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.