season of the bitch

Watching the Super Bowl today? Think women have the right to control their own damn bodies? Or just hate Focus on the Family and James Dobson?

Join the Super Bowl Tailgate for Choice party.

Donate at least $5 to a prochoice organization today in honor of the Focus on the Family anti-abortion ad and stick it to Dobson.

In addition to the big ones, there are some good smaller orgs that could use your cash: NLIRH and SisterSong, among others.

It’s Blog for Choice Day. And this year, a year many of us thought might actually be a good one for sexual and reproductive rights, has turned out to be a very lousy one indeed. We saw Democrats force the Stupak amendment into an otherwise fairly decent House health care reform bill, and do nearly the same thing in the Senate onto an already-pretty-crappy health care reform bill.

We saw the murder of Dr. George Tiller, abortion provider, in cold blood.

We like to talk about choice. We fight over terminology. But what have we really done, in the years since Roe v. Wade, other than hold the line and nervously try not to lose what we’ve won?

We criticize Democrats for not supporting us, we who put them in office. But what are we pushing for? When my Democrat Congresswoman from my quite Democratic district (BROOKLYN, people) sends me a form letter in response to my calls and emails about Stupak, reassuring ME that there won’t be any federal money spent on abortion, what does that mean for us? Even the Democrats are more worried about antichoice arguments than they are about people like me bailing on them. Where are we going to go, after all, right?

Well, I’m tired of it. It’s 2010. We need to be fighting for more gains, not hiding in a defensive crouch and praying we get to hold on to what we’ve got. Rights are not granted, they are taken.

Right after Stupak, I wrote:

Not enough. I want positives. I want to use this moment to affirm our right to a healthy, joyful sexuality and to talk about how we can achieve that. A messy, unruly sexuality—hell, part of the beauty of it is that it’s not clean and neat. It is like eating a peach, in the last lines of Prufrock, juices running down your chin, sweet and tangy. Those decisions that happen in a minute are sometimes wrong, and sometimes unplanned things come out of them, but we don’t need to be saved from it, we need to have resources and support to deal with it, from a relationship gone sour to unfortunate STIs or Plan B for a birth control failure—or, whether Congress likes it or not, safe, legal, insurance-covered abortion.

I want to come out of the closet and say yes, we like sex, and we have the right to have it. To say that if the government spends millions of dollars every year on technologies that are only good for killing people, it can include abortion in a health care plan.

We didn’t get to the point of Roe v. Wade by having nice polite arguments. We got there by being angry, and demanding, and pushing. We got there by staking out a firm position: that our bodies are our own and we have the right to do what we want with them. We got there by calling for free abortion on demand.

So this year I don’t want to hear any sugarcoating. I don’t want any dancing around the words. Abortion. Sex. Pregnancy. There it is. “Choice” means a lot of things, it’s true. But this year we should all remember at bottom what it is we fought for.

You know, over and over, lefties and liberals have told feminists that they have to look beyond sexism and abortion rights. Hell, I’ve been one of them. I criticized feminists during the primaries who seemed to excuse blatant racism from the Clinton campaign while freaking out about Obama calling a reporter “Sweetie.” I’ve noted that historical feminism was a white middle-class movement with white middle-class goals.

But right now, I’m really, really pissed about this Stupak amendment (as if you couldn’t tell). And yes, this is an issue that is personal for me: I’m a cisgender woman, heterosexual and of childbearing age, and I have no desire for kids.

And I’m sick and tired of hearing that I should look at the broader picture, that there are worse issues than sexism, blah blah blah.

I’ve heard this from well-meaning “liberal” men, but I’ve also heard it from activists I admire, who are usually RIGHT when they point out the myopia of much of the feminist movement (such as it is).

But this is the thing: millions of poor women, many of them women of color, will be hurt badly if this amendment stays in the bill. Shit, it’ll affect me, but I can probably still get an abortion if I need one. This isn’t a bourgeois issue and we’re not being myopic or selfish assholes to be righteously, ferociously angry and ready to fight this tooth and nail.

This is women’s lives. I care about race and class issues, poverty and health care and immigration and transgender people’s rights.

There are lots of lines in the sand that I’ll draw. One of them has been crossed right now, and yes, it’s personal. Because over and over again our issues get written off as things that should be compromised for the greater good, or we’re made to feel guilty because we’re worrying about something silly when there are worse oppressions out there.

I’m not going to play oppression olympics or other such bullshit. I’m just going to keep fighting this with every breath I’ve got, and I don’t care who you are, if you tell me I’m wrong for that, you can kiss my ass.

And Congress is voting to let him make that choice.

The amendment, which you can download and read in full here, would do three things.

First, it would codify the Hyde Amendment provisions in the bill so that the ban on federal funds being used for abortions besides those resulting from rape or incest, or in cases where the mother’s life is endangered would remain intact regardless of Hyde being reauthorized. As it’s currently written, the bill’s restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion coverage would end if the Hyde Amendment, which has been reauthorized by Congress on an annual basis since 1976, is not reauthorized.

Secondly, it would not allow individuals purchasing insurance at least in part with federal affordability credits to buy a plan that covers abortions. The bill as currently written would allow individuals to use affordability credits to buy insurance that includes abortion coverage, but it requires any such plan to segregate the credits from individual premium payments and ensure that only the premium payments are used to fund the abortion services portion of the plan.

Affordability credits are available under the bill to people who don’t get insurance from work and earn between 150% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. The Stupak amendment would bar all people in this income bracket from purchasing insurance that covers elective abortions unless they can afford to pay for a separate abortion coverage plan on their own. People earning below 150% of FPL would already be ineligible for abortion coverage because they will be on Medicaid, which does not cover abortions under Hyde. There are no concrete numbers for how many people would be denied an abortion-coverage option under the amendment, but it would likely be at least 20 million.

Thirdly, the Stupak amendment would dictate that the government-run public option does not provide abortion coverage. The bill currently leaves the decision of abortion coverage in the public option up to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Allowing the public option to cover abortions would not violate the Hyde Amendment because the public option is not government funded; will be entirely financed by individual premiums, just like the private plans.

You better be contacting Congress and letting them know that you’re pissed. This is ridiculous. This is NOT what we voted for in giving the Democrats huge majorities and this is NOT what we wanted in health care reform.

The Summer Of Death continues. Patrick Swayze has apparently died. In his honor, I’m reposting my somewhat famous feminist defense of Dirty Dancing, complete with video. You know you love this, so don’t even pretend.

1. Dirty Dancing.

I submit that not only is Dirty Dancing a classic, but that it is in fact a feminist movie. The entire relationship between Baby and Johnny is about HER desires, what she wants and when. She has the power to break his heart. Her sexuality is not punished in the film (though admittedly Penny and her sister do suffer for their desires). But Baby knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it, class differences be damned. Plus, she’s studying economics of underdeveloped countries, and wants to join the Peace Corps–in the 60s. I love it. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

This post on girl power in comics, from Retconning My Brain, is a seriously awesome piece that made me want to read a lot of these books (Power Girl, Batgirl, etc.) more than I already did.

The original “Girl power,” a sugared-up, popified version of what Riot Grrl was, hit when I was in my last years of high school. The late 90s, which brought us post-communications deregulation prefab pop, but also at least sort of acknowledged that women wanted pop culture that was their own, and that there was more to it than fighting over a man on a soap opera. It brought us Xena and Buffy, too.

I’ve never been the type of feminist who is terribly bothered by the word “girl”–if prodded, I can even conjure up a defense of using it as a word that doesn’t contain the word “man,” although that’s really not any less useless to me than spelling woman with a y. At the ripe old age of almost-thirty, I still refer to myself as a girl and usually anyone else who is my age or younger. I’ve even been scolded for it by friends male and female. But I can’t really help it, and I wonder if the twin specters of Riot Grrl and Girl Power are to blame.

I was thinking about Girl Power, while I was writing my generally-happy reactions to the stories, and I remember learning about third wave feminism and discussing Girl Power in my class, and the positives and negatives. You had shows with strong (Xena) or complex (Ally McBeal) female leads, but they were wearing short short skirts (and some of them could have used a sandwich, ahem). You had the Spice Girls saying friends come first (in a way more empowering way than bros before hos, yo) but most of their popular songs were still about finding love or something. I think. I can’t actually admit in public to listening to the Spice Girls. You know.

So. Is the rash of “Girl” comics a revival of this kind of feminism-lite? There certainly has been a trend lately, especially with DC books, toward female leads. Batwoman, Batgirl, Gotham City Sirens (and yes, Marvel Divas) and many more that I’m probably missing because this just isn’t really my area of expertise. The pop universe doesn’t seem to be swinging that way in the dramatic fashion it did in the Spice Girls era, but we do have Twilight and other pop-culture phenomena that are aimed at girls bringing a new demographic to geek culture–check out Vaneta Rogers’ awesome piece on The Fangirl Invasion.

Either way, I have to agree with this statement, again from Retconning My Brain:

What it came down to for me this week was that it was nice to buy a bunch of comics that are led my female superheroes, who are super with or without their male counterparts, but don’t exist in a vacuum of femaleness or solely for the gaze of the male reader. They’re there to kick some ass and be super.

Amen to that.

Yeah, that’s not true at all, actually, but it neatly sums up the type of attitude I regularly hear and see in the comics world and the literature about comics–if by literature you mean articles and blog posts written 9 to 1 by men.

Anyway, Jennifer de Guzman wrote a post several months back that I just stumbled upon via this post on Amazon Princess (which I found via When Fangirls Attack), and it articulates something that I’ve never really thought about before, but makes perfect sense.

As I wrote in my reply, I am kind of astounded that some men don’t see why physical empowerment would clearly be attractive for women. I think it’s intriguing to note that women often like the hot women who kick ass as much, if not more, than men do. Here’s what I think is behind that: As women, we are nearly constantly aware of physical threats. And those threats often are of being violated sexually. When I used to go to campus for night classes and people warned me to “be careful,” what they are saying was, essentially, “avoid getting raped.”

Now, what if, what if, as a woman, you could walk around, be sexually attractive and not have to feel threatened? What if all the rage you feel about women being victimized and brutalized could be channeled into pure, righteous ass-kicking? And, because you’re a woman, you could possibly do that ass-kicking without being seen as a testosterone Steven-Seagal-esque meathead. Ass-kicking fantasies for men are more about proving and retaining power, I think. For women, they’re about finding and asserting power when they’re not expected to have any.

This resonated with me on so many levels. I’ve taken kickboxing, krav maga and muay thai at different times in my life, and they always did make me feel more confident and yes, sexier, but I’ve always attributed that to feeling healthier and stronger. Maybe I thought a bit about the idea that I might be able to kick someone’s ass if they harassed me as a component, but only in a very general sense.

Yet Guzman’s point is that a superheroine can be sexy and because she can kick someone’s ass, she doesn’t have to apologize or fear for herself. There’s no need for the tradeoff–sexy woman needs powerful man–because she is both. Her sexuality is no longer something to be feared, but something she is free to display if she wants to without worry of repercussions.

In media for so many years, female characters were simple projections of what men wanted to see. Still, women gravitated toward certain characters, and as more women create comics (and movies and TV series and and and) we argued that yes, we do want superheroines. And maybe we do want them to be pretty.

Also, perhaps this explains why I was never one of those who was really bothered by superheroine costumes. Sure they’re unrealistic. But could they also be a gleeful middle finger to everyone who wants to tell a little girl that what she’s wearing is “inappropriate” or that bad things will happen to her if she dresses in a way that attracts male attention?

(Of course, we could debate about the rather narrow view of what is “sexy” that is still put forth by superheroines, but that’s another post.)

Hi, darlings. I’m getting settled in Brooklyn and at my summer gig, which, if I haven’t already mentioned (and by mentioned I mean bragged) is as the web intern at The Nation. So if you don’t already read EVERYTHING ON THE SITE, you should start, stat.

Seriously, though, I’m going to be pretty busy so I don’t know how often I’ll be around, though I’ll be required to be even more obsessively informed on the issues of the day, so I’ll probably have some rants here and there.

If you’ve missed me dearly, I’ve had two pieces up at Global Comment this week in between the unpacking. “No Common Sense, No Pleasure: From Dr. Tiller to The Pill Kills” is pretty much what it sounds like–it’s a beginning of some thoughts on how we deal with women’s sexuality. (I wish I came up with the title, but Natalia is better at that than I am.)

It’s 2009, and yet we’re stuck on the old terms when it comes to discussion of women’s sexuality. We’re inured now to sex scandals among male political figures, but women are still subject to lectures about their duty to children and families, and even the debate over a new Supreme Court justice hinges on whether or not she is pro-choice. Discussions of birth control and abortion too often leave out the point that sexuality is normal and healthy, and women should be able to enjoy it without being forced to bear children.

We yield to discussions on mournful abortions, or else feel required to admit to absolutely no guilt or second thoughts, lest we unwittingly give the Right some talking-point ammo. We are left with no avenue to talk about the pleasures and pitfalls of adult and adolescent sexuality.

Then yesterday I wrote a quick response to the early reaction to the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. There are so many ways I could’ve gone with that story, but I got quite annoyed at the bickering on Twitter about whose fault it was that an antisemite got a gun.

Arguing over whose side the killer was on is as simplistic, reductive, and plain stupid as arguing about whether the Columbine shooters were victims of bullies or crazed Marilyn Manson fans (they were neither). It misses the point entirely.

We have a culture, especially in the Obama years, in which a radical fringe feels newly disempowered, and acts of terrorism like this are perpetrated by people who feel threatened. They take up arms in some attempt to go after the ones they blame for their situation. They may believe their actions will change things, or just be angry or disturbed enough to want to go out in a hail of gunfire.

Hope that will tide over anyone who cared. Be back soon.

I read this article this morning in the Mail & Guardian about Vladimir Putin and it made me giggle. At first, I thought that it was just worth a drive-by snarking on Twitter, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I should go back and write about it.

At first, of course, you get the usual masculinity-fetish. The title of the article is “That Shrinking Feeling,” which is just too obvious. Further down, a sentence reads, “Not that Putin is a spent force.”

Sexual metaphors and obsession with Putin’s bare chest are hardly rare–comic artist Becky Cloonan has a whole range of Putin-fantasy webcomics that are totally hilarious. I admit to a bit of a Putin obsession myself–he’s such a caricature.

As was Bush, of course. A caricature of a certain type of American masculinity (just like Reagan before him) the same way Putin is a caricature of a certain type of Russian masculinity. He has judo videos! He shoots tigers! He’s so BUFF!

Only a few months ago, we were scared of Putin “rearing his head,” (oh, Palin, will you ever get old?) but now we hear little to nothing about him. And this article, masculinity fetish aside, makes a decent point about why, even if it buries it beneath layers of alternately fawning and poking at him.

Analysts add that United States President Barack Obama’s emollient approach on Nato enlargement and missile defence is not helping.

As Russian president, Putin was a natural when it came to attacking former president George Bush, for example over Iraq.

But fast-forward one year and he looked far less comfortable, barely speaking above a whisper, as he made a conciliatory speech praising the new Iraqi order in front of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at a recent Moscow meeting.

As the public questions whether everything is really the United States’ fault, a change of tone is needed that Putin may struggle with, says political commentator Arkady Dubnov of the newspaper Vremya Novostei.

(OK, they did say “enlargement.”)

Does Obama’s conciliatory approach to foreign policy make the former bluff and bluster between Bush and Putin look…well…juvenile? Does Obama’s refusal to give leaders like Putin (and Chavez, and and and) a target effectively work where threats and yes, swagger didn’t?

Of course it’s far too early to tell. But during the campaign, especially the primaries, I wrote about Obama’s demeanor and tone about foreign policy contrasted with his rivals, and how Hillary Clinton and Obama seemed to have switched gender stereotypes.

I’m disappointed with many of Obama’s moves so far, but I wonder if just the tonal shift in public diplomacy is having an effect worldwide. It’s definitely not calming the Right inside the U.S., but they sure do look silly. So there’s that.

Greenwald has an excellent piece on Sonia Sotomayor (and as usual, rips Establishment media a new one for using anonymous sources in the process).

I know far, far less than he does about Sonia Sotomayor or about the relative fitness of judicial nominees for the job. I was far more qualified to talk about Sarah Palin and the attacks leveled at her for being an affirmative action hire, a pretty dumb chick whose appeal was solely prurient.

Rebecca Traister pointed out the obvious gender bias to the TNR piece in question, a bias that is only multiplied by her being of Puerto Rican descent, as Adam Serwer notes. She’s bossy! She doesn’t shut up! She’s not that smart–Obama is prioritizing diversity! (The Clarence Thomas arguments, of course, are too obvious.)

When Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the Court, we heard similar arguments about her intellectual ability–and we didn’t argue. When Sarah Palin got the Republican VP nomination, we giggled and made our own jokes. Now Obama’s nominees will face the same kind of criticisms, ones that would never be leveled at a white guy up for the same job, and what do we say?

It’s a double bind. We don’t want to be unable to criticize female nominees or people of color (*cough cough* Gonzalez–or closer to home, Roland Burris) but we need to be consistent in noting the difference between substantive attacks and gender or racially motivated ones. It’s entirely possible that Sonia Sotomayor is not the best choice for the Supreme Court, but I very much doubt that she’s any less “smart” than Thomas, Alito, or any number of federal judges that the Right (or the nominal left as represented by TNR) would have no problem with–because they’re white and male.

The fact is, when it comes to the Supreme Court, there are probably many lawyers and judges and law professors who would do as good or better jobs than the people already on there. There’s no one best person for the job, and it’s also fairly difficult to predict how justices will rule once confirmed (note that the retiring Souter was nominated by George H.W. Bush and became one of the reliable liberal members of the Court). So there’s absolutely nothing wrong with picking a qualified justice who comes from a different ethnic and class background than the rest of the Court for the sake of diversity.