If We Just Burned All the Books, We Wouldn't Have To Worry About Corrupting the Children

Menifee, California school district bans the Merrriam-Webster's College Dictionary because it contains a definition for oral sex.

Free Abortion On Demand

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.

Sexism and Stupak

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.

Geisy Arruda's Sane Decision

This sounds a bit more like the Brazil I remember, rather than the Puritanical one that appeared last week.

First, in regards to Arruda turning down the Playboy offer: good for her. I know about as much about Arruda as the rest of the world, which is to say: she goes to college, and she was expelled and humiliated for an outfit that very few found remarkably offensive or revealing. She was readmitted back to the school, and went back, seeming to genuinely want to earn her degree to improve her social standing.

Yet as is often the case, her instant "celebrity" led to Playboy knocking at the door, offering her quick money and fame, but nothing of substance. That is the Brazil I remember: the one that has a remarkable (even arguably by American standards) fascination with the celebrity-culture that pushes an obsession to be famous among certain sectors. These people are usually young men and women on reality-TV shows in Brazil. Almost always, an appearance on a reality TV show means a guaranteed offer to appear in Playboy or any other number of knockoffs; it's not even excluded to women, as young men on these shows often end up in nude photoshoots in other magazines. From then on, they remain famous as long as they keep popping up in these magazines, contributing nothing to society (save for some release for the teenagers who get their hands on these magazines), and as is usually the case with celebrity culture, when the latest phenomenon comes along, they're usually brushed aside.

Arruda decided to avoid that; instead, she chose to probably hopefully return to anonymity soon, and finish her studies. And for that,s he should be applauded.

I Hope Taft's Not On Top

The link is probably inappropriate for work, but artist Justine Lai is working on a series of paintings showing her having sex with the American presidents, in order of succession. She's as far as Grant I think. Here's her explanation:

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated.

I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness. It would be easy to let the images slide into territory that's strictly pornographic—the lurid and hardcore, the predictably "controversial." One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its "Fuck the Man" symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do.

While I'm not really qualified to judge Lai's work from an artistic standpoint, I like the principle of it. Humanizing presidents is a valuable service, particularly the most mythologized. The painting of her and Lincoln is probably my favorite because of its shocking humanization of a man that seems so unlike us. It reminds me of the greatest bit in John Stewart's book, the pin the clothes on the naked Supreme Court justices. That was one of the most juvenile jokes, but also the most profound.

Via Tomasky.

Virginity By Major

Via Sociological Images, this survey of virginity by major at Wellesley is interesting. But the numbers seem awful high to me. Are well over half of all college students really virgins? This seems highly dubious.

Nonetheless, I am glad to see historians getting way more action than political scientists. Take that Yann!

And evidently studio arts equals one endless orgy or something.

Hookups

Amy has a good rebuttal to this annoying Charles Blow article where he bemoans "the end of dating" and hookups.

She writes:

Hooking up is not some sort of evil social phenomenon that will destroy our culture; it's a no-bullshit way of getting to know someone for people who are interested in sex. Frankly, a lot of sadness has been reaped in this world because of marriages (or relationships) between one person who loves and needs sex and another who can do without, or would just rather not. What's wrong with these two pools of people having such drastically different "loving" styles that they become less likely to mix?

Indeed. The unfortunately named Blow, is well, a blowhard who tries to explain what he sees as the culture of those crazy kids to other clueless people. There's nothing inherently wrong or right about hookups, or about dating for that matter. People should do whatever they want to so long as it isn't hurting someone else. Just because it seems strange to out of touch people over the age of 40 does not mean it is wrong. And even if it was wrong, writing an article as an explanatory guide of the insanity of youth to fuddy duddies is not a very appealing genre.

Historical Image of the Day

Page 1 of Baltimore Brevities, a tabloid paper, September 14, 1932.

That's Not a Contradiction; That's a Failed Method

Just whittling my time away while waking up to coffee this morning, I read this meaningless, fluffy little article on the "reddest" and "bluest" cities in the U.S. Among the "reddest" cities, they included Lubbock, Texas (No surprise here; 3 of the 4 they listed were in Texas, and the fourth was Provo, Utah). One of the ways they described Lubbock was "contradictory," and one of their two examples of Lubbock's "inherent" contradictions? "The city has a high rate of teenage pregnancy but an abstinence-only sex education policy."

There's nothing contradictory about this, and these aren't mutually exclusive things. Time and again, people have shown that abstinence-only sex-ed doesn't stop teenagers from having sex. While I have no expectations for an article of this type, it's still really frustrating to me that this article can espouse abstinence-only as a valid form of sex-ed even while its own evidence (Lubbock) shows that the approach doesn't work. It's one thing for right-wing nutjobs who believe people and dinosaurs lived side-by-side and that the rapture is dependent upon Israel's independence to espouse this crap, but for an "article" of this sort to also blindly accept and puke up abstinence only as a valid program and remain befuddled as to why teenagers get pregnant so often in a city with such a program is just mind-numbing and counfounding.

Most Direct Song Title Ever

My nomination: Marvin Gaye, "You Sure Love to Ball"