Pacific Views

Without a Health Exception: Men (and 'Concerned Women') Hate You

I believe I mentioned that the recent Supreme Court ruling has planted, for the first time, a little seed of fear that pregnancy could be deadly. I mean, I always knew it was possible. It's why when you go back and look at old genealogies, the men so often had more than one wife listed. They would wear out the first one and then, well damn, someone's got to look after the kids and make more. Hopefully, the second one didn't die the same way.

I have no doubt that many people were very sad about this then-inevitability of life. And it totally makes sense that they thought it was a waste to educate most women back then. Why would you waste years of expensive schooling on someone with a life expectancy in their early 20s? And while many people were probably sad about it, and glad when the species learned to ford that river, other people look back and long for the good old days.

Because there's nothing like a good dose of fear to keep the women in line:

... Their motto is that the wronged women should open up a can of whup-ass on the thugly oppressor. Otherwise, men might take it into their heads that women can be kept in line with intimidation. According to these feminists, the women who cry uncle have allowed themselves to become “victims rather than people.”

But look here. Who are they trying to kid. Women can be kept in line with intimidation, and the whole world knows it. Aren’t people who have been raped and intimidated and harassed and threatened with death “victims”? What the fuck is wrong with that word? It describes the situation perfectly.

Do you guys get, I mean actually get, that our society is a patriarchy? Patriarchy isn’t just a gimmick for a blog. It really exists. There are actual implications. Do you get that a patriarchy is predicated on exploitation and victimization? It’s not a joke! It’s not an abstract concept dreamed up by some wannabe ideologue making up catch-phrases while idling away the afternoons with pitchers of margs. Exploitation and victimization is the actual set-up! A person is either an exploiter or a victim, or sometimes both, but never neither. ...

So yeah, I knew it was possible for pregnancy to be dangerous, but this is a First World (ha!) country. This is the 21st frakking century. Right? No. This country is becoming some bizarre Republic of Gilead, where Concerned Women advocate for sexual pig-ignorance. A crazy place where wingnuts tell women that getting married is consent to rape, that cervical cancer is the natural price to pay for sex, and seek to make pregnancy as dangerous as possible. So we'll ... want to get married and have kids? Are they crazy? Really, terrifying the hell out of women everywhere seems to be the only reasonable explanation for their behavior:

... Senator Santorum also said that it is a lie to argue that a D&X is sometimes required to protect a woman from a serious health risk. But if he truly believed that statement, then he would not have objected to President Clinton’s request that an exemption be added to the bill in cases of serious health risks to the woman. After all, if there was no risk of a devastating health problem, then the exemption would never be exercised, and there would be no harm in including it in the bill.

The whole anti-abortion philosophy really is that simple, that brutal, and that anti-life.

Don Imus’ oh-so-cutesy “nappy headed hos” remark wasn’t just about the Rutgers basketball team. It was about all women — and all the fired multimillionaire shock jocks in the world won’t change this: the law of the land gives a fatally-deformed hydrocephalic fetus with a 20” head more right to “life” than it gives the mother of that fetus, who will die trying to deliver it because NO pelvis has an opening that large.

It could be that hurting a lot of us is nothing personal. Hey, if you injure a few animals in a pack, the whimpering takes the fight out of the rest. And there you go, easier to manage:

... They passed a federal ban on a kind of abortion only done to minimize women’s physical suffering and maternal morbidity in cases where pregnancies are going terribly wrong. The major effect will be to put a chill on doctors who perform these abortions and force them to use more invasive procedures that maximize the chance of infection and uterine perforations and ruptures. Using the power of the federal government to make sure as many uteruses are painfully damaged as possible is unvarnished woman-hating. ...

Well, all right, it does seem like hatred. It certainly feels like hatred. But perhaps they don't really see us as people, just objects. Devices. Tools, if you will. Or maybe animals. Right. Hey, guys will still screw animals, even sometimes dead ones (and I am not Google fishing for links to those news stories. Just no.) And women now rank, in terms of reproductive health law, somewhere below farm animals, according to this lycanthropically ticked off Oklahoman:

... I'm so glad to know that I'm not even accorded the level of respect given to a fucking farm animal. A useful farm animal is cared for, and its unborn offspring are not considered more valuable than it is.

... Oklahoma law already:
• Makes abortion, all abortion, illegal in the event Roe v. Wade is overturned. Physicians who advise a patient to have an abortion, or who perform one, would be guilty of a felony. And unless the woman's life is in danger, she, too, could be put in prison for a year, fined $1,000, or both. ...

Less than a farm animal. I guess I'd have to be pretty intimidated before I thought of myself that way, and the far right clearly knows that already. They got off a big milestone on the project just this last Wednesday.

Posted by natasha at April 19, 2007 11:19 PM | Women | Technorati links |