Menstruation Is Murder

By Climbing Trees

So, in the U.S. (where else?) a Georgia Republican wants women who have miscarriages to prove they weren’t the result of, um, intervention. i.e. it all came out by itself.

Reminds me of the great Mikhaela Reid cartoon “The Egg Rescue Squad.” So let’s, as Mikhaela did, take this a little bit further. Why isn’t Mr I Hate Menstruating Women Because They Aren’t Fulfilling Their God Given Duty to Reproduce demanding that all used tampons be checked for possible fertilised eggs. After all, [PDF!!] only about 50 percent of these teeny tiny “people” actually implant in the womb. Why is it that ProLiferators and the GOP don’t seem a sh*t about the kind of tampon massacres that are going on every day. Ladies, when YOU lift the lid on those tampon disposal bins in the loo, don’t you sometimes feel just heartsick at the thought of all the tiny dead people in there? Those things are like mass graves. Maybe Repubs could fund something like Reid’s Egg Rescue Squad to regularly clear out those “sanitary disposal units” (talk about euphemistic! “Killing Fields” is more like it). Locate the eggs, take DNA samples, and then git out there and hunt down and lock up the callous murdering menstruating wimmin responsible. It’s outrageous.

I was listening to Bill Maher’s show the other day. Bill can be an annoying, sexist wanker, but I have a soft sport for his irreverence (especially over religion). Anyway, he was whining on about how badly Muslim men treat “their” women. Tavis Smiley (the guy can talk!) challenged him by rather gently suggesting that Americans don’t treat “their” women so damned well either. Bill was apoplectic. But way to go Tavis. Bill, of course, cited the example of the Muslim guy who cut off his wife’s head. Never mind that non-Muslim men are killing their wives and girlfriends every damned day – there was probably one just down the block from the studio that afternoon. But I digress – as Bill waxed on about how terrible it is for women in Saudi because they aren’t allowed to drive or fly planes (sure, it sucks!), and I was thinking, well, what’s more important, being allowed to fly a phucking plane or being able to control your own goddamned eggs? Is America really such a female paradise when its elected officials want to put miscarrying and/or menstruating women in the dock?

I doubt I’ll live long enough to see another feminist revolution – no sign yet that enough people give a cr*p about women’s rights – but I sure hope … that … one of these days … the Sisterhood Will Rise Up! All We Have to Lose Are Our Tampons… or something.

UPDATE LATER THAT SAME DAY: I swear I hadn't seen this really great blog post -- "Dear Rep. Franklin: I submit my used tampons as evidence" -- by Jill Filipovic when I wrote this. But she Nails It! Does anyone smell a fabulous political action here...involving the sending of scores and scores of tampons to anti-choice politicians? Or is it just me?

Why Don't Men Give a Cr*p?

By Climbing Trees

Why don’t brothers, fathers, husbands, sons of women care more about protecting their sisters, mothers, wives, daughters reproductive rights? Men seem to care so very deeply about protecting fertilised eggs, why don’t they seem to give a cr*p about women? It’s not because they don’t care about how women live their lives. They seem to care very deeply about it, since they are on the front lines of the battle to take away women’s reproductive rights (or, where we don’t have any, to make sure we never get them). There have been lots of good answers over the years, the patriarchy primary among them. That’s really shorthand for a complex story about men needing and wanting desperately to have control over women, and to have control over women, step no. 1 is to get control of their fertility. So, sistahs, despite the second-wave, despite this being called by some (idiots) the post-feminist era, we never won that struggle. The men and their henchwomen are still lining up against us in droves, and they’re making a lot of gains – especially in the U.S. It’s pretty neat the way they managed to conjure up a world in which those aspects of fertility that have to do with men (you know, the sperm side of things), attracts no political interest at all. Who cares if men do or do not get vasectomies. As Ashley Sayeau pointed out recently on The Guardian site, while the Obama admin is all cautious about whether contraception (for women) should be counted as preventive care and so made free (or cheaper at least), no one is losing sleep over vasectomies, “which are widely covered by insurance agencies.” And for every unplanned and/or unwanted pregnancy, there were sperm involved. Really! So why aren’t there public campaigns urging men to take responsibility? Why aren’t men whose sperm were responsible for unwanted and/or unplanned pregnancies excoriated like women are? The really cool Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker points out that American policymakers believe in ensoulment, essentially when sperm meets egg. That means sperm don’t have souls so having vasectomies isn’t messing with any God-given souls. Contraception like IUDs or Plan B – even the pill according to the really hard-core antis – might possibly, at a stretch, in one case out of a zillion, mess with an ensouled cell, and so women mustn’t be allowed to get hold of it. As a friend of mine put it, we are up against the medieval mind – though I think that’s a bit rough on the medievals. OK, so this post doesn’t really put forward a nice, clear argument about, well, anything. I was just feeling so bummed about men getting all the breaks, and not (with a few notable exceptions…I do know I have some fabulous pro-choice brothers out there) helping out with what I think is a frontline battle between modernity and the f**king dark ages.