The other side of reproductive choice

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.

Abortion debates

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.

@!

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.

observations

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.

Why women aren’t actually ruling the world

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 like this question better

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.

Link on gender and math skills

At Feminist Philosophers. No time to comment now but I wanted to save the link for future reference.

Self defense and victim-blaming

I first saw the Melissa Bruen story on Feministing, but Rad Geek just put up a good post about it and I decided to mention it in light of victim-blaming.  Both these sources already did this, but I figure I’m on such a roll with the victim-blaming thing, I’ll just keep tabs on stories that prove it wrong and maybe someday someone can make use of it.

Here’s the deal: a college woman acted in a reasonably safe way and it didn’t work.  She worked to make the event more safe and knew there were lots of people and police around when she walked on the path by herself.   And when she was assaulted, she fought back, just like one would assume people want her to do by the way they provide self-defense classes for women with the intent of helping them fend off rape.  Well, she did fend off any potential rapes, but because she beat off her original attacker and yelled that he had assaulted her, another guy, saying “You think that’s assault?” assaulted her again.  Other men watched and instead of helping her, cheered for the assault.

FIrst of all, I find the likelihood that all men involved in the assaulting and cheering are sociopaths.  I think probably they’re fairly normal guys, and that’s what makes this scary.  This didn’t happen because somebody had a screw loose.  Maybe that first guy did, but the whole crowd didn’t.  This happened because we have a culture that permits and fucking cheers for sexual assault.

But more specifically on victim-blaming, doing what she was supposed to do didn’t work.  In order to avoid this situation, she would have to sit at home and never go out like normal college students.  And don’t think no one has ever been raped while sitting at home, that’s actually a very common place for rapes to occur.  She fought back, but guess what?  That wasn’t what the rape culture kids actually wanted.  The second attacker’s words and actions show that self-defense, while helpful (and it did help her), is not enough.  What was missing from the equation was change on the part of the perpetrators. Putting the burden on the victim doesn’t work.  We have to change the culture that permits and even promotes rape.  We have to change the masculinity that leads men to cheer for sexual assault and to answer one assault with another instead of with aid.  They are the ones with a problem here, not Melissa Bruen.

Oh, and please dispense of any “victims were asking for it/wanted it” arguments forthwith.  Bruen showed clear opposition to being sexually assaulted after the first incident, but the second incident happened all the same.

But is it true?  Innocent until proven guilty!!: This isn’t a trial.  I don’t think she even knows who did it, so no specific people are being accused here.  I am inclined to believe people when they tell their stories of sexual assault, especially if they a) claim that it happened at a time when others could answer to whether it happened that way or not, b) admit to not know who did it and therefore couldn’t be just trying to slander a particular person, c) don’t have anything like pregnancy or being caught having affair to cover up for and don’t have a story that would even be able to cover up for those things, and d) give their real names to the press, opening themselves up to very painful critiques.

Anger

I’ve written a lot about how revenge is not a worthy goal, and more to the point, not an effective way to make positive change, and therefore, we shouldn’t dwell on it. Not in our criminal justice system, not in our personal mistakes as activists and privileged people. But I don’t want to give the impression that I think people who are oppressed or silenced or ignored or have crimes committed against them should not be angry.

We all have the right to be angry when we are wronged. We do not have the right to react to the wrongdoing, to the anger, in any way that pops into our heads, specifically not in any way that violates human rights, and we would be wise not to react in ways that are counterproductive to our goals. People think anger means violence, but it doesn’t have to. You can choose what to do with it. It can incite you to fight people or it can incite you to fight injustice.

Anger is not the most pleasant of emotions to feel or to see in others, but it is a real and critical part of movements for making the world better. Just look at how many blogs are about angry people. I’m angry, too, although less now than I was when I started, simply because I’ve gotten better at recovering quickly from the rush of anger that certain stories bring up in me. But it still comes.

Sometimes people say that anger is poison, and you have to let go of it to get anywhere. There’s some truth to that, but I’m wary of taking to to the extreme. Anger is often a healthy sign of something else, like pain. People who can’t feel pain and thus find the cause of the pain, the thing that’s harming them, are at risk of getting injured very badly. People who don’t acknowledge the anger of others and look for the cause of the anger instead of dwelling on the anger itself and/or blaming the anger on the psychology of those people are at risk of injuring society quite badly. Sometimes psychology is to blame, but not always.

This is personal for me, because although the oppression I have experienced is mild compared to what’s out there, I know how much it sucks to see a problem and react with horror and yes, anger, and be told by people I trust and rely on that they care about me and hope I feel better…and that’s it. They hope I feel better about the problem, they don’t hope the problem will go away. They’re sorry that there’s something wrong with me and unwilling to entertain the notion that there might be something wrong with our religion or with society. My anger was not and is not proof of a problem, because it was based on a belief and an understanding of events that may or may not have been accurate. (I continue to believe it was accurate, but again, can’t prove it.) That’s how I went from not being angry to being angry, by changing what I believed about the situation. But I think my anger warranted at least a glance at whether or not there was something worth being angry over by the people who were so concerned about me. Especially if they respected my opinions and considered me in any way intelligent. But they preferred to protect their beliefs from any risk of corrosion.

This is an issue for all oppressed groups, as the claim that they have no good reason to be angry is tantamount to justifying their oppression and therefore key to keeping the powerful in power. The issue is aggravated when women are the group being oppressed (comment if you see ways that this works for other groups). That’s because human emotions are divvied up between men and women, since we’re so totally opposite that we can’t share anything, and women got most of the emotions, but anger was given to men. So when women express anger, it’s seen as unacceptable because of their gender, in addition to the other reasons (oppression, beliefs about the unhealthiness of anger) that also apply to others. People mock female anger (“you’re cute when you’re angry” etc) because “real women” don’t have the capacity to get really angry. They mock women who leave no room for doubt that they really are angry for transgressing gender roles (“ball-busting bitch” etc). They act like real female anger is overwhelming even when it’s a level of anger that would be considered understandable coming from a man, just because women aren’t ever supposed to get that angry (“she’s scary!” etc). They advise women not to be angry or show anger because it will lose them popularity and influence. You’re right, some people tell me, but don’t sound so angry about it or no one will want to listen to you. Yeah, I’ll try to sound like sugar and spice when I talk about rape, good idea. These are all ways to focus attention on the anger itself rather than on the cause of the anger, which helps cover for the real cause, especially when the real cause is sexism.

But it’s a really special tool of the patriarchy to tell women and others that it’s a virtue to let yourself be walked over with a smile on your face. (Other “virtues” I reject: chastity, blind faith.) People love the turn the other cheek line in the Bible. That’s the kind of stuff that makes non-Christians admit that the Bible is a good guide for how to live even if they happen to think it’s fiction. But I disagree. I reject the idea that it’s a virtue to let someone take advantage of you, to be an enabler, to support a system of oppression. It’s not always a sin, because the oppressed don’t always have a lot of options. But a virtue? I don’t think so. And I defy you, people out there, to prove that you really do think it’s a virtue. Do you live that way? Do you want to? Would it make any sense? It’s really interesting to watch people do mental gymnastics to interpret that part in a way that doesn’t mean they have to give their car to the next person who tries to steal their car radio. Once I saw a priest say that when someone hits you, it makes your face look one way, and if you turn the other cheek, you have to pass through a position of looking the person in the eye (not necessarily true, but ok), which is a position of equality, and so the message of the turn the other cheek line was that you shouldn’t let people take advantage of you, take away your dignity. He failed to explain how that accounts for the rest of the passage:

38“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’^[a] 39But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

Not quite so up for that interpretation anymore, is it?

There may be a place for this kind of reaction, and in some cases it may have an emotional effect on the “evil person.”  But by and large, being an enabler is not virtuous. It doesn’t help any of us in any real way if a woman who is being abused by her husband turns the other cheek. The Civil Rights movement was more virtuous than it would have been for a black man to willingly submit to a lynching. Just because something hurts you doesn’t mean it will help someone else because life is not all about zero-sum games. (Keep this in mind when thinking about the morality of sex, please. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I know we all get that idea from the jokes about stuff that’s good for you tasting bad and vice versa, but just because people say it doesn’t make it true. Some veggies are tasty, some poisons are not.) But the belief that it’s a virtue to be so humble that you don’t even demand your RIGHTS, which is to demand that people live in a way that is fair to everyone and thus benefits everyone, this belief can and has been used to shut up uppity people. I’ve seen it in action in Christianity. A woman who I really do love and respect but who believes in things I do not once said that since being a priest is a form of service, there’s no reason to argue about letting women be priests; if you’re willing to be a servant, you shouldn’t care what kind of servant you’re going to be. That is a really difficult argument to face if you’re trying to be humble and obedient and selfless. And this ignores the fact that telling not just individuals but groups, like women, to relinquish their right to fairness, creates not just a little humble suffering for one person, but systemic inequalities that go deeper than just how important you feel as a priest or a nun. To keep with the priesthood example, the fact that women can’t be priests doesn’t just mean that sometimes they feel that their role is less important, it means that they can’t be in any part of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which means they have no say in who is the Pope, and they have no say in the rules that the Church makes. Women still don’t have suffrage in the Catholic Church, so to speak. And so these things affect more than just you, and when you shut up about them because you think it’s virtuous never to be angry except when people try to sell stuff in the temple, you’re allowing other people to be oppressed. Tell me, is that the goal of selflessness?

Is racism a feminist issue?

Preface: I use the stories of Romona Moore and Sean Bell in here to make my points, and this post is really not about the content of those stories so I don’t go into them much besides talking about where they should be covered. I just wanted to say that I find their stories tragic and I hope we learn lessons from them, and that I don’t mean to come off as callous or make light of their stories by talking about them this way.

My post All or Nothing was my attempt at finding concrete ways to react to recent criticisms of the feminist movement, to figure out what we need to do to not be racist and to be inclusive. But I just came across a post by Cara on Feministe saying that the Romona Moore rape and murder case shows that racism is a feminist issue, and now I think I finally get what the argument is about. But I’m not sure I agree with her (on that topic – I’m with her on the good people doing nothing part). I have a lot of respect for Cara, and I’m a little concerned about disagreeing with her because I want to be on the anti-racist side, but I also don’t want to say I believe something just because it’s “popular” (I know, it’s not that popular, but where I read, it is). Before you react, just read the rest, and then if I’ve missed something huge – which is a real possibility given that I’ve never read the books on intersectionality and all that – let me know.

I see two reasons for naming racism a feminist issue:

1. Because if we don’t consider these things feminist issues, feminists will ignore them. From Cara:

There’s a big difference between saying “things that happen to women of color are not feminist issues” and “things that happen to women of color because of racism are not feminist issues.” I have never, in my life, seen anyone argue the former. I have seen them argue the latter. And I don’t think that they’re really all that far apart, regardless of how it’s intended.

But I believe all feminists should be believers in human rights for ALL first. That means I think all feminists should be anti-racists. I don’t think we have to label anti-racism A Feminist Issue in order to say that it matters and that feminists need to care about it.

These issues do intersect, because people have lots of characteristics and can be oppressed for any number of them, so feminists have to be aware of racism and all the other types of oppression to 1) avoid personally being oppressive, 2) avoid oppressing members of their own movement, 3) avoid advocating policies that would have unforeseen oppressive effects, 4) advocate policies that will help women of color (and others affected by other kinds of oppression) in cases where they are affected by sexism differently than white women are, 5) use feminism and anti-racism (and other kinds of activism) at the same time when dealing with the case of a person who is oppressed by both. And I tried to address all of these things in All or Nothing, without having to name racism a feminist issue. Instead, I named racism and feminism both human rights issues and said that that’s where we need to start, with a belief in human rights for all. It just seems feminism-centric in a world of lots of issues that matter equally to say that naming something “a feminist issue” is so important and to spend so much time arguing about how related to feminism something is.

From Cara’s quote, I think she’s concerned that if we relegate things that happened because of racism to anti-racist blogs, feminist blogs will, perhaps unintentionally, stop including the oppression of women of color and focus only on white women. But rest assured, women of color are oppressed by sexism. If we’re determined not to ignore the ways in which they are oppressed by sexism and not to silence them, we should be able to keep reporting on the sexism against them even if we’re not reporting on straight-up racism. In cases where both are present, we should report them on both feminist and anti-racist blogs rather than each disowning it. (And for the record, I am all for feminist blogs posting on issues that aren’t feminist issues. I just don’t think it’s necessary for a feminist blog to do so to be ethical.)

2. Because something is a feminist issue if it oppresses women. From Cara:

You know, I’m one of those feminists who thinks that racism is indeed a feminist issue, just like poverty, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and much more are feminist issues, simply because these are factors that oppress women on a daily basis and prevent them from living lives freely, safely and to their full potential.

In her defense, there is a difference between ‘bad things that happen to women’ (like, when you’re unlucky) and ‘the oppression of women’ (caused by systematic injustice), and this distinction means that some criticisms I’ve seen are straw arguments. But still, I don’t define my feminism as ‘fighting that which oppresses women.’ I define it as ‘fighting sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy.’ Often, that does mean ‘fighting that which oppresses women.’ But both definitions include things that are not included in the other, so although they overlap, they are different ways of approaching feminism. Here’s why I choose the definition I do:

a. It’s the injustice that makes it worth fighting, not who the victim happens to be. I’m not just out to help women. In my capacity as a feminist, I want to help all people oppressed by patriarchy, and sometimes that means men. Some men’s issues are, in my book, feminist issues. On the flip side, not all women’s issues are feminist issues to me.

b. I think the way to solve a problem is to figure out what’s causing it and fix that. This isn’t a radicals vs. liberals thing, it’s about whether you divide up movements based on their causes/origins or based on their victims. I think it makes more sense to do it based on their causes. Therefore, I could be persuaded to call LGBTQI issues feminist issues, and vice versa, because I think they’re all caused by patriarchy. But I am not currently aware of a root cause that is shared by sexism and racism that is not shared by all oppressions (eg, xenophobia, pursuit of power), so I see no reason to group them together any further than I already do in putting them both under the umbrella of human rights issues. They have some things in common, but they’re also different, which is why people tend to come to such messed up conclusions when they compare them too much.

Interestingly, I think looking at things this way allows us to undercut the arguments of MRAs that men are really the more oppressed gender, because we can say that regardless of who is more oppressed (and I personally am convinced that’s women, but whatever), the cause of the oppression of men is the same as the cause of the oppression of women: patriarchy. And patriarchy was set up by and continues to be run by men. So in this case, finding the root cause of the oppression of men and fighting it means feminism, whereas finding the people hurt by the issue at hand and standing by them no matter what means being an MRA (although I’ll grant that they add in a few illogical steps to get there, like assuming that if men are the victims, women must be the culprits). I think you can guess which one I think works better.

But to show you what I mean with my points a and b, consider the hypothetical situation that all sexism is eradicated but other oppressions are still around. Yes, there would still be plenty of women who would be oppressed. For the moment let’s just consider the women of color who would be oppressed by racism, although there would be lots of other problems, too. This situation wouldn’t convince me that racism really is a feminist issue because these women of color aren’t free yet. On the contrary, it would convince me that feminism isn’t enough to free all women. It would be offensive to the people of color who didn’t identify as women if I said I would fight the racism that was oppressing them for the sake of freeing women. It’s not being a woman that makes you worth freeing, it’s being an oppressed human being that does. It would be silly for me to say I would fight that racism under the banner of feminism. Why feminism? Just because I’m attached to that word? These people wouldn’t be oppressed for their femaleness, even if they were female; they’d be oppressed for being people of color. We need different tools to fight racism (although some are the same) than we do to fight sexism.

The way to free all women, and in fact all people, isn’t to make feminism include everything, but to include more than feminism in our own tactics.

The Apostate wrote a post on Sean Bell counter to the one linked in Cara’s quote. I don’t agree with the whole post, but I think this part is in line with what I’m saying:

If anything that affects women either 1) equally with men (such as rising gas prices) OR, 2) second-hand through men (such as Middle Eastern men being arrested for minor visa infractions and being imprisoned without charge – they have mothers and other female relatives, I suppose), is a feminist issue… then what, pray tell, is NOT a feminist issue?

Why must we call this “feminism” if it includes everything?

And as for Romona Moore’s story, it just seems forced to me to say that racism is part of sexism just because sometimes they happen to the same person and affect the same incident. We can’t, and shouldn’t, tell Moore’s story without mentioning both, but that doesn’t mean we have to present them both as one thing. Their interaction is important – for example, we have to be aware of racism to fight rape properly, thinking about the racism in the criminal justice system before advocating lots of prison time for rapists or advising women on what to do if they’re raped. But to me, that’s still an intersection of two different things, with different causes and different solutions, rather than one big Feminist Issue.

To make this more concrete:

If you want to post about Sean Bell and other racism-related stories on a feminist blog, I think that’s great. But I personally would rather you just say, “Here’s a story on racism, because feminism alone won’t save the world” instead of “I swear, it’s somehow related to feminism, so you should read it” or “So this dude was shot and stuff…and his female relatives are REALLY suffering! Stop racism so there will be less bereaved women!” (I made those up and am not accusing anyone of saying things like that, just trying to make my point. Also, the bereaved women certainly do deserve sympathy, they just wouldn’t deserve to be the center of attention in a story about a man who was murdered.) And if you don’t want to post about Sean Bell’s story on a feminist blog, I think that should be fine, as long as you take the stance that your readers should also learn about racism somewhere else. In fact, I think you should do that no matter what. I think it’s better to have people read a blog dedicated to racism than to let them rely on a few occasional posts about racism on a feminist blog, first because the anti-racist blog is more likely to go in depth and cover more things, second because the feminist blog is likely to spend half its time arguing over how related this is to feminism, which has nothing to do with how worthwhile it is, and third because for white women like me, it’s important to learn to put ourselves aside and read about racism because it’s unjust instead of because sometimes it’s related to MY oppression. And writing this has convinced me that I need to make much more of an effort on that front, so I don’t claim to have gotten it right yet. I let myself feel like I’m covering my bases by reading feminist blogs that mention racist issues, but when I go to sites that are just about racism, I can feel the difference.

There’s also an issue of efficiency here. I don’t have a problem with occasionally including other stories in a feminist blog, because I haven’t seen it really take away from or change the purpose of the blogs I read. But since we talk mainly about racism when we talk about making intersections into Feminist Issues, we overlook what that would really mean if we did it thoroughly. Since intersections apply to every kind of oppression, every blog that is about a kind of oppression would have to write on every other kind of oppression to follow this principle. The result would be that we would have a million general human rights blogs and no specialized blogs. There’s a place for general human rights blogs, absolutely, but I think there’s also something useful in having a place that is dedicated to one kind of thing. It’s more efficient in some ways, because it can focus on one issue in depth and the writer(s) can get deeply educated in that one issue, and then it can be your go-to point when you want to show a friend that such-and-such really is a problem.

I know, I know, you’re saying people just won’t do it, they won’t go and read other blogs, they won’t really acknowledge intersections in their own movements. Some won’t, that’s true. But look, that’s how it works in activism. We can’t make people do anything. We point out problems and offer solutions, and then it’s up to each person whether or not they’re going to follow through. But the least we can do is offer solutions that are solid in principle, and I think the principle I’m supporting makes more sense.

By the way, there’s a rare respectful conversation from different sides of the debate here.

And all that being said, I do think police brutality can be a feminist issue, when you’re talking about gender-based police brutality and how sexism and gender roles keep us from paying enough attention to police brutality against women.  It is also a racism issue and a trans issue, and you can find more information at INCITE!.