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Behold, the fetus fetish.
Unfortunately, the torrent of burning stupid never stops (the republican primary debates are ample evidence), not even for the new year. Brazil has just passed a piece of legislation making compulsory to register if you happen to be pregnant. How nice. Winnowing away of the rights of women has not gone away in the new year and it looks like the pace is increasing in South America.
“In the dead of night on December 27, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff enacted legislation that will require all pregnancies to be registered with the government. Provisionary Measure 557 (PM 557) created the National System of Registration, Vigilance and Monitoring Women’s Care during Pregnancy and Post Childbirth for the Prevention of Maternal Mortality (National Registration System).
She used a provisionary measure—intended only for urgent matters—that allows the president to pass a law without congressional approval. Congress only gets to debate and approve the law once it has been enacted. Rousseff claims that PM 557 will address Brazil’s high rates of maternal mortality by ensuring better access, coverage and quality of maternal health care, notably for high-risk pregnancies.”
Kinda spooky. No debate, no discussion just poof! and you get to watch your rights disappear in the rear view mirror of misogynist public policy.
“Both public and private health providers must report all pregnancies—providing women’s names—with the National Registration System so the state can then track these pregnancies, from prenatal to postpartum care, presumably to evaluate and monitor health care provided.
How does simply monitoring pregnancies reduce maternal mortality? There is no guarantee that care will be available to all pregnant women and no investment in improving health services included in the legislation.”
Of course registering women having birth might be considered a first step if there was more medical aid forthcoming, but nothing like that is in the legislation.
“And what’s the benefit to women? PM 557 does authorize the federal government to provide financial support up to R$50.00 (roughly US$27) for registered pregnant women for their transportation to health facilities for pre-natal and delivery care. However, to receive the stipend women must comply with specific conditions set by the state related to pre-natal care. Let’s face it, that paltry sum may not even cover the roundtrip for one appointment depending on where a woman lives.
In fact, PM 557 does not guarantee access to health exams, timely diagnosis, providers trained in obstetric emergency care, or immediate transfers to better facilities. So while the legislation guarantees R$50.00 for transportation, it will not even ensure a pregnant woman will find a vacant bed when she is ready to give birth. And worse yet, it won’t minimize her risk of death during the process.”
So, bad for women, bad for their life expectancy, bad for their chances to die in pregnancy. It would seem to be a fairly raw deal for women all the way around.
“Last but certainly not least, MP 557 violates all women’s right to privacy by creating compulsory registration to control and monitor her reproductive life. In fact, it places the rights of the fetus over the woman, effectively denying her reproductive autonomy. A woman will now be legally “obligated” to have all the children she conceives and she will be monitored by the State for this purpose.”
Ah, there we go the real reason for MP 557, those unruly women need less autonomy. Why does that always seem to be the answer when it comes to many programs dealing with women’s health? Rhetorical questions aside, Brazil needs to get this bill back in front of the assembly and rework it into less a monstrosity, stat.
Just in case you forgot what you were living in and tacitly supporting… from I Blame the Patriarchy.
“It’s like when I happen to run into the occasional woman who thinks Bust is a feminist magazine. Or maybe she believes that femininity is “natural,” or that “radiant skin” is desirable. Look at her sails! Her bloomy, billowing sails, bloated with hot wind! What can I do? If I don’t take that wind outta them things she might go around the rest of her life arguing that burlesque is an empowering form of feminine self-expression.
So I cram down her neck the truth that our patriarchal social order, despite what she’s been told since the cradle, doesn’t really have her best interests at heart. I explain that she is defined in this social order solely with respect to male interests, and that she is a member of an oppressed sex class out of which she may not opt, and that her success in life is entirely a matter of the degree to which she appeases her oppressor.
She protests. She demurs. She vituperates. She calls me a sex-hating harridan prude.
And then her lobe starts to pulsate. The mascara falls from her eyes. She grasps that, yes, patriarchy is founded on oppression and suffering, that Ponzi schemes and thread-count cons are logical consequences in a world order that is itself the Mother of All Scams, and most horribly of all, that she is both complicit and a dupe in the whole set-up.
Her life is ruined, and she has me to thank for it.*
Trust no one.”
This is a compete repost of what guest blogger Starling on Shapely Prose, says about our rape culture and how it works for the people who have no choice but to live within its confines. This is a “S2” moment, as in Sit the frack down and Shut the frack up.
This is how it works out there. Starling writes with brilliant clarity on a topic that troubles me greatly, she lays down exactly what being female is in our culture, exposing the double standards, patriarchy, and rape culture that are inherent in our society.
You do not want to be part of the problem, so don’t be that guy or girl who glosses over someones “personal problems” or laughs at a rape joke or endorses the other 101 quadrillion bits of misogyny that passes as humour these days. Problems are not fixed by ignoring them. Not taking personal responsibility for making the society you live in safer is a shitty thing to do. So don’t be that person.
Read on.
Phaedra Starling is the pen name of a romance novelist and licensed private investigator living in small New York City apartment with two large dogs. She practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu and makes world-class apricot muffins.
Gentlemen. Thank you for reading.
Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities. So you must look further afield to encounter her.
So far, so good. Miss LonelyHearts, your humble instructor, approves. Human connection, love, romance: there is nothing wrong with these yearnings.
Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.
“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”
Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is. When I go on a date, I always leave the man’s full name and contact information written next to my computer monitor. This is so the cops can find my body if I go missing. My best friend will call or e-mail me the next morning, and I must answer that call or e-mail before noon-ish, or she begins to worry. If she doesn’t hear from me by three or so, she’ll call the police. My activities after dark are curtailed. Unless I am in a densely-occupied, well-lit space, I won’t go out alone. Even then, I prefer to have a friend or two, or my dogs, with me. Do you follow rules like these?
So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?
Do you think I’m overreacting? One in every six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I bet you don’t think you know any rapists, but consider the sheer number of rapes that must occur. These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion. While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?
I don’t.
When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.
Fortunately, you’re a good guy. We’ve already established that. Now that you’re aware that there’s a problem, you are going to go out of your way to fix it, and to make the women with whom you interact feel as safe as possible.
To begin with, you must accept that I set my own risk tolerance. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve had this post on the back burner for months, since a commenter at Shakesville (I think) said, you could never get away with restricting men’s access to Viagra the way state legislatures have restricted women’s access to abortion in America. And no, you couldn’t. But interestingly enough, it’s pretty easy to make a set of arguments for restricting access to Viagra, that are pretty similar to the arguments for restricting access to abortion. For the most part, all you have to do is search the text, and replace “woman” with “man”, “abortion” with “Viagra”, and “ends a human life” with “begins a human life”. (If pre-born human life is that important to you, you should take its creation as seriously as its destruction.) Then there are a few restrictions that claim they’re protecting women, and you just have to look at the flip-side: preventing men from hurting women. For some of the restrictions, I’ve invented an imaginary evil radical feminist anti-het-sex conspiracy to substitute for the Religious Right.
Every restriction on access to Viagra I propose below, is either a fact of life, or a legislated restriction, on abortion in at least one, and often many, American states. When the restrictions and their justifications are imposed on men, they look pretty radically man-hating (never mind that being unable to get a hardon is nowhere near as traumatic as going through childbirth against your will), but in their anti-abortion form, it’s not just fringe whackaloons making the arguments I’ll list, it’s people elected to public office. Read the rest of this entry »
I just keep posting about gender inequality, others say pfffff! what the heck I am talking about….
Until the idea that inequality exists and that it is a problem,then there really is not much to discuss now, is there?
Of all the women and all the poses that are available *this* one gets the attention. Of course it is rape culture double thumbs up approved so its all good.
*sigh*
Still so much work to do…
Ahh, a small break in the studies allows me to do some sweet sweet blogging.
The Canadian Supreme Court as just managed to find its ass with, get this, not just one, but BOTH of it hands. The wisdom and judicial prudence has been flowing as of late, but let us scry into the dense legal jargon and decipher this weighty codex:
“A woman cannot give advance consent to sexual activity while unconscious, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday.”
How they get the creamy filling into the chocolate bars is next on this braintrust’s todo list. One problem at a time though…
“If the complainant is unconscious during the sexual activity, she has no real way of knowing what happened and whether her partner exceeded the bounds of her consent,” the ruling said.
The definition of consent is an ongoing state of mind where individuals can ask their partner to stop, McLachlin wrote.
“Any sexual activity with an individual who is incapable of consciously evaluating whether she is consenting is therefore not consensual within the meaning of the Criminal Code,” she wrote.
Why we need such clarity is because in 2007 a couple engaged in mutual erotic asphyxiation and of course, the dude while his partner was out did stuff to her that was above and beyond the terms of their agreement. Okay, that was speculation on my part, this is what the article says:
“The case goes back to a particular episode in 2007 when the woman, who cannot be named because of a publication ban, complained to police about what her partner did to her after she passed out. At trial, the man was found guilty of sexual assault but his conviction was overturned on appeal.”
Ah, says the rights crowd, she had it coming then as she had already agreed to take part in sexual activity. Yes, she did to the initial act, but she did not give consent for x, y, and z that came after when she was unconscious and correctly this dudes appeal was overturn and he went to prison.
“The Ottawa man served 18 months in jail after his conviction in 2008 on the sexual assault charge.”
And justly so, because there was a point, before committing x,y,z on her body, he had the choice. There was a threshold, a line of ambivalence that needed to be consciously crossed before he continued with the sexual assault and he did so. Consent is everything in an intimate relationship, especially one that pushes boundaries with racy sexual activities, and the dude in question made a conscious decision to go beyond the reasonable expectations of their relationship.
Three Justices dissented from this ruling –
“In the dissenting opinion written by Justice Morris Fish, the judges said Friday’s ruling would deprive women “of their freedom to engage by choice in sexual adventures that involve no proven harm to them or to others.”
They also expressed concern about the criminalization of normal sexual relations between spouses.
“The approach advocated by the Chief Justice would also result in the criminalization of a broad range of conduct that Parliament cannot have intended to capture in its definition of the offense of sexual assault. Notably, it would criminalize kissing or caressing a sleeping partner, however gently and affectionately.”
I’m guessing that the x,y,z that our friendly dude perpetrated against our victim was a little more that caressing or kissing. The dissent relies on a less than reasonable interpretation of the law.
“Elizabeth Sheehy, a lawyer for the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, which intervened in this case, dismissed the dissenting opinion. She called the majority ruling a major victory for women.
“The most important message that the court is communicating is that unconscious women are not sexually available,” she said.”
Hurrah for that.
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