Image from Amanda Marcotte’s “Book ad up.” post at Pandagon

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy has the perfect book-jacket blurb for Amanda Marcotte’s It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Jungle is all jokes, but it isn’t all jokey. Contained therein is some primo patriarchy-blaming. She takes on PETA, Hollywood, abstinence-only “education,” the famous anti-Girl Scout backlash, and plenty more. No, it’s not a lesbian separatist revolutionary tract, but I pity the hardcore radfem who doesn’t get a bang out this book.

Read the quote in context here.

I read the book last week on vacation and haven’t had time to say nice things about it. I quite liked the book. Although there was this one personally embarrassing thing about it.

In format the book appears as a series of problems confronting women, with a brief intro, a bit of discussion, and then a list of things you can do. In other words it’s laid out like most standard text-oriented travel/survival guides. And it’s a great list of issues women, especially but not exclusively young academic or professional women, regularly find themselves confronting. In addition to the topics Twisty mentions there’s…

Your conservative relatives discover you’re a feminist? Check. Assumption that if you’re vegetarian it’s a feminist thing? Check. Men who like the “challenge” of dating feminists? Check. The office donut do-or-don’t-damnation conundrum? Check. Intelligent defense of the Girl Scouts? Check. “Asshole-bleaching?” Check, and handled with all the dignity the subject deserves. Dealing with Nice Guys™, MRAs, fundamentalists, anti-choicers, and wedding consultants? Check.

Embarrassing admission of utter cluelessness while reading? For maybe the first five or ten chapters I kept reading these fantastically incisive, classically-Marcott-ish zingers in the chapter intros and then totally wincing at the comparable level of snark in her proposed remedies. I mean, I kept saying WTF? (You could see them in my copy of the book, right there, in the margins, in pencil.) I kept thinking the same thing about the so-over-the-top-it-almost-stops-being-appalling 50s-era mainstream adventure-babe comics cover and chapter-break art.

So what was my problem? I didn’t notice the “politics/humor” classification. It reads like a snarky joke book because, incisive introductions aside it’s a snarky joke book! Doh! The illustrations are offensive because Marcotte was offended. The suggestions are acidly (and if you get it, humorously) sarcastic because sincerity has so often been ignored or misinterpreted these last 37 years — so might as well have fun while being misinterpreted.

Ok, so I might not give it to my eight year old right away, not till she’s read a few more straight-ahead and age-appropriate introductions**. But I’ll definitely give her a copy before she’s ready for high school. I think it’ll be perfect for her then, just like I think it’ll be perfect all kinds of people high-school age and up.

[** Bleg: Speaking of which, what are the age-appropriate (3rd-5th grade, 6th-8th grade, and high-school level) introductions to feminism for kids? Preferably suitable for both girls and boys. Let me know in comments if you’ve got ‘em. —fl]

While her site is undergoing server upgrades Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon invites us to consider a post on someone else’s blog.

in the meantime, please enjoy reading this post by Jill Morrison about how stupid it is to have all these rules and regulations about finances, emotional “maturity” and other factors for women seeking donor insemination, infertility treatments, etc.. She expresses what has always bothered me about it:

It just doesn’t seem right that if you are healthy and heterosexual, you can go down to your local watering hole, have a few Coronas, spot some dude across a crowded bar, and bam-you’re someone’s mother. Lucky kid! (See, e.g., the movie Knocked Up) Yet someone who is willing to mortgage her house and pour every ounce of mental and physical energy into becoming a mother gets audited to see whether or not she has enough money left over to be a mom.

The big difference is that no matter what level of asshole you pick to screw randomly to get pregnant—even if he turns out to have no positive impact on the kid—you’re legally stuck with him for life, so the state feels you’ve given up your pound of flesh to the patriarchy.

She said it here.

I think it I were just a Men’s Rights Activist kind of guy I’d bloviate about how guys wanna know the spunk they’re wanking into a cup doesn’t wind up in some kind of un-concerned mother. And if I were just a knee-jerk “pro-feminist” man I might self-effacingly hint that since men’s role in artificial insemination really does end at masturbating into a cup then who gives a flip what happens to it or where it ends up? And finally, perhaps if I were just a social-policy wonk I’d say something about it being unobjectionable for donors and recipients to receive roughly similar levels of scrutiny (though no more.)

But I’m not any of those things, not enough to feel comfortable with any of those labels anyway. Instead I’ll just say that it’s probably dangerous to assume that sperm donors are any less concerned for the health and well-being of any possible offspring that might result, no matter that they’ll never meet them. And while when I was very young I did know a couple of simple stoners who sold sperm for quick cash, the majority of donors I’ve met since then really have taken what they were doing very seriously and, generally, don’t do it for the money — which isn’t always offered anyway.

Um, I got a little off track there so let me get back on. Again, I think it’s dangerous to assume sperm donors don’t care that when children are conceived with their donated sperm they will be their offspring left completely and irreversibly in the care of someone else. It’s dangerous because it perpetuates the stereotypes and memes that men are reproductively irresponsible, that intentional fatherhood is alien to them, that sociobiologists are right that evolution merely tricks men into fathering children (with those weirdo breasts-are-buttocks-up-front theories and all), and, most important of all, that men don’t, won’t, and never will give a fuck whether they knock someone up or not because they see women purely as inconvenient life-support systems for holes they can get their rocks off in.

To be honest I can’t imagine donating sperm, any more than I can imagine anyone “voluntarily relinquishing” their own flesh and blood for adoption. The idea of not being there, not for the birth, for the blissfully anguish of sleep deprivation required to tend a child in the months after birth, for the first words, for the first steps, for thousands of bedtime hours reading and singing and talking and cuddling, for the tears and cheers of first days of school, of proud or wretched parent/teacher conferences, for graduations and their equivalent steps depending on who they are… how could any human being summon the courage, the willpower, the compassion for someone else to sacrifice that so someone else could experience parenthood? I just couldn’t have it in me.

I also happen to think it would be egregiously unethical for someone to, as Morrison suggests, head down to a local bar, get a man drunk, and “bam — you’re someone’s mother.” No more so than were a man to head down to a bar with the same intention! To imagine the use of another human being for expendable, non-consensual reproduction is just… critically, cripplingly, strips them of their humanity — as it would anyone who undertook to make that deception. (An old episode of The L-Word handles that situation surprisingly well.)

Anyway, sure, as Morrison says a determined woman can just head off to a bar, get a guy drunk enough that he can’t tell there’s no condom, and be done with it — leaving her partner none the wiser… and herself none the wiser as well. Or she can go to a lab where the samples have been carefully screened and submit to some degree of screening herself.

Bottom line: Women aren’t regrettable sperm repositories for the patriarchy, but then neither are men superfluous semen nozzles. Both structural misperceptions must be refuted if patriarchy is to be dismantled.