a bird and a bottle

Well, color me surprised.

I was already to write a post deriding Judd Apatow’s new film Knocked Up. I haven’t seen Apatow’s other work (Freaks & Geeks, the 40-year-old virgin), so this was not what you might call an educated opinion, but I figured that a movie called “knocked up” couldn’t be good. The phrase knocked up just rings of misogyny.

But I was pleasantly surprised. SF and I saw it last night. A.O. Scott was right. It was funny. It was sweet. And, for the most part, it lacked the misogyny that often pervades the two genres with which it toyed: so-called chick flicks and stoner movies.

I was nervous about the film’s treatment — or lack thereof – of abortion. I had heard that the film sort of glosses over it. Apparently, the topic was interesting, and obvious enough, to make its way into the NY Times Styles section this week. While it’s true that “abortion” is never uttered in the film, the issue is not ignored either. More than that, what (admittedly little) conversation there is about abortion in the film seemed to me to be a fairly biting satire of our inability to talk honestly and apolitically about abortion in the U.S. And the film’s general treatment of pregnancy, reproduction, and birth (in a very impressive Stan Brakhage-esque scene) is often much better than the Hollywood standard.

And I’m not alone in my relief: Amanda Marcotte’s review at her new blog Unsprung echoes a lot of my thoughts.

Still, I can see why some pea-brained conservatives seek validation for their misogynist political opinions from the previews of the movie. From the preview, the movie seems like a wet dream for anti-choicers, a story of an uppity bitch who gets hers by getting trashed and sleeping with the wrong guy, which leads to punishment-by-pregnancy. Add in the college Republican fantasy of being able to trap a wife through pregnancy, and you’ve got a bit of anti-choice propaganda. Those folks will be sorely disappointed by the movie, unless they’re too dumb to pick up on the not-really-subtle subtleties, particularly with the way that the movie sides with Alison’s right to have her own life and career despite being pregnant.

All of this praise doesn’t mean I don’t have a bone to pick with the film. And that nit to pick is this: why is it that the only people who actually sorta kinda talk about abortion in the film are men? Ben’s (the guy who gets Katherine Heigl’s Allison pregnant) stoner friends are the ones who get closest to saying the word “abortion,” while Allison’s mother says only that Allison should “get it taken care of,” or something to that effect. One of Amanda’s commenters also picked up on this; she sees it as yet another example of the “father knows best” mindset. I’m not so sure. Maybe it just speaks to the fact that it’s easier sometimes for men than for women to talk about abortion — and to pontificate about it. But maybe I’m just being too optimistic.

Whatever the case, I was impressed by the film. Anyone else seen it and have an opinion? I’d love to know…

I love it when the Times avoids real social commentary by sidelining articles in the styles or travel sections. Yesterday, for example, the Times had an article in the Escapes section about prisons. Prisons? In the friday travel section? Well, yes, because it’s not about prisons today, per se, but rather about how prisons of the past have become tourist attractions.

Turns out, prisons around the country are becoming big tourist destinations and, in some places, big business. Alcatraz has, of course, been a big draw for quite some time (and is now owned and operated by the National Park Service). Turns out, the conversion of Alcatraz into a park and museum was the top of a much larger trend. Today, it’s one of many prison parks.

There’s a lot of good that come out of this — particularly, education about life inside a prison and about the errors of the U.S. penological past. But, because these museum/theme park prisons are not often political entities, the lessons that can be learned today are often notably missing. For example, Eastern State Penitentiary, the prison on which the Times article focuses and which was the subject of Dickens’ musings, was built around the idea that rehabilitation could be found only through solitary life. All incarcerated men were in solitary confinement for the duration of their sentences. Of course, this proved effective not as a rehabilitation tactic but as a way to ensure that people went insane. Today, in Supermax and other maximum security prisons, people often remain in solitary for months if not years on end. Should we really still believe that this is makes penological sense?

Also, there’s a danger to opening prisons up as theme parks. They become Disneyfied (to borrow a term from SF). Take this example from the NYT article:

At the Crime and Punishment Museum in Ashburn, Ga., visitors can eat lunch at the Last Meal Cafe, which has, the museum’s Web site proclaims, “meals to die for.”

Get it? Yeah. Because wolfing down a greasy burger can help a person really understand the American prison system. Or can help some company make a buck. There’s also this:

In just about every prison tour, there seems to be at least one poster child whose bad behavior helps bolster ticket sales, and the more notorious, the better. Al Capone is featured at Eastern State. The Wyoming Territorial Prison Museum in Laramie, Wyo., which gets 20,000 visitors a year, highlights the fact that Butch Cassidy was imprisoned there for stealing horses.

If Al Capone knew he was Pennsylvania’s Mickey Mouse, he’d be rolling over in his grave.

So what’s the takeaway here? To me, it’s the lost opportunity to really re-examine the failings of American criminal justice. As the article notes, some visitors view the prisons like they do a car accident — it’s impossible to look away. But as SF noted in an email to me, that’s the wrong analogy. The better comparison is to a torture museum, which have become popular around Europe. This stronger connection, of course, exposes the fatal flaw: torture is illegal across Europe while the tortures of the U.S. prison system persist.

update: via Jill, here’s a woman’s story of abortion. It’s sad and moving and also joyful and energizing.

—

The Supreme Court’s shift in abortion jurisprudence with its decision a few weeks ago in Gonzales v. Carhart has gotten a lot of press both in traditional MSM and on blogs (including this one). That’s to be expected given the politically explosive nature of the abortion debate and the love of the media for all things inflammatory.

What’s interesting, though, is how many of the stories and posts to follow the decision have been about men’s experiences as fathers, fathers-to-be, and would-be dads.

Take, for example, today’s LA Times opinion piece by Dan Neil – a touching and, at this point, familiar story.

Neil writes about his and his wife’s desire to have children; she underwent IVF to conceive, and ended up with too many fetuses (four when they could only have or handle two). So they reduced her pregnancy — a euphemistic term for selective abortion when a woman carries too many fetuses as a result of IVF or other fertility treatments. Neil writes well - he’s totally unapologetic (rightly unapologetic) and is concerned about the world his two female daughters-to-be will face once they’re born in light of the Supreme Court’s rightward shift and the fact that 9 of the 10 GOP presidential candidates profess to want to see Roe overturned.

I read the story, and felt for Neil and his wife; both their sadness and their relief at reducing the pregnancy. But I couldn’t help but wonder if men are the new face of abortion rights. Is it men whom we must ask to defend abortion rights now against a court and a rightwing political movement led mostly by men?

And if so, isn’t it a sad state of affairs that there is such contempt for women in this society that we need men to be the public faces of the fight for our reproductive autonomy?

Kudos to the NY Times for running an article today about Carmen’s Place, a shelter for transgender youth in the city. The shelter, a second-floor apartment in an Astoria, Queens building, houses young men and women, many of whom are teenagers and most of whom work as prostitutes on a nearby “tranny stroll.” It’s run by a man named Father Braxton, who leads the residents in prayer each morning and locks the door at 2AM each night. Disappointingly - but not surprisingly - this small apartment may be the only shelter for transgender youth in the entire city.

At first, I was impressed by the article and by the reporter’s sensitivity — using the proper pronouns (so often male to female transgender people are wrongly called “he”). But that positive impression was short-lived. Because this article, perhaps typically, couldn’t resist painting its subjects as sad, abused, superficial, desperate young women. The article’s entire second page is a litany of short biographical sketches of the women: growing up in broken homes, subject to sexual abuse, desiring love and affection. Maybe I’m wrong, but the article seemed to me to say: these women don’t have to be this way; it’s their upbringings that have created their gender confusion.

Maybe I read it wrong. Maybe I’m being uncharitable. But I still found it objectionable.

Via WIMN’s Voices:

Yesterday, an explosive device was found at an Austin, TX women’s health clinic. A clinic that performs abortions, of course. The place was shut down, people evacuated, and even a portion of the highway roped off.

Oh, didn’t hear about it? Yeah, didn’t think so.

There’s a reason for that — the nonexistent (or trifling) media coverage of violence against women, particularly when such violence brushes up against politically touchy subjects like abortion.

With the exception of this short AP article (mainstream national media did cover the spree of abortion provider shootings in Buffalo, NY and bombings around the country in the 1990s. But that was ten years ago. One would particularly expect the news antennae to go up over this violence and attempted violence today, with the fear level ratcheted up and the 24-hr coverage of terrorism, war, and anything else violent or salacious.

So why is it that stories about violence against women and women’s health is being ignored? Is it the politics? Or just a sense that because we don’t make a big deal out of it, the news machine doesn’t have to?

WIMN’s Keely Savoie suggests that the lack of news media attention is harming all feminist causes, and making feminists who do make a stink seem like chicken littles (or worse, like the stereotypical shrill women’s libber). Zuzu posits that there’s a real, actual, danger in the MSM non-reaction to such violence, and that it was also reflected in the lack of action after the first shooting at Virginia.

I’m not sure that I buy these theories. But I am disturbed by the lack of national concern about such violence.

Tomorrow, in memory of the lives lost at VT on Monday and in the hopes that such tragedies can be avoided in the future, students will wear the Hokie colors — maroon and orange.

Here’s the call for solidarity from Tech’s school paper:

College students across the country have united to declare Friday, April, 20 “Orange and Maroon Effect Day.” Students are creating groups on Facebook to announce and spread word about the day-long memorial. A student at Virginia Commonwealth University created the group, writing that the point of the group is to get everyone to wear Tech’s colors and show support.

“We are all part of the Hokie Nation now, touched by their tragedy and one in their healing.”

I encourage you to take this easy step to show support for a community in mourning and trying to heal.

(hat tip SZE)

One of the most common comments I’ve seen around the blogosphere (sometimes from trolls, sometimes not) since yesterday’s ruling is that the decision doesn’t matter — that it only affects one procedure which is performed very infrequently. As I noted in a post yesterday, the decision matters a lot. In large part, its impact will come from the fact that it sanctions abortion restrictions that don’t have an exception for women’s health.

Another big reason (or rather, several reasons) this case matters is (are) clear in today’s L.A. Times article, aptly titled “Anti-abortion activists Look to Build on Court Victory“. Based on an interview with Operation Rescue’s head (OR is Randall Terry’s baby), the article is a bullet-point list of the wingnut anti-choicers’ plans in the wake of Gonzales v. Carhart:

– Ban all abortion of viable fetuses, unless the mother’s life is endangered.

– Ban mid- and late-term abortion for fetal abnormality, such as Down syndrome or a malformed brain.

– Require doctors to tell patients in explicit detail what the abortion will involve, show them ultrasound images of the fetus and warn them that they might become suicidal after the procedure.

– Lengthen waiting periods so women must reflect on such counseling for several days before obtaining the abortion.

It is far from certain that the Supreme Court would uphold all these proposals. But anti-abortion activists clearly feel momentum is on their side.

In particular, they’re pleased that the court upheld an outright ban — with no exceptions — on a surgical procedure performed in the second trimester, when the fetus is too large to be evacuated through a suction tube.

Still think Gonzales was an unimportant blip?

(via Scott)

It pains me to link to them. Fox News (via Broadsheet):

“Congress is practicing medicine and the Court has decided to let it, in direct conflict with its own precedent. Five members of the Supreme Court have decided that Congress knows more about obstetrics and gynecology than the doctors in the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology do,” says Susan Estrich for, hold onto your jaw, Fox News.

Not surprising: It was Susan Estrich. Still surprising, she was on Fox (balanced for once?).

Update:

Least surprising criticism? Dahlia Lithwick. She’s not a surprise, but damn she’s good.

With a stirring haiku about how “respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” the justice interpolates himself between every one of those mothers and every child she might ever bear. Without regard for the women who feel they made the right decision in terminating a pregnancy, he frets for those who changed their minds.

The core of Lithwicks’ article is Kennedy’s focus on the trope of the indecisive woman, who, in her half-witedness (as women are wont to be), gets an abortion and later regrets it. Lithwick rightly takes Kennedy to task for this paternalistic — not to mention faulty — assumption:

It’s hard to fathom why Kennedy has so much more sympathy for the women who changed their minds about abortions than for those who did not. His concern for Inconstant Females might be patronizing in any other jurist. Coming from him, it’s brilliantly ironic. Kennedy is, after all, America’s Hamlet. The man who famously worried that “sometimes you don’t know if you’re Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line,” will long be remembered as the living incarnation of agony and indecision, And today he seamlessly rewrites his Stenberg dissent as a majority opinion that blasts his earlier Casey vote to its core.

I’m no psychologist but in light of today’s Gonzales opinion one has to wonder: Is all of Kennedy’s tender concern over those flip-flopping women really just some kind of weird misplaced justification for his flip-flopping self?

Also at LG&M.

Turns out, it’s easy for states to just say no.

The L.A. Times reported Sunday on the rash of states that have refused to accept federal abstinence only funding. In a turn that makes me dance with joy, swing state Ohio was among the most recent:

In an emerging revolt against abstinence-only sex education, states are turning down millions of dollars in federal grants, unwilling to accept White House dictates that the money be used for classes focused almost exclusively on teaching chastity.

In Ohio, Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland said that regardless of the state’s sluggish economic picture, he didn’t see the point in taking part in the controversial State Abstinence Education Program anymore.

Five other states — Wisconsin, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Montana and New Jersey — have dropped out of that grant program or plan to do so by the end of this year. California has refused all along to participate in the program, which is managed by a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Strickland, like most of the other governors who are pulling the plug on the funding, said the program had too many rules to be practical. Among other things, the money cannot be used to promote condom or contraceptive use. Students are to be taught that bearing children outside wedlock is likely to harm society and that sexual activity outside marriage is “likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

“Harmful physiological effects” gets it about right, though it’s a vast understatement and a sort of shameful glossing over of some important details. Like, say, the fact that abstinence only programs equate girls who have premarital sex (and girls ONLY) with dirty food or glasses of water full of classmates’ spit. As Jill has pointed out, the trope of the “used up girl” is a common theme in many abstinence only programs. How do you think that makes some sexually active 16-year-old feel when she’s sitting in the classroom? I’m going to go with not so good. Abstinence only “education” curricula promote sexism by teaching lies including this whopper: in relationships, women need financial support, strength and flattery. Men need emotional support and sex. I kid you not.

The programs also inculcate heteronormative beliefs; if the only sex that is normal or sanctioned is sex within marriage, what does that say to gay kids? And there’s more. Abstinence only programs receiving federal dollars are required to say things including that HIV can be transmitted through tears, skin-to-skin contact and sweat, and that abortion is wrong.

You would think that with such scare tactics, abstinence only programs would work wonders. But they don’t.

[A]ccording to the [Ohio] governor’s spokesman, Keith Dailey, [Gov.] Strickland sees little evidence that the program has been effective. “We’ve spent millions of dollars on such education since Ohio first started getting grant money in 1998,” Dailey said. “If the state is going to spend money on teaching and protecting kids, the governor believes it’s better to spend it in a smarter, more comprehensive approach.”

New Jersey was similarly galled:

Health and Human Services endured enormous criticism by governors last year after it issued a document underscoring and clarifying key rules for states that took federal abstinence grants. Among the points that unsettled some state officials: Applicants “must not” promote contraceptive or condom use, nor even “refer to abstinence as a form of contraception.”

In the months that followed, states started to turn away from the program. In October, New Jersey said it would do without the $800,000 it had been receiving. Wisconsin followed in March, when Democratic Gov. James Doyle said the state would no longer accept nearly $600,000.

“When we got that first memo, that did it for us,” said Stephanie Marquis, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Health and Family Services Department. “How can we do our best to teach the teens that are sexually active if our hands are tied?”

That’s exactly the point. Abstinence only is not about teaching teens. It’s about preaching to them.

(Via Kaiser Network)

Here’s a little Jenny Lewis and the Watson twins (with intro by Sarah Silverman):

In a column in a recent Orlando Sentinel, columnist Kathleen Parker lights into Salon and the NY Times for their recent articles about women in the military, sexual assault, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Why is she so mad at the NYT and Salon? Well, because she thinks that the sexual assaults experienced by numerous women soldiers is “not quite rape.” Huh? Here’s Parker in her own words:

Both stories, however, contain enough errors to raise questions about whether the rape-assault rate is as high as suggested. The Salon story reports, for example, that one woman was “coerced into sex” by a commanding officer, which the Salon writer asserts is “legally defined as rape by the military.”

This is simply not true. According to the Manual for Courts-Martial, rape is defined as “an act of sexual intercourse by force and without consent.” The same woman also was prominently featured in the Times story, where she said she was “manipulated into sex.”

Not quite rape, in other words.

It’s funny that she’s going after two articles for their supposed inaccuracies when, as Salon’s Broadsheet notes, her definition of rape is “not quite” right.

Parker is right — the manual does define rape in those terms. But, reading just a few lines down from the manual’s upfront definition of rape, you’ll find this: “Consent, however, may not be inferred if resistance would have been futile…” The soldier was “coerced” into sex; meaning forced to do something that she didn’t want to do; meaning “resistance would have been futile”; meaning she was raped.

Galling, huh? But it’s not even the worst part. Parker goes on to blame not the patriarchal and chauvinistic military structure for the rapes, but the women victims and their feminist predecessors. I’m not kidding:

Clearly, some of what is considered sexual harassment falls into the category of harmless sport — the usual towel-snapping that is, in fact, a way to neutralize sex.

But more overt sexual aggression may be the product of something few will acknowledge, at least on the record: resentment.

Off the record, in dozens of interviews over a period of years, male soldiers and officers have confided that many men resent women because they’ve been forced to pretend that women are equals, and men know they’re not.

The lie breeds contempt, which leads to a simmering rage that sometimes finds expression in aggression toward those deemed responsible.

Targeting women isn’t excusable, obviously. It’s also not the women’s fault that they’ve been put in this untenable situation — exposed both to combat and to the repressed fury of sexually charged young men.

The fault lies with the Pentagon and others who have capitulated to feminist pressures to insert women into combat. Although women are prohibited from direct ground combat and are assigned primarily to support roles, the lack of clear boundaries in Iraq has eliminated the distinction.

Right. So men are excused because their resentment of women usurping their time-honored role as soldiers justifies these rapes. Don’t blame the perpetrators or their commanders who sanctioned such behavior. Blame feminists who dared to claim that women might not actually be equal to men (gasp!). Blame “feminist pressures” for equality (god forbid!). Yes, the distinction between combat and support has been erased by the unrelenting violence in Iraq. But that’s more an indictment of the war than a reason to point fingers at the brave women who enlisted to fight in it.

But, see, to Parker, not only are feminists and women soldiers to blame for their rapes, they’re responsible for the fact that this war has been such an unmitigated disaster.

Finally, our commanders and fighting men could focus on the business of war rather than tending to gender skirmishes that distract commanders and steal time, resources and energy from the military’s purpose.

Right-o. Because if the men could just focus on fighting the war and not getting killed (rather than tending to silly concerns like equality and rape), the war wouldn’t be going so badly.

This is propaganda in its lowest form.

The Republican noise machine (Amanda’s great term) is in a tizzy about this photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is in Syria.

They’re calling her trip a publicity stunt and a bad idea, and criticizing the fact that Pelosi is in Syria — representing a bipartisan Congressional panel — to begin with. And there’s been a lot of talk about her decision to don the headscart to go into a mosque. Of course, as Amanda notes, the most vitriol has come from Althouse and Glenn Reynolds, who maintain that Pelosi cannot be a feminist and also wear a headscarf. That’s BS. Showing respect when entering a religious house of worship is totally different than endorsing that mandatory head covering.

Of course, as Media Matters points out, the criticism of Pelois’s tip in the first place is disingenuous. Plenty of Republicans have or are planning to travel to Syria to engage in peace talks. And being the hypocrites that they are, the talking heads have seized on the image of Pelosi in a headscarf because they think it will be divisive. Or make her look bad. Or something. It’s a lot of fuss over…nothing.

Especially when she donned it to enter a mosque, just as visitors to Italian churches must cover their shoulders and male visitors to synagogues often wear yarmulkes.

Oh yeah, and given, as Zuzu masterfully points out, that Laura Bush too has worn a headscarf when appropriate to show respect.

It’s a double hypocrisy whammy.

America’s Next Top Model has a lot of things wrong with it. If you can get past Tyra’s overacting and the fact that this show makes its bread and butter (no pun intended) off of telling beautiful and painfully thin young women that they are fat, it might be entertaining.

Sure, there was the whole pro-death penalty vs. pro-life-sentencing thing (to which I objected).

But this week really takes the cake. According to Jill at Feminste, via Jennifer at WIMN’s Voices, for this week’s photo shoot, the women got all made up and were dressed in revealing clothing…and then had to play dead. One is pushed down stairs and so has bruises all over her body. Another dies when her organs are stolen (was Stephen Colbert watching?), another is strangled. One woman “dies” when she is pushed off a rooftop. The photos are all here.

This whole thing is clearly about sexualizing violence against women, as Jill rightly notes. What bothers me so much about this series of photos is that violence against women is already closely tied to sex. Pregnant women, for example, are more likely to be domestically abused than their non-pregnant peers – as many as 324,000 pregnant women annually. After car accidents, murder is the most common cause of injury-related death among pregnant women. Statistics suggest that up to 23% of women seeking prenatal care have been domestically abused; for 40% of those women, they did not face any domestic violence until they became pregnant.

Seems to me like violence is already sexualized. In the case of pregnancy, it’s not because violence against women is a turn-on (as it is clearly intended in the ANTM episode), but as a means of control. But it’s all from the same assumption that violence against women is connected to — or even counseled by — women’s sexuality and the expression of that sexuality.

And here I thought TV these days wasn’t political…

I love me some Mikhaela Reid. Her comics are funny, political, progressive, and pro-woman. They’re in your face. And it’s great.

Which is why I wasn’t all that surprised to read in today’s Women’s eNews column, that they’ve sometimes been censored.

Take this comic, for example, called “Every Sperm is Sacred” (a la Monty Python) :

The image, as described by Women’s eNews, is about a “dystopian America of 2020,” in which “the Supreme Court has upheld a “Spermy Protection Act,” a show of power by the “sex-cell rights movement.” It’s meant to convey Reid’s anxiety about the crusade to not only cut back on abortion rights but also to limit contraception. And it was rejected by one of her usual clients, a “progressive” upstate New York newspaper, saying that it too closely resembled the recent killing of Imette St. Guillen, whose body was found with her hands tied.

Of course, this is not the first time that comics about abortion have been targets for censorship. As the Women’s eNews column points out, Doonsbury’s abortion strips, which “show[ed] scenes from “Silent Scream II: The Prequel,” briefly starring Timmy, a 12-minute-old embryo, and his mother whom Trudeau’s filmmaker-narrator refers to as ‘the murderess herself,’” have met a similar fate.

What’s angering about this trend is that it’s not the only time that the First Amendment has been limited at the behest (or to the benefit) of anti-abortion rights forces. The Supreme Court held in 1991 in Rust v. Sullivan that Congress could limit what doctors receiving public funding were allowed to say to patients about abortion without violating the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

Think Supreme Court doctrine doesn’t shape people’s attitudes? Think again.

I second Jessica’s nomination of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute for assholes of the day (TM).

This innocuous - nay, benevolent-sounding - organization claims to “provide[] the most up-to-date and accurate information to medical professionals and the general public on how to prevent breast cancer.”

Sounds good, right?

The only problem is that the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute thinks there is only one way to prevent breast cancer: don’t get an abortion.

That’s right kids. Except…it’s not.

In reality, where I live,there is NO science linking abortion and breast cancer. The American Cancer Society has this to say about the supposed abortion-breast cancer link:

After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. The size of this study and the manner in which it was conducted provides substantial evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.

Yet this new website claims that abortion is the “single most important avoidable risk factor” for breast cancer.

And they’ve even got this video:

Way to take advantage of people’s fear, anti-reproductive-justice movement. Way to reel in those women who have just received breast cancer diagnoses and are scared and already needlessly blaming themselves. Way to prey on people’s vulnerable moments. Don’t you just love that pro-life ethos?