Category: feminism

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Domestic Terrorism

A bomb was planned at the Planned Parenthood of Grand Chute, WI. For those of you who don’t know, that’s about 5 minutes from where I live.

How can a person even respond to this kind of violence that would target poor and working class women who are trying to get their health needs met in a difficult economy? How do you explain to people who would bomb a health clinic that PP clinics don’t offer abortion services in the first place? How do you respond to a group that would plan bombs and kill innocent people – theoretically, even the fetuses they say they’re protecting – and who call themselves “pro life”?

How do you respond at all?

I am at the point now where anyone who apologizes for the inflaming and incendiary rhetoric aimed at Roe v. Wade & at a woman’s right to choose is not my friend, my family, or even someone I can talk to. I understand objections to abortion; I was raised Catholic after all, & am the youngest of 6. But this language around choice, the “army of God” mentality that’s been fed to people is so hurtful, so entirely wrong and beside the point.

When will those of you who vote Republican start telling your leadership that you will not vote for them until they stop with this rhetoric and these policies that target poor women especially?

This Planned Parenthood is so easily a place I might speak at or have a student intern at. The women who go there and work there could be friends.

I don’t understand violence as a response to what is sold as a moral objection. It just doesn’t make sense.

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RIP: Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich died, and the world is a little less poetic – and a little less political – as a result.

Translations
By Adrienne Rich

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political

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“Viagra Review Board”

There’s a jokey photo circulating that’s meant to be a humorous response to the (male) (Republican) attempt to make birth control illegal and/or not covered by health insurance. In it, a group of women, most of them white haired,  all wearing dour clothing, old fashioned hats. They have a sign that says “Viagra Review Board.”

And it keeps bugging me to see (feminist) friends posting this as if it’s funny. Why?

There is a long, long history of women being considered the morally responsible gender, for starters, which is based on the (false) assumption that women don’t like sex. There is also a long line of feminist thought – eugenicists, anti-porn activists, & the like – who have been extremely sex negative, accusing men’s sexualities of either “ruining racial purity” (via miscegenation, because, as the thinking went, men will fuck anyone,while women innately know better & so only have sex with members of their own, appropriate race).

Similarly, women “of a certain age” and older are as well, historically, either considered the “third gender” post menopause – and that’s courtesy Simone de Beauvoir, of all people – or otherwise considered sexless, frumpy, or just unattractive. A friend of mine commented to me recently that men only seem to get more attractive as they get older, while women only decline, and as she’s a peer — well, I wanted to smack her.

So I give you Helen Mirren, who is 67 this year.

There is nothing but our own vision, and our own cultural bullshit, that allows even smart, feminist women to see men as aging well & women not aging well.

But in either case – women as sex negative and older women especially as prudish or sexless – this “jokey” response confirms and reifies (there, I said it) a bunch of ideas about women WHICH ARE THE EXACT SAME IDEAS that cause male politicians to pass laws that shame women who have sexualities – and who insist on being in control of them – in the first place, that women aren’t actually supposed to like sex, that women are only attractive when they’re young, and that any woman who is in control of her body must be a slut.

So let’s give that joke up, shall we? I mean, the Boomers are now our “women of a certain age” after all, & they were the first generation truly liberated by the pill and who were actively practicing “free love”.

That is, my feminist “Viagra review board” would be handing that stuff out to anyone who wants to continue to have sex despite physical limitations, just as they would also freely give out birth control and other safe sex tools to anyone who wanted them.

Women like sex, dammit.