This Is My Body

This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.


Share. Share. Share.

In an earlier post, I tried to explain how women in the USA are in grave danger from the religious right.

"The Republican Party, which has degenerated to little more than the political arm of the conservative religious right, has been striving relentlessly to ensure that women will be legally forced to bear all of the negative physical, social and most of the financial repercussions for any unplanned pregnancy, while the churches themselves underline and enforce the subordinate and inferior position of women in the culture. Through tireless efforts to withhold access to contraception from women, the religious right ensures that reproductive control remains primarily in the hands of men. Thanks to ideologically-driven appointments to the FDA and the business interests of both drug companies and the medical establishment, only male-controlled methods of reliable contraception are available without a prescription, forcing women to navigate (and pay for) "care" from layers of medical and pharmacy gatekeepers before they are permitted to obtain reliable female-controlled contraception...

In the Republican vision of the future - as in the past it idealizes - "freedom" and "rights" will only fully belong to men and to the potential offspring of men, while women will be, at best, reduced once again to second-class citizenship, and, at worst, returned to sexual and reproductive slavery. Political, financial and social oppression of women, reproductive slavery and viciously misogynistic church-mandated rules of correct behavior and dress (for women only) are the unceasing reality for millions of women in theocracies around the world.  All of these forms of oppression of women are rooted in the desire of these conservative societies to control the sexuality and reproductive freedom of their women. Almost without exception, societies based upon religious laws which both deny women fully human status and hold them accountable for the sexual activity of both genders strictly limit female freedom and impose exaggerated requirements for modest dress on their women and girls.  If a Christian theocracy is successfully installed by conservatives in the United States, ever-deepening oppression will become the inevitable future for women and girls here." Wait, Consent Means What?

This is not alarmist rhetoric; it is a fact.  Extreme religion induces people to behave in ways which they never would do if they were not under the pernicious influence of terrible supernatural belief.  Women themselves are complicit in their own oppression and the oppression of other women. Please wake up, American women!!!

RIP Sally Ride

Sally Ride, the first woman in space and an inspiration to girls everywhere, has died. Dr. Ride passed away earlier today due to complications of pancreatic cancer. She was 61 years old.

"... when I wasn't working,
I was usually at a window
looking down at earth."

Sally Ride, first woman in space, dies at 61,  USA Today.

Sally Ride, first American woman in space, dies,  CNN.

Sally Ride, first American woman in space, is dead, NPR.

"(In space) The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter...The view of earth is spectacular."

Dr. Ride inspired an entire generation of women scientists who watched her break the gender barrier in a new frontier and realised that they, too, could one day see that view of the earth and stars from space. 


Later, Sally broke through another social barrier. She was an out lesbian who shared her life proudly with the woman she loved.


I would like to send my sincere sympathy to Dr. Ride's life partner of 27 years, Dr. Tam E. O'Shaughnessy.


RIP, Dr. Sally Ride, American Hero - May 26, 1951 - July 23, 2012

Sex, Pregnancy and Consent

A Facebook friend recently posted a link to an interesting story about the possibility of a future world where responsibility for - and control over - reproduction could eventually be more evenly shared by men and women. In the blog The Last Word on Nothing, Sally Adee discussed pregnancy, abortion, women's and men's rights in light of ongoing research into the development of external womb technology. Whether it is futuristic fantasy or a real possibility, the topic of ectogenesis shines a spotlight on one of the thorniest issues related to heterosexual human sexuality: unplanned pregnancy.

Coming soon: a brave new world?

Right now, though, there is no handy external womb to help level the moral playing field between men and women when it comes to decisions about preventing or coping with unwanted pregnancy. Women must face all of the emotional and physical risks and demands of a life-altering, physically-depleting, potentially life-threatening experience which results in their almost total loss of bodily autonomy and they usually face most of the burden of the financial and social costs as well. Men who father unplanned children may be held legally responsible for some, none or all of the pregnancy-related medical costs in addition to nearly two decades of child support - if they accept the responsibilities of paternity (or can be proven to be the biological father of a child and forced to accept responsibility).

None of the above is a big problem for two people who have freely chosen to take on these risks; who have planned for and consented to a pregnancy and who happily plan to be jointly responsible should the pregnancy result in the live birth of a child.  The above risks and responsibilities become a serious problem, though, when the two people have not planned for and consented to pregnancy. The physical, psychological and financial risks to a mother and the psychological and financial risks to a father of an unexpected pregnancy are far too high for the possibility to be dismissed lightly. Consent to sex does not mean consent to pregnancy. Pregnancy is easily prevented by mutually respectful sexual partners and it is easily aborted in the earliest stages in the unlikely event that responsible contraceptive efforts fail. Childbirth should never be accidental, unplanned or forced.

No sex, no problems!
That should work!

But, the uncomfortable truth is that, in a religion-soaked culture, people who are sexually active - especially young people with uteri - are presumed to be consenting to the possibility of pregnancy whenever they have heterosexual sex - even if it is non-consensual sex. This has been strenuously underlined in society through abstinence-only pregnancy prevention programs, suppression of contraceptive information for sexually active young people, rape victim blaming, and waves of legislation designed to restrict access to female-controlled birth control and abortion services - even if pregnancy has resulted from rape, incest or coercion. The religiously-motivated "abstinence only" advice to repress natural, healthy sexual desires by avoiding all forms of sexual expression is nearly as ineffective as it is stupid and psychologically abusive.

Less loudly proclaimed, but no less true, is that young people with penises are presumed to be consenting to the possibility of pregnancy whenever they have heterosexual sex, too. The law in most states requires young men to contribute child support toward their progeny's expenses until 18 years of age. Since young men do not suffer any direct physical, educational, social or employment interruptions due to pregnancy, they are often in a far better position to prosper in life than their pregnant female counterparts. The gap widens throughout life as fewer than half of pregnant teens ever manage to finish high school and less than 2% complete a college degree even by the age of 30. Yet, a depressingly small per centage of men actually meet these responsibilities.

Reading the comments under the article on external wombs, I was not surprised to find the often-cited complaint from a male reader that it is unfair that a man may be legally required to support children that he may not have wanted. This speaks to the point above: that the role of men in an unplanned pregnancy is very much downplayed in society, leaving many men surprised and angry when they discover that they may be held legally responsible for support, even if they did not consent to fatherhood.

Sure, give your heart,
but don't lose your mind!

In a perfect world, no unplanned pregnancy could ever occur. But, we do not live in a perfect world. Therefore, it is essential that sexually active people respect and care for themselves as well as their partners in a happy, healthy relationship, whether it is a long-term, monogamous partnership or a single joyous sexual encounter. Luckily, wherever there is safe access to affordable, reliable birth control, this situation can be easily handled by caring - and responsible - sexual partners. It's true that contraception is not a perfect tool for preventing unwanted pregnancy: the failure rate for contraception when only one sexual partner "handles it" is higher than necessary for many reasons, but the main reason is usually operator error. However, when more than one form of birth control is used simultaneously, the failure rate drops significantly. The logical solution to that problem is for both sexual partners to use a reliable form of birth control to protect themselves and each other from operator error. If a condom is one of the two contraceptives used, there is the added bonus of protection from STDs!  Win, win!

I think the foundational understanding should be this: healthy, sexually mature human beings should be able to enjoy worry-free consensual sex. It is one of the joys of being human. In healthy heterosexual relationships, all participants take responsibility for protecting themselves and their partners from unplanned pregnancy. Unless both partners have willingly agreed to try to become parents and both have explicitly consented to actively pursuing parenthood every time they have sex, then both partners must assume that there is no consent to pregnancy, though consent to sex may still be enthusiastic. For every single sexual encounter except those explicitly meant to result in conception, all participants should use some form of contraception.

Indispensable equipment
for fun, sexy times!

What if your partner will not use birth control?  If your partner will not use birth control, perhaps s/he is assuming that you have consented to the possibility of parenthood. You know what you need to do: Correct the assumption before you have sex! If you correct the assumption and your partner still refuses to use birth control, then it is time to consider whether this person respects you and deserves to have a sexual relationship with you. Why would you want to have a sexual relationship with a person who does not respect you? There are millions of people in the world - quite a few of them very interested in a healthy sexual relationship with you. Get out there and find someone else who respects and cares about you!

Look, if you are a man who is unprepared to become a father, or if your partner has not explicitly consented to try to become a parent with you right now, then do not engage in sex without using some form of male-controlled birth control. Men who, like the commenter on the ectogenesis thread, whine immaturely that "she said that pregnancy is unlikely! (she lied!)", or who complain that they think wearing a condom reduces their pleasure (so they won't wear them, dammit!) are men who are too immature for sexual activity.  It is every human being's responsibility to prevent unplanned parenthood. There is a wide array of products out there designed to enhance your sexual experience safely and at least one of them will work out just fine for you. Sex feels great with or without a condom, but subjecting your partner (and yourself) to the risk of an unplanned pregnancy because you want an already awesome experience to be even better (for you) is a lousy way to show respect and caring to a partner.

All-important accoutrements
for fun, sexy times!

If you are a woman who is unprepared to become a mother, or if your partner has not explicitly consented to try to become a parent with you right now, then do not engage in sex without using some form of female-controlled birth control. Women who have become unwillingly pregnant may whine immaturely that "he promised that he would look after contraception!(he lied!)", or who complain that the pill or the IUD may have unpleasant side effects or that it feels too slutty to plan ahead to prevent pregnancy, are women who are too immature for sexual activity. It is every human being's responsibility to prevent unplanned parenthood. There is a vast selection of products out there to enable you to enjoy worry-free sex and with a little effort you will find the one that works well for you. Sex is a wonderful enrichment of life, but subjecting your partner (and yourself) to the risk of an ill-timed pregnancy because you want an already awesome experience to feel thrillingly (for you) spontaneous is a terrible way to show caring and respect to a partner.

We have sexual relationships with other people: our actions affect our partners, and we must have the maturity to treat them with the same consideration that we hope for ourselves. Control over your own fertility should never willingly be ceded to another person, not only because unwilling or unplanned parenthood can and often does result, but also because every child deserves to be conceived knowingly and deliberately by two people who have made a conscious choice to be parents.

Religious conservatives get it so wrong when they declare that extra-marital, non-procreative sex is immoral. Consensual sex is moral, natural and good. But, consensual sex does not mean consent to pregnancy. Whenever you engage in sex without using personal birth control, you are unfairly denying your partner the right to consent to or not to consent to a possible pregnancy. And do you know what?  That would be immoral.

Ah, the joy of consensual sex!

Wait, Consent Means WHAT?

The future of American women?

Individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy - the principles behind our understanding of consent - were the principles upon which many of us assume the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision was based, although the case itself was focused on a citizen's right to privacy around making decisions concerning her bodily autonomy and medical care.  Laws which deny a woman the right to bodily autonomy - including laws that deny a woman the right to control what happens to her own body in favor of giving any potential fetus the "right" to use her body against her will or without her consent - are an unconstitutional denial of individual freedom because they relegate a woman to a legal status that is less than human. The legal precedent that a woman actually has the right to consent to the risks and responsibilities of pregnancy, and an equal right to decline consent to those risks and responsibilities was thought to be finally established. But since Roe v Wade was argued as a case for privacy, it has never been a guarantee of women's reproductive rights. It has always been vulnerable to attack, either through court challenges or through legislation which has chipped away at it.

One way or another, the
Republican Party will find
a way to control those sluts!

From the moment Roe v Wade was decided, the religious right began working to overturn it. Outraged that women had at last been granted the right to choose if and when to be pregnant -  a right which conflicted with the patriarchal order which demands that men have complete authority over women - the "moral majority" began a campaign of slut-shaming, raising the specter- never far beneath the surface in any misogynist culture - that uncontrolled women would engage in wildly promiscuous and "irresponsible" sex and darkly warning that the new law would bring about the downfall of American civil society  However, when this tactic initially only gained traction within the most conservative and misogynistic segments of society, conservatives realized that the problem was that a majority of Americans in the late 1970's actually respected a woman's right to choose - and that most Americans believed that the consensual sexual activity of women was no more society's business than the consensual sexual activity of men.

Religious conservatives soon zeroed in on "consent" as a potentially malleable concept that they might be able to use to drive a wedge between women and their human rights, thereby setting the stage to put women back in their traditional place.  In order to overcome the legal issue of consent, religious and political conservatives began working tirelessly - using tactics including slut-shaming, abstinence-only purity campaigns inserted into public schools, and falsely equating microscopic blastocysts with full term babies - to entrench the notion that recreational sex involving the conscious avoidance of pregnancy is shameful and that only marital sex which welcomes the prospect of conception should be recognized and supported by society. Their aim was to increase public acceptance of explicitly Christian sexual mores in order to garner voter support for their social agenda. The ultimate goal was to get this explicitly Christian theology enshrined into law: that whenever a woman has consented to sex, she has automatically consented to pregnancy, too.

That's right, ladies, when you consent to sex, you consent to
pregnancy. And when you don't consent to sex, you
consent to pregnancy, too! You and your uteri are in a perpetual
state of consent to pregnancy! Ain't patriarchy grand?

Eventually, extreme conservatives began to worry that exceptions for rape and incest could possibly become a loophole through which some lying women could escape unwanted pregnancy, leading to the push for the elimination of exceptions for rape and incest as legal justifications for abortion. Building on the false premise that a conceptus is equal to a full-term baby, conservatives argued that a fertilized egg, no matter how it came into existence, is an innocent life deserving of protection. Completely ignoring the question of whether a woman who has been raped is deserving of society's protection and adroitly sidestepping Roe v Wade, forced-birth groups wrote bills denying abortion rights to women even in the case of rape or incest which their political arm, the Republican party, sponsored in state legislatures. In one giant leap of cruel imagination, conservatives managed to establish as a serious idea that even when a woman does not consent to sex, her consent to pregnancy should be automatic in the eyes of the law.

Lest there be any doubt about the intentions of the religious conservatives and their hired guns in the state and federal legislatures to render the legal notion of female consent completely irrelevant and completely powerless, forced-birth organizations created "personhood bills" which they instructed their Republican lackeys to sponsor and pass in various states. "Personhood" bills, if signed into law, would confer the full rights of a "person" - a deliberately vague term, but generally considered to be equal to a live-born child - to all fertilized ova. Such laws would criminalize most forms of female-controlled contraception, emergency contraception, assisted reproduction and, of course, all abortions. They would also open the door to state-sponsored invasion of women's privacy and health care rights since legally protected "persons" could potentially be "murdered" before a conception is discovered to have taken place. Furthermore, such laws would criminalize anyone who attempted to help a woman abort the conceptus "person" either by performing a surgical procedure, providing medical abortifacents, or driving a woman across state lines to obtain an abortion in a non-"Personhood" state.

Got that, gals?

"Personhood" laws are the holy grail of the forced-birth movement and the ultimate goal of religious conservatives. If passed, such laws would strip women of all bodily autonomy in matters of reproduction. Women would be denied female-controlled birth control, they would be denied emergency birth control if their partner's birth control fails or he refuses to use it and they would be denied abortions - even if they are impregnated by rape and even if their health or lives are endangered by a pregnancy. In short, thanks to the twisted culture of "life" pushed so ruthlessly onto them by religious conservatives, women would be compelled to sacrifice their happiness, risk their health and even lose their lives because a single-celled conceptus has been granted a right to occupy her body which supersedes all of her rights including her humanity, her dignity and her right to life.

Keep that contraception out
of those sluts' hands!

The Republican Party, which has degenerated to little more than the political arm of the conservative religious right, has been striving relentlessly to ensure that women will be legally forced to bear all of the negative physical, social and most of the financial repercussions for any unplanned pregnancy, while the churches themselves underline and enforce the subordinate and inferior position of women in the culture. Through tireless efforts to withhold access to contraception from women, the religious right ensures that reproductive control remains primarily in the hands of men. Thanks to ideologically-driven appointments to the FDA and the business interests of both drug companies and the medical establishment, only male-controlled methods of reliable contraception are available without a prescription, forcing women to navigate (and pay for) "care" from layers of medical and pharmacy gatekeepers before they are permitted to obtain reliable female-controlled contraception.

Religious patriarchy allows society to label unplanned pregnancy a "women's issue" in spite of the fact that it takes both a man and a woman - both failing to use effective contraception - to create an unplanned pregnancy. The fact that society allows unplanned pregnancy to be framed as a women's issue reveals the depth of the unconscious misogyny which lays the responsibility for - and the consequences of - an unplanned pregnancy squarely in the woman's lap, while little thought - and almost no censure - is directed toward the "guilt", the "promiscuity" or the "irresponsibility" of the man involved.

The old joke about keeping women
barefoot and pregnant?
Not so funny anymore.

More insidiously, when pregnancy and the laws restricting women's rights over when and if they will become pregnant is framed as a women's issue, conservatives ensure that half the population at least may ignore the very real danger to women's health and safety. Few men pay attention when women's rights are being stripped away because the phrase "women's issue" is unconsciously received as a signal that the subject is unimportant and less than men's other concerns. Even men who love the women in their lives are lulled into a false sense of "nothing to worry about" as their wives, their sisters and their daughters are slowly but surely reduced to the legal status of walking wombs compelled under threat of criminal prosecution to gestate the offspring of any man who succeeds in impregnating them - whether by mutual and loving consent, by accidental failure of birth control or by force.

In this way, the religious patriarchy ensures both that women cannot control their own reproduction completely (since women - even abstinent women - can be, and often are, the victims of forced impregnation) and that no man - not even a rapist - needs to accept the decision of a mere woman on the question of whether or not he can use her body to reproduce. That is because the "right to life" of a conceptus is, in fact, really just an extension of men's rights. A conceptus is always some man's potential offspring, and at its core, religious teaching is all about enshrining the right of every man to reproduce. If women are allowed the freedom to choose, some men would almost certainly have difficulty finding a willing mate with whom to procreate. Religions which enforce the authority of men over women and which restrict the freedom and choices of women therefore speak to the root of cultural misogyny - men's fear of the potential power of women to control their (men's) ability to reproduce. "Right to life" is actually the trojan horse by which male rights over women are being inserted directly into women's uteri. That's right. It's a great big legal 'fuck you, women'!

While religions pay lip service to condemning male brutality and offer assurances on how a "godly man" behaves, they strenuously resist efforts to enact laws which could increase rape prosecutions or extend protections for women against sexual assault, citing concerns about - you can guess - men's rights. The ultimate social priority of religion is to confirm and enforce the authority of men over women. To that end, religious conservatives - and their men in government - are willing to grant even rapists and abusers privileges over women, to safeguard the authority of "godly" men. In short, in order to protect the privilege of all men, themselves included of course, even "godly" men who profess to abhor rape willingly award rapists and abusers the right to reproduce using women's bodies against their will. As always, there is no thought spared for the humanity of the women who would be sacrificed to this Christian ideology. At best, they are dismissed as the "blessed" recipients of a "gift from God".

This is already a real thing in
the conservative Christian world

In the Republican vision of the future - as in the past it idealizes - "freedom" and "rights" will only fully belong to men and to the potential offspring of men, while women will be, at best, reduced once again to second-class citizenship, and, at worst, returned to sexual and reproductive slavery. Political, financial and social oppression of women, reproductive slavery and viciously misogynistic church-mandated rules of correct behavior and dress (for women only) are the unceasing reality for millions of women in theocracies around the world.  All of these forms of oppression of women are rooted in the desire of these conservative societies to control the sexuality and reproductive freedom of their women. Almost without exception, societies based upon religious laws which both deny women fully human status and hold them accountable for the sexual activity of both genders strictly limit female freedom and impose exaggerated requirements for modest dress on their women and girls.  If a Christian theocracy is successfully installed by conservatives in the United States, ever-deepening oppression will become the inevitable future for women and girls here.

Religious conservatives want Roe v Wade overturned because they oppose the principles of individual freedom and the right to bodily autonomy for women upon which the decision was based.  That denial of those rights would relegate women to less than human status is exactly the point. Second-class status for women would be a feature, not a bug, for Christian conservatives since the Bible commands that women are not equal but subordinate to men. Bible-based religion asserts that man is the original human and woman, taken from man, is less than human. This is the reality of Bible-based governance. It seems like a nightmare from the dark ages, or some dystopian futuristic novel, but this is really happening right now in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Virginia/Virgynia

I am planning to continue to bring up as frequently as I can the horrendous issue of mandatory ultrasounds - for no medical reason - being forced on women seeking legal abortion.  More than twenty states have or have tried to put laws on the books mandating these invasive ultrasounds. In the last year alone, at least seven other states have tried to pass similar anti-choice measures, with varying levels of success.  I worry that the Republicans will succeed in distracting women from this reality. I worry that women will forget that their freedom and human rights are in very real peril.

Rachel Maddow may be thinking along the same lines, and hopefully a lot of other prominent writers and journalists will not let this issue drop off the national radar as the election campaigning heats up.  This week, Ms. Maddow did a follow-up piece to her blog series about personalized Virginia license plates.  The video clip is great, but what is even more awesome is that one of my Facebook friends, Becky Kirkland Kremkau is one of the contributors!  The final - fantastic! - plate is Becky's:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Just to refresh your memory:

Charting the number of laws restricting abortion rights since 1985

Women Are Not An Interest Group

President Obama's remarks March 29, 2012 to Planned Parenthood Supporters.

"Women are not an interest group"  <- It is hard to believe that this needed to be said, but...it needed to be said!  Thank you, Mr. President, for saying it.

I hope this is only the start of a sustained and principled stand for women's rights from the President.

Four Excellent Things

Here are four excellent things to listen to on this St. Patrick's eve:

Mount Everest still holds mysteries for scientists. 

Why are some countries rich and others poor?  (You knew it!!)

My idol, Meryl Streep, introducing Hillary Clinton at the Women in the World Summit:



My other idol, Hillary Clinton at the same conference:

Triggers

I have had a hard time functioning normally these past few months thanks to the cluster of shockingly misogynistic bills that have come before some state legislatures and the even more viciously misogynistic rationale, propaganda and political strategy which spawned them.  I have about a dozen posts in various stages of production,  but right now I seem to be incapable of sorting through it all calmly enough to write coherently on any one of them.

There is a term for this logjam of emotion, this mind-choking wad of confusion, rage, pain, misery and almost nihilistic despair which is triggered by events which stir up horrible memories of past trauma: post traumatic stress disorder.

I have never been diagnosed with PTSD and I probably never will be.  I doubt I will ever trust a medical professional enough to ever go for assessment. The worst traumas in my life were visited upon me by the very professions upon which society depends to protect people from criminal assaults or to treat them for medical emergencies.  Like many women, I have learned the hard, painful way that neither police nor doctors can be trusted to care about what happens to me. Worse, I have learned, as most women do, that these professionals can even do me harm in the service of the ideologies they hold: their sincerely held belief systems which render someone like me sub-human in their eyes.

Like most women in the western world - and possibly every woman in the developing world - I have endured regular, casual, culturally-approved gender-based mistreatment from my young girlhood to the present day.  Like most women, I have been sexually assaulted - not just once but several times - ranging from the clumsy grabs at breasts and crotch which are a regular occurrence on any school playground or neighborhood backyard to the intimidation of catcalls and threats from strangers in passing cars or in nightclubs, to unwanted sexual advances after a date from which I barely escaped, to a violent daytime stranger assault that left me bruised and terrorized. To the nonchalant amusement of the police, my attacker was a teenager a little younger than I was, already known to the authorities from having committed this type of assault before, and I was informed that no charges would be laid, because it might "ruin the kid's life". Had I been a man, brutally attacked and beaten at midday as he was on his way to work, the perpetrator would have been charged with aggravated assault at least. But I was a young woman, still a teenager, and the perp also sexually assaulted me. For that, the potential for his reputation to be ruined by a charge of attempted rape was considered much worse than the fact that my life would never be the same again, even after I recovered from my injuries.

Unlike most women, but probably like many more than women themselves realize, I have been denied information about a life-threatening condition in order to limit my choices in my own healthcare.  A doctor placed his religious ideology above my life and decided that I was not to be trusted with information which might have resulted in my choosing a legal abortion in order to safeguard my own health and possibly my life.  There is no doubt that my choice would have been to try to save that very much-wanted pregnancy anyway, but the knowledge that a person with power so dehumanized me that he felt he had the right - no, the god-given duty - to take away my right to make my own healthcare decisions by concealing the facts from me - even at the risk of my dying because of it - is an emotional trauma from which I may never recover.

Women in the west are constantly chastising themselves for failing to be happy in our modern, post-feminist world. Men who love us cannot understand why we can't just be happy, and we ask ourselves the same question. We wonder why, with all of our alleged equality in the modern world, we cannot seem to feel equal or respected or safe. The answer is simple: we know, through constant lived experience, that in every human culture we are not equal, not respected and never safe.

Women in the west have been force-fed a sickening glut of lies and misogyny that has, I believe, left too many of us paralyzed. Reality does not match the story our culture tells us, and we have daily proof that our rights as "equal" human beings are a myth. We are paralyzed with fear and we are paralyzed with the knowledge of just how degraded and dehumanized we remain in a world that is still overwhelmingly dominated by misogynist, religiously-fueled patriarchy. We are humiliated by the daily barrage of hateful messages directed at ourselves, our daughters, our sisters, our friends, and we are doubly humiliated because we are jeered at and intimidated into silence if we dare to try to talk about it. We try to play the game, try to figure out how to navigate the world without falling victim to the constant threats to our minds, bodies and livelihoods, and we try to suck up the inevitable attacks every female human being endures in her life - simply because she is female - to keep on living as joyfully as we can.

I have lived the life of a relatively-privileged and protected white woman in the western world:  raised in a society which pays lip service to equality for all human beings, but which systematically privileges a few dominant groups. Like all average western women, I have endured a lifetime of fear of assault, shame for the fact of my femaleness, humiliation at the hands of men, betrayal by men and by other women (who have joined the patriarchy in beating other women down to save themselves further pain) and doctor-mandated rape as punishment for having the audacity to seek medical care to which I was legally entitled.

"Many women find Pap smears embarrassing, 
and they would avoid getting them if they could get away with it 
and still get the other gynecological care they need...Is it paternalistic to require a Pap smear in order to get contraceptive pills? One could argue that. But it's also effective. Sometimes doctor really does know best."

Elizabeth Boskey, PhD*

The recent rash of horrors from state legislatures mandating - among other horrors - state-sponsored rape of women seeking abortions is nothing more than the logical extension of a 50-year policy of subjugating women to doctor-mandated rape for seeking female controlled birth control.  The rationale that women need "information" forced upon them before choosing a legal abortion to end an unplanned or forced pregnancy is no more dishonest than the rationale that forced "screening for cervical cancer" is a necessary prerequisite before oral contraceptives can be safely prescribed. Both rationales come from the same root belief: a woman seeking birth control/abortion is a slut who deserves to be punished for having sex. Both rationales are lies. 

Many women have been following recent events with growing terror, and that is the longterm goal of this strategy:  to keep women in a perpetual state of fear so that we will not dare to organize again and speak out to defend our human rights.  We are publicly worried about losing what few rights we had managed to win in the last century,  and we are privately frightened every day by the intimidation of a patriarchal society which threatens to strip a woman of everything she cherishes - the love of her family and friends, her ability to earn a living, her very life - unless she conforms to its impossible norms and restrictions.

Most women keep trying to play the game. Most women hope that if they try hard enough to please, try hard enough not to be too pushy, try hard enough not to be too demanding or too insistent on being treated as the equal of men, then somehow they will avoid attack. They play along to get along.

United, we can stand up to misogyny.

But, here is the thing, my sisters:

Playing along to get along isn't working.

It has never worked.


It is time to be courageous and stand up.

It is time to do what is right and speak out.

We can face down the fear together.




It may take me a while to be able to finish that dozen or so posts.  But, I will get there.  I hope you will be there with me.

* In November, 2010, Dr. Boskey added the following postscript to her unedited original post on Ask.com. :

Update 11/10: Since writing this article, I've read many women's stories of their experiences getting Pap smears, and I'm no longer in favor of using birth control pills as a way to encourage Pap screening. I still think that regular, although not yearly, screening is important; however, I think that it would be better to recruit women through education than through mechanisms that are perceived as highly coercive. Your stories have changed my mind. Thank you.

While this postscript is called an "update", it sits at the bottom of the page well after the article is concluded. The original article has not been updated: the language and message remains unchanged from the original including the quotes above.