Someone at Shakesville (not Liss- and I can’t remember which post and I’ve got literally thousands of things in my reader that I’ve been catching up on) made an offhand comment in a post about abortion (I think) that overpopulation is what is killing the environment.

Can we please, pretty please, put an end to this racist fucking bit of trollop.

Whenever I hear some over-educated white person bitch about overpopulation, I see white robes and cone hats. They mean too many brown women in poor countries having too many babies.

Truth is, those brown babies use only a fraction of the resources over-educated white people do. A tiny, environmentally sustainable fraction.

The environment is not in trouble because brown women in other countries have babies. It’s in trouble because latte drinking, car driving, plane flying white people need an exponentially increasing amount of stuff that is grown, produced and delivered in an oil based economy.

And oil is running out. But those over-educated white folks don’t need to worry too long about how many brown babies are alive in the world. Those brown babies are going to be the first famine victims when the price for oil goes so high that coffee drinking becomes a luxury, and land previously used to grow staple crops for poor brown people gets turned into bio fuel instead so that coffee can still be delivered to white folks in developed countries.

It’s not the brown babies people, it’s the oil. Oil. Oil. Oil.

I don’t know if happy is really the word for it. But thanks Vets. I may totally disagree with the men who give you orders, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the work you do.

And since it is your job to follow orders, it is our job as citizens to make sure you’re not given senseless orders. We haven’t been very good at that for the last decade or so, and I apologize.

Since I’ve never been one for patriotic chest thumping here’s a few songs about the military that I do like.

The Decemberists- 16 Military Wives

Moxy Fruvous- The Gulf War Song (originally written for Desert Storm and Bush I)

To Bill Clinton and all pass it now, fix it later Democrats.

I dropped a large, heavy, wooden umbrella stand on my big toe today. I’m limping, in massive amounts of pain. The toe is turning colors and at the very least I am going to lose a toe nail.

I have no health insurance, and can’t possibly afford care in an emergency room.

I also have an as yet undiagnosed (at least by doctors) chronic pain disease. I have the arthritic hands of an 80 year old woman and I grimace at the idea of grasping things. Some days, every single step I take feels like the ligaments and tendons in feet are going to snap. My shoulders, back, neck, hips and legs always hurt and I’ve gotten used to it, but the hands and feet bring me to tears.

I could be helped with a medical diagnosis and pain meds. Until then I take fistfuls of Advil every day.

I am absolutely the person you are all talking about when you say we have to pass this healthcare bill, flaws and all,now now now or it won’t happen.

But I’ll wait. I may be in pain. I may end up with a gangrenous toe. But I can suck it up and wait and will gladly do it if it means not selling out women to forced pregnancy fuckwits. And I will gladly wait for real universal “universal health care” not this milquetoast compromise with insurance and drug companies.

I’ll wait, but not forever, just until the next election rolls around. Pass real healthcare for all men AND women. Stop fucking around with compromises to shit heads who shouldn’t have any say in this fight.

Because I must be some kind of glutton, I followed a sitemeter hit back to this post about George Sondini and the misogyny of MRAs.

And then (I blame insomnia) I read the comments. Ampersand has a much higher tolerance for the verbose and inaccurate ramblings of misogynists than I do. What keeps coming up is the idea that feminists don’t acknowledge “female privilege” and that differences between men and women are because of biology and not culture.

1st let’s talk biology.

Yes, women have babies and produce milk for babies. Men can’t do that. That sucks and is unfair. But as a feminist I gladly support any medical or technical innovation that makes it so that men who want to be pregnant and nurse babies can. Hell,I’d even offer up my own overly fertile uterus and ovaries as a donation, though I’d prefer if they went to a transwoman or a gay man. I also support any and all advances that make it easier for both women and men who DON’T want to have babies. Bring on the male pill.

That’s it. That’s all there is to the biology thing. Sure, men and women get different diseases, or the same diseases elicit different symptoms in men and women. There’s no privilege there. Where there is privilege is in the different ways medical society treats disease based on gender. But that is not biological, that’s cultural.

All other supposed biological truths are really just cultural. The men are stronger meme relies entirely on a a very specific and narrow idea of strength lying in large muscle mass and ability to cause harm. Again, those are cultural applications to biology, not scientific truths like gravity.

And the truth is, along a spectrum, there is more biological difference between women alone or men alone than there is between men and women combined.

(*please note that yes, this portion doesn’t mention a thing about issues of transness or gender queerdom. It is not meant to exclude either from the argument. I believe that like sexuality, gender is a spectrum. Some people are hardwired, regardless of genitalia, at one end of the spectrum or the other, and some people fall more in the middle.)

So culture is the thing that tells us little girls like pink and little boys like blue. I know this is a fact, because it wasn’t that long ago (100 years maybe) that pink was a boy color and blue was a girl color. I know that not all women want to be nurturing caregivers and not all men want to be brave soldiers.

I also know that violence in men is a trait specifically created by the patriarchy to continue the patriarchy, and not an inherent masculine trait.

Think about that for a minute. Feminists, by acknowledging that, give men more credit than they give themselves. We allow for the idea that they can be better men and better humans than they are allowed to be now. But we’re the man haters. Go figure.

But what about that female privilege thing.

From what I can gather, MRAs think women have privilege over men because

1) We don’t have to pay on dates
2) We don’t have to open doors for people
3) We aren’t eligible for the draft or required to sign up for the Selective Service
4) We can choose to have sex anytime (except when we can’t choose- that’s rape) without having to pay for it.
5) We are(sometimes) believed on domestic violence claims

I will gladly pay my own way on all future dates (and most of my past ones) in exchange for never being street harassed again. Really, if the cost of not fucking up my entire day and being able to go about my business in public without the ever present fear of creepy dudes is buying my own coffee or dinner, then I’m all in.

I already hold open doors for other people, but we can make a gender neutral door opening law if we can also make equal pay for equal work a reality and not a catchy phrase.

On this, I am reminded of a line from my favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuassion, “The only privilege I can claim for my sex, and you needen’t envy it,” is of not being eligible for the Selective Service. I’m pretty sure there are lots of female soldiers and sailors and pilots who wish the combat restrictions were gone.I don’t think anyone should have to sign up with the Selective Service, male or female.

We have more options for having sex, but only if we are willing to fuck any guy. It’s not like Tahmoh Penikett is going to walk through my door wearing nothing but a smile. If I was interested in good old boy southern rednecks, I’d be golden. But I’m not.

And there is one thing that women have to fear when it comes to sex way more than men do. We fear you and the harm you can do when you don’t believe in enthusiastic consent. So we may seem our to be rolling is dick and ignoring it, but mostly we are worried that our drinks may get roofied or our “No” will be ignored.

The solution to that is feminism though. Then everybody gets to choose more sex (or no sex or some sex- it’s about choice)and no body has to fear rape. What MRAs see as privilege is just self preservation.

And domestic violence, sometimes women get believed by cops and judges. But really, it’s only sometimes. It’s no so much a privilege when you consider the rates of victims of other crimes being believed, like say murder or robbery. We domestic violence survivors actually score pretty low on that. So do rape victims.

That doesn’t mean that women have no privilege. As a white women I have more privilege than a black woman. I don’t ever even have to consciously act on the privilege. It’s always there, whether I want it or not. But just because I don’t act on it consciously doesn’t mean I don’t benefit from it.I knew in my old neighborhood that if someone needed to call the police in my apartment complex, it should be me as the nice white lady because I was going to get faster and fairer service from the police than my black neighbors. Same thing is true for men, just because you don’t rape women doesn’t mean that you don’t benefit from the silencing fear it creates.

Sesame Street was originally designed as a way to give kids who couldn’t go to preschool the same kind of counting and reading lessons so that they wouldn’t fall behind in kindergarten. The original target was poor inner city kids, but now it reaches all over the world teaching kids their abcs and tolerance and kindness.

Just to show how very affecting this little experiment was, I don’t know a single person my age who wouldn’t finish the line if I started singing “1,2,3,4,5”

And I still joke when I’m making a grocery list “a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter”

May Sesame Street have another 40 years of of being one of the best damn things America has ever exported.

How about this, we make all abortions illegal except for rape and health of the mother if all non-custodial parents who are even a week late with a child support payment get shipped off to work camps where their earnings are sent straight to the children they neglected.

What? Is the idea of forced labor of mostly men types in order to make them care for their children too much for you? Do you think it’s a violation of their civil rights?

How is my proposal any different from forcing women to be incubators?

It even passes the forced-birther personal responsibility test, though in this case it’s more pants up than legs closed.

Think of it this way, 70 percent of noncustodial parents would now be working on chain gangs, maybe more, but all the baybeezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz that would be saved would also have a guaranteed income.

What? Still squeamish about controlling a man’s body because he was stupid enough to have sex?

Then STFU about controlling women’s bodies you sanctimonious fuckwads.

I will learn to read posts before I hit the publish button and edit out the typos.

Someday

I will find a cure for insomnia and my family will no longer be able to joke that I am a vampire.

Someday

I’ll find a job where I am neither stuck in a pink collar ghetto or forced to constantly prove myself as better than to be equal.

What will you do someday?

OuyangDan shared this post with me and I thought it was a perfect example of how to climb the kyriarchy pyramid on the backs of people you are supposed to “belong” to.

Now I haven’t read Amanda Marcotte or the pink obamabot ghetto that is Pandagon since the racist book cover shit. See Marcotte got a feminist book published- oh ahhhh money and legitimacy for writing about one’s beliefs (the blogger’s dream peeps- all us bloggers have it) but she didn’t get it without stepping on a few people. Namely, blacks. And once you start down that road of selling out to get ahead, it’s easy as pie to keep going. Next came all us girls who called Obama out on his sexism, now it’s poor sex workers (under the guise of wanting to help them- but remember agency folks- if you’re trying to help by giving someone less choice then you are taking away their agency).

But Marcotte is not the only blogger who has used the backs of lessers as stepping stones to elitism. There’s Markos Moulitas- go to fauxgressive for the opinion bunnies on MSNBC and head of the Big Orange Cheetoh. Kos is famous for his comments deriding the “women’s studies set” as well as banning anyone from Kos who wrote critically about Obama’s sexism, racism, classism, corporatism during the campaign, or who wrote enthusiastically about HRC.

And I assume you all know about the shithole that Feministing has become, a beacon of transhate and classism and abelism. Abelist Courtney is now one of the finalists to become a paid blogger for the Washington Post. Congratulations on using the broken backs of women to climb on.

Then there are the token gays- John Arovosis and Dan Savage. Both hate women, but Dan kicks it up a notch by throwing in some abelism, racism, fat hate.

These are some of your A list progressive bloggers folks, and I don’t see a progressive in the bunch.

And while I love Kate Harding and think she’s brill, there are more than a few fat folks with disabilities who feel stepped on by her promotion HAES (health at every size) and healthy fatties vs fatties with health problems dichotomy.

Now let’s contrast that with two big, truly progressive blogs and their leaders, Shakesville and Melissa McKewan and Corrente and Lambert Strether. Neither allows their blogs to use the people on the bottom of the pyramid as stepping stones. Consequently, both have to run regular donation blegs (as do I, though my readership is much smaller). Neither have book deals or tv appearances.

That is your blogging kyriarchy at work. You can’t get to the top unless you’re willing to step on someone else.

She knows why.

(and all other political wives)

Your husband(s) has done a horrible thing for every woman in this country, regardless of political or religious views. Insurance coverage for abortion of any kind will now be non-existent in this country.

Perhaps you share your husband’s views on abortion. Perhaps you think that the women who need abortions should be punished by having to pay for them out of pocket.

But I think about a dear friend who recently had an ectopic pregnancy treated with an abortion before the pregnancy either killed her or permanently ended her fertility. I think of a family member who, terminally ill and believing she was infertile, could either have an abortion asap, or both she and the baby would die. I think about myself, and how lucky both I and my son are that my old home state paid for abortions for poor women. Our lives, though hard and terrible as the are, would be exponentially worse if our little family of 2 was increased.

It is poor women and women with disabilities or traumatic pregnancies that will suffer the most under your husband’s amendment. It is women who cannot pay out of pocket for medical care who will find the idea of choice is just that for them, an idea but not a reality. Their reality, our reality, my reality is one of poverty, injury or death.

So I am asking you, as a woman, as a human being, as the person probably called “your husband’s better half” more times than you can count, for help.

We need you to stand up and tell your husband that women’s health care needs should not be a bartering chip in the political realm.

And if you really want to get creative about it, I would suggest a bit of a Lysistrata moment. If women cannot get insurance coverage for unplanned pregnancies, perhaps you should make sure there is no opportunity for an unplanned pregnancy in your own household by refusing to perform acts that lead to pregnancy. It is, after all, the only option that 90% of women in this country will be left with if this amendment is part of the final bill.

Sincerely,
RQ