The idea that women should be able to have babies when they want to doesn’t seem as controversial as the idea that women should be able to NOT have babies when they don’t want to, especially when the latter involves abortion. And yet it is not a right that has been consistently protected. But, while abortion rights are denied to the poor via practical obstacles, like people saying they don’t want their government funds to go to something they oppose and therefore poor people not being able to afford abortion, people have purposely targeted the poor and minorities when it comes to denying people the right to reproduce. So instead of arguing that the denial of this right is wrong, like I did with abortion rights, I’m going to assume that you can see how it’s wrong already and that I just need to show that it has happened a lot and keeps happening, although nowadays often in more subtle ways.  I can’t cover every single incident, but here are some basics.

Forced sterilization (without consent, sometimes even without knowledge):

Targeted groups have included the Roma (gypsies), African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, the mentally ill, and criminals.  I’m also betting on Australian aboriginals.

Forced sterilization has been the law in Peru, Japan, Sweden, Australia, and the US and more.

States (27) that had sterilization laws still on the books (though not all were still in use) in 1956 were: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah,Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin.^[9]

Forced abortion:

China (here’s a fun look at Pat Robertson’s hypocrisy)

This is the story of two allegedly forced abortions in the US.  I’m skeptical because the source is a pro-life(tm) organization, and they’re not always into telling the truth about abortions.  But if this is true, it is wrong, and ties into the way doctors should respect their patients’ ownership of their bodies more, which I mention below.

Coercive sterilization (taking advantage of someone’s limited options):

Undocumented women in Pennsylvania were allowed access to tubal ligations (without cost) but no help for other shorter term birth control methods. (This blogger thinks that was a reference to this story, which still classifies as what I consider “coercive” while not “forced” or “compulsory.” The laws may not exist in the US anymore, but the attitudes still do, and that is my point. Here’s more on what’s wrong with that story.)

Justice Now says there are still unnecessary hysterectomies performed on women of color in prison (this, on the other hand, may count as forced.) In fact, unnecessary hysterectomies are common in general, which ties into the problem of the medical community not always respecting women’s ownership of their bodies and making choices based more on convenience or payment for them than on results for the patient (example 1, 2 of this - more coming when my computer stops fighting with me.)

In 1989 free tubal ligations were offered to poor women in rural South Carolina. How much you wanna bet the same offer was not being given for reversible forms of birth control? (This link also points out an interesting legal phenomenon with implications for both sides of reproductive justice: a person is not SUPPOSED to be able to be forced to undergo surgery for the sake of someone else, and yet women are.)

Coercive abortion:

With the stigma of teen or unwed pregnancy, sometimes pregnant women can be pressured by others or just feel pressure from their culture to abort a fetus that they would otherwise keep.  Violence against pregnant women is also a serious problem and is often an attempt at inducing an abortion.  Additionally, in some cultures (here’s an article on India) there is pressure to abort female fetuses because institutionalized sexism creates financial and social privileges to having sons and disadvantages to having daughters.  Sex-based privileges and disadvantages are not unique to those cultures; think of the naming system we have in the US (no female juniors or the thirds), think of the way the parents of daughters worry more about rape, pregnancy, and “purity” than the parents of sons, think of the European rulers ( Henry VIII, Napoleon) who got rid of wives who didn’t bear sons to be heirs.  But in some places, these differences are more directly tied to finances because of dowries, limited career options for women, and patrilineal systems (where women become part of their husband’s family, leaving their own), which puts more pressure on couples to eliminate female fetuses, especially if they are pressured by law or by financial limitations to only have a certain number of children. 

Needless to say (actually, with some people it is needed), outlawing abortion doesn’t fix these problems.  Especially the violence one!  Sexism is the main problem here.

Barriers to childbirth:

Maternal and infant mortality rates are a big problem where people are too poor to afford good health care, where discrimination leads health care workers to give substandard care to certain people, and where health care infrastructures just aren’t there.  Here’s reproductiverights.org on this issue in Nigeria, in Brazil, and in the US among African American women: African American women are four times more likely than white women to die in childbirth.

The new trend is looking at birth rates in Western countries, and the immigration rates into Western countries from Muslim and other countries, and fretting that Team White is going to lose the population game. The racism inherent in this fretting is hardly even veiled, as people imply that there really is a race-based Us and Them, and that the consequences of Them outnumbering Us in our countries would be catastrophic. Though they don’t often explain why. I do think it would suck if Western countries adopted Islam-based laws, but I also think it sucks when Western countries adopt Christianity-based laws, and the people who I see fretting here are in favor of the latter, so it’s not the separation of church and state that’s bothering them - it’s losing their dominance. Meanwhile, encoding the separation of church/mosque and state real deep in our legal institutions would mean there would be very little to fear from changes in demographics, unless you fear brown people and their culture. Back then, “President Coolidge said that “America must remain American,” which is in relation to the fact that some of those targeted for sterilization were immigrants (Piotrowski, 2000).” That sounds a little too much like what people are saying now.

Someone I actually like read a book about this, possibly this one but I’m not sure, and said jokingly “I want to kill as many Muslims as possible.” Replace “Muslims” in that sentence with “Jews.” Sound familiar? Now explain to me why feminists like me are the ones who get called Nazis, while conservatives like him are the ones calling people Nazis.  He’s not going to start any death camps, but still.

As you can see, this is an issue that ties a lot of things together: ableism, racism, sexism, poverty, several aspects of healthcare (from doctors treating patients as human beings to ways of adequately funding pregnancy care), and more.  It’s even an issue that those who disagree on abortion rights can agree on, although sometimes they still don’t.  We need to start by asserting that all women own their own bodies, and then focus on making that principle work in practice, despite obstacles like racism and poverty.

I think I’ve read and had enough of them, on both sides, to sum up the main positions of both sides.  I’ll argue from the pro-choice point of view and include the pro-life(tm) rebuttals that I know of (and used to give).

1. The Life/Personhood Argument

Pro-life argument: It’s human, and it’s alive, and that’s enough for it to have the right to live.

Response:  It is human and alive, but it is not a “person.”

Counterargument A: But it has a soul!

Response to A: We can’t prove whether it has a soul or not.  Laws should not be based on religion.

Counterargument B: But it might grow up to cure cancer!

Response to B: If you have go have sex with someone you don’t like during a full moon, you or she might get pregnant with a kid that will grow up to cure cancer.  It’s possible!  But I don’t recommend it.  We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.  It’s hard for us to accept that limiting the number of human lives could be a good thing, because once someone is here, we’d feel terrible thinking they shouldn’t have been born.  And yet, we can’t strive to have as much human life as possible.  It’s destructive to exceed a certain population, on several levels.  Innumerable potential human beings were never conceived, or never implanted, or were never born, human beings that could have been your bestest friend or great inventors or serial killers.  It’s difficult for the human psyche to accept, but it’s necessary.  Non-spontaneous abortion is not necessary, but given these facts, it cannot be proven wrong on the basis of depriving us of one more human life.

Counterargument C: What defines a person?  Is a human in a vegetative state not a person?  Is a chimpanzee a person? 

Response to C: (I think I first saw this sort of response by Jill at Feministe, but I can’t find the link so far.)Even if it is difficult to define, people don’t act like they really believe that a very early-stage fetus is as much of a person as you or me.  More fertilized eggs die than are implanted, but we don’t mourn this.  The ones that are implanted still have a fairly high rate of spontaneous (natural) abortion, many of which are not even noticed.  If we were to consistently apply the belief that every fertilized human egg is a person with all the same rights as other people, we would have to check menstrual fluid for dead bodies and investigate women who had miscarriages, and maybe even require fertile women to adhere to dietary and other guidelines in order to avoid hurting a person that might be living in them without them even knowing it yet.  It would end up violating the rights to privacy and bodily autonomy of women, which we turn to next. 

Pro-lifers(tm) will have to take argument #2 (which they very often ignore) into account in some way unless they are willing to argue that all killing of human beings is to be avoided no matter what the extenuating circumstances or competing rights.  In that case, they would have to be anti-war, anti-death penalty, anti-euthanasia, anti-murdering abortion providers, anti-poverty, pro-free and accessible comprehensive sex ed, birth control (though possibly not the hormonal kind) and STD tests, pro-HPV vaccine, and maybe even in favor of legal abortion, since, as we’ll see in argument #3, outlawing abortion has pretty much nothing to do with reducing the number of human deaths.  On the other hand, if a pro-lifer(tm) thought some killing was okay and it depends on the circumstances, they would have to deal with argument #2 to say why it doesn’t make the cut.

Pro-choicers will probably need to rely on some form of argument #2 if they want to argue that late-term abortion, when the fetus is more person-like, is not immoral.  However, even if they do find late-term abortion to be immoral, they can still argue that it should be legal by argument #3.

2. The Bodily Autonomy Argument

We do not force people to give their bodily organs to others, even if others would die without them.  We should not force women to give the use of their body to a fetus, even if the fetus will die without it.  Roderick T. Long wrote a really fancy form of this argument, that explains how it can be consistent to believe that women have a right to abort fetuses but not to abandon newborns (via RadGeek).  Here’s a quote from it:

Counterargument A: Except in the case of rape, the woman chose to put herself at risk for pregnancy by having sex.  She shouldn’t have had sex if she wasn’t ok with getting pregnant.  Since she had sex, she has the responsibility to house the fetus; she has forfeited the above right.

Response to A:  We do things that involve risks all the time, but that doesn’t mean we forfeit the right to respond if the risky thing does happen.  For instance, if I have surgery and a doctor does something wrong, I can sue, even though I knew that was possible.  If I drive and get in a wreck, I can go to the hospital, even though I knew that was possible.  Abortion should not be used as birth control, for both the woman’s and the fetus’s sakes, but it should be considered an option for addressing an unwanted pregnancy.  Counterargument A is circular.  If abortion is not an option, a person shouldn’t have sex unless they are willing to get pregnant.  But if abortion is an option, then a very small chance of getting pregnant, like that afforded by birth control, is acceptable.  You can’t prove abortion wrong by stipulating that it’s wrong and therefore not an option that a person should take into account.  Finally, note that this pro-life argument is based on the responsibility of a woman who engages in sex, NOT on the life of the fetus, and therefore abortions in the case of rape would be allowed unless this argument was combined with #1.

Long’s essay notes: <blockquote>The “parental obligations” objection to abortion, like the refusal to recognize rape in marriage, appears to stem from a traditional attitude that refuses to acknowledge women as autonomous individuals, and regards their bodies as mere resources to be used by family members.</blockquote>

Counterargument B: The difference between not requiring someone to give blood or a kidney and requiring someone to use their body for a fetus is that in the first case, the other person would die by an act of omission, while in the second case, the fetus would die by an act of comission, because you have to actually do something to have an abortion.

Response to B: Does that make a difference, given that the results are the same - a dead person?  In fact, you could also argue that it’s the first case that is worse, since the dead person would be one who is universally recognized to be a “person” with the right to life, whereas the fetus’s status and rights are debated.  I think whether or not the omission/comission difference changes the rules is a matter of opinion.  Should matters of opinion like that be legislated on?  Remember, our choices for legislation are asymmetrical: one tells a pregnant woman what she has to do: stay pregnant.  The other tells a pregnant woman that she can choose to stay pregnant or choose to have an abortion.  We are not entertaining any laws that will force anyone to have abortions (I am of course against laws like the one in China.)  So, should we make the opinion of some the law for all, or should we let each person act in accordance with their own opinion?

Long’s essay provides a stronger response to this counterargument, because he’s a philosophy professor and better at this than me.  So if you don’t buy mine, check out his.

Pro-lifers who do not accept an extreme pro-life position like the one I outlined at the end of argument #1 will have to consider argument #2, as I said.  Then they have three choices: they can overrule argument #2 altogether by supporting laws forcing everyone to be organ donors, they can accept the argument by supporting the legality of abortion, or they can try to find a distinction between organ donation and pregnancy that makes the first optional and the second, once begun, compulsory.  Then they will have to proceed to argument #3 and argue that this is not only the moral thing to do, but would also make a good law.

3. The Pragmatic Argument

As we can see by looking at countries where abortion is outlawed or at the past in the US, outlawing abortion - as well as making it more difficult to get - does not make abortions go away.  Rather, it makes abortions more dangerous.  Which would you prefer: having fetuses die, or having fetuses plus the women carrying them die?

Counterargument A: But they shouldn’t have had sex in the first place.

Response to A: When someone should or shouldn’t have sex is a matter of opinion and none of the government’s business, but even if it were ruled that they shouldn’t have had sex in the first place, it would be a little late for talking about that.  They’re pregnant, they want an abortion, and they’re going to try to have one any way they can.  Will you let them do it the safe way, or do you want them to be punished with possible injury and/or death (in addition to whatever legal consequences may be in place if they are caught)? 

Counterargument B: But the state shouldn’t condone abortion by making it legal. 

Response to B: The law is different from morality.  We need it to have the right effect on society, not to read like a Bible.  What good would it do if we had laws that matched your morality exactly, but that nobody followed?  That’s the lesson we learned from Prohibition.

Again, pro-lifers(tm) must combine this argument with another argument that explains why abortion is wrong in the first place; only after it has been deemed immoral can one begin to argue why it should also be illegal.  Since the law is different from morality, both types of arguments are needed for the pro-life(tm) side.  Alternatively, pro-lifers(tm) could argue only that legal abortion is bad for society in some pragmatic way, but to the contrary, non-coercive abortion is usually considered to be beneficial to society in a practical sense (due to the reason above, population control, and reduction of crime and poverty) even by those who object to it on moral grounds.  On the other hand, one can be pro-choice based on argument #3 even while believing that abortion is immoral.

***

In each of the three main arguments (and let me know if I missed anything), there is a little hint of the pro-life(tm) stance being more about sex, responsibility, and punishment than about fetal life.  First, there’s the way they don’t take their belief that the fetus is a person to its logical conclusions that its death should be treated the same as any other human death - with an investigation, obituary, and funeral, as well as charges of manslaughter, negligence, or murder for the woman if it is determined by the investigation that something she did contributed to the death.  If that doesn’t all make perfect sense for the pro-lifers(tm), what makes them pro-life(tm)?

Next, we see the idea that when a woman has heterosexual sex, she is basically entering into a contract with any resulting fetuses, even if she shows that she doesn’t want to get pregnant by using birth control.  We hear talk of irresponsibility and of accepting the consequences of your actions (those were the things that made me really angry about pro-choicers when I was pro-life(tm)).  We hear the phrase “shouldn’t have had sex in the first place,” which usually contains the incorrect assumption that all women who have abortions are unmarried and/or teenagers (will you tell a married couple to stop having sex once they can’t support any more children?).  Behind that phrase we see the idea that if you do something these people (that is, whoever says this - not all pro-lifers(tm)) deem immoral (have premarital sex), you deserve the punishment of having an unwanted pregnancy.  They rarely say this overtly and so I can’t say who thinks this way and who doesn’t, but I believe that it is at play in some pro-life(tm) stances, along with the idea, familiar from abstinence-only sex education, that if you don’t give help to people who break your rules of morality, you’ll convince more people to follow your rules, and as for the ones who break them anyway, well, sucks for them.  The fact that the plights of these rule-breakers can be bad for society is ignored, and later blamed on their inherent worthlessness rather than on the policies that shaped their circumstances.

This becomes even more clear in the last argument, in which pro-lifers(tm) make giving the impression that abortion is wrong a bigger priority than saving lives.  This is comparable to the way abstinence-only sex education proponents, who overlap with pro-lifers(tm), prefer to send kids the message that premarital sex is unacceptable rather than give them a way to prevent unwanted pregnancies when they do have sex (and many of them do, no matter what), which ironically creates a higher demand for abortion.  Both of these approaches rely on the assumption that when authority figures give people ways to cope with the risk of pregnancy, those people hear “Have all the sex you want!” and on the assumption that when authority figures don’t give people ways to cope with the risk of pregnancy, those people decide not to have sex.  These assumptions have not proven true.  These approaches also put the government in the business of telling people when not to have sex, which is none of its business.

This “tough on sex” approach does not work and is not fair.  It’s also sexist, as it is pitched harder at females than at males, and affects their health more directly.  The way a woman’s uterus is treated differently than anyone’s kidney could be seen as very sexist, in effect saying that a uterus is not the exclusive property of a woman, which chips away at women’s ownership of their own bodies, a right that worldwide sexism often tries to revoke in many different ways.  I think arguments based on sex, responsibility, and punishment are based in religion, which doesn’t belong in our laws, and hate, which I also don’t much care for.  I consider arguments based on fetal life, that is, based on what most pro-lifers(tm) claim (and I think believe) is their top priority, to be much more respectable and appropriate to the law, and yet there are major problems with them, as I discussed at the end of argument #1.

***

What would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned (a distinct possibility if McCain is elected and gets to appoint new Supreme Court justices)?  The decision on the legality of abortion would be up to the states rather than the federal government.  Some states (via Feministe) have laws ready to outlaw it whenever this may happen.  We can reasonably assume that blue states would legalize abortion and red states would outlaw it.  Thus, women who wanted abortions and lived in red states would travel to blue states to get abortions.  Obstacles to this would be the cost of travel and possibly of missing work, and the possibility of laws aimed at keeping this from happening.  I would bet that rich red-staters would find it relatively easy to get around these obstacles, while poor red-staters would have a harder time.  Thus I would predict a result of nothing changing except more poor people in red states either having unsafe abortions or having unwanted children that they would probably have difficulty supporting.  Sound like a good outcome?  The poor and the red-staters often have a harder time than others even now (via Feministe), but this scenario underscores the classism that would result from anti-abortion policies: as usual, the poor would be disproportionately affected.

In accordance with my new policy, I’ll be following this up with a post on coerced sterilization and abortion - the other side of reproductive rights.

So besides being a strong believer in human rights, I’m a cooking enthusiast, of the Alton Brown/www.cookingforengineers.com variety.  Both of these recommend using a scale to measure ingredients instead of measuring cups.  This combined with the fact that European recipes are often given in weight (www.onlineconversion.com makes metric to US no problem; it’s so cool it can also do weight to volume, but you know the accuracy of that is just not perfect) and that I HATE digging in the flour or sugar bag trying to fill a cup measure and that pouring till I get the right weight, taring, and repeating with the next ingredient all in one bowl sound super easy, have convinced me to invest in one.  Digital, to be precise (actually, accurate, but who’s counting). 

The problem is, there are a lot of choices out there and I have some idea of what matters but the descriptions don’t always explain everything.  So if anyone out there happens to have a digital kitchen scale, let me know how it works, which things you like or don’t like about it.  For instance, does it really work when they measure liquid in volume units?  I assume they assume that the liquid is water-based and calculate the volume based on the density of water, but that seems likely to be really inaccurate.  But I can’t figure out how else they’d do it without having a catalogue of liquids and densities, which they don’t seem to (and which I don’t care to mess with).  Following Alton Brown’s advice, I plan to measure liquids in medicine droppers and turkey basters as soon as I find graduated ones. 

I really want MyWeigh’s Uber Deluxe 6000, mostly because I can’t believe it’s really called that.  It looks like a fantastic scale though, although it has some extra stuff that I don’t need (I’m ok with actually touching buttons) and costs too much (I wouldn’t pay more than $60 for a scale, and the only reason that figure isn’t $50 is that Alton Brown recommends a $60 Salter one in his book Gear for Your Kitchen).  But still…Uber Deluxe 6000, guys!

Anyway, if I’ve convinced you to get one, here’s a page on why and how to buy.  But watch out, especially if you’re struggling with/recovering from an eating disorder; scales can be used for dieting and the people selling them know that, talk about it, and try to convince you how great it would be to have a pocket-sized dieting scale so you could check the serving size and caloric content of everything you eat no matter where you are.  If that sounds like a great idea to you, I recommend Shapely Prose as an antidote.

I don’t know how long this has been around unbeknownst to me, but I just saw the @ sign, whose name I only know in French oddly, used in the word Latin@s to show the masculine o or the feminine a. I love it! It was at RaceWire. Funny, since I just commented on Female Impersonator (still in moderation) about the annoying-ness of grammatical gender. Perhaps I’ll try to explain my feelings on that topic soon.

So this is annoying: people who haven’t worried about energy since the seventies are all the sudden remembering the seventies and going, hey, how come nobody has done anything to improve our energy situation since the seventies?

Um, that would be because you, the majority of voters in the US, didn’t make anyone do anything about it since the seventies.

Someone just wrote into my paper saying in one paragraph that senators wrongly worry about being re-elected instead of getting things done, and in the next paragraph that voters should hold them accountable.  Apparently never realized that voters were holding them accountable the whole time, and that was the problem.  Maybe this will lead some US voters to think about things besides their own immediate gain in their future voting and polling and so on?  Probably not though.

Now Obama is throwing the separation of church and state out the window; I was worried about McCain pandering to the evangelicals too much and then winning, but I didn’t realize I should worry about that with Obama.  I now see that given the current political climate and the current alliance between evangelical Christians and the deepest part of social conservatism, any politician who wins poll points by talking about religion is not to be trusted.  Not that any politicians are to be trusted, of course.  I listened to a physics class podcast by RIchard A. Muller in which, veering from physics a bit at one point, he likened a two-party political system to a long beach with two ice cream stands, and each one kept moving towards the center of the beach, knowing the people on the ends wouldn’t cross over and that the people in the middle could be better reached by moving inward.  Thus he concluded that two-party systems breed centrist politicians.  He seems pretty accurate.

Yesterday was the fourth of July.  Independence Day.  Supposed to be patriotic.  I had a hard time because my country tortures people.  But the food was good. 

I read the paper while I eat breakfast, but sometimes that just means I do the crossword puzzle.  But lately I have actually read some, and so I have one piece of good news and one piece of bad news.  I’ll start with the bad, always been a save the best for last kind of person.

Bad news: Someone who lives in my city wrote in to our paper that people who aren’t American citizens don’t have rights.  With an exclamation point, no less.  Problems with this include that it means we have some people, literate ones who live near me and sign their real name, who don’t think human rights for all humans is a good idea; that we have people who think America is the center of the universe and therefore don’t even bother to consider that other countries may have their OWN documents guaranteeing their OWN citizens rights; that we have people stupid enough and working in bad enough faith to come to the conclusion that “all men are…endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” means “only American men are endowed by their government with certain unalienable rights” (unless he’s the kind of patriot who doesn’t believe in the Declaration of Independence, but I haven’t met one of those yet) (obviously there’s a gender problem there but he was arguing that foreign men don’t have rights so that wasn’t even the issue); and that we have people stupid and overconfident enough not to realize that if other people’s rights don’t count to America, then American people’s rights shouldn’t count to the rest of the world.  That’s a lot of problems.

Good news: my paper covered a real feminist issue in a responsible way!  It was an issue afflicting a Muslim country and they didn’t even get all hate-mongery; rather, they pointed out that the biggest cause of the problem was something related to men wanting to control female sexuality.  They didn’t say it like that, but it was very straightforward with the facts, so anyone who isn’t completely anti-woman would probably see that as the problem if they bothered to think about it at all. 

So today I went to work for my first real day of my very part time summer job (yay), and this guy who works with me picked up a Skirt magazine (it’s a free feminist magazine) and started looking through it.  I don’t know him very well, although he seems like a lovely person.  I asked him if he reads it, and he said he’d never seen it before and figured he’d look through it throughout the day, since it was so slow.  Hmm.  I couldn’t figure out what he thought about it, but he gets points for being willing to be seen with a magazine called Skirt.  At one point I told him I didn’t know how I felt about the magazine (I’ve only seen it one other time, but I feel like it makes feminism look frivolous, but in reality I should just be glad that it uses the F-word and includes some feminist thought in something people I know in real life and didn’t meet at the campus women’s center might actually read) and he asked if I was a feminist.  “YEAH!” 

“Are you like, a radical feminazi?” 

“…I would call myself a feminazi just to spite the people who say ‘feminazi.’”

He found this very funny.  We’ll see.  I guess I shouldn’t worry about if people think it’s weird that I’m a feminist; it’s clear that I don’t hate men, and I call myself a feminist BECAUSE of it’s negative connotations.  Not because I’m that rebel who wants to shock and frighten people (SO not, which is clear from the fact that I was a little concerned), but because I think people need to learn, probably from a real person that they know and consider sane, what feminism ACTUALLY is.  Or can be, at any rate.

I keep telling myself that next time someone asks me if I’m a feminist I’ll say, yeah, are you?  Maybe someday.

SInce I have an odd lack of overflowing opinions lately, I dug up a draft (that’s why it talks about France in the present tense) and added a little to it. Voilà:

Lauredhel at Hoyden About Town and Shakesville does a great job of explaining something I’ve never been able to express intelligently before. You know when guys (thinking of a girl they like who makes them feel helpless) complain that women have all this power and it’s not fair and why would we need feminism when women are running the world anyway? They’re mistaken. Let’s use me as an example. I get hit on a few times a week here [edit: towards the end it was at least once a day]. Like three guys in my dorm have professed their “love” for me. I must have so much power! I must like, run France by now! Except I don’t, because instead of having sex with them in exchange for stuff, I tell them I have a boyfriend - then they give me a quizzical look, keep trying to get in my pants, and I finally just say no and walk away and make yet another mental note that having a boyfriend isn’t enough in this country - and then they walk out of my life forever. Unless they decide to try to get into my pants again a couple weeks later, in which case the above is repeated. [I got way more cool stuff from my female friends there, who are definitely into dudes.]

If I’m not willing to perform the duties of the sex class - whether that means having sex with them or giving them the impression that I’m going to have sex with them - my “power” vanishes. They don’t even want to talk to me. If they do keep talking to me, it’s only out of denial of the fact that I’m really not going to have sex with them.  (I’m only talking about the guys who hit on me in the first place, by the way; there was a very very small handful of guys who treated me like a friend the whole time, which I appreciated.)

But can you ever get stuff just for being attractive, without having to have sex or play a part or fulfill other demands?  Yeah.  It is true that people treat attractive people better, or at least, that’s what I learned in high school psych, and it’s confirmed by how my friend got out of paying a penalty fee by being pretty recently. But men and women can be attractive. If women get stuff for being attractive more often, the most reasonable explanation would be that it’s because there are more heterosexual men than homosexual men, and more men than women are in financially/politically powerful positions from which they can bestow perks. In other words, because men control the real power.  So if women get more “pretty perks” than men, it’s probably just evidence that things are still far from equal.  There’s also the issue of female beauty being far more valued in our culture than male beauty.  That could have something to do with it too, but just thinking about how willing I am to bend over backwards for a guy I have a crush on makes me think the availability of perks really does have more to do with who has the power to hand them out.

Sometimes pretty perks do turn into financial or other kinds of power, kinds of power that I think carry more weight than mere sexiness does, but this apparently doesn’t happen on a wide scale in a consistent way or else we’d see the results - more women in positions of non-sexual power.

To sum up: a) Women are rewarded for playing the role of a sex object, but of course, that requires playing the role of a sex object.  b) Men and women are rewarded for merely being attractive to people in power, and more men are in power than women.

I wasn’t posting for a few extra days after my trip because my internet subscription ran out in Paris, and I didn’t renew it because I was leaving.  Did leave, in fact.  I’m hooooooome!  But I’m also out of the loop a little, because I wasn’t reading blogs and all that, so I have surprisingly little to rant about right now.  I’ll be posting, it’ll just take a little while.

A man on the metro just flashed me.  It was sort of subtle, it wasn’t like a guy in a trench coat running up and opening it.  He was sitting across from me and his fly was open - actually it looked like there was no zipper, nor underwear, just a gaping hole - and he had a bag with him that he kept over it most of the time so you couldn’t tell, but at one point I glanced there while he had it moved.  I gasped and looked away, it shook me up more than I probably would have expected.  Later I saw him move the bag back.  I just don’t think that could be an accident.  There are a lot of beggars in Paris that don’t have proper clothing, but I figured this was intentional.  So I started wondering why.  I wanted to stay because there was a girl next to me who seemed unaware, what if he followed her off the metro?  But then what if he followed me?  I’ve been approached by way too many guys after getting off the metro to think this would definitely be the end of this.  Maybe he was just an exhibitionist, maybe more.  I was very protective of my friends in Morocco when guys were giving them trouble, I always wanted to be there, I wasn’t afraid of yelling at them.  But there, if you yell at them they stop.  I didn’t know about this guy.  And I felt at a disadvantage because I was terrified of being touched by his genitals.  I reminded myself of the girl in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  I got off the metro at the next stop and sat in the next car over.  Thank you line 4 for having separate cars.  When I got off I looked in at the spot where I had been sitting.  The girl next to me was still there, the flasher was gone.  I don’t know what he’s up to, but at least she’s ok.  I wanted to do something about him, because I hate being the scared girl that lets harassment have its intended effect, but alas, there’s a reason why people do what they do - because it works.  Even in this big city in broad daylight where I comfortably speak the language, I just didn’t think I could count on not getting somehow assaulted if I tried to do something.  The idea of trying to loudly out and embarrass him on the metro, which is what I told myself I’d do if I was ever grabbed or anything, didn’t cross my mind until I was already safely inside the building I was heading to.  It seemed laughable.

It’s always a weird feeling when something like this happens to YOU.  I have one friend here whose butt was grabbed by a man in the metro.  I have another friend here who a man in the metro pressed his erection against when it was really crowded and she couldn’t move away.  I have another friend who a guy yelled sexist obscenities at, waved money at while grabbing his crotch, and slapped in the metro.  But this was my first encounter with something more than a guy trying to ask me out.

I’m just writing this because I have to right now, it’s how I deal with things that freak me out.  I’ll check comments from while I was gone a little later.

So a while back I wrote about whether it makes sense to call racism and a lot of other things “feminist issues.”  My point was mostly semantic; I wasn’t arguing that feminists don’t need to worry about racism, but rather that I’m not going to say that everything is a feminist issue just to be fair, because 1) I think I can be fair without doing so, and 2) I don’t think that actually is fair.  And I still believe that, and I’d rather us call intersections “intersections” than try to fit everything under the title of feminism just because.

But Sudy at A Woman’s Ecdysis wrote a post that I just found through Feminist Allies that reframes the question.  Instead of asking “is this a feminist issue?” we can ask “has this issue been analyzed from a feminist perspective?”  That is SO much more useful.  Especially if you combine that with “has this issue been analyzed from an anti-racist perspective?” and all the other perspectives that we know are important and often left out.  Then you don’t have to worry about dividing the news up into the right types of slices.  And you can acknowledge that things are complicated and have many sides and many possible interpretations and affect different people differently; a quick example is how I just interpreted the Catholic Church’s stance against most, but not all, forms of birth control as coming from a belief that physical pleasure is sinful if sought for its own sake, while acknowledging that I could also interpret it as coming from sexist beliefs.  I think it comes from both, but it’s possible to look at one without looking at the other, and we need to try as many perspectives as possible (not necessarily in every individual blog post, but acknowledging that they’re there is helpful) to avoid letting certain people’s problems fall through the cracks.

I need to do more follow-up on the ideas that I laid out earlier about intersections in movements; specifically, how can we fight violence against women, sexual and otherwise, without relying on a racist criminal justice system?  (And racism is definitely not their only problem, but a big one.)  I haven’t gone into immigration issues yet because I’m not yet informed enough to give any worthwhile opinions. But I think the criminal justice issue is pretty important, since we appeal to the system all the time.  Can we work outside of it?  Can we fix it?  My problem here is that not only do I not know how to answer either of those questions, I don’t even know which one holds more promise (not that they’re mutually exclusive, but I think people tend to pick one to work with).

Another thing I wanted to mention is the idea that there are two sides to a lot of issues.  Take reproductive rights.  That means the right to have babies AND the right to not have babies.  A lot of times, and this example is no exception, two-sided issues affect different populations differently; some have to worry about one side of the right being taken away (sex ed, birth control, abortion), and others have to worry about the other side of the right being taken away (forced sterilization, forced abortion, poor pregnancy care).  And some people lack both.  So I think a rule of thumb to avoid letting some people fall through the cracks needs to be to keep both sides of these issues in mind whenever we deal with them.  That’s what gives women real human rights, after all; a woman who’s protected from rape but not given license to express her sexuality, for instance, is the madonna, and the one who can have sex but gets assaulted with impunity is the whore, and neither the madonna nor the whore is treated or viewed as a full human being, which is, you know, why we bother being feminists in the first place.