Personhood

Two of fifty states have now codified government-mandated sexual assault. Texas and Oklahoma, I'm looking at you while my skin crawls and my internal organs quiver in fear. Virginia is on its way to becoming the third member of this misogynistic, utterly abhorrent club.

Because it is incredibly unhealthy to be a rageball all the time, I am working assiduously at setting aside my anger at the very idea that the government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure. But let me just say that one more time, so that it sinks in for all of you following along at home:

The government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure.

Why is this ok? I'm seriously asking. I want to know why this is ok.

I find some of the quotes from people defending these laws to be instructive as to the kind of mindset that makes things like this ok. For example, "They already chose to be vaginally penetrated." Again, setting aside the initial rush of rage, I can start to unpack that statement. Choosing to have sexual intercourse once makes anything that happens afterwards consensual. It's something like a chaste/virgin doctrine: once intercourse occurs (once the hymen is broken?) there is no protection for your ladybits. By breaking the seal (so to speak), you lose claim to any protections. Consent to sex is something that can only happen once, and it can never be revoked. Once you've lost virginity, you are ever-after "open for business" to anyone, including the government! It's the fallen-woman doctrine, gussied up for modern times.

Another came after a Virginia legislator was asked about exceptions for rape and incest. His response? "Sometimes incest is voluntary. The woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman."

First of all, I am not kidding.

Second, can someone please find me a breakdown of "voluntary" incestual relationships versus molestation and rape by a family member? I would like to know more about this voluntary incest.

Really, I don't think this guy defines "voluntary" in the way that you and I do. Voluntary sex is any sex that happens because you don't kill yourself rather than be defiled. And sex, itself, is always a defiling act. Sex is dirty.

And that's really what all this is about, isn't it? The deeply-seated belief of many people that there is something inherently, irrevocably wrong with sex. The body is dirty, because it is corporeal and not spiritual, and acts of pleasure for the body are naught but devilish distractions from the work of cleansing the soul.

It's a sad, tragic outlook. My well of compassion is almost emptied, thinking about all these people that think the pleasures of touch and give are evil. Women are by necessity nothing but uteruses, because to acknowledge the entirety of a woman would be to acknowledge desire.

Sex is not shameful. Corporeal joys are not lesser than spiritual ones.

And the government has absolutely no right to be enforcing such arcane and deeply personal beliefs. You may wish to hold onto your notion of sex as something that is capital-W WRONG, but you do not get to codify your beliefs. Mandating sexual assault and making birth control inaccessible are inexcusable abuses of power. Women are more then uteruses, and our uteruses are not yours to make decisions about. I get to decide who and what enters my vagina, not a legislature. I get to decide whether I have sex, and whether I want the possibility of progeny to come from that sex, not a legislature. Those are my decisions to make because I am a complete person, with the ability to reason and choose.

You want to talk about personhood? Let's start with the personhood of women.

I am tired of constantly having to defend the existence of my brain, my character, and my capacity for moral decision-making. Women are complete beings. Accept it. And stop treating us as if we are not.

Pinterest and Techie Gender Bias

The hip new kid on the social media block is Pinterest. Ubiquity, thy name is Pinterest. Suddenly, the site and discussions about the site are everywhere. Someone in my twitter feed joked a few days back about how grateful they were that tweetdeck allows you to censor your feed by keyword, so they'd removed anything with the word "Pinterest" in it.

(Whoever you are, you're probably not reading this blog. Because I'm talking about Pinterest. GET IT? IT'S FUNNY.)

So. What is Pinterest? It's a virtual corkboard. You have one (or several) boards that you can theme any which way you'd like, and what you do is pin images of things you stumble upon on the Internet to this virtual corkboard. The pin includes a link taking you back to the original site. It's an image-based link-cataloging service. It's del.icio.us with pictures. There is absolutely nothing gender-specific in its concept or its design, which is oft-noted in pieces about the site with titles implying it's just for women.

Why is everyone talking about it? Well, it's proven itself in a very short time to be a phenomenal traffic-generator. But I don't really understand the techie-stuff. I get that it's a big name player because it is capable of driving traffic to sites, and that means those sites pay attention to it and its users because it wants that traffic, because I understand basically how the internet works and how to make money off of it.

(There's a reason I don't try an "monetize" this blog. I mean, I love you guys, and I love you guys for reading it, but I just don't get enough traffic. See? I totally understand the internet.)

So, I'm not real tech-oriented and that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about gender and Pinterest. Because, OH MAN.

Props to The Atlantic for writing the only gender-neutral piece on the explosive popularity of Pinterest that I can find. Credit where it's due.

And now we can get into the bizarro male-oriented world of tech blogs. 

The one-liners in some of these pieces make my head spin:

"Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest."

Really, readwriteweb? Really? Are you really trying to say that things must be named in gender-specific ways so that we all understand who is supposed to use them? One, that's pretty insulting to just about everyone, and two, it doesn't actually make sense, since I cannot for the life of me come up with a way that "pin" is female-centric somehow.

"Pinterest is Tumblr for Ladiez."

Really, gizmodo? Your writer is trying to mitigate the blow of all that misogyny by claiming some sort of special privilege by sort of being ironical, and also maybe having a lot of female friends. Sort of like "I have a lot of black friends?" I can't tell. But let me just get right to the point: Ladies use tumblr. In fact, tumblr has perhaps the most even-steven gender split of any social networking site, at 51% men and 49% women.

Essentially, what is going on here is that contrary to what is generally accepted to be the case for new technology, the early adopters of Pinterest are women. Young women. Whereas Facebook is at least partially grounded in the horribly anti-women idea of comparing female faces for hotness, and Twitter's early adopters were heavily skewed towards men and coasts, Pinterest is being embraced first and foremost by young women in fly-over country.

Perhaps it's really the "fly-over country" thing that these tech blogs object to, but you wouldn't know it from titles like "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest" or even "Gentlemint Offers a Manly Alternative to Pinterest." It would appear that what galls is that ladies like it.

So, while women were capable of taking Facebook, with its petty start, and make it their own (currently something like 58% of Facebook users are female), men are not capable of doing the same with Pinterest? Or, because Pinterest has been embraced by women, it is doomed to some sort of niche-internet? How disappointing. I was pretty sure men had more creativity than that. The casual marginalization of something popular among women is both offensive and deeply disappointing.

Pinterest is not tumblr for ladies. It is not for ladies, period. It's for anyone that wants visual link-organization. And you may not be looking to plan a wedding or construct an elaborate shopping list, but you can still use the site. And you may not want to use the site, because we all could probably do with one less social network rather than one more, but the reason you don't want to use is not that it is "for girls." Or, maybe it is, but if that's the case, I really don't think we should be friends anymore.

Morality Cannot Be Defined By Any One Thing: Planned Parenthood vs. Karen Handel

Can we just talk about Karen Handel for a second? Ok, maybe a couple of seconds. She doesn't merit much more than that, but as a case-study in a particular way of thinking that I cannot for the life of me make heads or tails of, she's interesting.

And then we'll talk about how she's batshit insane.

But first, the earnest and wide-eyed questioning ingenue portion of today's blog.

Handel ran for governor of Georgia some years back, and her campaign website has been archived on the internet, because the internet never forgets anything, and so we can look at her statement about Planned Parenthood while she was running for governor. The salient portion of the statement reads as follows:

First, let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood. During my time as Chairman of Fulton County, there were federal and state pass-through grants that were awarded to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as a “Healthy Babies Initiative.” The grant was authorized, regulated, administered and distributed through the State of Georgia. Because of the criteria, regulations and parameters of the grant, Planned Parenthood was the only eligible vendor approved to meet the state criteria. Additionally, none of the services in any way involved abortions or abortion-related services. In fact, state and federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion related services and I strongly support those laws. Since grants like these are from the state I’ll eliminate them as your next Governor.

The sentence that smacked me upside the head and made me want to cry for the state of humanity is the last one: "Since grants like these are from the state I'll eliminate them as your next Governor."

What the what? Not, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll amend the criteria so Planned Parenthood is not the only eligible vendor as your next Governor." Or even, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll take the grant money and let the state itself administer cancer screenings and baby check-ups."

No. None of that reasonableness. As the next Governor, she would have eliminated the grants.

She's so pro-life that she's going to eliminate state spending on diagnosing life-threatening disease early! She's so pro-life she's going to make sure that poor babies don't see a doctor!

Look, Planned Parenthood is fun for a lot of people to use as a punching bag because they stubbornly refuse to stop providing comprehensive reproductive care services for women, usually women that have no other, or very limited other, access to healthcare. In plain English, Planned Parenthood refuses to remove abortion from the plethora of services it provides. Because of this, "pro-lifers" are quick to pile on, screeching at the top of their lungs that Planned Parenthood ought to be defunded by everyone and hounded out of business.

So, you don't like abortion. That's fair. I know some very lovely people who are staunchly against the practice, would never have one, would be horrified to know their daughter had one. I also know some not-so-lovely people who are staunchly against the practice.

The thing that, in my mind, separates lovely anti-abortion people from horrifyingly misogynistic control-freaks is something I call the Planned Parenthood barometer. It goes like this: I understand and respect your belief that life begins at conception and that you would never abort a fetus; do you understand and respect my belief (backed up by ACTUAL FACTS) that Planned Parenthood does way, way more than performing abortions, and can you recognize the good that they do and be happy that they do it and that they save lives? If the anti-abortion person I am speaking to can, in fact, recognize the good that Planned Parenthood does every day, then I term them a lovely anti-abortion person. Maybe they still have some discomfort, morally, with that, but you know what? Nothing is black-and-white. No moral decision will ever be simple. Being a good, moral person is to be uncomfortable for most of your life, because choices are hard, whether you're talking about an unintended pregnancy or killing a man that breaks into your house with the intent of harming you. If someone cannot understand that moral choices are fraught with gray and cannot recognize and acknowledge all the good (and I do mean, straight-up good) things that Planned Parenthood does, I mentally write them off as a horrifyingly misogynistic control freak and remind myself to never, ever trust them. With anything.

I'm not exaggerating even a little bit.

If your sense of being "pro-life" is so centered on a fetus that you are blind to the lives saved and made easier and the comfort given by poor people having access to breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, STD testing, and a general environment of non-judgmental knowledge, you're not very pro-life. You don't have to like abortion. You don't have to have one. But if you'd like to simply cease funding programs that do, in fact, save lives simply because they are being administered by an organization that does perform the perfectly legal abortion procedure, you cannot call yourself pro-life.

PERIOD. FULL STOP. You cannot do it.

Apparently, Karen Handel is one of these people.

What I learned last week, as the Komen debacle unfolded, is that contrary to what I had begun to believe about American humanity, she's the minority. People who are so incapable of recognizing nuance and the gradations that are attendent in any moral decision-making process are a minority.

You may not like abortion. You may think it's a bad thing, and a bad choice to make, and you might choose not to have one should you ever find yourself in an unfortunate position. But you don't get to condemn millions upon millions of poor women to death by breast cancer, or cervical cancer, or to lives of pain and suffering because of constant pregnancy due to lack of contraceptive access or STDs, and call it the moral, good, pro-life choice. And I learned last week that far, far more people than I thought would be able to make that distinction, DO, in fact, make that distinction.

World, you did me proud. I love all of you right now.

Then I read Handel's resignation letter this morning. The woman is batshit insane. She thinks if she says the same untrue things often enough, people will start to believe her. She thinks this even after last week very demonstrably proved that her extreme and frightening ideology and narrow focus is not shared by the majority of the people that Komen tries to help, or is supported by. Isn't the definition of insanity "doing the same thing and expecting different results?"

I thought so. The woman is nuts.

Your First Time Is Never Any Good

This is a thing we tell teenagers, or young adults, about their first sexual experience. Maybe it's just girls we tell this to? I don't know.

It's totally true, though. Your first time is never any good. Mine sure wasn't. My first few times weren't very good. Possibly my first few hundred? It took a few years for me to get the hang of sex, and then I'm pretty sure it just happened on accident anyway. Now, I find myself at the ripe old age of 27, actively working at my sex life for the first time ever.

It's weird. The working at it is weird, I mean. I am not naturally a "worker." My natural state is much closer to "dilettantism." I am very good at doing nothing. I don't actually like to work at anything. That's probably why I flunked out of college (twice) and now have a mindless administrative job. So working at sex is something of an unnatural state of affairs for me, as my character is so unsuited to work in general, and that goes double for working at things that are supposed to be pleasurable.

I have been having better sex in the last year, though. So even I must concede that there must be something to this work thing.

A few months back, when I was riding high on some confidence-binge of unknown origins, I submitted a short story to a bonafide literary publication.

SCARY.

Almost immediately after hitting the "send" button, I wanted to take it back and be all like, "Oh, hai, can you just delete that? Don't bother reading it. Kthnx."

I didn't do that, of course, because that would have been stupid. Also, even though I knew I was setting myself up for rejection, I sort of wanted to see what happened. Expecting anything other than rejection on your first submission attempt is pretty much ego-suicide, and I know this. Much better, and much more deserving, writers than I have been rejected hundreds upon thousands of times.

But still, some part of me wondered if maybe I hadn't just stumbled into a good story, the way I accidentally stumbled into good sex.

I didn't. The expected (albeit VERY TARDY) rejection letter arrived in my inbox this afternoon.

And now I find myself in the distasteful position of having to work at something else. If I'm going to publish anything, clearly I have to clean up my act, write more, dedicate time to it, read about writing, all that nonsense that all those silly "get-published-quick" websites tell you to do.

How common. (I'm really a snob at heart. I don't pretend anything else, ok, so don't get all up in my business about it.)

Still, if your first try is never any good, and working at sex has made my sex better, maybe I'd better stoop to being common. Clearly I am not extraordinary, anyway, as the rejection letter in my inbox keeps yelling at me.