It is nice when the anti-woman, fetus-fetish brigade starts getting worked up. The thin veil of “protecting life” is torn away leaving only the desperate misogyny that is so typical of the anti-choice zealots. This from the Feel that pro-life love! Tumblr.
damnsoprochoice:
jojobear11:
DPC: Lol, people who think it’s okay to use someone’s body against their will and think that anyone will benefit from forced pregnancies and birth. Lol, people who think think that an embryo is more important than a grown person. Lol, people who think being born is a right.
DPC: I can lol all day.
J: Forced pregnancies and birth? Hahaha don’t get pregnant then asshole. No one said the unborn were more important, but keep putting words in someone’s mouth to make yourself look less like the stupid selfish cunt that you are. Saying being born isn’t a right doesn’t make any sense. You’re just making up stupid shit now.
DPC: Oh shit happens, peopel get pregnant. Abortion is a legitimate way of dealing with it.
DPC: And oooh, name calling. Fiesty.
DPC: But I’m not putting words in your mouth, you are making the embryo more important than the born person because you don’t give a fuck about how hard and debilitating a pregnancy can be for people, and you certainly think people should suffer through just so that itty bitty baby can be born and solve nothing. Just so that you in 20 years can go “I don’t have to provide for you, go fucking work or something you lazy ass”.
DPC: Being born isn’t a right, it’s a privilege. Now go kiss your mother for suffering for you.
DPC: Not just “name-calling”, but an insult that implies that being a woman and not self-sacrificing is a horrible thing. Unsurprising considering who it’s coming from.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
6 comments
February 5, 2013 at 9:32 am
Reneta Scian
It sounds a lot like the entirety of “Anti-equality” positions, especially some of the MRA and Christian Right who believe women have it equal now, or perhaps that feminists have even created “Reverse Sexism”, or that they take power from men. Or even worse, that “Modern Feminism” and the fight for equality for women is them “Rejecting their Role as Women, rejecting the role nature/God/biology endowed them with” usually but not always in the belief that invisible friend is the only one who know how women should use their bodies. Or even more devoid of reason than that, the “It works for me, and I’m happy”, or “So many other women do and are happy”, a sort of “dodge” basically saying “it can’t be bad if women can agree to it”.
Because to get these sorts people to understand the right to bodily autonomy, we’d have to get them to understand a world which is foreign to them. That world is the real world in this case. When traditional gender roles are still so deeply rooted in the status quo that they can’t even understand “misogyny”, anti-choice/women nonsense is but a hop, leap and a jump away. It becomes “simplified” as “Think about the babies”, because “making babies is a women’s role anyways, right?”… And that is the toughie, how do we get people whose entire world view is derived from a misogynistic baseline to understand something as advanced beyond that as basic bodily autonomy? The person she is talking to, in my opinion, probably still doesn’t get it after her statement.
The culture that allows this sort of thing in the US and Western World in General, is the culture of apathy, intellectual laziness, and the status quo for it’s own sake sorts of garbage. A vocal component of it’s religious, no doubt; however, misogyny is a cultural norm. It’s so normalized and internalized that women do it to each other, sometimes they’ll even call you a bitch, or worse, for calling out misogyny. The status quo is that “feminine = bad, lesser, subservient, passive, unclean, et cetera ad nauseum”. So for those people who haven’t challenged that norm, those statements are no surprise.
But, the cold hard truth is this… “Anti-choice is Slavery for Women”. And you want to know what else is ‘crazy’ about that statement? The arguments sound similar in many cases to the Anti-abolitionists, and I’ll demonstrate this replacing slavery with traditional roles for women (not-verbatim in all).
~~~~~~
Traditional roles for women benefited the US economy (in spite of the fact that nations with more equal roles have better economies). Women aren’t as well suited for jobs that don’t involve being nurturers or childcare givers (in spite of data that indicates to the contrary, and the stories of women being successful in other careers). Women already do take on that “traditional role” (ignoring that any woman could protest such a role, or have other dreams. Basically instilling that “it’s natural for women to want to have and raise babies”, while not acknowledging the role culture plays in cultivating that narrative).
Women aren’t treated badly, unless they are aggressively unwilling to perform those roles, in fact women have “the good life” in traditional gender roles (in spite of the fact that this clearly isn’t beneficial to women as it undermines their autonomy, and misogyny contradicts that and in fact makes the opposite true in most cases). Women in traditional roles is “endorsed in the Bible”, so why not right? (probably the worst excuse of them all. Believe it or not I formulated those statements based on the arguments of people who were “pro-slavery”. Is it any wonder they sound so familiar?
~~~~~~
I wonder how many people would change their tune realizing that they are preaching modified mantras of the same old discriminatory garbage. Stating it in this way can be a useful recognition tool. To help them recognize if they failed before, that they are still a failure now. The arguments from above can arise from nothing more than the cognitive process of assuming a position is correct and then mining evidence and positions in favor of it, sometimes also ignoring contradictory evidence. Mind you, most of the above is religiously motivated, highlighting that this mindset can be the position of those who aren’t religious is important. So really, how many people would be able to be for traditional gender roles realizing it’s the same justifications for slavery? Pro-life arguments are natural extensions of traditional gender roles.
LikeLike
February 5, 2013 at 9:51 am
The Arbourist
@Reneta
Being christian means that you can believe in a lot of things that aren’t real.
Can we say Naturalistic Fallacy? Tapeworms are natural, why are they not worked up about the complete lack of infestation in the US, afterall it is as god intended…
I’m thinking we don’t. People who do not want to understand, will not. Not one step forward, not a charitable moment, nothing. Retrograde elements of society will always exist and will be dragged along, kicking and screaming by the forces of progress. Too bad for them.
Agreed. And thus the fun of arguing with people who are axiomatically wrong begins. What? there is no such thing as Patriarchy…how can there be when we live in a classless meritocratic society… *long list of wrong beliefs rolls on*
Absolutely.
Mmm…evidence would suggest an outcome to the contrary. Being a member of the sex class gets you the super-duper triple A card to be treated like shite from the get go. If you’re talking about a relational stance between those who actively perform femininity and those who do not, I can see your point.
Assuming that you can lay a charitable groundwork for arguing, it could be a good position to take.
LikeLike
February 5, 2013 at 10:31 am
Syrbal/Labrys
Yeah…I had an argument with the mother-in-law of a young woman I was counseling for some marital issues. And the phrase that came up was “the only choice women have about pregnancy is the choice to cross their legs”….whoa, Nellie! At that point, I pretty much grasped why marriage had made the bride feel like a non-person.
This kind of alleged reasoning drives me up the wall.
LikeLike
February 5, 2013 at 10:35 am
The Arbourist
@Syrbal/Labrys
And there is where the suggestion that we should have sex only for procreation comes in.
Let’s legislate *that* into law. Any dude caught having sex for pleasure is going to jail.
LikeLike
February 5, 2013 at 11:59 am
Reneta Scian
I highly doubt that anyone would be able to pass a law prohibiting male sexual pleasure… Something similar happens towards women already happens though, apparent when you look at theocratic “Sharia Law” where female nudity is seen has bad, women are forced to wear burkas, and deprived of any kind of agency, sexual or otherwise. The burden to make society moral, efficient, or free of sexual immorality in sexually puritanical societies has historically always fallen more heavily on women. In fact, most of the moral burden of control befalls women in general, in that context. Thus the dynamics of marriage where women feel like less than a person, because… Well, they aren’t. In the concept of marriage, women are property. I kind of border on the issue of gay marriage between separatism and equality, sometimes. Honestly, I am for the abolition of marriage as a law and concept in regard to inequality, period and replacing all of them with civil unions with equivalent protections. Don’t want to let homosexuals marry? You can’t have it both ways, I say.
But back to the subject… I have a suggestion to the problem that is the reverse of that position… How about men undergoing testicular cryostorage, until they are ready for marriage? Or perhaps as Arb suggested, make it illegal for men to have sex before marriage? Or in light of sharia law, implant a blinder chip into their brain so that when they look at a woman a visual block would be placed over the woman’s body, to exclude eyes for communication? A societal V-chip, so to speak? Or perhaps, temporarily blinding men prior to marriage, so that are unable to look at women? I am sure we could create seeing eye dogs to help them get around day to day? Or perhaps, just like in some theocracies, we should circumcise men in a way that prohibits them from experiencing sexual pleasure. That way, when it can down to it, they’d not have sex outside of wanting to have a child as there is no reason, right?
I am pretty sure no man alive (self-loathing potentials aside), and perhaps many women would protest to such an arrangement given our social dynamic. The problem is equally sufficed by men having only the choice to “Keep their dicks in their pants”. It’s ironic how ludicrous that mentality can be revealed to be when you reverse it. No man would consent, deep down, to having their sexual agency undermined or stripped away. Abstinence only sex education, or female abstinence geared education is a non-solution to the problem of family planning, unwanted pregnancy. Furthermore, it’s discriminatory to make the burden to deal with this issue fall on women, without given even the slightest in resources towards that end. Without medical intervention, suppression of sexual desire isn’t possible, and unfair to expect of people without it (like asking a human to “not be human”).
To be honest, I think that people having freedom over their sexual agency, and the resources to plan actually decreases the societal issues that arise because of sexuality. Statistically, there is backing for this, as areas that are more “sexually puritanical” also have higher instances of unwanted pregnancies. Abstinence only policy seems to make that much worse. Even if someone had doubts, in that light, the only logical, reasonable and fair way to approach pregnancy, family planning, and societal issues is to allow women full, and unrestricted autonomy over their bodies, and access to healthcare towards that ends. Anything less would be uncivilized, as is demonstrated by the barbarism of societies that prohibit that autonomy.
LikeLike
February 5, 2013 at 3:02 pm
another lurker
quote: “Can we say Naturalistic Fallacy? Tapeworms are natural, why are they not worked up about the complete lack of infestation in the US, afterall it is as god intended…”
The pro-lifers will come back at ya with ‘tapeworms are bad, pregnancy is good’
I have found it easier to counter the naturalistic fallacy with ‘just b/c we can let our hair and nails grow endlessly does not mean that this is a good thing’
Every child does not need to be born. Just like every hair does not need to be grown.
LikeLike