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hell below, stars above
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| I see that a lot of you still have me added. In case you missed the first announcement, my new journal is ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wednesdayxadams. Migrate over thataway if you still want to read. I'll be deleting this journal as soon as I finish saving the old entries. | comments: 13 love letters or write love letters to me   |
| Here's the source.
Wearing 'Abortion kills kids' T-shirt gets student sent home from school
KNOXVILLE — A fifth-grade girl hoping to participate in National Pro-Life T-shirt Day ended up going home from school after the principal said the shirt she wore was inappropriate.
The maroon shirt, distributed by an anti-abortion organization, had a picture of a fetus' head with the words ''ABORTION KILLS KIDS'' in capital letters below it.
A.L. Lotts Elementary School Principal Emily Lenn told the girl's mother, Debbie Williams, that the shirt was inappropriate and said the student would have to cover the message or remove the shirt. Instead, Williams took her daughter home for the day, she told The Knoxville News Sentinel, which agreed to her request to not identify the girl or show her face in a picture appearing on yesterday's front page.
( Here's the rest of the article. )
( Here is a picture of the shirt in question. )
Does anyone else find it thoroughly repellent that anti-choicers think it's completely acceptable to:
1. Use their children as political billboards/mascots?
-OR-
2. Foist incredibly graphic images onto elementary school-aged children as part of an obvious effort to shock them into compliance with the anti-abortion movement?
I'm pretty much sickened. | | comments: 18 love letters or write love letters to me |
| ...since every pro-choice community on this site is presently rejoicing over it.
Here's the story for those who haven't gotten wind of it just yet.
Summary: Dr. Hagar is a paternalistic, fundamentalist asshole who thinks that birth control is evil and prayer is the best way to fix womanly problems. He writes sacchrine, condescending books about healing us poor, pathetic women as Jesus did, which somehow entails denying us healthcare. Naturally, Bush, being the king of idiotic Christians, appointed him to the FDA's advisory panel where he proceeded to wreak havoc on the approval of drugs intended to help women, particularly the morning-after pill.
This is where his troubles began. Apparently, he wrote a "minority report" outlining the Christian opposition to the morning-after pill to the commissioner of the FDA, which resulted in the refusal to bring EC to over-the-counter status. I imagine it was the usual histrionics about us slutty wimmin havin reepsonseebilitee furee sayx and how that violates THE WORD OF GOD. Anyway, he's refusing to release what he wrote and the name of who asked him for it, so senators Clinton and Murray are launching a congressional investigation of him charging him of imposing his politics on the medical decisions of the FDA.
At the same time, it was revealed that he had engaged in much anal rapage of his ex-wife when they were still married, which is apparently a felony in his home state of Kentucky.
Looks like things aren't going well for him.
What's really amusing about this whole debacle, however, is the Religious Right's reaction to it. While the news was just announced yesterday, they've already whipped themselves up into a frenzy over THE INCREDIBLE PERSECUTION of a good Christian. I've already addressed the "good Christian" part of that sentiment and find it pretty nauseating that anyone could, in good moral conscience, stick up for someone who forcibly sodomized their spouse. But I guess since he opposes abortion and birth control, he qualifies as an upstanding citizen. Ridiculous, as is the evident belief that the dismissal of an admitted rapist (which is kind of a crime in this country; we're not Nigeria yet) who is also being investigated for unethical behavior in his position constitutes wholesale persecution of Christians everywhere.
Of course, I wasn't aware that there exists a Bible verse that says that anally raping one's wife is acceptable sexual behavior. It must fall under the "graceful submission" category, then, which seems to be a pretty convenient umbrella for lots of ugly, paternalistic behavior. But then, the Bible doesn't really say anything about abortion or premarital sex, either, so I guess we should all just get used to whacko Christians fabricating shit under the impression that no one actually reads the Bible in its entirety. While this may be true of most Christians (of the "I know it's in there somewhere variety), the rest of us like to examine things more closely. I've always found it really hilarious that atheists and agnostics typically have a far better understanding of the Bible than most Christians.
Which is probably why we reject it.
I think this cartoon, courtesy of anne_jumps sums it up nicely:
The only thing that Hagar is being persecuted for is being a rapist (which he kind of deserves) and using his position of power to impress his religious beliefs onto the lives and bodies of millions of American women (which, once again, he really deserves). But since rape and anti-abortion beliefs make up such a huge part of Christian doctrine, it's understandable why the Religious Right is getting all bent out of shape.
After all, it's not like Christians don't comprise three-quarters of the American population, approximately six times the number of the second-largest religious subcategory (which, ironically, is that of the secular and non-religious) and fifty-eight times the second-biggest actual religious group (the Jews). No, Christians don't have a stranglehold on the American population. Even if we cut the number down to fundamentalist/evangelical denominations, they still make up anywhere from twenty-five to thirty percent of the population, still double to triple the size of the secular population and thirteen to eighteen times the number of Jews. They are a tiny, persecuted minority and by damnit, they'll stick up for their rights!
And by rights they mean the inherent right to impose their idiotic beliefs upon everyone else. Well, it's nice to see it coming around to bit them in the ass. | | comments: write love letters to me |
| Crazed Catholic Walgreen's employee refuses to dispense emergency contraception and confiscates woman's prescription. Woman goes on to get pregnant and ends up having an abortion. This is pro-life at its absolute finest.
I'm almost of the opinion that since these people do such a good job of shooting themselves in the feet, I should simply stay out of abortion politics altogether and enjoy the fireworks.
Seriously. My mother always told me to choose my battles wisely, and this is a battle that anti-abortion dumbasses activists should not be picking. While they may be able to convince the majority of Americans that banning medically necessary late-term abortions and sending teenagers into the land of baseball bat-induced abortions are good ideas, the harsh reality is that everyone wants their consequence-free sex and is not willing to part with it because some religious crazies are idiots enough to think that hormonal contraception is the same thing as a chemical abortion. Most people have enough sense to know that birth control *prevents* abortions and don't fancy playing Vatican Roulette because some sanctimonious asshole with a god complex would rather listen to Pastor Joe Bob than scientists.
In choosing to wage war over birth control and emergency contraception, the pro-life movement is effectively marginalizing itself into the Land of Religious Lunatics, right there with Fred Phelps and Randall Terry. They're going to be considered so completely backwards and irrelevant that people will stop paying attention to them and just say, "Oh, yeah, they're crazy. Just ignore them and they'll go away."
The pro-choice movement is very shrewdly milking the fuck out of this. Every time it happens, they get it blared in the headlines as though it's a national epidemic of crazed anti-choiceness. William Saletan at Slate.com writes:
If pro-choicers and the media draw the public into this fight, pro-lifers will be in deep trouble. The most universally compelling petitioners for abortion rights are rape victims. Even by conservative standards, you can't say they deserve pregnancy as a "consequence for sex"—as a New Hampshire politician did three weeks ago during a fight over the morning-after pill—since they didn't choose sex in the first place. Such politicians look insensitive to crime victims, a deadly problem for a Republican in a general election. Already pro-choicers are working this angle, promoting the pill as post-rape treatment and spotlighting cases in which women turned away by pharmacists claim to be victims of sexual assault.
The other danger for pro-lifers is that the wall they've erected between abortion and contraception will collapse. Morning-after pills can prevent conception or implantation; in any given case, it's practically impossible to know which. If pro-lifers appear to oppose contraception, rather than abortion, they risk antagonizing and alarming most Americans. Five months ago, a CBS/New York Times poll asked, "Should pharmacists who personally oppose birth control for religious reasons be able to refuse to sell birth control pills to women who have a prescription for them, or shouldn't pharmacists be able to refuse to sell birth control pills?" Only 16 percent of respondents said yes. Seventy-eight percent said no.
Already pro-lifers are straying across this line. The president of Pharmacists for Life reportedly doesn't stock any contraceptives in her store. Three weeks ago, in a high-profile appeal to Gov. Blagojevich, a Catholic bishop protested that the Illinois regulation requiring pharmacies to fill prescriptions for morning-after pills violated the Catholic doctrine "that artificial contraception is morally wrong." Against this view, pro-choicers argue that a woman who requests a morning-after pill is trying, responsibly, to prevent a pregnancy so she won't have to abort it. If pro-lifers start to look like they care more about resisting contraception than avoiding abortions, look out.
Furthermore, the fact that this case is rapidly turning into a high-profile lawsuit is golden political capital-- and we didn't have to do anything to get it. Pro-lifers instigated and are responsible for all of this themselves. Congratulations, rejects.
Side Note: The fact that someone thinks that the prevention of a fertilized egg from implanting (which the MAP does not do anyway) constitutes a chemical abortion is able to work in any type of healthcare profession is truly frightening. | | comments: 5 love letters or write love letters to me |
| | Subject: | *ahem* | | Time: | 06:39 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankcreateg.gif) creative |
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| ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) atheists4choice
You don't have to be an atheist to join. The only requirement is a great displeasure at the way in which religion is used in abortion-related rhetoric.
More to come; I am prsently working on things. | | comments: 1 love letter or write love letters to me |
| Waaah! Cry the anti-gay, Christian assholes.
Here are my favorite parts:
Irked by the success of the nationwide Day of Silence, which seeks to combat anti-gay bias in schools, conservative activists are launching a counter-event this week called the Day of Truth aimed at mobilizing students who believe homosexuality is sinful.
...
Johnson said the event is meant to be “peaceful and respectful,” but made clear it is motivated by belief that homosexuality is wrong. “You can call it sinful or destructive — ultimately it’s both,” he said.
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Echoing the stance taken by defense fund lawyers in several court cases, Johnson said teachers and students critical of homosexuality have been pressured to stifle their views while at school. They cite the case of a San Diego-area high school student, Chase Harper, who was disciplined last year for refusing to change out of a T-shirt that read, "Homosexuality is Shameful."
...
According to GLSEN, 84 percent of gay and lesbian high school students experiences verbal harassment on a regular basis at school, and 40 percent experience physical harassment.
So, nearly all homosexual students are harassed, threatened, verbally abused, and nearly half are physically mistreated. This is clearly not a problem because, OMG, SOCYEUTY is taking their side, but when one student is asked to remove a hateful, offensive shirt, all hell breaks loose because, somehow, a religion that is practiced by anywhere from 75-85% of the American population is being horribly persecuted.
What. The. Fuck. Ever.
Christians have the worst collective martyr complex of just about any religion I've ever encountered. The fact that they have a literal stranglehold on the population means nothing to them, because they have it in their heads that they will always be a "persecuted minority." I grew up in the Bible Belt, and I can honestly say that the only Christian Persecution I've ever witnessed occurred when the so-called Christians insisted on harassing people they considered sinful. I've seen Christians mocking gay people, attempting to coerce non-Christians into converting, and spreading vicious rumors about those they perceived to be immoral, but I have never once seen a Christian get made fun of for their religious beliefs when they weren't using them to further some evil cause.
The only times I've ever seen a Christian get called out is when someone sees them doing something hateful, like tormenting gay people, and asks them to stop. The overall integrity of their religion is never questioned; they're just asked to stop being hateful. But, oh no, The Eleventh Commandment "Thou shalt be a hypocritical asshole to anyone you find disagreeable regardless of what the Scriptures say about loving thine enemy as thyself," is being flagrantly violated, so the Christians must be being persecuted. Oh no!
I hate that it is still considered socially acceptable to abuse people over their sexualities. If I had walked into my old public middle or private high schools wearing a shirt that said: "Being a woman is Shameful," "Being Black/Asian/Hispanic/whatever is Shameful," "Being handicapped is Shameful," or "Being a Christian/Jew/whatever religion is Shameful," there's a good chance I would have gotten suspended (at the very least) over it. Why? Because it's considered hateful to insult someone's gender, ethnicity, abledness, and religion. However, if I wore a shirt in that said "Homosexuality is Shameful," I'd have entire political groups fighting for my right to be a hateful bigot towards a sexual minority. How incredibly fucked up is that?
I honestly cannot fathom this. The Lord of All hate Himself knows that I should be able to, seeing as how I was raised in extremely conservative Southern Baptist churches my entire life. I am practically an expert in the dissemination of hate rhetoric, so much so that I could be an Inner Party Member in the world of Orwell's 1984:
Love the sinner, hate the sin.
Suffering and Self-Loathing are Enlightenment.
God is Love.
See? I've got it down.
Yet, I'm still incapable of comprehending the level of anger and hate that so-called practitioners of "the religion of love" (there's some Newspeak for you) are capable of directing at people who dare to disagree with them. When they're not killing people such as myself selfish, baby-killing whores (as if rendering people destitute by forcing them into having and raising children they don't want because of your idiotic religious beliefs isn't entirely selfish), they're harassing atheists (the next time someone tells me that they're sorry that I don't need a supernatural crutch to turn me into a judgmental asshole give my life meaning, they're getting punched in the nose), they're treating homosexuals like dirt because of a handful obscure, totally taken out of context passages. In a way, I'm thankful I'm not gay because of all the persecution I already get at the hands of Christians. And they really seem to get the worst of it: no one knows about my abortion or my lack of religion until I tell them. Gayness is not necessarily as easy to hide.
While homosexuality is becoming progressively more socially acceptable (statistics show that people of my generation are overwhelmingly in favor of gay rights), there is still a chunk of hard-core reactionaries in American society that will always be present. Right now, they're running things. I just hope they don't make too many messes that my generation will have to clean up once we come to power. | | comments: 6 love letters or write love letters to me |
| This brilliant comment has sliced through my facade.
I admit it. I hate babies and I want to kill them all. Not satisfied with mere pro-choice activism which only allowed OTHER women to kill their babies, I decided to get pregnant approximately two years ago for the express purpose of having an abortion. I didn't just want to contribute to the deaths of millions of unborn children each year, I wanted to be responsible for one of my very own.
Of course, I couldn't say that to anyone. While we're still way ahead in terms of public opinion and forty percent of all women will have an abortion in their life, the harsh reality is that not very many people think that abortions for the sake of killing the hatefulness embodied that are babies are a good idea. They must rely on such shallow, superficial rhetoric to justify their actions:
Inadequate finances 21%
Not ready for responsibility 21%
Woman’s life would be changed too much 16%
Problems with relationship; unmarried 12%
Too young; not mature enough 11%
Children are grown; woman has all she wants 8%
(Source: AGI)
So I decided to couch my abortion decision in terms of these asinine little qualms in order to appease society, although all I've wanted these past two years is to stand high on a pedestal and say "I hate babies! I want them DEAD! So, I got pregnant so that I could have an abortion to PROVE just how much I hate them!"
I have been in a state of anguish for two years over this, and I am so thankful that this veritable genius has been so kind as to expose my true motives. I am the gladder for it! I am a much better pro-choicer now.
I look at who I was just a half an hour ago and seethe with disgust. I'd go on and on about how I have never made more than six thousand dollars in a given year, which isn't even enough for me to live off of, let alone a child, and, once having birthed a child, I would have a difficult time taking care of it and working simultaneously (assuming that's even possible). I'd constantly complain that my unstable, somewhat abusive mother would throw me out of the house and the remainder of my intolerant, fundamentalist Christian family would excommunicate me, leaving me in a truly bad state of destitution. I'd moan about how Jakob was totally uninterested in having a kid and had previously threatened duck and run should I ever give birth to a kid that he didn't want. Lord, how I would bitch about how having a child would have prevented me from attending the college I wanted to go to, since I would definitely not be able to pay for it, much less keep up with its rigorous academics with a baby in tow. What pitiful, pathetic excuses. I should have known better.
And, I must finally confess: I wasn't using protection. I was also fucking literally dozens of men, so that whole "religious use of condoms with my one partner" story I've been giving you all is a terrific lie. I was an uncareful, irresponsible slut. I wanted to kill that baby, so I did whatever it took!
Not only that, I knew that the only responsible way I could handle the situation would have been to give birth to a child in a state of destitution with little or no hope for future economic advancement while in a state of serious mental disorder with absolutely no hope whatsoever of material or financial support from my family or my deadfetusdaddy. I knew that throwing away all of my educational opportunities in favor of birthing and raising an unwanted child on what little government assistance I could glean while working full time at McDonald's is the most moral course of action for any eighteen-year-old woman. I killed the damn thing anyway just out of spite and my blinding hatred of all babies. And it felt good.
Now that I have confessed, I feel whole again.
I stand before you a humbled woman. Please, find it in your hearts to forgive me. | | comments: 4 love letters or write love letters to me |
| redneck_pride and southernpride.
I'm absolutely convinced that people who come out of this region are either divine geniuses: me, incoherencehere, and natethewriter in particular, along with James Agee, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams, and so on and so forth OR total fundamentalist mongoloids: members of aforementioned communities, George W. Bush, Bill Frist, and Jerry Falwell. I'm appropriately proud and ashamed.
I'd be willing to settle for a healthy amount of mediocrity and a reduction of the extremes, especially since everyone seems to focus on the mongoloid extreme. Not that I blame them: they're a lot more visible than mere literary giants, alas. | | comments: 17 love letters or write love letters to me |
| Tuesday: Warm, sunny, and all-around beautiful. Not a cloud in the sky.
Wednesday and Today: Chill, rainy, and all-around moldy-sweat-socky from all the humidity. Looks like the storm of the century is about to hit.
Aaaaannnnnddddd I get to go walk 3/4 of a mile in it today.
Consider me annoyed. | | comments: 4 love letters or write love letters to me |
| I find the nauseatingly sententious brouhaha surrounding the Pope's death disgusting on an intellectual and moral level. That's not to say that I'm glad he died (although it is a nice thought that he's no longer suffering from Parkinson's, chronic pneumonia, and every other health problem he's lately been afflicted with) because I'm not that mean-spirited (and why, as Hamlet would say, fly from a known evil to an unknown one?). I just think it's weird that everyone is jumping on this Big Bandwagon of Grief without critically examining who he was and what he stood for. It's one thing if you're Catholic. He was a good Catholic. If you're not, though, and have any kind of issue with [very conservative] Catholic theology, you probably shouldn't be weeping so much.
I'm really annoyed with all of my supposedly liberal friends who go on and on about how great a "humanitarian" he and all the other action figures of the Catholic church (like Mother Teresa) are without knowing one damned thing about the details of their actions. As far as I'm concerned, humanitarianism is doing something unconditionally good for the human race (or, in this case, the poor), not spiritually fetishizing their tragic condition while ensuring that it continues. Both John Paul II and Mother Teresa were extremely anti-birth control, and considered it their moral duty to deprive every poor family they encountered of the ability to plan their children so that they could better support them. Way to entrench the poverty! Oh, and telling a bunch of Africans that condoms don't help prevent the transmission of HIV? If that isn't evil, I don't know what is, seeing as how it sentences people to die horrible deaths so that the integrity of one's religious beliefs about the continued popping out of children remains unsullied.
That's not to say that they were necessarily all bad; there's no doubt in my mind that, in their extremely myopic, misguided way, they cared about the poor and wanted to help them, but, as we say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'll not complain about the pope's eerily prophetic predictions about the war, his opposition to the death penalty, and his commitment to fighting some human rights abuses, but the fact that he represents an entity I believe to be thoroughly corrupt in addition to arguing for the unequal treatment of homosexuals and the reproductive enslavement of women do not allow me to join in the "What a fucking awesome guy!" parade-- especially since these last two things seemed to take precedent above everything else. Thirty-five thousand children die of starvation a day, but Canada might allow gay marriages and abortion is legal in the United States. Can we get a fucking perspective check, PLEASE?!
And the fact that everyone around me is in mourning is really starting to get on my nerves. And I can't say anything because I don't want to come off like an asshole and get bitched out for something that i don't even really think. My opinion of him, like that of the institution of Christianity as a whole, is forever doomed to ambivalence, and most people can't understand or fathom holding an opinion that's not black and white. I'm just left holding a sign that quotes Thoreau: "The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior." As usual.
My sincere condolences, of course, to my Catholic friends (who probably should be mourning this). Even though I'm not a big fan of the Church, The Pope, or religion in general, I know you care and I'm sure you feel pretty badly about the whole thing, even if I don't. | | comments: 23 love letters or write love letters to me |
| Him: What are you and [friend] talking about?
Me: I was just saying to [friend] that it's hypocritical and cruel of the Republican party to demand an end to abortion but obstinately insist on cutting funding to social programs that take care of poor women and their children.
Him: Why?
Me: To demand that someone bear children they don't want in the name of your morals and then refuse to pay the taxes necessary to support your lofty morals in action is completely illogical in addition to being extremely cruel. Do you like the idea of forcing women into destitution?
Him: It's not that simple.
Me: Yes, yes it is. You can't have your cake and eat it, too; you can't insist that women be forced to have unwanted children one month and then turn your back on them the second they're born, nine months later. If you were really pro-life, you'd want to take care of these children and their mothers their entire lives, not demand their proper treatment until the fetus has exited the womb and then turn your back on the both of them. It's sick, twisted, and cruel.
Him: Why should my taxes pay for this?
Me: You're obviously okay with using taxes to create and enforce abortion bans. And here I was thinking you fiscal conservatives were against high taxes. I guess that only refers to projects you don't approve of, even when you should be approving of them. Hypocrisy's so attractive.
Him: Look, the reason we oppose high taxes is because we'd rather choose which charities to donate to. In fact, we'd donate more of our money to charities without such high taxes because we'd be able to afford it.
Me: Are you honestly telling me that, should you end up in your parents' likely tax bracket, you'd give up thirty to forty percent of your income to charities? Specifically those that help poor, unwed women you'd be forcing into motherhood?
Him: ::walks off sulking::
Moral of the story: If you want to force women into destitution by making them bear children they don't want and then refusing to help care for them and said children, be honest about it. You're not fooling anyone and, quite honestly, it's marginally better to be an asshole than a lying asshole. | | comments: 2 love letters or write love letters to me |
| After the recent entries about birth control access and rightwing, anti-choice nutjobs using pharmacies as instruments of reproductive harassment, I think we ought to do something about it. I hereby propose that we begin an e-mail and letter-writing campaign to objectionable pharmacies informing them that as long as they continue to not take a positive stance on women's rights, we will not only not be utilizing their services, we will tell everyone we know not to, either. Simply not shopping somewhere quietly doesn't get the message out efficiently; for all they know, we could just be going somewhere two streets closer. They need to know why we're boycotting them and that our actions pose a threat to their businesses.
Right now, I'm still in the research phase of this. I'm looking at various pharmacy chain websites and discerning what their actual policies in regards to birth control and prescription refusal are. Ideally, I'd like to come across some e-mail and regular addresses at which to file complaints. I'd also like to set up a website that houses this information and provides necessary resources. Unfortunately, I'm a full-time student and not technology-savvy, so if any of you are interested in working on this, please let me know!
Edited to add: NARAL has a letter of concern here. Please oh please use it, but I'm more interested in setting up something of a blacklist for companies that actually have objectionable policies.
X-posted to desperateopiate, ljforchoice, and sluts4choice. | | comments: 2 love letters or write love letters to me |
| | Current Music: | Foo Fighters- Everlong | | Subject: | WTF?! | | Time: | 11:58 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankangryg.gif) aggravated |
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| The next person who informs me that atheism entails an act of faith is getting punched in the face.
Explicitly refusing to have faith in anything that one cannot see does not constitute faith. It's the very antithesis of faith.
Taking a world like this in which such shitty things happen on a second-by-second basis and believing that there is some all-loving, all-caring being out who created this fucking mess and loves us all dearly for it there is an act of faith. I look around at all the insanity and suffering and misery that surround me and see no evidence of a god, particularly not the grandfatherly type who wants us all to love one another and created such a magical fucking paradise for us to lovingly inhabit. I therefore do not believe in a god. This isn't an act of faith, this is common fucking sense. | | comments: 2 love letters or write love letters to me |
| I think the thing that I hate most about college is the sense of intellectual entitlement. People think that since they managed to get into a top twenty university, they are geniuses and every asinine thought that pops into their head must be considered with all the same seriousness as a revelation from Eistein himself. While intellectual entitlement-inspired discussions can and do provide many amusing moments, they mostly just piss me off because I wonder what on earth makes people think that such idiocy should ever escape the confines of their brains. Like today, in my philosophy of natural sciences course:
We were discussing the importance of personal perspective and experience in the pursuit of science, particularly medicine, when a proud feminist closet misandrist said that only women should be OB/GYNs. Since women can actually experience menstrual cramps, menopause, pregnancy, and childbirth, she argued, they are the only ones who are really qualified to help other women in those areas. While men can learn about these things, she continues, it's not the same as being able to experience them and so they are less qualified than women.
I leapt into action like a cheetah on a trampoline and said:
"That makes no logical sense. While women experience menstruation, labor, menopause, and every other wonderful thing our second x-chromosome entitles us to, we're limited to our own experiences which seldom, if ever, have universal value. Let's say there are two female obstetricians, both of whom have children. However, they had very different labors; the first had one that was so easy she hardly needed pain medication and the second labored for thirty hours only to require an emergency c-section because the baby was in distress. It's unreasonable to expect their experiences to apply to even a minority of their subsequent cases.
"In dealing with women who are not themselves (and that would be every other woman), they must resort to book knowledge, which functionally makes them no different from a male OB/GYN. Either way, they don't have the relevant or actual experience necessary to conduct their medicinal practices. So gender's definitely not a convincing argument for excluding men from an entire field of medicine, especially since it rules out all women, too."
I should have added that it would also preclude childfree and childless women from being obstetricians and non-menopausal women from helping those experiencing it, but I felt I'd laid a sufficient smackdown.
I'm not sure how people manage to get so stupid. It never fails to boggle the mind. I'm also not sure how people with such evident feminist leanings manage to get so damned misandrist, either. Feminism is about working for gender EQUALITY, not further stratification of existing gender stereotypes. If a man want's to be an ob/gyn, cool. If a woman wants to be a proctologist, cool. And vice versa. Feminism's about being able to do what makes you happy, not shunting yourself or others into lifestyles that you think they ought to be in. I don't care if you're male or female, such thinking is wrong no matter how you say it.
Oh, by the way, my gynecologist is male. | | comments: 12 love letters or write love letters to me |
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