Why sexual assault is fine and abortion is not

Very good, succinct take on the blatant Repub double standard.

I think the only thing holding up their transparently false claim to any kind of moral support is the media. If the media didn’t report their thinly disguised hostility to women and women’s rights as a “valid moral concern”, the Repubs could not continue to use it.

And of course, there’ve always been the ostensible “liberal” males who view women the same way. The author of that Dailybeast article cited above is obviously one. I’d written a longer comment about his infuriating position that got deleted by Firefox as I was updating that computer, but Joy Reid said it better anyway:

Per Lewis, all Democrats have to do to win people like him away from the defenders of child molesters and authoritarians is to abandon women. (Not far off those who argue Dems would do better abandoning "niche" civil rights issues.) ^[7]— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) ^[8]

arrrgh – even with preview! Make that “claim to *any* kind of”.

PDXpat, spamasaurus snaffled your comment because of the two good links. Sorry about that. Fixed the typo.

Yes, the media is at fault. They loooove a good old-fashioned he-said-she-said gossipathon stay-tuned-for-more-after-this BS. And I’m not sure anyone could have put brakes on that process without better free speech and broadcasting laws.

But going way back to the dawn of this particular reactionary train, in the late 1970s, when fundies were (rightly) considered cultists in need of deprogramming, it was a huge mistake to let them define the terms.

They were never pro-life. It was always obvious. (Pro death penalty, pro guns, etc etc) They were anti sex for women. That was always obvious too. But it’s only recently that people have begun calling them anti-choice, which is way too mild. Forced pregnancy is the right term.

But they didn’t get adequately jumped on in the beginning, because religious freedom or some crap, they were allowed to drape themselves in their holier-than-thou terminology, and here we are. A hair’s breadth away from full-on Gilead.

And losing the glimmer of hope of ever getting out of it in the parts of the world where it’s been in force the whole time.

By the way, I want to mention that the great line about “equality is poison when your worth depends on power over others” is something I saw out on the wide and wonderful web, but I don’t remember when or where.

“equality is poison when your worth depends on power over others”

I guess I don’t get this at all. Really. And I trust your perception enough to get that it’s something I’m not getting.

So many women I knew, in the past that was another country in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, had an easy acceptance of the equality the laws (and temporary enforcement thereof) and the media granted them, When the backlash happened, they reverted to their previous place. With gusto.

My own integrity depended on not doing this. But fighting for simple equality proved to be the hardest thing I could have done in my life. As a woman of any race, I was not “privileged” in this country, outside of subjection to a man of my race. I chose not to do that at the age of 18. believing in those times that I had a chance to succeed as an autonomous adult.

Women who fight for women’s rights do not fight for power over others. I know you don’t mean this, but I don’t know what you do mean.

I have to add that my own non-negotiable commitment to women’s equality came from a study I did in my first year in college in embryology.

I was already inclined that way, but looking at the various ways animals get sex done convinced me that all the human layering of dreck on top of that one edict was purest baloney. All the animals I looked at carried on their lives more or less outside of reproduction, and human males weren’t even anywhere near the top of their own ridiculous sexual hierarchy.

If you based your place on men’s own constructed sexual pyramid, males are down among the invertebrates, without even separate urinary and genital tracts. Whereas women are at the apex. Our very class is named after what only women are capable of.

Males provide a trigger and half the blueprint. Women provide half the blueprint and all of the structure, including the wondrous four dimensional map that is DNA. And do this so unfailingly, under such incredibly diverse circumstances, that if this were all there were to human worth, we should still be worshiped.

It’s not, of course. Human beings are equal in all the capacities that make us human. Racism is as much a sheer illogical waste as sexism. Both prejudices are like blocking out the sun from whole swaths of the human race.

Funny with language how easy it is to fill in words and not realize they aren’t actually there and that what I just wrote isn’t necessarily comprehensible. 🙁

To me, that sentence means: if you derive your sense of self-worth from having power over others — instead of, say, from having been kind and helpful to them — then equality is poison to you. Meaning you can’t stand to see it anywhere. You can’t stand the possibility of it. You can’t live and let live because if some people are doing just fine living as friends and peers, not masters and subhumans, it’s a direct threat to your whole universe.

The sentence was an unsarcastic comment on the mind of the sort of people the rest of the post was being sarcascatic about.

As for embyology, yes, no eyeliner or studly tires anywhere to be seen. One thing you’re not quite right about. Sperm doesn’t provide half the blueprint. Mitochondria, the little organelles inside all our cells that produce most of our energy, have their own DNA, and that comes only from the egg since sperm don’t contribute mitochondria.

Another thing about blueprints contributed by the egg (not part of what you mentioned). Somehow, they haven’t quite got it worked out yet, the egg contains the information on how that blueprint is to be read. So they can’t just combine the female half of the chromosomes and the male half and create an embryo in any old cell. They have to use an egg, which somehow knows what to do with all that, even though its own DNA-containing nucleus has been removed.

Thank you for clearing up my confusion about the equality quote. It does make sense, once you explained it. I hope I haven’t reached the “dense years”, but lately it seems like it.

Wow – thanks also for the clarification on mitochondria (hah! a new word for spell-check!) and what female gametes do. It’s even more elegant and precise than I suspected – though I did get a giggle out of a Disneyfied mental image of conception. Eyeliner, forsooth!

Somehow, the fact that all not yet known is cheering, too. I remember when “they” didn’t know quite how photosynthesis worked then reading in Scientific American around 1986 that there’d been a breakthrough in knowledge about energy transfer. That progress is always being made somewhere is encouraging.

One more thing to add to the abortion issue, and then I’ll stop not-commenting 🙂 –
I remember when the media and people around me started to question whether abortion should have been as available and unremarkable as it was (there really was such a time, even in Georgia, in the mid to late 70′). One thing that seemed to emerge was that a lot of people of both sexes couldn’t bear the thought that their mothers might not have wanted them – in other words, they identified much more with a fertilized egg than with women. The media used this angle a lot, too.

It wasn’t any use explaining that if either parent had sneezed at a critical moment or just gone shopping instead, they themselves would not exist – that unique combination of DNA would not have happened. As a woman, of course, there was the additional argument that the autonomy of an actual existing human being must take precedence over forcing a potential one into existence.

“Mommy might not have wanted me??” seemed to be a wedge point for a lot of adults and, I suspect, still is.

“Mommy might not have wanted me” as the big motivator for forced pregnancy? ?? Wow. Just wow. What will they think of next?

If you were that horrible as a kid, Mommy could have offed you in a hundred ways that law enforcement could never detect.

And before you (generic you!) were a kid, it wouldn’t have been *you*. Fetuses aren’t known for their vivid internal world of thoughts. Embryos even less so. So Mommy couldn’t have been deciding on an abortion specifically to get rid of you.

Besides, who would want to grow up with someone whose dearest wish had been to abort you?

People. I swear. Can’t think their way out of a tissue paper bag.

“And before you (generic you!) were a kid, it wouldn’t have been *you*”

That was the point I was trying to make! That identification with a hypothetical bundle of cells, rather than a real woman (possibly a Mommy who hadn’t catered to their every whim?)

People, indeed! Amazing to think this is the same species that accomplished all the great human achievements.