anti-feminists

When the "Pro-Life" Agenda Opposes Contraception it Stops Being a "Pro-Life" Agenda and Turns Into a Bunch of Sex-Hating Jerks

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-06-10 10:46

Pema Levy correctly identifies sex-that-doesn't-punish-women activist Marjorie Dannenfelser as both a liar and a bastard.

The most important way for conservatives to roll back access to family planning is to link it to abortion. To wit, at the Faith and Freedom Conference last week, Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser declared: “Every year that contraception and family planning increases, the abortion rate also increases in direct proportion. … This is an undeniable fact.” SBA List will not support a candidate that does not want to defund Planned Parenthood because of this faux-causal relationship between contraception and abortion.

Source: TAPPED

To equate a correlation with a causation is to be either stupid or a deliberate liar. Presiding over a major nationwide political organization requires considerable intelligence; to be president of the Susan B. Anthony List means categorically that Marjorie Dannenfelser not stupid. Therefore she's a calculated, categorical liar.

To a) deliberately lie about a causal relationship between contraception and abortion when b) there is no causal relationship and c) there is in fact considerable credible evidence that women who lose access to contraception instead increase their rate of abortion when d) your stated purpose of making such a correlation is your opposition to abortion and e) you've been previously identified as not stupid enough to make such a mistake in error is... to identify one's self as a mendacious bastard. Marjorie Dannenfelser and her coven of supporters are aggressively performing items A-E. Consequently Marjorie Dannenfelser is a mendacious bastard.

So if access to contraception does not in fact increase the rate of abortion for those who have access to it but instead decreases it, but the decidedly non-stupid president of a nominally anti-abortion organization makes that claim she must be making it to advance an agenda that's... well... not actually causally related to reducing the rate of abortion.

I'm thoroughly prepared to acknowledge that other people have a different view of the origin of human life. And consequently I can acknowledge that other people can honestly and ethically oppose abortion on the basis of their view of when life originates. Even if I disagree with their view. Even if I bitterly disagree!

But by moving beyond the debatable question of when human life begins into the thoroughly unambiguous question of opposing contraception itself, Dannenfelser and her ilk surrender any and all right to claim that their motivations are, at all, about protecting unborn human life.

So if, as I think is an inescapable conclusion that Dannenfelser's organization is interested in far more than opposing abortion, what is their intention instead?

Pema Levy concludes, as do I, that (emphasis mine.)

Dannenfelser's statement has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with the idea that women should, literally, bear the consequences of having sex.

I think that's about right. We can quibble about why the sam hill anyone would want women to think about sex in terms of consequences to be suffered. But there's no quibbling that that is indeed the only conceivable purpose of opposing contraception.

Want a little tip about contraception?

Not one single woman I know has had an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy with a man who's had a successful vasectomy. Not a single woman on earth has had an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy with a man after having a successful tubal ligation.

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What Senate Candidate Christine O'Donnell Really Means When She Opposes Masturbation

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-09-15 11:25

Not to just keep citing Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think all day long but, well, she is a reporter and her beat recently has been at the rather important intersection of sex, gender, and politics.

Anyway, she dug up this jewel of debased thinking from over-the-top anti-sex conservative Christine O’Donnell, as of last night’s primary is now the tea-bag fueled Republican candidate for Senator from Delaware.

O’Donnell first rose to national prominence as the founder and president of the SALT, an anti-masturbation youth ministry. In 1996, she and her fellow salteens appeared on MTV’s series “Sex in the Nineties” to explain why masturbation is a form of adultery that will render your future married sex life irrelevant. “[I]f he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?” O’Donnell asked earnestly.

Read the quote in context here.

I mean… I just feel sorry for anyone who’s worldview includes the notion that the only possible hold a woman can have on a man in a relationship is to supply him with sexual gratification. And anyone with the corollary view that unless she’s the sole source of his gratification that her relationship with her partner is imperiled!

And I hate to say I told you so but this is exactly the sort of thing that illustrates my contention that anti-feminists loathe and fear men far more than even the fringe-iest 70s radical separatist ever did.

In other words when it comes to world views about heterosexuality the biggest difference between O’Donnell and, say, Twisty Faster, is that Twisty doesn’t think it’s just the best thing to come along since before cheese slicers went on sale at Whole Foods. The only other big difference is that Twisty’s got the integrity to say women who don’t want to become men’s “cum dumpsters” should be allowed to have access to the kind of jobs, education, respect, medical care, and legal and social standing that will let them live fulfilling lives without effectively exchanging access to their bodies for economic support and physical “protection.” As opposed to O’Donnell who seems to think the solution is for women to hold out for the best possible deal.

Sweet mother of pearl!

——

Oh, and based on Beyerstein’s quote, what are the odds the idea that it’s simply never registered to O’Donnell that women are also capable of masturbation? The odds that it would occur to her that women’s masturbation habits would affect their chances of having sex would be even lower.

Heads up! The bogus Two Rules of Desire should not be model legislation!

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It's Not Feminists Who Hate Men Item #1,4134,325: Senator Ensign's Single Donor For the Year Edition

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-04-23 19:31

Speaking of disgraceful outings, via yesterday’s mid-day political-news roundup at DailyKos, here’s word about admitted adulterer Nevada Senator John Ensign, who’s also under investigation for abuses of office for attempting to hush things up…

Jon Ensign had just ONE donor all of 2009, and TPM talked to him.

“He did some bad things with his personal life,” Robert Donald, a Las Vegas retiree, told TPMmuckraker. “But as a senator, he’s doing the right thing. He votes the right way.”

He added: “He’s back with his family, so I don’t see any problems.”

Besides, Donald said, “all men are dogs, the way I look at it.”

Donald added a whopping $50 to Ensign’s coffers.

Read the quote in context here.

Adultery is pretty par for the course for conservatives, as is abuse of power, nepotism, and mis-allocation of funds. What seems to have sunk Ensign is that he did the latter in combination with the former. Otherwise he’d have had considerably more than one donation last year from…

...a bunch of other anti-feminist assholes who

... largely agree with Robert Donald that “all men are dogs.”

They’re also the people who insist no, really, it’s feminists that hate men!

Sweet mother of pearl!

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Pulitzer or No Pulitzer, Kathleen Parker's a Moron: Real Men Actually Do Talk About Vaginas in Public

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2010-04-12 15:41

So anti-feminist darling Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post just won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

The editors at The American Prospect blog TAPPED posted a reminiscence of Parker by TAP’s Kerry Howley from last November’s print issue. (Emphasis mine.)

Save the Males, Kathleen Parker’s 2008 polemic on sexual permissiveness and libertinism, contains the following euphemisms for vagina: “inner sanctum,” “familiars,” “you know what,” “very private parlor,” “sacred vessel,” “vestal vestibule,” and “hirsute abyss of God’s little oven.” We will be, laments Parker in her obligatory chapter on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, so “awash in vaginaism,” that we are nothing beyond “vaginas on the plain seeking out other vaginas with which to hold hands and gaze unlongingly into the silky night of a manless moon.” We have abandoned a better, gentler America, a place where women were “above this sort of thing,” a nation where men did not “talk about vaginas in public.”

Read the quotes in context here

Funny. Just yesterday a friend asked me about unusual vaginal discharge and I told her what I knew about it. Worse (from Kathleen Parker’s perspective, I suppose) I grabbed a couple of medical reference books, did some follow-up research on Google, and we talked about that too.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Because I’ve been in intimate relationships with women for a number of decades, and therefore I’m relatively familiar with different kinds of discharges, I briefly considered suggesting I take a quick look at her vagina. I balked, however, because in order to do that I’d have seen her vulva as well. We’re not on those sort of terms, however, and so I don’t think either of us would have been comfortable with that.

While I feel Parker should feel reassured by my reservations I have a feeling she wouldn’t be. I expect she’d be appalled that I’m familiar enough with “inner sanctums,” “familars,” “you know whats,” “hirstute abyss of God’s little ovens” (though statistics suggest these days they’re actually hirsute only about half the time), and “down theres” that I can distinguish vaginas from vulvas.

Meanwhile I’m embarrassed that Parker doesn’t make the distinction.

And speaking of distinctions, what’s the difference between “talking about vaginas in public” and writing about them, disparagingly no less, in the pages of the Washington Post?

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Amanda Hess On the Dour Expectations of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists vs. Genuine Male Utility

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2010-04-12 14:25

So the other day I spoke with blind optimism (tempered with a great deal of anticipatory pragmatic despair) about a “male studies” program founded by the usual anti-feminist suspects. At least so far nobody I’ve read has had more to say about the program than Amanda Hess. And evidently as a result, as far as I know nobody I’ve read has gotten more anti-feminist whining in comments on her blog at Washington City Paper.

In the link above Hess directly answers most of the dozen or so tropes that make up the entire core of male discontent with feminism. (That would be another reason a legitimate “male studies” curriculum would spend no more than eight minutes of class time on feminist oppression of men since virtually all damage done to men is collateral and/or self-inflicted damage upon ourselves and each other.)

I wanted to call out one particular instance because it speaks to an instance of male oppression that has nothing at all to do with “feminist oppression” but instead illustrates perfectly why men’s and/or male studies should focus instead on the impact of anti-feminism on men.

In the exchange below, the commenter calls on the anti-feminist expectation that men sacrifice their lives for women and children.

If you think you have it so hard why not trade places? Have the guys sit at home and play housewife while you get marched off to your death for god and country? Have the guys get in the lifeboats with the kids with you go down with the ship?

Amanda Hess carves that little conceit into giblets (emphasis mine)

... I’m afraid that if we actually traded places, I would be forced to sit at a computer and file nonsensical blog comments expressing outrage at outmoded gender analogies that I am unwilling to work to deconstruct, for I am an anti-feminist blog troll, in this scenario. So yes, in this case, women do have it better.

Read the quotes in context here.

At the end of the day, in even the most disaster or war-torn countries (say, England during the World Wars) or subcultures (say, inner-city America) or regions (say, post-Katrina Louisiana or post-tsunami Sumatra) the vast majority of men live natural lifespans.

And, as Hess points out, instead of “theirs is not to question why / theirs is but to do or die”-ing it in the Charge of the Light Brigade, most men, and certainly most anti-feminist trolls sacrifice nothing. Except, evidently, their dignity, less-evidently but no-less certainly, their self-esteem.

That contrast between men’s acquired social expectation on the one hand, and men’s lived experience on the other, would be something else a real “male studies” program could really dig into. Unless, of course, it tried to somehow tie that scrutiny to some kind of criticism of feminism — because as Hess points out feminists are almost dead set against men sacrificing themselves in general, and against men self-selecting themselves for violent sacrifice for “womankind” in particular. And consequently trying to find any negative links with feminism would be a colossal waste of time.

I ought to point out that another, less overt resentment embodied in the commenter’s remark is the anxious middle-class male certainty that “when the big one hits” men like them will be completely dispensed with, as “alpha males,” (often “big black” African Americans in these fantasies) take all the food, property, and (white) women for themselves, leaving NiceGuys™ like themselves to die isolated and alone.

When, in fact, even in the most war-torn and catastrophe-ridden places that still doesn’t happen: strong, healthy men tend to be sent to the front lines, and when they return the heterosexual ones still tend to enter into relationships with at most one woman and, of course, the homosexual men “take” no women at all.

So again, if I were embarking on an inquiry into “male studies,” and the “enormous relation between … a person’s biology and their behavior” Professor Tiger claims he’d like to examine, I’d definitely want to take a look at the disconnect between the roles men imagine they’re supposed to fill vs. the roles they actually fill. I’d further examine the source of that intense, and intensely irrational, indoctrination that leads perfectly average men to believe they serve no purpose and that they’re neither desired nor desirable to the very partners that… they are married to by the tens and hundreds of millions.

Again (and again, and again) these are the guys who imagine feminists hate men. And imagine that anti-feminists are on their side.

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Beyerstein on GOP Strip-Club Debacle: 'Wingers Don't Just Want Roe Overturned, They Won't Donate Till They See Women In Chains!

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-04-02 21:06

In the midst of a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-probably-fire stroll through other Republican National Committee expense-report filings Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think says of the RNC’s notorious expensing of a trip to a “girl on girl” bondage-themed strip club. (Emphasis mine.)

Even the infamous trip to the strip club was legitimate from a campaign finance point of view, despite being a PR nightmare. The staffers were apparently courting donors: These hard-driving captains of industry are not putting down cash on some vague promise of overturning Roe. Apparently, rich Republicans won’t cough up the big bucks until they actually see women in bondage.

She said it here.

The rest of her article, which is about other… questionable expense items and the remarkable lack of oversight for campaign fundraising expenditures is pretty good too. But those last two sentences? Ouch!

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Picky Picky Boy

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2009-05-27 20:54

Ezra Klein, now of The Washington Post finds… problems with erstwhile blogger Ross Douthat, now yet another conservative columnist at the New York Times.

Ross Douthat wrote a column yesterday bemoaning the decline of female happiness. The takeaway is that women are less happy, both in absolute terms and relative to men, than they were before Betty Friedan published her manifesto. “All the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness,” Ross writes.

That is, I think, what we’d call a correlation/causation error. There’s no evidence that women wouldn’t be much more unhappy without the advancements of the past 50 years. Same goes for men, for that matter. Both groups would be, among other things, quite a bit poorer. And this data would be measuring something else for women: Happiness at home, rather than at home and at work. Meanwhile, some of the data directly contradict Ross’s reading.

...

What’s striking about [a graph Klein posts from the pdf-format paper Douthat cites] is not that women are less happy. It’s that men and women alike — that is to say, everyone — have grown markedly less happy over that time period. Women’s satisfaction has dropped a bit more quickly, but not all that much. And the two sexes are much closer to each other than to their 1960s-era selves. Or take this data [in a second chart], on suicide rates

...

As the authors say, “contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample.” This is the sort of thing that economists might call “revealed preference.” Happiness is a subjective measure. Suicide rates aren’t.

Which is all to say that data this broad are, inevitably, a bit of a Rorschach test. A lot of variables go into individual happiness, after all. Among them, expectations. The Danish are famous for being very happy because they expect very little. Women might be less happy because they now have the opportunity to desire more from life. Or maybe not. The best we can say, really, is that the data are sort of interesting.

Read the quote in context here.

In other words Douthat’s not even coughing up apple- and orange-shaped hairballs. To do that he’d at least need to compare breakouts of stay-at-home vs. working women both from the years before and after feminism. And failing to mention that both men and women are measurably less happy today than they were before feminism doesn’t seem terribly honest. Also, to paraphrase Paul Krugman, “Um, dismantled safety net?”

Which raises the most significant point: a lot of things have changed in the last 50 years that pundits from across the spectrum could have chosen to blame for both the overall and sex-specific declines in happiness. Everything from the collapse of labor unions to the introduction of The Pill to Brown vs. Board of Education to prohibition of (forced) prayer in school to the advent of color television to the British Invasion to industrial competition from Japan and other Asian nations to civil rights to voting rights to the discovery of LSD to the Miranda Rights decision to… to… to… yeah, there are some things for progressives to be sour about but by and large it’s complaint a la carte for conservatives.

Yet the single issue Douthat pulled out of that giant bingo cage to blame for all that unhappiness was feminism?

Hmmm. Agenda much?

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Because Now Men Are So Superior We Can't Concentrate Either! :-)

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-06-16 22:15

Hugo Schwyzer, feminist, takes to task Kathleen Parker, anti-feminist.

“Boys and girls are hard-wired differently, which one notices as soon as the little critters become mobile. Although there are exceptions, girls can sit and focus for long periods and boys need to move around more. In fact, brain research shows that multitasking stimulates the pleasure center of women’s brains, hence 42 years of NOW. The men’s movement has been in gestation for 15 years and hasn’t begun to quicken yet. Ultimately, letting men be men means not insisting that they be our best girlfriends.”

I wonder how Kathleen Parker explains the feats of memory undertaken by Torah students for three millennia, who do relatively little moving around and learn with dutiful exactness? Or how the Chinese civil service survived nearly as long with a nearly all-male membership, made up of fellows who spent hours not only committing the law to memory, but learning how to shape complex characters? How could they have done these things, when it is so “natural” for boys and men to be easily distracted and in need of constant physical exertion?

Read the quote in context here.

Actually I think the men’s movement has had a hard time getting off the ground because we’ve been fiddling with a variety of unproductive or counterproductive goals and hampered a great deal by the “worthiness trap” dilemma of thinking we can only “get it” when approve. And possibly “reward” us with sex. Which is almost exactly the opposite of what I’m pretty sure we need to be doing. Which would have a lot to do with getting over the whole alienated conceit that sex is a reward, a counter, a sign of approval, or “getting lucky” or a ‘score” for anything and, instead, recognizing that it’s just something our partners want to do because they enjoy it too.

Remember, “entitlement” is nothing but an uncorroborated belief that you’ve done something that, in your opinion, warrants someone else “rewarding” you for it.)

The hoot about the interview Schwyzer quotes, by the way, is that it comes from a Father’s Day post by the equally extreme right-wing blogger Kathryn Jean Lopez on the National Review Online interview. The lead paragraph?

It’s Father’s Day this weekend, in a land where men are underappreciated, disrespected, and under attack. Kathleen Parker is here to save them, with her cultural wakeup call, Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care. She recently took questions on her new book from NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Source: I don’t like linking to those people.

So us master-gender men “hard wired” to be impulsive thugs? And anti-feminists are supposed to be on our side? Sheah, right. Save the males indeed!

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If Your Hymen Is Duct Tape Then Who's the Garbage Can?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2008-01-05 00:59

So you may or may not have seen this “public service” video illustrating a standard abstinence-only device…

Jessica Valenti of Feministing has a perfectly reasonable reaction:

Okay, I’m well aware that this “PSA” was probably made for some class project, but I really think it shows how frigging bizarre (and dangerous) abstinence-only classes are. I mean, fucking duct tape? I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that of the many places the slutty piece of tape gets stuck, a garbage can is shown multiple times. (Just in case you didn’t get the sex-is-dirty message clearly enough.) After all, there’s nothing worse than trashy, whorey, adhesives.

She said it here.

I’d like to share her objection and add my own.

See, my New Year’s blogging resolution has been to point out just how much conservatives, “traditionalists,” and all-round anti-feminists despise men! So what better place to point out that if they’re proposing duct tape as a metaphor for virginal women then WTF does the filthy, disgusting, slimy, disease-laden, virginity-sullying garbage can in the video represent?

Even with our eyes closed we can tell they don’t like women. What’s bizarre is that once we do open our eyes we see how much they detest men.

The miracle is that they get so many of us, so many men, to believe feminists are the problem! Weird huh?

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More on men in the kitchen, women in cars

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2007-10-29 13:12


Photo by Flickr user AnaCamila. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hugo Schwyzer reports on the details of a fascinating conversation with an older anti-feminist woman who, as a young woman, volunteered for Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum/STOP ERA crusade to keep women separate and unequal.

One point Schwyzer makes that’s dear to my heart:

The “complementarian” view of marriage, to which YM and other anti-feminists tend to subscribe, sees men and women as fundamentally ill-suited to step outside traditional roles. This “separate spheres” ideology assumes women are better nurturers, better parent-figures, better home-makers; men are better leaders, better earners, better protectors. In a complementarian marriage, each does for the other what he or she cannot (because of their sex) do for themselves.

A feminist marriage, like a complementarian marriage, recognizes that two different people will always have different gifts. But a feminist marriage doesn’t assign roles based on sex — it allows for flexibility based not on genitalia but on desire and on need. My wife will be the one getting pregnant, and nothing can change that — I can’t take on that role. But when it comes to earning, spending, cleaning, planning, building, washing, dreaming, shopping, and caring — we are both equally well-equipped as full and complete human beings to do these tasks. We both wear pants in our family.

He says this and more here.

I’ll probably have more to say about Schwyzer’s correspondent in another post but for now I’d just like to say that the “separate spheres” or yin/yang theory of gender looks like handcuffs. I mean if there’s some “man’s area” that the man happens to be bad at or incapable of then the couple’s screwed. And they’re not screwed because the woman can’t take up the slack but because she shouldn’t. And, for that matter, she’d better fucking not or, as is the case of women driving in, say, Saudi Arabia, she can go to jail if she gets caught. Same if, for instance, she’s a lousy cook and he’d be pretty good at it — the two-sphere model says they should both eat cold food out of cans because it’s wrong for him to cook.

Or wrong for men to cook at home anyway. He could still be a chef. I still remember being reassured that while I could never grow up to be a “cafeteria lady” at my elementary school — a job that seemed like paradise since they had all that cool equipment and, I imagined, could eat all the dessert they wanted — my sister shouldn’t tease me because unlike her I could grow up to be a chef and chefs were always more important cooks than cafeteria ladies.

I choose those two examples because they really are so arbitrary. There’s nothing magical about a threshold such that a man can cook outside but not inside the home. And as far as I know even Ann Coulter, Wendy Shalit believe women should be allowed to drive.

Now to be fair, in Schwyzer’s notion of feminist marriage there may still be gaps in what can be accomplished but if so they’re bound to be fewer and, I’m guessing, regarded more sympathetically when both sides recognize it’s not “supposed” to be a gender assignment. And as long as I’m reminiscing about my extreme youth I also remember more than one father in my neighborhood comparing “his” wife’s poor cooking or ironing skills to someone else’s. He might not have been able to do a better job but the (totally arbitrary, remember) “two sphere” model forbade either of them from finding out.

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