Friday, February 25, 2011

The War on Intelligence


Some of the recent actions of our House of Representatives are scaring me a little bit. While our middle and lower class bends under the weight of a national deficit, jobs flee overseas to exploit workers, and our education and healthcare systems perpetuate cyclical poverty and disease, the best they think they can do is take away our intelligence so that we don't notice the actions they aren't taking. 
The recent attack on public broadcasting (170MillionAmericans.org) and Planned Parenthood (ppaction.org/IStandWithPP) are a distraction and a waste of time that hurt, not help, Americans. The attack on public broadcasting not only does not make a dent in the national debt, but it takes away a valuable unbiased news resource from the American people. It is an attack on intelligence that leaves many with no domestic news options besides incredibly biased news stations that avoid the real issues.


Thanks Marz for the image: tellhertruly.tumblr.com

As for the attack on Planned Parenthood, it is a wedge issue and at it's heart is an attack on women's health. The NY Times spells out what the Pence Amendment is really all about:
"The egregious cuts in the House resolution include the elimination of support for Title X, the federal family planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In the absence of Title X’s preventive care, some women would die. The Guttmacher Institute, a leading authority on reproductive health, says a rise in unintended pregnancies would result in some 400,000 more abortions a year... Their continuing resolution would cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality (The War on Women)."
This is not about abortion. Very little federal money that goes to PP funds abortions, and those dollars that do are for extreme cases like rape and incest. This is about misogyny, about a war on the intelligence of the U.S. public and of women especially. How much more do Republicans have to take from the middle and lower classes before we start taking it personally?
How about the trillions of dollars we have spent killing people in the Middle East? How about the billions of dollars spent on the war on drugs-- the war on drugs being the jailing of thousands of poor non-white men who have committed victimless crimes-- which hasn't stunted drug use in the least? How about the obscene salaries of the men pushing this legislation through? THOSE are the dollars we should be cutting. There's a reason stupid crap gets so much time on the news: it's so we don't think about this stuff. It's so our only political and moral convictions have to do with abortion and gay marriage, instead of the plagues that are killing the minds, hearts, and bodies of our children. This is a war on intelligence. By all means, keep getting angry about the freedom of Muslims to practice their religion, the choices that women make in their personal lives, and the sexual lives of women and men you have never met. But one day you will look down and see the ground has been taken from underneath you by the very men who incited you to such anger, and they will have done it without you even noticing.



http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/

NY Times: The War on Women

http://www.170millionamericans.org/




Lupe Fiasco- Words I Never Said:



Thursday, February 24, 2011

A few graphs that explain most of what's wrong with America...

I want to print this out and keep it in my wallet at all times. So frustrating! But so enlightening... How much worse is it going to get before the middle class gets their heads out of their... well, you know... and stop voting for Republicans?!

Mother Jones: It's the Inequality, Stupid

A Villanelle

It Seems I Am Not So Hard to Forget
Although by kindest words I am beset,
Your actions tell a story of deceit;
It seems I am not so hard to forget.
In languishing for me you feign and fret,
But coolness overcomes the sec we meet—
Although by kindest words I am beset.
While happiness adorns at love’s onset,
When touch and sight have gone, the feelings fleet!
It seems I am not so hard to forget.
You lift me up to graze God’s silhouette,
And leave me with a sadness just as deep—
Although by kindest words I am beset.
Though inwardly I swirl like winter’s threat,
The woman that you see is kind and sweet.
It seems I am not so hard to forget.
But if somehow I part from this vignette,
I fear I’d make my loneliness complete.
Although by kindest words I am beset,
It seems I am not so hard to forget...

Sarah Sanders, '11

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Double Standard

Vanity by Memling

"You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight."

John Berger, "Ways of Seeing: Men Act, Women Appear"

Friday, February 11, 2011

Will Someone Please Say These Words?


Because I’m sick of hearing these words!:
Slut, whore, hussy, skank, hooker, prostitute, ball-buster, ho, trick, cheap, easy, bitch, floozy, harlot, tart, tramp, bimbo, man-eater, jezebel, wench, vamp, cunt, streetwalker, broad, scarlet, vamp, loose, working girl, sleazy, immodest, stumbling block, improper, unchaste, out of place.
Pimp, player, hustler, man-slut, womanizer, “the man,” playboy, stud, ladies man, casanova, lady killer, skirt-chaser, mack daddy.
Un-lady-like...

Boys will be boys...

Love...

and Respect....

Enchanting...

Wild at heart...
Will someone please say these words?:
Patriarchy, oppression, paternalism, sexism, violence, rape, control, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies....



Verlassen (Abandoned) by Max Klinger

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Target: Women

I recently learned about the Target: Women segments of the tv show InfoMania. Sarah Haskins does an awesome job of using humor to shed light on how women are targeted by the media. Watch them! They are super funny if you just need a laugh, and I encourage you to think about the messages the commercials send to women.
This one is the first Target: Women segment. I had never thought of it before: why are ALL yogurt commercials so obviously targeting women who feel insecure about themselves?


This one was interesting to me after a discussion in one of my classes about engagement rings. It's only been in the last 60 or so years that men have been expected to buy a woman a diamond ring to propose. De Beers, the company who controls 90% of the diamonds in the world, inflicted the U.S. with this message in order to boost sales, but now it is basically a fact of life: he better get a diamond ring if he's planning on proposing! But what kind of messages does this send? What is it suggesting that women really care about? Also, what is marriage built on, and what are the most important aspects of love in American society's eyes? Haskins does such a good job of putting what is actually sort of a ridiculous expectation into a humorous light. :)



This one made me laugh so hard I almost spit out my soup. These commercials definitely send some powerful messages to both genders.

Google Target Women for more videos... they're all worth watching! You go, Sarah Haskins.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Pro-choice vs. Pro-life; Could There Be Another Way?

I recently read an article by Naomi Wolf called “Pro-Choice Rhetoric: Our Bodies, Our Souls.” The article is about a need for a new pro-choice rhetoric that allows abortion to exist in a moral framework. While not advocating for any specific perspective, I found her approach to this incredibly controversial and sensitive subject refreshing, and I’d like to share.
The assumptions behind Wolf’s article are these: that we live in a patriarchal and male-dominated society in which women have historically lacked the freedom to take control of their lives and their bodies; and that still today, there are circumstances in which abortion can be argued as necessary. Rape, incest, dangers to the life of the mother, or the many cases of lower-class women who simply cannot afford another mouth to feed. However, Wolf deviates from the typical pro-choice approach and insists that these issues do constitute a moral decision: the decision to take a life.
Wolf disagrees with the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement that turns a child into nothing more than “material” within a woman’s body. This rhetoric arose out of legitimate concerns, during a wave of the women’s movement, that the pro-life movement was emphasizing the child at the cost of dehumanizing the woman. In response, the pro-choice movement swung to the opposite side of the pendulum, dehumanizing the child in order to preserve the humanity of the woman.
The abortion debate has truly turned into a competition into which side can most effectively diminish the importance of one life over the other, rather than a passionate conversation about what is truly merciful and just. It has become polarized into an “either, or” debate in which no one is truly heard because each side is striving only to gain ground, rather than to gain knowledge. On the pro-life side, this has meant an inability to hear the legitimate concerns of hundreds of thousands of women. On the pro-choice side, it has meant the inability to hear the legitimate moral outrage of hundreds of thousands of religious and morally conscious secular citizens. Wolf acknowledges this danger on her own side of the argument:
“The pro-life warning about the potential of widespread abortion to degrade reverence for life does have a nugget of truth: a free-market rhetoric about abortion can, indeed, contribute to the eerie situation we are now facing... Day by day, babies seem to have less value in themselves, in a matrix of the sacred, than they do as products with a value dictated by a market economy.”
I found it incredibly refreshing that Wolf acknowledged the short-falls of the attempt to make abortion into a medical decision, rather than a moral one. Consequences are already showing themselves, most obviously in the fact that our country has the highest rate of avoidable abortions among industrialized countries. Abortion has become, in some cases, a rite of passage for affluent young couples, or a quick way out for irresponsible partners who don’t like the feel of latex. “Fifty-seven percent of unintended pregnancies come about because the parents used no contraception at all. Those millions certainly include women and men too poor to buy contraception, girls and boys too young and ill-informed to know where to get it, and countless instances of marital rape, coerced sex, incest and couplings in which the man refused to let the woman use protection. But they also include millions of college students, professional men and women, and middle-and uppermiddle-class people (11 percent of abortions are obtained by people in households with incomes of higher than $50,000)—who have no excuse whatsoever for their carelessness,” said Wolf.
When it comes to the fight for abortion rights, these issues should not be masked over. Nor should the very true claim of the pro-lifers that a life is being taken during the act of abortion. The shocking, disturbing, and somewhat propagandic images used by pro-lifers to dissuade one from supporting abortion are often real, and must be acknowledged as so, no matter how awkward it is. “Free women must be strong women, too,” Wolf said, “and strong women, presumably do not seek to cloak their most important decisions in euphemism.”
Wolf brings a new vision to the argument. She uses the parallel of war to make her point. Many believe (not all-- this is an imperfect, but effective analogy) that war, while immoral and while most definitely evil, is sometimes necessary. Those that argue this necessity don’t frame their argument around an assumption that the young women and men who fight in our wars are simply  “cannon fodder.” No, there is a profound respect for the sacrifice of those who have fought in these evil and degrading, yet sometimes necessary, acts of men. If the problem of abortion is acknowledged in this honest and transparent way, there is room for dialogue:
“It was when I was four months pregnant, sick as a dog, and in the middle of an argument, that I realized I could no longer tolerate the fetus-is-nothing paradigm of the pro-choice movement. I was being interrogated by a conservative, and the subject of abortion rights came up. “You’re four months pregnant,” he said. “Are you going to tell me that’s not a baby you’re carrying?”
"The accepted pro-choice response at such a moment in the conversation is to evade... Had I not been so nauseated and so cranky and so weighed down with the physical gravity of what was going on inside me, I might not have told what is the truth for me. “Of course it’s a baby,” I snapped. And went rashly on: “And if I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life, then that would be between myself and God.” 
“Startlingly to me, two things happened: the conservative was quiet, I had said something that actually made sense to him. And I felt the great relief that is the grace of long-delayed honesty.”
Wolf suggests that the discussion be framed within the ideas of sin and redemption. Women faced with this enormous decision should have the freedom (and responsibility) of taking the reality of the situation into themselves, realizing the evil being committed, grieving, and moving toward healing and redemption. By framing the argument in rigid and amoral terms, unborn children are categorized and viewed accordingly: wanted or unwanted; life or genetic material. By incorporating spiritual language into both sides of the debate, healing can come an so can new ways to reduce the abortion epidemic in our country.
“Now imagine such a democracy, in which women would be valued so very highly... in which there is no coerced sex without serious jailtime: in which there are affordable, safe contraceptives available for the taking in every public health building; in which there is economic parity for women—and basic economic subsistence for every baby born; and in which every young American woman knows about and understands her natural desire as a treasure to cherish, and responsibly, when the time is right, on her own terms, to share.”
“In such a world, in which the idea of gender as a barrier has become a dusty artifact, we would probably use a very different language about what would be—then—the rare and doubtless traumatic event of abortion. That language would probably call upon respect and responsibility, grief and mourning. In that world we might well describe the unborn and the never-to-be-born with the honest words of life.”
“And in that world, passionate feminists might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.”
Could there possibly be another way to go about this? Could we perhaps be honest with each and with ourselves in saying, “Yes, this is complicated. Yes, this is evil. Yes, this is necessary.” Instead of demanding 1 of 2 inflexible and unrealistic options: legal or illegal, maybe we could accept the exceptions and acknowledge the “if”s and the “but”s, and start on a journey with each other toward a world in which there really are choices, and the majority of women are inspired, encouraged, and able to make the right ones. This issue should be about women coming together to create a better society for all of us... not one that divides those who need to be united in a society like ours. 


The Kingdom of God is a Kingdom in which all life is precious, not just the one that happens to be at the top of our agenda. And when His Kingdom truly does come, evil will no longer be seen as necessary...

A voice of one calling: 
“In the wilderness prepare 
   the way for the LORD; 
make straight in the desert 
   a highway for our God.
   Every valley shall be raised up, 
   every mountain and hill made low; 
the rough ground shall become level, 
   the rugged places a plain. 
   And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, 
    and all people will see it together.
            For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
Isaiah 40:3-5


To read the full article, go here: Pro-Choice Rhetoric: Our Bodies, Our Souls
All quotes in this blog post are taken from  “Pro-Choice Rhetoric: Our Bodies, Our Souls.”