You Ladies are Just Being Hysterical

by 5:29 pm. It has 109 Comments.

This is a righteous piece by Rebecca Traister:

I have been thinking, like so many people this week, about rage. Who I’m mad at, what that anger’s good for, how what makes me maddest is the way the madness has long gone unrespected, even by those who have relied on it for their gains.

For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before that, I have watched people devote their lives, their furious energies, to fighting against the steady, merciless, punitive erosion of reproductive rights. And I have watched as politicians — not just on the right, but members of my own party — and the writers and pundits who cover them, treat reproductive rights and justice advocates as if they were fantasists enacting dystopian fiction.

This week, the most aggressive abortion bans since Roe v. Wade swept through states, explicitly designed to challenge and ultimately reverse Roe at the Supreme Court level. With them has come the dawning of a broad realization — a clear, bright, detailed vision of what’s at stake, and what’s ahead. (If not, yet, full comprehension of the harm that has already been done).

You can not compromise one inch with fanatics. The moment you buy into their framework of things (“ABORTION IS EVIL”) and start saying things like it should be “safe, legal, and rare,” you are losing the battle. The only acceptable answer is “I support it and fuck you for telling people what to do with their own fucking body.”





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Keeping the Shit at Shoe Level

by 10:12 am. It has 127 Comments.

If we’re still talking about abortion, here’s a dispatch from my current heartland location, where “Abortion Kills a Beating Heart” and “It’s a Child Not a Choice” billboards herald your arrival to a lot of little towns.

The South Dakota legislature has at least one anti-abortion bill on their to-do list every year. This year, they had two. One required that women wanting an abortion sign a 13 page document prepared by the Department of Health, and initial every page. This one was simple fuckery – the single Planned Parenthood location that provides abortions had its own consent form, but apparently it wasn’t enough of a waste of time and paper. That bill passed and is now law. The other bill was an attempt to force women to have an ultrasound prior to an abortion, and also to hear the fetal heartbeat. This one failed because the anti-abortion lobby thought it was unconstitutional.

The reason that the anti-abortion advocates here are sensitive to whether a law is constitutional, no matter whether the Supremes are now wired to overturn Roe, is because they played with fire and got burned in the last decade. A law prohibiting abortion was overturned by a referendum (with a healthy 56-44 majority) in 2006. One of the arguments in that referendum was that litigating Supreme Court challenges is an expensive waste of time. (Another was that this bill didn’t have the exceptions for rape and incest – only the life of the mother.) Since then, legislators have pretty much stuck to throwing as much sand in the gears of what little abortion machinery is left in the state, without causing a court challenge.

Even in this red state, a good majority of people are not ready to overturn abortion. People will vote for legislators who want to overturn it, because of party affiliation, but those legislators are handcuffed by popular opinion, at least in this state.

The lesson I take home from this little bit of politics is that, at some point, even in the fucked up political environment that we’re experiencing today, popular opinion matters.





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Floriduh! Woman: Public Service Announcement Edition

by 9:44 pm. It has 122 Comments.

And now a Public Service Announcement brought to you in regard to Floriduh! Woman…

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity…

Also: EWWWWW!!!!!

Open thread!





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How About Just Not Being a Fucking Clod

by 11:13 am. It has 91 Comments.

WTF is wrong with these people:

Men attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year were worried about a lot of things. A global economic slowdown. Threats to cybersecurity. Populism. War.

And, several acknowledged at the meeting this past week, mentoring women in the #MeToo era.

“I now think twice about spending one-on-one time with a young female colleague,” said one American finance executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue is “just too sensitive.”

“Me, too,” said another man in the conversation.

***

Pat Milligan, who leads research on female leadership at the consulting firm Mercer and advises multinational companies on gender and diversity issues, said many of her clients had voiced concerns over saying or doing “the wrong thing” since #MeToo drew broad international attention.

“A number of men have told me that they will avoid going to dinner with a female mentee, or that they’re concerned about deploying a woman solo on-site with a male,” Ms. Milligan said. “People are concerned and have questions.”

“If we allow this to happen, it will set us back decades,” Ms. Milligan said. “Women have to be sponsored by leaders, and leaders are still mostly men.”

WTF is going on at dinners that I am missing? When I go to dinner with people, we order food, eat it, pay the bill, and leave.





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We Need to See All the Videos Before Drawing Conclusions: Covington Catholic High School Students Yell at Young Women Edition

by 11:21 pm. It has 74 Comments.

Since we have to see all the videos of the fine young men from Covington Catholic High School, we definitely should make sure this is on the front page with the context provided by the person who both took the video and was in the group of young women being accosted and yelled at.

Beware of the 21st century technological Panopticon. It sees all!

Open thread.





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