[Originally published in countercurrents.org, counterpunch.org, stoppatriarchy.tumblr.com, and revcom.us]
By Carol Downer
The headline, “In Texas, Activist Group ‘Stop Patriarchy” Draws Criticism’ and the first two paragraphs might first appear like an objective report; however, your blog, reprinted in Bitch is not a report, but a trash job. Come clean, Katie Klabusich, Texans for Reproductive Justice is you and your buddies in an ad hoc group formed for the sole purpose of opposing Stop Patriarchy and their mission to come to Texas, protest the TRAP laws that are closing down Texas clinics and their goal of linking this to the nationwide emergency facing abortion rights.
I’m on the advisory board of Stop Patriarchy and I went on the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride for one week.
So, you have not given me or anyone else one good reason not to support Stop Patriarchy. Your criticisms are baseless; if anything, they are reasons to support Stop Patriarchy.
It is great that we attract media attention because we go to where the Patriarchy is crushing women down; our demonstrations are photogenic; we have good slogans, “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology”; we have attention-arresting enlargements of photos of women who have died from illegal abortion and great props dramatizing that enforced pregnancy is unconstitutional “involuntary servitude.” We have great fliers and dramatize women’s abortion stories. We get national and local media response, in addition to getting out broadly into the communities across Texas and talking to real people – not just people in the existing “movement” – the majority of whom know nothing about the clinic closures and have never heard anyone speak positively about abortion. I saw this have a real positive impact on people’s thinking. What is not to like about that?
You ask where the money we raised went? $30,000.00 is not much these days, especially when dozens of you fly or drive to the destination and you have to use cars and stay in motels, but if you sleep on the floor and cook your own food, you can make it stretch. What money do you think is not accounted for?
You all call Stop Patriarchy racist because we say that forced motherhood is female enslavement? A woman accepts the pains and dangers of wanted pregnancy and labor, but when we are forced to endure them, what would you call it? A walk in the park? You call us Islamaphobic because we condemn the patriarchy that forces women to wear the burka? We condemn Western patriarchy that pressures women to be sex objects and wear body-restricting clothing like thongs. Is that Islamaphobic? And, who says Stop Patriarchy is against sex workers because we are against pornography? Is being against sweatshops also being against underpaid laborers who work in unhealthy conditions?
None of these are good reasons for opposing and seeking to sabotage Stop Patriarchy.
Let’s get to the meat of what is burning your buns. We did not get permission from you all to come protest at the Federal Courthouse in Austin at the hearings to decide whether to let the restrictions on clinics go into effect this September 1st, did we? Katie, did you notice that we demonstrated at the FEDERAL courthouse? That’s because the question before the court was whether the law violated the U.S. constitution, and that affects all of us, doesn’t it? Just because it happens on Texas soil is irrelevant. We don’t have to ask permission. Get over it.
Also, you are upset we did not use our money to pay for women’s abortions now that Texas women are being forced to travel and incur extra costs. Well, that is a political decision. Most people who call themselves reproductive rights groups consider themselves “political.” Political means engaging in the political process. Protesting is a time-honored way of being political, and while we are all consternated at the injustice against Texas women that is being perpetrated, social change will only come about through political organizing, which costs money.
What really makes me question your ad hoc group’s opposition to Stop Patriarchy, Katie, is that you want to keep SP from protesting in Texas, because they are “disreputable” and many of them support the Revolutionary Communist Party. Why do you think this disqualifies us from being part of the reproductive rights movement?
I have been a reproductive rights activist and an abortion provider for over 40 years, and I am on the advisory board of Stop Patriarchy. I am aware that Stop Patriarchy is an effort that Sunsara Taylor and other supporters of the RCP initiated which also includes others who believe in the goals of Stop Patriarchy, such as I. I believe that we need a revolution in this country, but think it has to be a feminist-led revolution that transforms our society, therefore I am not a communist, but I have known these folks since before 1979. I esteem them as fellow progressives that share my opposition to U.S. imperialist wars, and mass incarceration of poor, black and brown people, and I condemn your red-baiting.
The red-baiting brings up an interesting question, Katie, are you guys against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the blatant use of our law enforcement machinery to imprison so many young men of color and the murder of Trayvon Martin and now Michael Brown? Or, are you all the kind of reproductive rights activists that believes that the women’s movement is just about raising women’s status in our society, and not about broader social justice. That might explain your group’s slurs.
I have to wonder if you folks have lined up with the Democratic Party who continues to support Hyde Amendment restrictions and the mealy-mouthed “choice” people whose only goal is to reduce female fertility, and you do not want us “disreputable” protestors to raise hell about these TRAP laws.
I would like to say why I came to Texas at this time to protest these laws. First, I have watched our defeat in Texas with dismay, and I wanted to come join in with the protests of Texans and to voice my own outrage. Second, I see more and more attacks coming around the country, and I see very little visible protest occurring. Mostly everything is left up to Planned Parenthood and the Democrats, and I am sick of it. I think it’s time for outspoken protests saying “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.” I respect that Texans have been working hard on this issue, but it has not been enough. We need to do more. In L.A., in NYC, everywhere. I invite Texans who are working for Reproductive Freedom and Justice to come to California. We need some help too.
Showing posts with label Women's Liberation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Women's Liberation. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Response to "The Body Politic: This campaign needs more women and less gynecology"
Original Posting [Yahoo News]
CAROL DOWNER'S RESPONSE FOLLOWS ARTICLE
By: Virginia Heffernan
Actual women—instead of phony gynecological issues—pervaded the last election. Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, Katie Couric and even Tina Fey can each credibly be said to have changed the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, as Rebecca Traister documented in her rollicking chronicle of that race, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women.
And those were just the women at the podiums. In Traister's account, each campaign hired women aplenty on the understanding that they could help their candidates, in one way or another, to attract voters. Got that? Women didn't come around to discuss obscure lady matters, but to help campaigns win votes.
Yet this time around, genuine women have disappeared, in favor of sex talk smuggled under the rubric of "values." The conversation recalls nothing so much as the days when the nightly news shows couldn't stop running pseudo-health segments that featured male reporters fondling silicon breast implants. They'd cluck over their hazards and fondle away at the translucent synthetic protoplasms. Today's fondlers of ultrasound wands seem no less prurient.
It's time we sidelined the fine points of obstetrics from public discourse in an election year. Just as girlie magazines are marketed to male readers, public discourse that features women's body parts should be clearly labeled—as Playboy used to be—"Entertainment for Men."
Transvaginal probes? Entertainment for Men. Interstate abortions? Entertainment for Men.
Single-sex entertainment is just fine, as far as it goes. But "transvaginal" anything and "interstate abortions"—no matter what side you're on—don't count as social issues. This stuff is arcana, and the rhetoric associated with these topics is third-order porn, and an occasion for (mostly) male commentators, politicians and satirists—and I mean you lefties too, Jon Stewart and Garry Trudeau!—to perseverate on gynecology in a weird O.C.D. way.
It's creepy.
Really, the zeal with which male politicians of all stripes make politics sexual is disconcerting. Last week Barack Obama placed a personal call to console Sandra Fluke, asking the law student and advocate of birth-control subsidies if she were "OK" in the days since Rush Limbaugh incoherently deemed her platform akin to sexual promiscuity. Limbaugh had likened Fluke to people who are paid for sex, and likened taxpayers to her pimps, or some bunk like that; Obama aimed to redeem a 30-year-old woman by comparing her to his daughters, ages 10 and 13, who evidently need his protection from bad men who use bad words.
Didn't this seem strange? It drove what should have been a non-erotic conversation—about health and money!—back into the key of sexual melodrama, with Dudley Do-Right Obama saving Maiden Fluke from Rake Rush.
The way Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney wax gynecological is weirder still. And, come on, Ron Paul is an actual gynecologist. They all get right into it, gunning to destroy Planned Parenthood and casually discussing "rape and incest"—limit-case exceptions to an abortion ban that doesn't exist—as if these far-fetched scenarios served any polemical purpose except to name-check sexual trauma.
Fortunately, women treat these fake-clinical spiels as neither appalling nor exciting, like Playboy itself. Maybe that's because those of us who have annual physicals don't relish the notion of rehearsing the particulars of the ultrasound—or the speculum, for that matter. The topic's cashed even for humor.
Nor do women seem to be engaged in the psychedelic philosophical seminar, led by master logician Limbaugh, of whether employer-provided birth control is tantamount to whoredom. Instead, according to a Bloomberg poll published Wednesday, some 77 percent of women don't believe that birth control is a fit subject for any kind of political debate. Is birth control a talking point for sluts and prostitutes? Or for good patriotic women in public life? Neither! As a political topic, it's a non-starter.
It's no surprise that Terry O'Neill, of the National Organization of Women, wants politicians to "get out and stay out of women's wombs," but she should retire her incendiary anatomical language, too. It's just not what voters care about. Exit polls in the primaries suggest that Republican women tune out when male candidates start yapping about uteruses and cervices. As Kate Phillips and Allison Kopicki put it Tuesday in the New York Times, "All of the talk about birth control and abortion laws seems to have had little effect on the ways women are voting for the two leading Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum."
New idea: no more examining-table politics—not transvaginal, transtesticular, or any other kind. Four years ago, with the exception of a brief discussion of Sarah Palin's reproductive decisions, the campaigns steered clear of fake-clinical gibberish. Perhaps we're less eager to talk gynecological smack when there are real women around.
Carol Downer's response:
Much as I enjoyed your [Virginia Heffernan] sharply written piece articulating our distaste at hearing men talking about our sexual and reproductive anatomy and lifestyle, there is something more important going on than garden-variety sexism that we women need to recognize. Although our sex life feels like, and should be, our private business, patriarchal governments seek to control our sex life, because our decisions regarding our fertility and our sexuality have profoundly political consequences. Prominent men in discussing our sexuality in both moralistic and degrading terms, but what is really going on is a veiled attempt to control our fertility behavior. All male-dominated governments (all governments) seek to control women’s sexual lives through legislation or custom in order to control the nation’s population growth. It's less humorous to expose that function of this outpouring of gynecological-talk, but we must use the power of the pen to do so. Women need to become sophisticated, and realize that even though the United States does not have a written-down population policy, as every other nation does, we definitely have one, and the boys are fighting each other; the pro-natalists want to outlaw abortion and birth control to increase our population, and the anti-natalists want to push abortion, birth control, abstinence, alternative lifestyles to reduce our population. Neither are working for true women’s liberation.
CAROL DOWNER'S RESPONSE FOLLOWS ARTICLE
By: Virginia HeffernanActual women—instead of phony gynecological issues—pervaded the last election. Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, Katie Couric and even Tina Fey can each credibly be said to have changed the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, as Rebecca Traister documented in her rollicking chronicle of that race, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women.
And those were just the women at the podiums. In Traister's account, each campaign hired women aplenty on the understanding that they could help their candidates, in one way or another, to attract voters. Got that? Women didn't come around to discuss obscure lady matters, but to help campaigns win votes.
Yet this time around, genuine women have disappeared, in favor of sex talk smuggled under the rubric of "values." The conversation recalls nothing so much as the days when the nightly news shows couldn't stop running pseudo-health segments that featured male reporters fondling silicon breast implants. They'd cluck over their hazards and fondle away at the translucent synthetic protoplasms. Today's fondlers of ultrasound wands seem no less prurient.
It's time we sidelined the fine points of obstetrics from public discourse in an election year. Just as girlie magazines are marketed to male readers, public discourse that features women's body parts should be clearly labeled—as Playboy used to be—"Entertainment for Men."
Transvaginal probes? Entertainment for Men. Interstate abortions? Entertainment for Men.
Single-sex entertainment is just fine, as far as it goes. But "transvaginal" anything and "interstate abortions"—no matter what side you're on—don't count as social issues. This stuff is arcana, and the rhetoric associated with these topics is third-order porn, and an occasion for (mostly) male commentators, politicians and satirists—and I mean you lefties too, Jon Stewart and Garry Trudeau!—to perseverate on gynecology in a weird O.C.D. way.
It's creepy.
Really, the zeal with which male politicians of all stripes make politics sexual is disconcerting. Last week Barack Obama placed a personal call to console Sandra Fluke, asking the law student and advocate of birth-control subsidies if she were "OK" in the days since Rush Limbaugh incoherently deemed her platform akin to sexual promiscuity. Limbaugh had likened Fluke to people who are paid for sex, and likened taxpayers to her pimps, or some bunk like that; Obama aimed to redeem a 30-year-old woman by comparing her to his daughters, ages 10 and 13, who evidently need his protection from bad men who use bad words.Didn't this seem strange? It drove what should have been a non-erotic conversation—about health and money!—back into the key of sexual melodrama, with Dudley Do-Right Obama saving Maiden Fluke from Rake Rush.
The way Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney wax gynecological is weirder still. And, come on, Ron Paul is an actual gynecologist. They all get right into it, gunning to destroy Planned Parenthood and casually discussing "rape and incest"—limit-case exceptions to an abortion ban that doesn't exist—as if these far-fetched scenarios served any polemical purpose except to name-check sexual trauma.
Fortunately, women treat these fake-clinical spiels as neither appalling nor exciting, like Playboy itself. Maybe that's because those of us who have annual physicals don't relish the notion of rehearsing the particulars of the ultrasound—or the speculum, for that matter. The topic's cashed even for humor.
Nor do women seem to be engaged in the psychedelic philosophical seminar, led by master logician Limbaugh, of whether employer-provided birth control is tantamount to whoredom. Instead, according to a Bloomberg poll published Wednesday, some 77 percent of women don't believe that birth control is a fit subject for any kind of political debate. Is birth control a talking point for sluts and prostitutes? Or for good patriotic women in public life? Neither! As a political topic, it's a non-starter.
It's no surprise that Terry O'Neill, of the National Organization of Women, wants politicians to "get out and stay out of women's wombs," but she should retire her incendiary anatomical language, too. It's just not what voters care about. Exit polls in the primaries suggest that Republican women tune out when male candidates start yapping about uteruses and cervices. As Kate Phillips and Allison Kopicki put it Tuesday in the New York Times, "All of the talk about birth control and abortion laws seems to have had little effect on the ways women are voting for the two leading Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum."
New idea: no more examining-table politics—not transvaginal, transtesticular, or any other kind. Four years ago, with the exception of a brief discussion of Sarah Palin's reproductive decisions, the campaigns steered clear of fake-clinical gibberish. Perhaps we're less eager to talk gynecological smack when there are real women around.
Carol Downer's response:
Much as I enjoyed your [Virginia Heffernan] sharply written piece articulating our distaste at hearing men talking about our sexual and reproductive anatomy and lifestyle, there is something more important going on than garden-variety sexism that we women need to recognize. Although our sex life feels like, and should be, our private business, patriarchal governments seek to control our sex life, because our decisions regarding our fertility and our sexuality have profoundly political consequences. Prominent men in discussing our sexuality in both moralistic and degrading terms, but what is really going on is a veiled attempt to control our fertility behavior. All male-dominated governments (all governments) seek to control women’s sexual lives through legislation or custom in order to control the nation’s population growth. It's less humorous to expose that function of this outpouring of gynecological-talk, but we must use the power of the pen to do so. Women need to become sophisticated, and realize that even though the United States does not have a written-down population policy, as every other nation does, we definitely have one, and the boys are fighting each other; the pro-natalists want to outlaw abortion and birth control to increase our population, and the anti-natalists want to push abortion, birth control, abstinence, alternative lifestyles to reduce our population. Neither are working for true women’s liberation.
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