls, that they are entitled to have more sports programs and investment. As for the grades thing, it’s telling that boys can get lower grades and do less well in school and still end up getting better, higher-paying jobs when they graduate. That’s because being male means you get a leg up, and Ingraham is openly angry that the boost isn’t even bigger.

But the ugly reactions to the domestic violence ad may have been even worse, because Jesus Christ, can’t we at least just agree that wife-beating is a terrible thing that needs to end? Apparently not, as there were many voices calling for sweeping this problem under the rug, such as ESPN’s Herm Edwards.

• Super Bowl 5 *

I realize he may have meant well, but refusing to talk about domestic violence in football until after the football season is over is functionally refusing to talk about it at all. No one is paying attention to football news is the off-season. Honestly, I think feminists have tried the whole thing of politely waiting until it was somehow less unpleasant to bring these subjects up and what we’ve found is no one ever wants to talk about sexism. There’s always a reason not to talk about it. So yes, I think it’s good to bring it up during the Super Bowl. Hell, at least there’s an audience listening.

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Interview

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Anti-vaccination sentiment has been a growing problem in our country, as largely privileged, wealthy families continue to opt out of vaccination for their children, usually citing vague concerns that have been repeatedly and aggressively discredited by science. I suspect it’s largely because it’s not really about serious concerns that vaccines are dangerous so much as opting out has become a status symbol, a way for wealthy parents to distinguish themselves from the vaccinating masses. It’s also helped usher in the return of diseases that had been all but eradicated from the United States. The issue has gained particular prominence in the last month when a number of people were exposed at Disneyland, causing the disease to spread relatively rapidly, with over 100 people infected. Doctors believe that refusal to vaccinate is a major factor in this incident, and so President Obama went on TV to ask people to cut it out and just vaccinate their kids already.

• vaccine 1 *

Anti-vaccination sentiment is kind of an interesting beast in the U.S. It’s so clearly a reactionary movement, both in that it’s an attempt by elite people to create difference between themselves and everyone else and because of the weird obsession with “purity” that drives it. But at the same time, it’s actually understood vaguely in the public imagination as a “liberal” thing, because it tends to be concentrated in wealthy urban enclaves that usually vote for Democrats. There’s evidence that just because they live in liberal enclaves doesn’t mean that anti-vaxxers themselves are liberal, but by and large there’s been some separation between anti-vaxxers and other reactionary movements that view modern health care as “impure.” The most obvious ones being, of course, anti-choicers, who also rely heavily on arguments about how contraception and abortion are unnecessary and against nature and all other manner of nonsense. Because of this, it seems somewhat obvious that the “natural” home of anti-vaccination sentiment is not the left, but the right, and already the bridges have been built by right-wing hysteria over the HPV vaccination in particular, which conservatives frequently reject because they believe that there’s something wrong with acknowledging the fact that your daughter is unlikely to remain a lifelong virgin.

Well, conservative politicians, always ready with a knee-jerk nuh-uh response to anything that President Obama says, hurried along the process of anti-vaccination becoming wholly a conservative thing. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey kicked it off.

• vaccine 2 *

While he didn’t denounce vaccination or anything, he’s clearly playing footsie with anti-vaxxers, particularly by suggesting that we give equal weight to parents spouting nonsense and to scientists offering facts. And his nonsense about how the parent aspect matters more than the politician aspect? Uh, no. This is a matter of public health and having smart opinions on public health as a politician matters way more than what you do at home. But that’s part of the problem facing conservatives on this issue. Conservatives have always been wary of the idea of the public good, but with the rise of the religious right and Ayn Rand’s writings, being radically opposed to the idea of ever doing anything for the good of the community has become de riguer for many conservative politicians. Now, I hate to even bring this up, because it implies that vaccination is somehow a sacrifice for the public good, when it is not. It’s a pure win-win behavior: You lose nothing by getting it, you get protection against disease, and you contribute to herd immunity. There is literally no downside, so much so that anti-vaxxers have to make up downsides to scare people. But so hostile are some people to believing themselves members of a herd that they will actively come up with reasons to shirk any behavior that contributes to the common good, even if it comes at literally no cost to themselves. Which is what conservative politicians, particularly of a more libertarian bent, are facing. No surprise then that Rand Paul was even more aggressive on this front.

• vaccine 3 *

Paul is actually a doctor so his pandering to anti-vaxxers with these lies is particularly outrageous since he almost surely knows that what he just said is absolutely false. Sure, he never said directly that the vaccines caused it, so we can’t say he lied, technically, but he implied that vaccines cause mental damage, which means he’s either a liar or he was a very bad doctor who doesn’t understand basic evidence and medicine. I suspect it’s more the former, and Paul is basically making a play for the anti-vaccination crowd here. It makes sense, as a lot of them are clearly hostile to the idea that they should ever do anything for the herd, much less contribute to the herd’s immunity, and he correctly sees that misanthropic snobbery as a perfect fit for his libertarian-heavy Republicanism. The problem with all this, besides the lying and the pandering, is that by making anti-vaccination a political thing, you are encouraging more people to pick it up. If this continues, I worry we’re going to see people in red states, which currently have high vaccination rates, start rejecting vaccines to stick it to those nanny state liberals. We’re already seen how politicizing reproductive health care has served to destroy access. I worry what will happen if the same happens to vaccination.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, really ugly victim-blaming edition. I have no idea why Stacey Dash of Fox News thought that it wise to portray rape as what you have coming if you dare, no joke, leave your house.

• Dash *

She came up with some garbled it’s-just-a-joke apology later, but I think her meaning was super clear and not a joke at all. Both in that it’s “naughty” for women to behave in ways that are fine for men, which is to say by leaving your house and even gasp, consuming alcohol in the presence of the opposite sex. And in seeing rape as the natural penalty for said naughtiness, which is on the level of saying someone deserves to get a beating for watching an R-rated movie.

The post Anti-Sexist Super Bowl Ads, and Anti-Vaccination Drama appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

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What’s that about forced again?

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll cover a street art protest against sexual harassment, the return of the Republican rape philosophers, and ask the question: Is the movie Frozen oppressing men?

During the interview section of this podcast, I’ll dig more into the “Stop Telling Women to Smile” project, but as a teaser, here’s a clip from one of the videos posted at Fusion covering the art project.

• harassment *

Check the site out in show links!

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During the 2012 election, starting with Todd Akin’s comment about “legitimate rape,” there was a spate of Republican politicians making unfortunate comments about rape, eventually earning them, via the writer James Wolcott, the nickname “rape philosophizers.” Since then, there’s been some efforts on the right to get conservatives to realize when it comes to the subject of rape, discretion is the better part of valor. Or, that when it comes to women, better to stay silent and let people assume you have no empathy rather than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. But conservatives just can’t help themselves. And so here is the latest round-up of rape philosophers, to show that this problem is not going away.

West Virginia is considering a law that would ban abortions after 20 weeks, allowing all sorts of rape philosophizing to commence.

• rape 1 *

It appears that Brian Kurcaba’s opinion is that while the rape-based delivery system is distasteful, women should be swooning with gratitude at the rare and precious opportunity to get their hands on some actual sperm to make a baby with. As you can imagine, this comment caused some people who do not think rape victims should be subject to idiotic sentimentality about how “beautiful” it would be to force childbirth on them, and so Kurcaba offered an apology. Except it wasn’t much of an apology, saying, “I apologize to anyone who took my comments about the sanctity of human life to mean anything other than that all children are precious regardless of circumstances.” Which is that he continues to maintain that forcible impregnation is a beautiful gift, and is just sorry that you rape victims aren’t more grateful for this precious opportunity.

More rape philosophizing was on hand in Utah, as the legislature considered shoring up its rape laws to clarify that yes, it is rape to force sex on an unconscious person because, being unconscious, they can’t consent. You may be wondering how that wasn’t already the law, but state representative Brian Greene had other questions.

• rape 2 *

So let’s say you’re married to a lady and your wife decides to stop having sex with you. Sure, you could ask her what the problem is and perhaps seek marital counseling, but ew, I hear you get girl cooties if you actually do something like think about your wife’s feelings. So instead, wait until she’s asleep and then just take her unaware! That’s the solution, right? Until all these killjoys ruined it all by pointing out that just because you marry someone doesn’t mean she’s actually your property and no, you don’t just get to rape her when you feel like it because you can’t be bothered to have a conversation with your wife. Eventually, Greene realized his pity for the marital rapist routine was not winning him any fans and he switched positions on this, but it’s just mind-boggling that this continues to be a problem in 2015.

Not all the rape philosophers of late are men, however. Catherine Hanaway, who wants to be the governor of Missouri, recently gave a long speech where she basically blamed feminism and birth control for the sexual abuse of children.

• rape 3 *

I’m cutting away because she goes on a rant saying that women lose jobs and educational opportunities because of “sexual permissiveness”, an argument that would require you to believe that more women held jobs and got college degrees in the Victorian era than now, a self-evidently silly argument. But then she goes on to make this about child sex abuse, and things get really weird.

• rape 4 *

And she goes on at length, but you get the idea: She is arguing that abortion and quote-unquote “other things”, which clearly means contraception, leads to raping children. Because if you let women have sex for pleasure, then there’s no way you can ever have any rule governing sexual activity ever. Notice what is not mentioned in this rant? The idea of consent. Women are adults who can consent to sex, something you’d think people who are always on about freedom would understand. Children are not. This is an important difference, and a much clearer one than trying to rules-lawyer whether or not sex is okay depending on what medications you take or whether or not you’ve been married. But ultimately, that’s what all rape philosophizing really comes back to: Undermining the centrality of consent when discussing human sexuality. Rape philosophers want right and wrong to be about anything but consent. Which makes sense. We are talking about people who want to force you to give birth without your consent, so they have a strong reason to want to undermine the concept of consent in the public imagination.

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Interview

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Multiple times on this podcast, I’ve shared my theory that traditional conservatism has been absorbing and regurgitating more and more “men’s rights” ideas. The argument driving the “men’s rights” movement is this notion that our society isn’t actually sexist but, in fact, is somehow anti-male. Basically, it’s less a movement and more a long-form attempt to play “gotcha” with feminists by trying to invert every feminist argument against sexism and spinning it like men are the real victims of gender-based oppression. Now, it’s absolutely true that sexism negatively affects men in ways that need to be talked about, but one of the things that makes “men’s rights” discourse so pernicious is they have no real interest in talking about those realities, because then they would have to admit the solution is feminism, and, at their heart, they are about upholding a sexist status quo and fighting feminism. So, for instance, it’s true that women tend to have custody after divorce more than men. But the reason for this is that women, due to sexism, tend to be primary caregivers more than men and so most couples come to a mutual agreement after divorce to keep it that way. If you want to change this, what you need is more feminism, encouraging couples to split child-care duties more. But “men’s rights” guys don’t want that. They want to change the law so that men can get custody without having to be primary caregivers—so they can, in other words, have it both ways.

Anyway, another attempt by “men’s rights” morons to play “gotcha” with feminists is to claim that it’s men, not women, who are victims of gender stereotypes in Hollywood. It’s an argument based in the worst kind of bad faith, but that doesn’t stop it from being trotted out on Fox News, by host Steve Doocy and guest Penny Nance from Concerned Women for America.

• Frozen 1 *

This is an unsubtle game of “gotcha” with feminists. Feminists frequently point out how Hollywood stereotypes and marginalizes women. So they’re trying to suggest that nuh-uh, it’s actually men who are stereotyped and marginalized, an argument that they make by huffing and puffing about how some male characters are villains and some are funny and etc., etc. But feminists never actually said we object to any portrayal of a woman besides showing women as humorless heroes, as they clearly are arguing all men should be shown here. Quite the contrary, feminists argue that the problem is that women don’t get to play a variety of characters. The problem isn’t having female characters with flaws, it’s that female characters, when they exist, often don’t get to have personalities at all. The male characters in this movie are not anti-male stereotypes or flat characters, but pretty well-written with a lot of diversity in terms of personality. Which is what feminists want for female characters as well. Which they actually get in Frozen, but I’ll return to that in a second. Because what Penny Nance says next is such a blatant lie that it really is stunning.

• Frozen 2 *

Basically, they’re counting on the audience having not seen Frozen, which is a weird thing to count on, considering the movie made like a billion dollars. Because if you have seen it, you know that the male hero, Kristoff, is not treated as a superfluous bumbler who is only good for a paycheck. He’s a competent and funny and charming man who is loved by all and helps out a lot. Indeed, the notion that men are held out as nothing but paycheck generators is particularly weird because this movie is about a queen and a princess who are, you know, wealthy women. In fact, part of the plot is fending off men who are using them for their money. The lesson of the story is you should love a man for his own sake, not just because he’s some kind of symbol to you. So basically, the opposite of what they say they see on screen. But we all know the real objection to Frozen has nothing to do with actual concerns about men being, uh, oppressed and stereotyped. The real concern here is that Frozen allows women to be something other than superfluous set decoration. Doocy edges closely to saying the quiet part out loud.

• Frozen 3 *

So the concern is there are not enough movies with male heroes. Got it. Chris Hayes had an interesting response to that.

• Frozen 4 *

The only conclusion I can draw is that Penny Nance and Steve Doocy believe that 29 percent of speaking roles going to women is too many speaking roles. I wonder what would be the acceptable level of speaking roles for women? Ten percent? Five percent? Or should women never speak at all?

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, anti-vaccination hysteria merges completely with anti-abortion hysteria edition. Fox News guest Jonathan Hoenig graced us by bringing these two anti-science, anti-rationality forces together in one meltdown rant.

• forced *

Of course, the actual, non-fantasy problem is not forced abortion, but forced childbirth, which is already going on in various states as safe abortion clinics are being shut down by conservative forces in an attempt to force women to give birth against their will. And unlike mandatory vaccination, which is both good for the public and good for individuals, forced childbirth is linked to poorer health outcomes for women and children and it escalates unnecessary costs on taxpayers. The only value to forced childbirth is that it satisfies the sadistic need of conservatives to see women punished for having sex.

The post Street Harassment in Mexico City, and MRAs Take On ‘Frozen’ appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

MSNBC interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Fifty Shades of Grey

Domestic violence counselors speak out against Fifty Shades of Grey

Troy Newman lies and lies about low-income women and abortion

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Ian Millhiser will be on to talk about how the Obama administration is quietly wining court battles in favor of contraception. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has some important things to say about abortion rights and there’s nothing new about Fifty Shades of Grey.

Sad news. Lesley Gore died last week of lung cancer at age 68. She sang one of the great feminist anthems before second wave feminism was even really a thing, back in 1963.

• Gore *

Though she never really hid it, Gore came out publicly as a lesbian in 2005. She’s survived by her partner of 33 years.

***************

MSNBC’s Irin Carmon interviewed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently, and clips appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show. The entire interview, which is available in show links, is up at the MSNBC website. Ginsburg is an interesting person, as listeners are no doubt fully aware, because she had a long history prior to her career as a judge being a crusading lawyer for feminist causes. These days, she sits on a conservative court that’s hostile to women’s rights and so she is known primarily for her scathing dissents of their attempts to roll back the clock. Irin is writing a biography of Ginsburg, and so she was really able to focus on this long history and some of the big picture questions. The interview quickly turned to the subject of abortion rights and the question of exactly how much danger the current court presents to Roe v. Wade. Ginsburg’s outlook is bleak, but sadly likely quite accurate.

• Ginsburg 1 *

No one knows this better than anti-choicers. That’s why their strategies are all geared at targeting clinics on a geographic basis and passing laws requiring waiting periods and other obstacles that take, above all other things, money to overcome. It’s about making abortion access a luxury available only to those women who can afford to drop everything for a week to travel to get an abortion. So say, the goal is that for a woman in Dallas to be able to get an abortion, she should be able to have the money to fly to New York and stay there for a few days to get that done: Hotel, airfare, ability to take off work. Anti-choicers are not there yet, but they’re way closer to that goal, forcing women across the red states to have to travel hours for an abortion. It’s basically “abortion for me but not for thee” as a legislative strategy. And it works as a political strategy, too, because so much of the media thinks that as long as Roe v. Wade isn’t overturned, abortion access is safe. But Ginsburg explained that it’s more complex than that.

• Ginsburg 2 *

And that’s really why the current anti-abortion legislation in Texas is so devastating. As Ginsburg says, the Supreme Court is unlikely to just overturn Roe v. Wade. But Justice John Roberts is a master at writing opinions that gut liberal decisions of the past without overturning them outright. For instance, he was able to gut Brown v. the Board of Education without overturning it by forcing schools that had voluntary desegregation programs to stop those programs. Perversely, he pulled the “colorblind” argument to justify his decision that upholds segregated school districts. So yeah, he’s an evil genius. And I suspect what will happen is that he will find that while there’s a technical right to an abortion, he’ll argue that as long as it’s legal somewhere in the U.S. it’s okay for states to use bogus regulations to restrict legal abortion out of existence.

Ginsburg had a really great analogy to illustrate how bad it could get.

• Ginsburg 3 *

This really gives you a good idea, I think, of what the end game here is, a situation like the past, where the only people who could get divorced were people who could drop everything and spend six weeks in Nevada to get one. To be clear, I think the people who engage in this kind of classist thinking aren’t necessarily cackling villains, though a few are. I think it’s just mindless prejudice. They think that they are perfectly capable of making a responsible decision about abortion, but believe that lower-income people are reckless and irresponsible and need to be controlled for their own good. You see that same mentality when you see conservatives push for marriage courses for low-income women or propose the just-get-married solution for single women living in poverty. They just assume that because you’re not rich, you’re not very bright and need some paternalistic wealthy figure telling you what to do. Of course, that mentality is super wrong and there’s scores of social science research debunking the idea that wealthy people are inherently better choice-makers than the rest of us, but the problem is that the people wed to this mentality don’t care to look at that kind of research.

All this is very sad, but there was a light joke about women’s rights in the interview, with Irin asked Justice Ginsburg to play a game where she asked for one-word responses to certain references. And got this.

• Ginsburg 4 *

Yes, it was wrong. I’m so glad she’s not afraid to say it.

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Interview

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If you have turned on your TV or the radio or flipped on the internet in the past month, you may have learned the shocking news that women have sexual fantasies. In fact, so much so that Hollywood has decided they make a lot of money off of them.

• Grey 1 *

For those who have been living under a rock, Fifty Shades of Grey is softcore, R-rated erotic movie aimed at primarily female audiences. It’s based on books that were based on Twilight fan fiction. The story is about a young college girl who is a virgin being seduced by an abusive older man who is a billionaire, and who stalks her, controls her, and forces sexual acts on her without her consent, all while she is secretly loving it on the inside. The movie downplays some of the worst aspects, but the basic idea is still there: Christian Grey is an abusive man who plays head games and engages in controlling behavior and stalking, but because she is submissive and loving, she turns him into the gentle, kind lover of her dreams. But there’s a lot of sexy BDSM along the way.

This movie is creating a lot of anger out there from a lot of corners. The Christian right, of course, objects to it because they believe women aren’t supposed to like sex, much less indulge sexual fantasies. BDSM enthusiasts also object, saying the book portrays BDSM practices incorrectly and unsafely, particularly by not showing that it’s supposed to be fully consensual. And feminists are angry because the movie romanticizes domestic violence.

• Grey 2 *

Look, let’s be real here. It’s absolutely true that one reason a lot of women get caught up in abusive relationships is that we are told, over and over again, that controlling and possessive behavior means a man just really loves you. And we are also fed the myth that abusive men are just broken souls who can be healed through the power of a woman’s love. Abusers themselves use the clichés to control their victims. For example, an abuser may hit a woman and then start crying and saying that he doesn’t mean it, but he’s just a sad soul who needs a woman’s tender, loving care. Many domestic violence victims report feeling like they had to comfort their abusers after an incident. Some are even made to feel they have to have sex with their abusers to make him feel better about what he did. It’s all messed up and it’s a dynamic that definitely is romanticized in Fifty Shades of Grey. However, I will point out that this is hardly the first time we’ve been told the story of the woman who heals abusive, controlling man through submissive love.

• Grey 3-7 *

Those were clips from, in order, Beauty and the Beast, My Fair Lady, The Taming of the Shrew, Twilight, and Pretty Woman. While there are some minor variations on the theme, the story is basically the same one, over and over: A powerful, often cruel and abusive man, takes control of the life of a woman much less powerful than he is, hiding her away from the world and remaking her into what he wants her to be. The woman fights at first, but eventually submits to his controlling ways, and her submission earns her “true love” and turns her beastly partner into a tender, loving mate.

That’s why I’m a bit troubled by all the attention Fifty Shades of Grey is getting. The only thing it does different than these other stories is it makes sex more central to the plot and involves kinky behavior. So yes, it’s good to criticize this book and movie for romanticizing abusive relationship patterns. But it would be better to do so while firmly rooting those criticisms in this historical pattern this story fits into, to show that the issues isn’t sex, but the long-standing and deplorable tradition of stories that tell women that you can turn an abuser into a pussycat with your love.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, proving Ruth Bader Ginsburg right edition. As noted in the first segment, Justice Ginsburg called out the war on legal abortion specifically as a class war, a way to make abortion and control over your own body a privilege of wealth instead of a human right. Troy Newman of Operation Rescue made some comments on American Family Radio that seem determined to prove her right. This is going to be quoted at length, because it really just captures so perfectly the misogyny, racism, classism, and hostility to facts that fuels the anti-choice movement.

• Newman *

How many ways is this wrong? You have him claiming Medicaid covers abortion, which it does not, by federal law. You have him claiming Obamacare has something to do with this, which it doesn’t. You have him claiming that the only expense associated with having a baby is the cost of a bottle of vitamins and a sonogram. You have him invoking “Obama phones,” which is this right wing myth that Obama bought off low-income voters with free cell phones—which is also not true. But beyond the lies, one shining truth comes through: Newman and his anti-choice comrades clearly hate poor women and want to punish and control them. That truth came across loud and clear.

The post 2015 Court Outlook, and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ in Context appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Renee Bracey Sherman’s abortion storytelling video

Colon abortions!

Patricia Arquette speech

Stacey Dash is in a snit

Fox News explains that women are just inferior

Greg Gutfeld spews nonsense

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Renee Bracey Sherman will be on to talk about her abortion storytelling advocacy. Why is everyone at Fox News so hostile to equal pay? Also, Girls somehow manages to pull a really great abortion storyline out of its hat.

Renee will be on in a bit to talk about her abortion video at Fusion, but here’s a small clip to get you started.

• Fusion *

You can check out the video in show links. After you hear Renee’s interview here on this podcast!

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So Patricia Arquette won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Boyhood. She used her speech time to make a demand for women’s equality.

• equality 1 *

The speech was a little garbled, but this was the Oscars and she was clearly nervous and so that’s understandable. It was really nice seeing such an important sentiment aired at such an important occasion, however. Unfortunately, she took the shine out of the moment later with comments that suggested that people of color and gay people had been neglecting to fight for women’s rights, a strange and demonstrably untrue statement. Andrea Grimes and Imani Gandy at RH Reality Check have taken that on, however, so I am not going to reinvent the wheel here.

I want to use this space to talk about the aftermath. The comments in the speech itself were hardly some great rabble-rousing radical speech about smashing the patriarchy or whatever phrase gets so many conservatives dudes to clench up. She was simply noting something that is a fact, that women continue to make less money than men in 2015, and that she thinks equality would be better. But such is the hostility to even basic women’s rights amongst conservatives these days that you would have thought she called for the immediate castration of all men. Stacey Dash, who we last quoted on the show suggesting that naughty girls get themselves raped, was in a full-on snit over this.

• equality 2 *

Actual students of history would point out that being granted some rights does not mean being granted all of them and it’s totally possible, for instance, to have the right to own property and say, not the right to vote, which was true for decades for women. More to the point, students of history would point out that simply passing a law declaring equal rights doesn’t actually magic them into being. Certainly, the law she’s speaking about, which is the Civil Rights Act, banned job discrimination against people based on race, as well, but there are reams of social science that shows that white people have a strong advantage in hiring over Black people, even if they are less qualified than Black applicants. The laws need to be enforced. Sometimes new laws that address structural inequities need to be written. There is much to be done besides formally declaring discrimination illegal and washing your hands of it.

Here’s the thing: Women do make less money than men. There are only two ways to explain this. You can either believe that women continue to suffer from sexist discrimination or you can believe women are worth less. It’s clear that the folks at Fox News are wed to the women-are-worth-less explanation, but, as is typical with conservatives, they are afraid to state those views out loud in clear terms, instead chasing down a bunch of garbled ways to say it. Eric Bolling got the closest to just coming right out and saying it.

• equality 3 *

Ah yes, the men are bolder and just know how to live while women are timid creatures who shiver in our homes nonsense. Believe me, if any man had to endure the amount of sexual harassment or the fear of assault that women endure just leaving their houses, this whole claim that men are braver than women would evaporate in a puff of smoke. It’s just another way to push the men-are-smarter-stronger-better narrative while implying women are naturally meant for the home. But the reason that women make so-called ”cautious” decisions more isn’t because they’re cowards but because when you go into the workforce with people already predisposed to believe you are less intelligent and weak, you know that even the slightest screw-up in your career could be total ruin. Men are allowed to screw up. Men don’t take more risks. Their risks are just less risky. But that’s not even really the cause of the wage gap. The entrepreneur gap is small, as most of us draw a salary instead of run a business, including the men on Fox who probably think they’re somehow entrepreneurs when they get that Fox paycheck. It’s discrimination, both in the workplace and in the home. But Greg Gutfeld wanted to deny that.

• equality 4 *

Actually, single childless women in urban areas earn slightly more, not much, than their male counterparts. But that single men still make more in rural areas proves the point: It’s discrimination. That’s why women do better in more liberal areas. You know, with less discrimination. Also, it’s worth noting that, despite their complaints about comparing apples to oranges, that’s exactly what Gutfeld is doing here. Women in these areas have more college degrees. If you have to earn a college degree to make as much as a man with a high school degree, that’s not equality. But most irritating is this is just another variation on the women-are-simply-inferior argument. The implication is that women do this to themselves by getting married and having children. But the fact that getting married and having children actually results in a boost to men’s income while it means a decline in women’s is pure, unadulterated sexism. How is that not discrimination if two groups of people are being treated completely different for doing exactly the same thing? I swear to god, women should just start refusing to have children until men agree to stop making this argument. If you’re going to claim it’s all personal choice, you can’t complain if women start exercising it.

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Interview

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The show Girls on HBO started off on a rocky foot in its first few seasons, but this last season really shows an assurance in both narrative and just plain humor that was sometimes missing in earlier seasons. Sadly, the show still doesn’t have the racial diversity that it’s been long criticized for not displaying, which is a shame because it’s become bolder in its story-telling in many other ways. The recent episode that had an abortion storyline in it is a perfect example. In the first season, there was a character that was on her way to get an abortion, but the show chickened out and did that thing where she has a miscarriage and therefore is spared from having to actually take control of her own reproductive choices. But on this most recent episode, not only did a character named Mimi-Rose, played by the hilarious Gillian Jacobs of Community fame, have an abortion, but the storyline was actually used to pointedly satirize how abortion stigma is all tied up ideas about male dominance and entitlement. It all starts when her boyfriend, named Adam, asks her to go running with him.

• Girls 1 *

That’s him tossing stuff, showing that he’s being a big baby over this. But man, I really appreciated how this story is already upending all these narrative conventions about abortion. She doesn’t feel bad about it. She is perfectly matter of fact about it. But more importantly, the show is giving the big, fat finger to the widespread and often unquestioned assumption that the guy who got you pregnant is owed something by you. She didn’t tell him because she was clearly afraid of a negative, controlling reaction. Maybe because she suspects he’s that way or maybe just because she, as a woman, knows that a lot of men feel some sense of ownership over your body just because they had sex with you. Either way, his ugly reaction justifies her decision not to tell him beforehand. Which leads me to the final part of this entire storyline that was just so fantastic: Mimi-Rose quietly but insistently maintains through the show that she deserves to have a good abortion experience. She rejects utterly the widespread narrative that other people, be it boyfriends or relatives or, by implication, anti-choice activists, have a right to make you feel guilt or shame or that the price you pay for your abortion should be that getting it sucks.

Adam, it turns out, is well-acquainted with the popular narrative of abortion that says it’s supposed to be some big goddamn deal full of tears and hand-wringing and state-of-the-relationship talk and other drama.

• Girls 2 *

This is hardly the first time the show has used the character of Adam to really interrogate some of the unquestioned and sexism assumptions and attitudes a lot of men who probably think of themselves as “liberal” have. Particularly when we’re talking about their relationships with their girlfriends. He’s had storylines where he was domineering to various girlfriends, including one where he didn’t exactly rape his girlfriend, but he used her desire to please him as a way to extract all sorts of sexual behaviors she clearly hated from her. But he’s also been shown to be something of a conquering hero, racing to comfort another girlfriend in her time of need, like the end of some romantic comedy. The show has been called out for that, repeatedly, by people who say that the characterization is inconsistent and how can he be such a controlling jerk sometimes and a chivalrous hero at others. But I always thought it was suggesting those are often two sides of the same coin: Sexist men see themselves as benevolent and protective of the little ladies, but if those little ladies defy their authority, suddenly the ugly side comes out.

Lest you think I’m giving the show too much credit, they underline this point for you when he threatens to walk out on Mimi-Rose over this.

• Girls 3 *
• Girls 4 *

There’s a lot of hand-wringing rhetoric about “life” vs. “rights” in the public abortion debate, but this show cut right through that and showed what is really behind the hostility to legal abortion. It does come down to this: this deep fear that women may not need men anymore. And if we don’t need them, they can’t control us. As she says, I do think that love is purer if it’s fully consensual. But you can see a lot of the insecurity and fear that drives this desire to control and oppress. Which doesn’t excuse it—the character Adam has been showing for many seasons now as a guy who is right on the verge of becoming an out and out abuser. But maybe he will consider another way.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, anti-choicers show how much they really know about women’s bodies edition. Idaho state Rep. Vito Barbieri has styled himself an expert on gynecological care, arguing that while he believes most telemedicine doctors perform is safe, he wants to ban telemedicine abortions because, in his esteemed medical opinion, they are too dangerous to be done at home. E.R. Dr. Julie Madsen testified that this is not true and that medical abortions are super safe. Self-styled expert on what is and isn’t safe medical care, Rep. Barbieri then had this exchange with her.

• Barbieri *

Despite being exposed as someone who confuses the anus and the vagina, Barbieri still decided he knows more than the doctors and researchers about this and voted to ban telemedicine abortions anyway. It’s unclear if he thinks we should also ban bowel movements, you know, so that someone doesn’t accidentally poop out their baby.

The post Abortion Stories, and the Equal Pay Debate appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Related Links

Gay “conversion therapy”

Phil Robertson at CPAC

STI rates generally falling

Sean Hannity’s joke

Laura Ingraham is really against Jeb Bush

Chris Christie brags about cutting family planning funds

Carly Fiorina at CPAC

Uh, no

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a researcher will explain the relationship of religious belief and political support for the contraception mandate. Also, CPAC happened again and women’s rights were yet again a punching bag.

Vice did a three part investigation into the continuing practice of so-called gay conversion therapy, which is so harmful it’s being banned for minors in some parts of the country.

• conversion *

Check out the whole documentary in show links!

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Is it just me, or is CPAC, short for the Conservative Political Action Conference, something that they have like every couple of weeks these days? Going through the archives at RH Reality Check, I realize that no, it just feels that way. Well, kids, it’s another year and another round of conservatives lining up to compete over who can say weird, inappropriate things on a variety of topics ranging from the president’s birth place to whether or not we should be alarmed by the continuing existence of the birth control pill. I could not even begin to cover it all, but luckily, this podcast is limited to the topics of sex and gender. And even then, we got ourselves a doozy this year.

As Emily Crockett at RH Reality Check noted, Phil Robertson of that show Duck Dynasty made an entire speech that was rambling idiocy. He got a free speech award, even though no one has ever threatened his right to free speech, suggesting that the best that conservatives can say about Robertson’s views is that they are not technically illegal. Well, good for him, I guess. But they are certainly very, very silly. He is all bent out of shape because over 100 million Americans have contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

• CPAC 1 *

He claims that simply by getting married and staying faithful, you can prevent STIs, which would be news to all those states in the mid-century that passed laws requiring blood tests to get married because they were so overwhelmed with men giving syphilis to their virgin brides. Indeed, his overall notion that somehow the “hippies” and the “beatniks” invented STIs or made them common is almost laughably naïve. STI transmission rates did spike during the 60s and 70s, but many of them are actually down, even though, if anything, people are more likely to have premarital sex. That’s because that sexual openness he denounces prevents disease. It causes people to be open about talking about condoms. It causes them to go to the doctor when they show symptoms instead of putting it off for fear of being seen as dirty. Indeed, the one STI that has an increased rate, chlamydia, only has that increased rate because of improves screening not because people are getting it more.

Fun fact: You know how they put eye drops in every baby’s eyes within minutes of it being born, a practice that has gone on for decades? That’s because chlamydia and gonorrhea are so common and have been for decades that it’s easier for doctors to assume you have it and take preventive measures. They did it for your grandmother when she gave birth, believe me. The prevalence of STIs is not a new thing because people have always had sex with multiple partners.

I wonder what Roberston would say about Sean Hannity’s joke, by the way.

• CPAC 2 *

A lot of people found his joke garbled and confusing, but I got his point. He was suggesting that because the crowd there was young and good-looking, there was going to be a lot of hooking up. I speak fluent Dad joke, y’all. I got a whole bunch of golf jokes, if you’re ever curious. Really, the garbled mess that is the conservative movement is captured in those two clips right there. Lots of intoning about how sex is the great evil downfall of our society followed up by a few jokes about how much screwing conservatives are up to and how unfair it is for liberals to suggest that they’re a bunch of prigs. He also blamed Bill Clinton for the supposed pregnancies, which doesn’t make sense if you remember what sex act the right always acts like Clinton invented. Hint, not the kind that makes babies, though, at this point, I would not be surprised to hear a conservative argue you can get pregnant from a blow job.

Most Republicans are desperate to close the voting gender gap that leaves their party with far fewer women’s votes than men. Laura Ingraham, however, decided to double down and make a bunch of sexist jokes that suggest she thinks having a huge gender gap is a good thing.

• CPAC 3 *

The joke was really supposed to be more of a swipe at Bush and his spending habits than at women, but it’s telling that Ingraham can’t make even a basic joke about rich politicians without being wildly sexist. After the interview, I’ll have even more from CPAC, this time just the stuff about reproductive rights. Hint: The speakers and most attendees are against them.

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Interview

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As I’ve said before, when I first started this podcast, not that long ago, attacks on contraception were considered really marginal even within anti-choice circles. Sure, most anti-choice organizations were opposed to birth control, but their opposition was kept very quiet. Most conservatives were careful to be seen as not opposing contraception use for grown women, treating it like a settled issue. But at this year’s CPAC, you really see how this has changed. In conservative circles, contraception use amongst low income women has become as dimly viewed, dare I say, as abortion, and efforts to make what used to be considered routine medical care seem instead like it should be a luxury good only for well-off women have become normal. Indeed, would-be presidential candidates were crawling all over themselves to show off how much contraception access they had taken away from low-income women.

• conservative 1 *

There’s no reason to dance around this: That $7.5 million he cut from funding was for birth control. Oh sure, it also covered STI testing and Pap smears and all these other things that get mentioned in this debate. But the reason that these cuts get hoots is because of birth control and the increasing conservative openness to the idea that low income women should not have access to birth control. The funds in question didn’t cover abortion. Do they ever? The word “pro-life” means anti-contraception and the anti-choice crowd is increasingly open about this and the crowd’s reaction to his cuts to contraception show how true that is.

Looking over the speeches at CPAC, it became clear that there were only two routes when it came to the issue of contraception: Either tout your efforts to make it harder for women to get contraception or accuse people who care about the issue of being sex-obsessed sluts. Or that’s how I interpret it when I hear comments like this from Carly Fiorina.

• conservative 2 *

You see this accusation a lot: If you bring up reproductive rights, you’re accused of trying to turn women into “single issue” voters. But why? If I ask a question about your policy on building road infrastructure, no politician would accuse me of trying to say that Americans have no interests outside of driving. If I ask about unemployment, you don’t accuse me of saying that all Americans are out of work. This is just a way of implying that women who care about this issue care too much about it, which is to say that it’s implying we’re all a bunch of sluts. It’s a derailing tactic that relies on sexual shaming.

Of course, one of the interesting things about CPAC was how conservative politicians that were pretending to barely know what abortion is during the election suddenly became rabidly anti-choice now that they’re firmly ensconced back in office. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ran misleading ads during the campaign implying that he’s pro-choice by highlighting that he supported a bill that didn’t technically ban abortion.

• conservative 3 *

What he failed to mention in the ad is the bill was aimed at shutting down clinics, so while a woman technically had an abstract right to choose, she would not have access to a doctor to work with. But he’s given up even pretending to support that abstract right to choose now that he’s been safely re-elected. Right after CPAC, where he was highlighting his efforts to cut birth control funding in the state, Walker wrote an open letter signaling his eagerness to sign a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks. So much for leaving the final decision to a woman and her doctor, I guess.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, using prison as if it were some kind of microcosm of society edition. I don’t even know how to introduce this nutty statement about homosexuality from Ben Carson.

• Carson *

People do not go into prison straight and come out gay. Yes, there are some same-sex encounters and even relationships that happen in prison that might not happen out of it. All that proves is that people can perform sexual behaviors outside of their preference under duress, something we already knew from all the thousands of gay people who have heterosexual relations while trying to stay in the closet. Carson seems to be operating under the touch-one-penis-and-you’re-gay mentality. Which, I must point out, takes the entire question out of the realm of choice if things actually operated that way.

The post CPAC 2015, and New Research Reveals Religious Women’s Attitudes Toward Contraception appeared first on RH Reality Check.

Reality Cast

Annual Girl Scout attacks

Colorado teen birth rate

Anti-choicers incensed over teen pregnancy reduction program

Oregon rape case crosses scary new line

Facile Nazi comparisons

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, we’ll look at what this latest Supreme Court maneuver on contraception means. Colorado anti-choicers are in a snit because the teen pregnancy rate has fallen so much and the University of Oregon crosses a scary line in fighting against an alleged rape victim who is suing them.

It’s Girl Scout cookie season! Which means that it’s also time for the Christian right to raise its annual alarm about the supposed evils of the Girl Scouts. Such as Kevin Swanson of “Generations Radio.”

• girl scouts *

Yes, the claim is that if you let your girl join the Girl Scouts, she will turn into a lesbian. As usual with right-wingers, their fears make more sense if you don’t take them too literally. I would argue that the real fear is that the Girl Scouts teaches girls things like the value of education and independence, and that’s the real threat. “Lesbian” is just the hyperbole they use to convey what is fundamentally a fear of female independence, regardless of sexual orientation.

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Last summer, there was a small amount of coverage of this story, which is a shame, because in my mind, it should be called the Colorado miracle.

• Colorado 1 *

So Colorado has instituted a program that makes it free, or nearly free, for teenagers to get contraception, and the IUD has been really popular. Which makes sense. If you’re a teenager, being told that there’s a contraception that you don’t have to fuss with that lasts for years and that no one needs to know about, well, of course you’ll be interested in that. But even so, it’s remarkable how effective this program has been.

• Colorado 2 *

You heard right. The teen birth rate in the state has dropped a whopping 40 percent. That number is so high it really tells you how much the IUD can really make a difference for teens. Teenagers often have busy, chaotic lives and keeping up with a contraception regimen can be hard. Making it so they don’t have to clearly works. On top of the 40 percent drop in teen births, there’s been a 34 percent drop in the teen abortion rate. We all supposedly agree that unintended teen birth and abortion are unfortunate, so this program is something that should continue, right? A lot of lawmakers in Colorado say yes, NPR reports.

• Colorado 3 *

Of course, you’ll notice that he didn’t say if you were, say, someone who actually cares about teen girls or cares about the well-being of children. But, whatever, if saving money is what it takes to get conservatives to care, I’m all for it. And yes, in theory, if you are against abortion, then you should be wanting free IUDs for everyone who wants one. But for some reason, anti-choicers in the state are actually in a full-blown revolt over this program and they want it to go away, like, yesterday.

• Colorado 4 *

Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard it. Look, it’s clear what’s going on here is that they want to redefine contraception as “abortion” so that they can ban public funding of contraception. The labored rationales about the supposed deaths of fertilized eggs are laughably easy to punch through. If you do think it’s “abortion” every time a fertilized egg doesn’t implant, then having unprotected sex is much more of an abortion than having an IUD is. That’s because the IUD works primarily by preventing sperm from meeting eggs, which means there are few, if any, fertilized eggs to not implant in the first place. But if you have unprotected sex, which is what these folks want you to be doing, then you fertilize exponentially more eggs. Half of them die on their own. Back-of-the-envelope calculations: In a group of 100 women with an IUD, maybe one or two will have a fertilized egg die in a year. But in a group of women having unprotected sex, approximately 80 will have a fertilized egg die. If you want to stop abortion, you support the IUD. If your concern is fertilized eggs implanting, you still support the IUD.

However, if what gets you mad is teen girls having sex without facing punishment, then you would oppose this program. Which is the real motivation for the opposition here. The only reason anti-choicers are up in arms over this IUD program is that it works, and they don’t want it to work. They just know that going on the record as for teen pregnancy makes you look like a monster, so they concoct this obvious B.S. about the IUD being “abortion.” But don’t be fooled.

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Interview

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Just when you think that you’ve heard every possible story of colleges and universities failing to deal appropriately with the problem of campus rape, here comes another horror story that will completely throw you for a loop. This time the story comes out of the University of Oregon. Right off the bat, this story is upsetting.

• Oregon 1 *

I don’t know all the details here, but there’s plenty of reason to be wary. The alleged rape happened in March, but the students weren’t kicked off the team until May. Sports fans listening to this will recognize the month of March as the one where teams like the University of Oregon Ducks, which the alleged rapists played for, vie to win the NCAA championship in college basketball, known as March Madness. The lawsuit claims that one of the alleged rapists was already known to be a rapist, but was recruited to play basketball anyway. That’s why the basketball coach is one of the people that the plaintiff is suing. So this sucks from tip to toe, is what I’m saying. The only thing that has gone right is that the players were eventually kicked out, but again, you have to imagine what it was like for the alleged victim to try to struggle through the rest of the spring semester with this hanging over her head. Sadly, this is not that remarkable a story. But what happened next is why it’s grabbing national headlines.

• Oregon 2 *

Yes, you heard that right. The school subpoenaed her medical records in an effort to undermine her. Turns out this is completely legal.

• Oregon 3 *

The federal government is alarmed but, because this is legal, their hands are tied. The U.S. Department of Education has released a letter asking schools to not do this and reminding them that if these kinds of actions are being done to retaliate against rape victims, they may face legal consequences. But there lies the rub. A school that does this could very well be sending a signal to students that if they try to seek justice after a rape they will be treated like this, but since it’s justified as legal fact-finding, they can claim it wasn’t retaliation. And it may not be in this case. After all, they did kick the players out and this was only done in a bid to create a defense strategy during this lawsuit. Still, the effects of this are chilling.

• Oregon 4 *

Most of the attention to the Title IX sexual assault and harassment situation has been paid to the issue of the consequences for accused rapists, which is no surprise because we still live in a society that prioritizes the needs and feelings of men over women. But in reality, Title IX’s purpose isn’t primarily to punish rapists, but to keep campus safe for women and ensure their equal access to education. Which sometimes means disciplining rapists, but it also means taking measures like making sure victims are cared for and feel safe. Which means, in theory, providing resources like counseling to help students process their trauma so they don’t fall behind in their studies. But this move dramatically undermines that. It’s not really counseling if you’re too afraid to open up to your counselor for fear that whatever you will be say will be used in court to argue that you weren’t a good enough or worthy enough victim.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, more Nazi projections edition. Here’s “Faith and Freedom” radio host Matt Barber praising more attempts at abortion restrictions by, yep, calling pro-choicers Nazis again.

• Barber *

This is actually a black-and-white issue: The Nazis increased restrictions on abortion. As for who is dehumanizing Jews here, I would have to say it’s the people who think that it’s OK to compare living, breathing Jewish people who suffered and died in camps with brainless embryos that can’t feel, breathe, or think. Comparing Jewish people to actual non-people like embryos is literal dehumanization.

The post The Battle Over Contraception for Colorado Teens, and the University of Oregon’s Chilling Legal Maneuver appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Tara Culp-Ressler will tell us more about the Colorado IUD controversy. The Senate has gridlock over a sex trafficking bill that Republicans snuck an anti-choice poison pill into and gun fondlers try to hijack the campus rape debate.

I’m going to get into this story more on the first segment, but I thought you all would appreciate Jon Stewart’s denunciation of Mitch McConnell for Republicans trying to cram abortion restrictions into every bill they can get their hands on.

• Daily Show *

Yep, pretty much. But I’ll get into more detail during the next segment.

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If you want evidence of how much the Republican Party is in thrall to the Christian right, look no further than this debacle over a bill that was supposed to be bipartisan and all kumbaya and whatnot, but because conservatives have this obsession with forcing rape victims to give birth to their rapist’s babies, the entire thing is falling apart. What’s going on is there’s this bill that would create a restitution fund for victims of sex trafficking, funded entirely by fines levied against sex traffickers. Sounds like an easy win, right? But Republicans slipped a provision in that would bar the victims who got money from using that money for abortion. Democrats are now revolting, as they should, because that provision is revolting. MSNBC brought on Politico’s Burgess Everett to discuss what the hell is happening.

• trafficking 1 *

Some background on this: In recent years, the Christian right has really taken on sex trafficking a major issue. Human trafficking generally, but really their interest is mostly focused on sex trafficking. It’s difficult to criticize people taking on this issues, since the wrongness of slavery is just black and white. But putting my cynic hat on, I have to point out that sex trafficking is a rather perfect issue to give conservatives cover to push an anti-sex agenda. They can use the issue to promote the idea that sex is inherently demeaning to women, that women are inherently asexual creatures, and that sexual liberation has created nothing but problems, all while shielding themselves from criticism because, you know, forcing women and children into sex slavery is wrong.

Now there’s a way to be against sex slavery that isn’t anti-sex, of course. It’s by centering the issue around the concept of consent. But the Christian right doesn’t like the consent framework, because, of course, they support the use of force when it comes to child-bearing—how a woman feels about having children should have no bearing on whether she is forced to have children, they believe. Thus the opposition to abortion and hostility to contraception.

It’s tempting for more sex-positive opponents of sex trafficking to overlook this critical difference between how they frame the struggle and how anti-choice conservatives frame the struggle. But as this entire fight shows, that was a mistake. NPR has more reporting on the specifics of the fight.

• trafficking 2 *

Anti-choicers are, unsurprisingly, gloating and doing the neener neener you didn’t read the bill dance. But you will not be surprised to learn that it’s not so simple. If you’re reading this bill, there’s not any direct language banning victims of sex trafficking, who are, by definition, rape victims, from getting abortions. Instead, it seems like it was deliberately obscured with legalese.

• trafficking 3 *

Under the circumstances, it’s hard to deny that there was an attempt to sneak this in. But what is really sleazy about this was it was a backdoor way to try to expand restrictions on how women pay for abortion. As noted, no taxpayer money is going into this fund. This is clearly part of a larger move on the part of anti-choicers to create so much red tape and so many obstacles to getting an abortion that it’s basically illegal in all but name. And, as is typical with antis, they are doing so by attacking the most vulnerable amongst us, this time women forced into sex slavery.

But I would say that, in this case, it’s more than that. This whole issue goes back to the larger Christian right framework around women and sexuality. The basic anti-choice belief is that sexuality is degrading to women, even if it’s consensual. And that the only way to purify the dirtiness of sex is through the purifying power of motherhood. The purity language, the obsession with waiting until marriage to have sex, and the hostility to contraception and abortion is all part of that. In that view, sex trafficking degrades women because of the sex part. Under that mentality, forcing women to give birth becomes some kind of good thing, because motherhood is what women are supposed to be doing, instead of all that degrading sex stuff. This is what happens when you approach issues of sexual violence while downplaying the importance of consent. It’s a disaster, in other words.

Of course, Dana Perino of Fox News isn’t happy about this.

• trafficking 4 *

Nah. You know who is a jerk? Someone who wants to force a woman to bear a rapist’s baby. Jerk is actually too nice a word for those people.

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Interview

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Just when you thought that conservative exploitation couldn’t get any uglier, I bring to you this new, uh, movement created by the gun lobby to hijack the campus rape issue and use it to sell more guns. By trying to convince people that the way to stop rape on campus is to fill the campus with guns, a move that won’t make campuses safer and will probably make them more dangerous. Not that it matters, because gun manufacturers know that gun sales are going down with younger generations, and trying to normalize guns on campus is a great marketing opportunity.

• guns 1 *

Here’s the thing: I grew up around guns. I’m very familiar with them. And most gun owners do not carry their guns, armed and at the ready, in every social situation in fear that their friends or relatives are going to attack them. That’s the behavior of a severely paranoid person who does not need to be carrying gun. And let’s talk about campus rape. It’s not just that most rapes happen between people who know each other, which this woman is tacitly allowing. It’s that they often happen in sexual situations. You’re with a guy you intend to make out with, even have sex with, and he springs a rape on you. What kind of person has a gun at the ready when having consensual sex? And if so, how do you keep the rapist from getting to it first? But no, the fantasy that you’re just going to be some badass with a gun who is kicking ass and taking names has so much power that people refuse to see how guns work in the real world.

• guns 2 *

The Jameis Winston case is a really good example of why this entire idea is so painfully dumb. Winston was accused of raping a woman who was too drunk to resist. How was she supposed to safely operate a firearm again? Regardless of his guilt or innocence, what’s critical to remember here is that rapists already are wary of victims fighting back, so they take measures to prevent that. They get victims drunk. They gain their trust. They create purposefully confusing or ambivalent situations so that victims second guess themselves. How a gun is supposed to change that, I don’t know. What I do know is that the same rules allowing would-be victims to have guns will also allow rapists to have guns. Indeed, a lot more rapists will be interested in getting guns, because while a gun offers crappy protection and can even be taken from you and used against you, if you’re a rapist, a gun is a great idea. You don’t even need to directly threaten your victim if you have a gun. Just have it visible in the room and subduing her will be much easier. Or reminding her you have a gun is also a good way to make sure she stays quiet about her rape after the fact. Really, these bills are just about doing rapists a solid, regardless of the intention.

But conservatives are always willing to offer free marketing to gun manufacturers, and so you have Katie Pavlich making a speech at Iowa State University where she pimped this stupid idea, by invoking the beloved but mostly fantastical image of the stone cold badass putting down the bad guy like a boss.

• guns 3 *

Hey, we all watch movies and we all love to imagine ourselves as Ripley from Alien or Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies, just ice-cold mofos who can drop a bad guy with haste before he attacks us. In reality, of course, the number of people who phone in a rape before it happens dwindles in the very low numbers, probably a fraction of a percent. Again, most rapists work to get you to lower your defenses before they rape you, and they sure aren’t going to let you have access to your phone anymore than they will let you have access to your gun. But here’s the other way that action movies have poisoned basic common sense. In action movies, the would-be victim grabs a gun and blows away the bad guy who is coming at her and then the screen fades to black, and next scene, everything is over and the sun is shining and the day is saved. Even if yours is that one in a thousand rape where you do have that chance, guess what? Now you have a dead body on your hands and now you’re the person who has to explain stuff. Already if you accuse a fellow college student of rape, you’re accused of being a scheming bitch who is making up false accusations to ruin a man’s life. Why should we think it will get any better if you take his life? Now you’ll just be accused of crying rape to justify murder. Between the danger of jail time and the danger of your rapist using your own gun against you, the last thing you need if an acquaintance tries to rape you is a gun in the room.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, priorities people edition. Right wing radio host and American Family Association governmental affairs director Sandy Rios is skeptical of the Christian right’s new enthusiasm for fighting sex trafficking. But not for the same reasons I am.

• Rios *

She claims the problem of sex trafficking is “overblown” before this, and I’m not here to debate that. But it is telling that she thinks the measure of the “morality” of an issue is how much it offends liberal sensibilities. Liberals hate rape and love gay marriage, so gay marriage must somehow be worse than rape or a bigger deal than rape. Also, note the continuing inability to understand the concept of consent. Gay marriage is, you know, consensual. Sex trafficking is not. But Rios seems more concerned about her own feelings of ickiness than your bodily autonomy.

The post Controversy Over IUD Funding in Colorado, Trafficking Legislation, and ‘Campus Carry’ Bills appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a representative of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum will talk about sex-selective abortion bans. Anti-choicers feel victimized by glitter bombs and Phil Robertson shares his gross rape fantasies with America.

If you ever wonder if some anti-choicers spend every waking moment obsessing over how much they hate the fact that women have reproductive choices, this story out of New Hampshire confirms it. A fourth-grade class went to the legislature and introduced a bill that would make the Red Tail Hawk the state raptor. Cute, right? But not to Rep. Warren Groen.

• Groen *

So yeah, we’re at the point where a bunch of 9-year-olds can’t even talk about the state bird without some hateful, obsessive anti-feminist trying to make it about how evil it is that women have rights.

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Tragedy struck recently in anti-choice circles as anti-choice legislators and activists find themselves very inconvenienced. The first victim of this horror show of mild inconvenience is Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), who was victimized by having, wait for it, some glitter get all over his office.

• glitter 1 *

It was horrible, you all. Glitter on the floor, on the desk, in their clothes. Cleaning it up probably took minutes, perhaps an hour, depending on how good the vacuum was. And they weren’t the only victims. Life News was also glitter bombed, which meant minutes of inconvenience and hours spent fund-raising over what huge victims they are because, y’all, cleaning glitter up is hard. No matter how hard you clean, I swear to god for months afterwards, small bits of glitter keep turning up, sticking to your clothes. Can you imagine the hell?

I mean, it’s not easy like being forced to carry a baby for nine months against your will is. Mandatory childbirth is nothing compared to that. Next thing you know, pro-choicers are going to require anti-choicers to wait 24 hours before they can clean glitter up in their offices. Or require some kind of invasive pelvic exam before you’re allowed to clean up the glitter. Or worse, what if pro-choicers won’t let you clean up the glitter until you have to listen to a condescending script about how great the sparkle is and how glitter-free offices lead to breast cancer and suicide. You should be forced to explain how you’re really, really sure you don’t want glitter in your office before you snuck out the sparkle.

Okay, I can’t in good conscience endorse this tactic, as funny as it is to watch a bunch of people who would literally force childbirth on you whine about how hard it is to clean up glitter. If nothing else, don’t do it because they fundraise on it, reaching out to their equally humorless supporters with a victim complex. But man, not only is the whining about this really tasteless in light of what they want to force on women, but it’s also tasteless when you consider that anti-choicers actually threaten and terrorize abortion providers all the time. So while anti-choicers are cleaning up glitter, this is what abortion providers are putting up with.

• glitter 2 *

On its surface, it’s similar, though it’s worth noting that the hassle this vandalism creates is exponentially worse than having to clean up glitter: The damage is going to be very expensive to fix. Nor can this be written off as a harmless prank, as this was a clear intention to do real harm, not just to give someone a hard time for an hour. But that’s without looking at the context. In context, this is much more than vandalism. This is an attack on the security system of an abortion clinic. Abortion clinics don’t have security systems because they’re worried about theft or glitter bombs. They have them because they fear violence. Anti-choice terrorists have murdered doctors and bombed clinics, with real bombs, not glitter bombs. They often try to destroy some aspect of the business so that they can’t provide care to women, which is clearly what the vandal was doing here. They cause real death and destruction. This act is threatening, for real threatening, not we’re going to pretend we were threatened to fundraise threatening.

And it’s not just because of the activities of criminal terrorists.

• glitter 3 *

In other words, the official, public face of the anti-choice movement has the same goals as the terrorist arm: To bully, badger, annoy, scare, or do whatever they can to shut clinics down. In contrast, while pro-choicers don’t love anti-choicers, we do not and have not taken measures to try to stop them from speaking their mind. We don’t try to censor them. We don’t try to pass a bunch of B.S. regulations to put them out of business. We don’t make public statements about how we’re going to end them. We don’t try to force anyone to get an abortion the way they try to force you not to get an abortion. We argue. We try to persuade. At most, some pro-choicers have argued that crisis pregnancy centers should be required to disclose what they are, but we don’t vandalize them or try to shut them down. With the anti-choice movement, from top to bottom, they are trying to force, through terrorism and legal action. And while you really shouldn’t be glitter bombing people, it’s safe to say that even that is not an attempt to force or bully anyone, but just a prank, however ill-conceived. That is a difference that matters and don’t let any whining about glitter bombs distract from this basic point. Only one side looks to force, whether through terrorist action or through the law.

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Interview

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Phil Robertson from that supposedly family values reality show Duck Dynasty made a bunch of headlines last year when he did an interview with GQ where he said nasty things about gay people and Black people, though for some reason, the stuff he said about gay people got more headlines. He got a bunch of positive conservative media attention and even some “free speech” awards from groups that confused having someone criticize you with government censorship. Well, their big hero is back in the headlines again, and once again it’s because he is putting his sadistic sexual fantasies and weird bigotries out there and calling it religion. He gave a speech at the Vero Beach Prayer Breakfast that people apparently thought was hilarious, because his fans confuse saying things loudly with humor. After going on a rant about how you don’t need health care, something I guarantee he has, because you’re going to die one day anyway, he then moves on to this:

• Robertson 1 *

The vividness of his fantasy of punishing people with rape and murder for not believing in his God is what really just blew people away, I think. But this sort of thinking is actually standard operating procedure with the Christian right. Wishing for all these lurid punishments to happen to women and gay people for having sex is a huge thing on the Christian right. This is more severe in tone but isn’t really that different, for instance, than the crisis pregnancy centers telling you that you’re going to get breast cancer and commit suicide if you have an abortion. Or abstinence-only programs that tell kids they’ll never be loved if they have premarital sex or that they’ll die horribly of cancer. It’s really best understood as a sadistic fantasy, even when it’s disguised as a warning.

Indeed, while his fantasy that atheists are punished by murder and rape, which he seems to imagine mostly as a property crime against your father or husband, Robertson’s speech was downright wide-ranging in its hate against women and gay men, as well.

• Robertson 2 *

It’s interesting playing these two clips together. I often point out how degrading it is to actual human beings who have suffered at the actual hands of actual murderers to say that they had no more value than an embryo. But you really begin to see how devalued actual human life is to radical “pro-lifers” here. So devalued that he can’t help but fantasize about the torture and murder of people just because they don’t believe in his God. So devalued that Robertson, like so many anti-choicers, routinely equates the death of actual human beings with names and hopes and dreams and feelings with the death of an embryo, which has none of that. It’s not that people like Roberston are actually confused about this, either, which is why miscarriage is never compared to losing a born child in an accident. It’s because fundamentalists like this want to elevate differing with them on their religious dogma to a capital crime. Whenever anyone asks me why I won’t call anti-choicers “pro-life,” this is why. How can they be, when they treat life like it has less value than forcing other people to conform to your religious dogma?

And make no mistake, this is all about conformity, making everyone live and act exactly the same, no matter how it makes them feel.

• Robertson 3 *

Everyone needs to be married, as soon as possible, in heterosexual marriages. Why? Not for their own good, for sure. After all, he wants not only for gay men to forsake any hope of happiness, but to marry themselves off to straight women, making sure their wives never get a chance at a loving marriage. It’s super obvious that the reason is just because difference, any difference, upsets him. He’s confused a childish desire to make everyone act and look exactly the same with morality. If it was just him, it would be no big deal, but he’s speaking to a crowd and tends to get treated like a national hero by the religious right.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, how many ways can one man be wrong edition. And that man is Mike Huckabee, claiming that the contraception mandate is the sort of thing that the American revolution was fought over. After claiming that there should be no limit on religious belief, Huckabee said this:

• Huckabee *

So first of all, the argument is that there should be no limit on religious belief, which means apparently that you should be allowed to deny other people health care based on your religion. Of course, having your boss tell you what kind of birth control you can use is severely limiting of your own personal religious freedom, so it’s clear that Huckabee only supports the religious rights of conservative Christians. This is a system where, if my belief conflicts with a conservative Christian’s, then his belief wins, even if it’s my personal health care that we’re discussing. I don’t get religious freedom, not if someone else is dictating what health care I can get based on his religion. Then he suggests that the American revolution was a revolt of religious people against a secular society. This is completely backwards. It was an anti-colonial revolution of people who wanted self-government and they specifically wrote a constitution that forbade the kind of imposition of religious dogma on the unwilling that Huckabee is promoting here. The man can’t open his mouth without lying, can he?

The post Glitter Bombs, and Phil Robertson’s Vile Speech appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Lynn Paltrow will be one to explain the Purvi Patel case in Indiana. Indiana is also the focus of a backlash against conservatives oppressing in the guise of “religious freedom,” and conservative rhetoric on rape is getting uglier.

Transgender activist Michael Hughes is doing a selfie project, under the hashtag #WeJustNeedToPee, where he photographs himself in women’s rooms, something he would be forced to do if a bill that would require people to use bathrooms corresponding with their birth gender assignment was to pass into law. In the photos, he stands with women in the bathroom, showing how absurd it is to think this is the correct bathroom for him, a hefty and bearded dude. He explained his process on MSNBC.

• Hughes *

The fact that he has to go to such lengths to make his presences in the women’s room safe shows, I think, what trans folks are up against and why these bills are so dangerous.

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Most people like saying “I told you so,” but these days, I positively hate it. I’ve long said that if Hobby Lobby was successful in their bid to use “religious freedom” as a cover story to deny their employees contraception coverage, then it was just going to be game on for the religious right. And I’ve been proven right by the situation in Indiana, where Gov. Mike Pence signed a law that, no matter how much he denies it, was clearly intended to give business owners broad rights to discriminate against gay people. That’s the bad news. The good news is, as I’m sure listeners are aware, the reaction has been swift and widespread, with celebrities and other politicians calling for boycotts of the state and politicians weaseling around trying to defend this law and making themselves look like complete asses doing it. Here are a couple of my favorites.

Mike Pence himself:

• gay 1 *

This goes on for roughly forever, with George Stephanopoulos begging Pence to give him a straight yes or no answer and Pence refusing and trying to recite talking points to dodge the issue. And here’s this weasel, state Sen. Bart Hester (R-AR), trying to avoid admitting anything regarding a similar Arkansas bill to ABC’s Jake Tapper.

• gay 2 *

And so one and so forth. It’s Schrodinger’s discrimination: They claim the law simultaneously does and does not allow someone to deny service based on sexual orientation. Obviously, no one is fooled by this two-step, least of all the conservative base. On the contrary, in conservative media the message is loud and clear: Unless they get a legal right to cite “religion” as the excuse in order to discriminate against people, then the end of the world is near. Glenn Beck went off on how either you allow people to refuse to let gay people sit at their lunch counter, or you might as well put them in concentration camps.

• gay 3 *

It is worth pointing out that this law he’s defending, much like the Jim Crow laws against black people that it is modeled upon, is actually about promoting segregation. The point is to allow people to say “we don’t serve your kind around here.” Despite all his let’s-all-hug-it-out rhetoric, he is actually promoting straight up segregation and defending the rights of bigots to treat gay people in this hateful, othering way he claims to oppose. In addition, as is usual with conservatives making Nazi analogies, they have it completely backwards. Nazis weren’t a bunch of gay people putting conservative Christians in camps. On the contrary, the Nazis put gay people in the camps. This is hardly unknown or obscure information.

Pat Robertson’s reaction was even more hysterical.

• gay 4 *

That he equates oral sex with bestiality tells you all you need to know about where he’s coming from. I barely feel I need to refute this, but let’s have at it: He’s projecting. The reality is it’s the Christian right that is trying to force you to conform to their sexual mores, ones that are so strict that even they don’t follow them. For years, they tried to force gay people to either be straight or give up on sex entirely through government force. The bans against sodomy were overturned a mere 12 years ago and it looks like the Supreme Court is about to overturn bans on gay marriage. So now they’re shifting tactics, looking to private business. I don’t know how successful the tactic will be, but the clear intent is to make it so miserable to be gay because people keep refusing your business that you leave the community. As more gay people relocate to rural and suburban areas, this could be a real problem and it is about more than simply getting another florist for your wedding.

But Robertson sounds calm next to Matthew Hagee, who whipped out the end-of-the-human-race card.

• gay 5 *

That’s right. If gay marriage is legalized, no one will ever be allowed to have heterosexual intercourse again. That is by far the most logical thing I’ve ever heard in my life. In all seriousness, I often think the primary reason gay rights have advanced as quickly as they have in recent years is the opposition is simply incapable of coming up with an argument that isn’t just hilariously bad. They all sound like people who have never left the house and learned everything they know about human interaction from 50s-era picture books. But mommy, how could you get a baby in your tummy without being married? It’s a mystery, it surely is.

***************

Interview

***************

As the debate over campus rape rages on, I’ve noticed that conservatives seem to be getting a little bolder and more mean-spirited towards rape victims. Rape has always been an odd issue to discuss publicly, because the conservative opponents of anti-rape activism are never going to come out and say they are pro-rape. There’s always a lot of face-pulling over how they agree that rape is a very serious crime. But, of course, once the formalities are over, their purpose is in arguing against treating it as a serious crime, by trying to define many rapes as not-rapes, blaming the victims and treating them like they’re hysterical, trying to turn the debate into a discussion about their own hobby horse, which is their opposition to women’s sexual freedom, or treating accused rapists like they’re the real victims here. That’s always been the case, but mostly conservatives have tried to couch these arguments so they don’t sound too indifferent to rape or too quick to blame the victim. But recently, the hostile rhetoric aimed at rape victims and their advocates is really getting uglier.

This was particularly obvious when the podcast host for the NRA’s news feed, Cam Edwards, went on one of the ugliest victim-blaming rants I’ve ever heard, all in service of trying to bully people into buying more guns. He’s denouncing the campus paper for objecting to the NRA’s marketing push to get guns legalized on campus, which wouldn’t prevent any crime but might help sell more guns.

• rape 1 *

And this is exactly why feminists have been speaking out about this. While this guy is claiming that he’s all about trying to help women, when say that the rape is the fault of the victim’s because she failed in her duty to protect herself, that’s basically legalizing rape. I realize that he doesn’t think of it that way, but that’s the logical result of saying the burden of preventing a crime, i.e. the responsibility for the crime, belongs to the victim, not the perpetrator. And thus, if you are raped and you don’t have a gun or can’t reach your gun or your rapist uses your gun against you, then you will be told it was your fault and you must have secretly wanted it because you didn’t do enough to stop it.

We need to blame rapists for rape.

That prevents rape in two ways. First of all, if a wannabe rapist knows that the victim will be blamed and he will get away with it, he’s more likely to rape. Because, duh, he knows that she’ll be blamed. Two, if a rape does happen, if we blame the victim, then the rapist will be free. Most of them rape again, which research has repeatedly shown. The only way to stop rape is to create consequences for rapists. And while the NRA wants those consequences to be profitable for the gun manufacturers that support them, shooting rapists is really a substandard alternative to holding them accountable. I’ll add one more thing: If you believe that a rape is the victim’s fault when she doesn’t shoot her rapist, odds are you will continue to believe it was her fault if she does shoot the rapist. Which means that on top of being attacked, victims will often face malicious charges of murder. Bad idea.

But victim-blaming to sell guns is just one flavor of misogyny I’ve seen recently. Gavin McInnes of Fox News was also victim-blaming to push his anger at young women for having fun and being sexually liberated. He was angry at women for enjoying spring break.

• rape 2 *

McInnes started Vice magazine. When he was young, he was Mr. Partying and Craziness. He was a nasty bigot then, but it’s funny to me that now that he’s middle aged and those hot young women treat him like he’s invisible, so now he’s decided they need to cover up and stay at home and never have any fun or it’s their fault if they get raped. Dude, we all get older. You don’t have to bust out the rape card on the young’uns because you’re bitter about aging.

Now we’ve heard the victim-blaming, so it’s time for talking about how, when it comes to rape, accused rapists are the real victims here. Courtesy of Andrea Tantaros of Fox News.

• rape 3 *

It’s telling that Tantaros thinks that coming down hard on rape is a war on young men. Only if you think either rape is not a big deal or that most young men do it, or some combination of both. In reality, and I will also speak slowly, rape is a hate crime against women. Most men are not misogynist bigots who will rape if they get a chance. And anyone who equates the war on rape with a war on men is implying that men are inherently rapists. So who’s the man-hater, again?

***************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, God kills babies to punish you for killing embryos edition. Recently, a pregnant woman in Colorado was brutally attacked by a woman who cut out her baby with the intention of passing it off as her own. Gordon Klingenschmitt, a state representative in Colorado, responded by making it about abortion.

• Klingenschmitt *

Classy. The baby died, and if you think this is about “life,” then his ramblings are nonsensical. But I don’t see it that way. I think anti-choice is rooted in misogyny. And because of this, it makes sense that he would think that women are being punished for their defiance and feminism by having God inflict violent abuse on them.

The post The Purvi Patel Case, and Conservative Rhetoric on Rape appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, Slate’s L.V. Anderson will be on to explain the search for a better condom. North Carolina is passing some self-contradictory abortion regulation, and anti-choicers force us to have a discussion about whether “abortion reversal” is a real thing. It’s not.

Mad Men is back on AMC and on its final run to the series finale in a mere seven episodes. The show returned with an episode titled “Severance,” and it showed that the show is just as good as it ever was at showing the 1960s era sexism that inspired second-wave feminism.

• Mad Men *

I saw some people decry this scene as over the top, but I disagree. I still see dude bros making the same kind of jokes premised on the idea that it’s hilarious that women have bodies even now in the twenty-first century.

***************

So the North Carolina legislature is attacking abortion access again, with a major omnibus bill that is clearly intended to make abortion much harder to get, and to shame and punish women during their abortion process. And, as is typical with abortion laws these days, the excuse is that they are doing this to protect women, doing that anti-choice thing where they paint women as dumb bunnies who are being exploited by evil abortionists and who need just need a little government-mandated guidance, perhaps a bit of force, to see that they really want their babies. Or, in lieu of that, be so hassled that the clock runs out and they don’t have a chance to abort. But yeah, the legislators love talking a big game about doing this to protect women. Huffington Post interviewed state representative Pat McElraft about this bill, and her excuse was all feigned concern about the poor women, who are basically just tall children who can get pregnant and need oh so much protection.

• North Carolina 1 *

Remember, as a general rule, these kinds of numbers antis cite tend to be pulled out of the air, so don’t trust them. The obvious reason for this waiting period is to make it a major hassle to get an abortion and also the hope is they can run out the clock, but whatever, the official excuse is they’re trying to help women. The bill would also require that abortions be performed only by an obstetrician or gynecologist. This is dumb, of course, because vacuum aspiration abortion is a simple outpatient procedure that any doctor can do if they want. More to the point, many abortions are just handing someone a pill, but to hear anti-choicers talk, handing someone a pill and asking them to swallow it is a fraught task that only the most elite and highly trained doctors can do. McElraft again.

• North Carolina 2 *

So concern. So wow. But here’s a funny thing about this supposed deep concern about women’s health and safety. If you really wanted abortion to be a safe medical procedure, you would want people who are offering it to get the best medical training available, right? Well, guess what? This same bill, the one that is supposedly about making abortion so safe and secure, guess what else it does?

• North Carolina 3 *

That’s right. They are going to ban the University of North Carolina medical school from providing abortion training. You know, the very training that makes abortion safe for women? You know what you don’t do if you’re worried about something being safe? You don’t ban people from learning to do it safely. This is like saying that you want driving to be safer, so you’re going to ban people from taking driving classes. And this isn’t just any medical school, either. As Rachel Maddow explained, they’re targeting one of the best OB-GYN schools in the country.

• North Carolina 4 *

She goes on to explain some of the implications.

• North Carolina 5 *

When asked about how doctors would learn how to do this, McElraft said, “There are opportunities for doctors to learn this,” suggesting they can figure it out by watching women miscarry or learning on the fly. Yes, the very same woman who was so recently worried that abortion is dangerous and complicated, which it is not, that she wants to restrict it to OB-GYNs, now thinks it’s so easy you don’t even need someone else to show you how to do it, but can MacGyver it on your own. I swear, I don’t know how people like her can keep going to church and telling themselves they’re good, moral people when they lie so shamelessly like this.

***************

Interview

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Arizona’s legislature, clearly worried that they’re falling behind in the race to be the most ridiculous on the issue of reproductive rights, passed a bill into law that would require, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, doctors to tell women getting medical abortions that they can get the procedure reversed. I’ve written about this for RH Reality Check [here], but now the rest of the media is catching up a little and so I can play some clips of those reactions, which are almost comical in the attempts to be fair-minded to the increasingly ludicrous medical fantasies of the Christian right. CBC in Canada described the basic idea.

• reversal 1 *

To be clear, these are also the same people who think that if you get an abortion, you’re doomed to suffer from breast cancer, suicide, drug addiction and whatever other random supernatural punishment they’re wishing on you this week. And they also think contraception causes abortion and embryos call out for mommy with their unformed mouths. Not really what you’d call the most scientifically sound group of folks here. NPR interviewed Dr. Stephen Chasen about this, and he’s a bit exasperated, as you would be, by all this.

• reversal 2 *

So what they’re calling abortion reversal is actually just… not completing your abortion. But there’s a lot of shots and anti-choice theater, because if there’s one thing anti-choicers are good at, it’s creating self-aggrandizing drama. Never have so many just needed to get a life. But I digress. Dr. Chasen isn’t too worried that this is dangerous per se, or at least no more so than taking one pill and then just not taking the other, which probably works equally as well. But he is worried, for good reason, that messing with women’s minds like this is just a bad idea.

• reversal 3 *

In other words, they’re forcing doctors to give you contradictory information. When you go to a clinic, they tell you that you really need to be sure because there’s no going back once this has started. But now they’re required by law, to turn around and say the opposite, that it can be reversed. This is a clear violation of medical ethics and, as Dr. Chasen says, it could create confusion in a woman who is unsure. But some women are, in fact, unsure. The irony here is that by supposedly trying to save these pregnancies, antis may actually cause some to be lost, as women who are on the fence take the pill, figuring they can decide later. Luckily, that won’t happen much, if at all, since most women are sure they want to abort when they come to the clinic. But those who are uncertain will be harder to talk out of their abortions now. Not that anti-choicers care, though. This isn’t and never was about “saving” babies, but about punishing women who have sex. So while this new requirement won’t save any embryos and may even kill a few more than otherwise would have died, it doesn’t matter to them. The main thing is confusing and upsetting women, to punish them for being in this situation in the first place.

***************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, funny how God always wants what some sexist douchebag wants edition. Recently, there was an incident at a Florida church where a 9-year-old fired a gun in the bathroom. When news cameras showed up at the church, they discovered a sign extolling the virtues of male leadership. Here’s how the pastor responded.

• Lytell *

He claims he’s not saying men are better than women, but obviously, that’s exactly what he’s saying here.

The post Ludicrous Anti-Abortion Bills, and the Search for Better Condoms appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Dallas female CEO says women can’t be president because they’re not suited for leadership

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll speak with a reporter who attended a huge annual crisis pregnancy center conference. Two states ban a very common abortion procedure, and the sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton started as soon as she announced her candidacy.

Jemima Kirke’s character on Girls didn’t get an abortion because she had one of those well-timed TV miscarriages instead, but the actress did have an abortion in real life and sat down to record a video about it for the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Draw the Line campaign.

• Kirke *

It’s a very typical abortion story, but I think that’s what gives stories like this power. It shows that the woman in question is not some weird, sex-crazed monster, but just like the rest of us: Most of us date people we don’t end up married to. Most of us have sex even if we’re not interested in having a baby. Abortion is a mundane, everyday part of the female experience and it’s good to talk about it as such.

***************

So there’s yet another assault on abortion rights that could dramatically impact a lot of women’s ability to get health care, but it’s barely getting any mainstream media coverage. I have a piece up at RH Reality Check [here: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/16/anti-choicers-going-take-away-second-trimester-abortion-without-much-notice/] talking about some of the reasons why, but this is really just going to be a more newsy piece to try to make up, as much as I can, for the deafening silence around this enormous issue. Anti-choicers are quietly taking away the ability to get a safe abortion in the second trimester.

• D and E 1 *

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and boo-hooing amongst anti-choicers about how supposedly barbaric it is to “dismember” a fetus. But it’s worth pointing out that, in many cases, they forced this situation. It used to be legal to perform something called a dilation and extraction, or D and X for short, which allowed the abortion doctor to pull the fetus out in one piece. Now, that’s not doable for a lot of abortions, but for some abortions, particularly later ones that were primarily done for medically necessary reasons, it was both safer and helped families who were grieving a wanted pregnancy that had to be terminated for medical reasons have an intact body to grieve. But anti-choicers banned that abortion, basically claiming that it’s somehow more gruesome to remove a fetus in one piece rather than bit by bit. Now they’re singing a different tune, claiming that it’s actually the D and E that offends them.

Anti-choice activists: not an honest group of people. It’s a recurring theme on this show.

• D and E 2 *

These exceptions are there to make it sound like they are pro-life, but rest assured, the exception is meaningless. It’s not just because there’s no exception for either health or rape or incest. Nor is it because there’s no exception for mental health, an exception that always tees off anti-choicers because they don’t like acknowledging that women have brains. Mostly it’s because an exception this narrow becomes nearly impossible to prove and, because it’s pretty rare, most doctors who feel confident with the terminate-or-die diagnosis may not have experience doing D and E abortions and so will have to resort to more invasive or painful procedures.

But the hatefulness of this bill doesn’t stop it from spreading.

• D and E 3 *

The lurid language is meant to be provocative and moralistic, of course, but it’s also meant to make it sound like they’re just singling out a specific procedure and like it’s nothing more than that. That’s simply false, however. Because the D and E is basically how they do second-trimester abortions, this is functionally a ban on abortions after 14 weeks. And a whole lot of those are done because of fetal abnormality or because of rape, and both those reasons for abortion are now not considered good enough in Kansas or Oklahoma.

***************

Interview

***************

Perhaps you have heard that a pro-choice feminist lady with strong name recognition has formally announced she is running for president. That’s right, Hillary Clinton has made her announcement in a video that feels deliberately low-key, about ordinary Americans doing ordinary things with Clinton wedged in at the end. I’m not surprised Clinton is trying to be as low-key as possible, because the fact that she’s a woman makes the already predictable conservative freak-out even uglier than it would be for someone with a similar resume but an M instead of an F on the driver’s license. And sure enough, NRA head Wayne LaPierre went all in with the misogynist reaction.

• Hillary 1 *

I mean, how do you even parody that? The actual argument, not even the implied argument, is that the White House belongs to white men and any other person who occupies it is an interloper whose presence can only be tolerated just long enough to make a point before returning the office to its rightful white male owner.

Bill O’Reilly engaged in the same logic where things like the presidency are assumed to belong to white men by rights and any attempts to allow more people in are taken as attacks on the rights of the white man to be the only legitimate candidates for things like high office.

• Hillary 2 *

It was only a couple days and already you had major conservative leaders working this idea that being a woman gives you all these inherent and unfair advantages over poor, beleaguered white men. Ridiculous on its surface, sure, but if you think about the implications, it gets even uglier. Because no woman has ever won the presidency. No woman has even been a major party nominee for the presidency. If you believe that women automatically have a leg up, then the only way to explain this discrepancy is to assume that women are inferior to men and that no woman throughout all of history has been even remotely as qualified as even the worst male president. Oh, I know the excuse is to say this is a new development and that this supposedly advantage women have over men just started happening. To which I say, I will believe women have an advantage over men when women start getting jobs and promotions and winning elections over men who are clearly better at the job than they are. You know, how sexism has always worked against women since forever? And Hillary Clinton ain’t your test case, as she has better name recognition and a resume that is much more impressive than every male candidate who has thrown in so far in this election. And even if the Republicans can muster up someone who has that going for him, you’d still have to prove the loss was due to gender and not policy disagreements with the public. Sounds like a lot, I know, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

When not claiming that men are victimized because they let the broads run for office now, Clinton critics were engaging in just plain old gender-baiting. Such as Republican strategist Ana Navarro on CNN.

• Hillary 3 *

As always, it’s wise to consider that “advice” coming from your opposition may just be concern trolling. I doubt Navarro is upset about male candidates drowning her in testosterone by always talking about their wives or their golfing. Instead, I would argue that this so-called advice is an attempt to make her womanhood an obstacle instead of an asset by implying that there’s something silly and weak about being female or even feminine. It is true, I think, that Clinton is embracing her gender more this time around than last. That’s because American women are increasingly rejecting the idea that our gender does make us weak or insipid. Instead, the idea of strong but feminine womanhood has really taken hold in our culture, whether you agree with it or not. The idea of the steel magnolia has always persisted in American culture, of course, but it’s really on the rise lately with the ascendency of stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and TV shows like the Good Wife and Scandal. Clinton’s gender is an asset in a way it wasn’t 8 years ago, and so it’s no surprise to see that Republicans are trying to hit hard on that front, trying to turn a strength into a weakness.

***************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the really far out sexist anti-Hillary edition. While the conservative press is trying a sexist narrative against Clinton that carefully avoids saying directly that women are inherently unqualified to be president, some of the every day conservatives out there aren’t so subtle. Go Ape Marketing CEO Cheryl Rios got herself on TV in Dallas recently by blabbing about how a woman can’t be president.

• Rios *

The cognitive dissonance of anti-feminist women is always hilarious. It used to be the women who have full-time jobs as writers and pundits in order to tell other women they belong in the home. And now you have a CEO explaining how women aren’t fit for leadership.

The post Anti-Clinton Sexism, and Second-Trimester Abortion Bans appeared first on RH Reality Check.

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Transcript

Apologies to listeners: This week’s episode is transcript-free due to a technical glitch.

The post Attacks on Reproductive Rights in Colorado, Tennessee appeared first on RH Reality Check.