fpb | A historic moment

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A historic moment

This election has already given us a historic moment; a moment which, I think, may well feature in future histories, become the centre of scholarly debate, and perhaps even be remembered as one of those factoids that everyone remembers about historical figures - like Pontius Pilate washing his hands, or Washington's troops starving at Valley Forge, or the fat figure and six wives of Henry VIII.

No, I don't mean the debate, although the results of the debate may well come to connect themselves with the event I mean. The event I mean is the publication, by the Obama campaign, of the following blog entry:

This is incredible. If it means anything, it means that the Republicans, if elected, would engage in a campaign of tearing out uteri from living women.

I think I can say with a clean conscience that no campaign ever stooped this low. This is a record, and, I would say, probably unsurpassable. My friends who are historians and know what I am talking about can make the mental experiment: project yourselves into the minds of Julius Streicher or Gabriele d'Annunzio. Try to imagine Streicher saying that about Jews, or d'Annunzio about democratic politicians. You can't. You know you can't. They would not think of it; and if they did, they, even they, would laugh at it as at a crazy joke. The evident and rather unpleasant sexualness of the enclosed drawing, featuring a lightly-dressed, apparently underaged young lady with her clothes being blown all over by the wind - the very image of the worst kind of irresponsible male fantasies - makes the thing even worse: it as good as invites women to identify with this near-paedophile fantasy image, and to imagine that there is something there that is worth something for women to keep and that it threatens women to lose. The abyss of abjection in the association of visual idea and depraved gag literally challenges description and analysis.

This does, of course, confirm my old belief that abortion is the central issue and the driving force of so much that seems unhinged and bewildering about modern politics. But it also suggests a desperacy lurking somewhere below the confident gloss of Obaman politics; as though these people felt the breath of the Avenger of Blood breathing over their neck, and feared it even where the rest of us can't begin to feel any presence except theirs. It is like the crazed language of British medical bodies on the subject of abortion - language that a child would know was insane. But it also suggests an essential hollowness at the heart of the Obaman message. If that is the sort of thing they resort to, they must feel they have exhausted every other weapon. Now, add this to the effect of Romney's definite victory in last night's debate, and see what you get.

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It's also about birth control. And about Todd Akin's claim that "legitimate rape" wouldn't cause pregnancy. And Darrell Issa forming an all-male panel to decide on contraceptive mandates, and Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut and prostitute for wanting to speak before that panel.

"Foster Friess, the billionaire supporting the candidacy of Rick Santorum, suggested in February 2012 that women put aspirin between their knees as a form of contraception."

It's about defunding Planned Parenthood, of whose services 62% don't have to do with contraception or abortion -- and most of the rest don't have to do with abortion.

It's about conservative Republicans opposing measures for battered women, which okay technically has little to do with "lady bits" but is part of the whole syndrome. Likewise,

"In April 2012, [Republican] Governor Scott Walker signed into law an act that repealed Wisconsin's Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed workplace discrimination victims redress in state courts."

Congratulations on your robotic repetition of Democratic talking points (what I mean is that there is not one of your supposed points I haven't heard before, often in the exact same words - which scarcely suggests independence of thought). If Planned Butchery does anything other than abortion, it must be counting the taxpayer money they get; it certainly isn't women's health. As for the rest, I don't know about Aspirin, but I can tell you that Coca-cola is a fairly efficient contraceptive, accounting for 90% of sperm. As a Catholic, the prospect of women no longer dosing themselves with infernal brews of chemicals and hormones and abortifacients does not particularly displease me, and the notion that "women's sexuality" should consist in being able to say yes as often as possible without consequences comes across as somewhat less than feministic. As I said of the trashy picture that goes with this vile filth, the whole thing seems to be about convincing women that an image of women as scantily-clad teen temptresses with flimsy clothes blowing in the wind is somehow something they should fight for, and should dread to lose.

Edited 2012-10-05 03:18 (UTC)

" I haven't heard before, often in the exact same words "

A poor heuristic, here; facts are facts. People defending evolution will make the same points, too. As for the supposed wording, *shrug*, I wrote everything not in quotation marks myself, the quotes coming from Wikipedia.

"If Planned Butchery does anything other than abortion, it must be counting the taxpayer money they get; it certainly isn't women's health"

Cancer and disease screening have nothing to do with health?

As for Coca-Cola: http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/sperm.asp

And the "infernal brews" are just women's own hormones.

No point in arguing about values when we can't even agree on facts.

Edited 2012-10-05 03:34 (UTC)

Oh yeah?. I double dare you to try and get a vaginal infection treated, or a case of breast cancer assessed,at any of their "clinics".

Plenty of point in arguing about values when your pseudo-values distort your facts and you don't even realize it. The Akin affair, to anyone interested in facts, has long since died down - the poor sap had just done what abortion supporters routinely do, stupidly repeating what had been talking points among the more idiot branches of the medical profession when he was young. He has withdrawn his dumb statement and shown that he understood it was dumb - which is more than abortion supporters ever do. And as a believer in representative government, I find it interesting that you should ban certain representatives from discussing matters of public interest due to their genital apparatus; somehow I doubt you would ban women from any similar discussion - unless of course they happened to belong to the wrong party. And apart that contraception is not only about the goddamn pill - it is about even worse devices, such as IUDs that frequently injure the womb - anyone who, in this day and age, has not heard about the lousy effects of the unnatural mix of hormones and chemicals you feel so smug about, on both the bodies of women and the environment, is hiding in a cave, metaphorically speaking.

"And as a believer in representative government, I find it interesting that you should ban certain representatives from discussing matters of public interest due to their genital apparatus"

Your values are distorting your reading comprehension. I didn't imply men should be banned; I noted that *women* were not included in a health panel about their own health options. They were the ones effectively banned. The appropriate analogy would be a panel entirely of women deciding on payment for prostate exams, or on paternal visitation and custody rights.

"IUDs that frequently injure the womb" -- this seems to be about as accurate as your belief that Coca-cola is an effective contraceptive.

As for your defence of your views on representative government, if the said panel had women in it and came to the same conclusions, you would just conclude that they weren't "real" women. That's what your party did to Sarah Palin and does to any women who dares disagree with their notion of "women's" sexuality - which is actually a male sexual fantasy which some unhappy women have internalized, to their own very evident distress expressed in shrill anger and unreasoning hatred.

About the vast health dangers of contraceptives (depo-provera causes bone loss, IUDs injure the womb, the Pill messes with the natural hormonal cycle - etc) and the increasingly disastrous effects of the Pill on the environment (rise of sexual disfunction among fish and other animals) the trouble is that your values so interfere with your sense of reality that you could read whole reams of articles and reports and dismiss them as biased junk science. I have been through this before, which is why I won't bother giving you the references I have. I would have to expect you to have an open mind before I wasted my time, and anyone who can repeat with a straight face that most of what Planned Slaughter do is not abortion is too bound up with abortionist fables for reason.

You are not, in fact, a telepath; claims of what I would do are inappropriate as well as inaccurate.

"Planned Slaughter" is also uncalled for. And while I may have overestimated the amount of non-reproductive health services they provide, it still seems solidly the case that their provision of birth control vastly outnumbers their provision of abortion. You are caught up in your fables, as well as your paternalistic dismissal of the agency of women who enjoy sex and lifestyles you disapprove of.

What Planned Mass Murder is killing is human life. It is nothing else: not beef, not sheep, not slugs, not worms. Those are homo sapiens bodies they rip to bits and dispose of. I understand you are all right with that, but don't try to deny that what goes on when one organization accounts for, at a conservative estimate, one million living beings a year, is slaughter and nothing less. Chicago meatpackers slaughter cattle for money. PP slaughters human bodies - always for money.

"Women who enjoy sex". I have news for you: all women enjoy sex, otherwise the human race would have gone extinct long ago. The kind you mean is women who have somehow become incapable of doing without sex, who speak as though sex were as necessary as breathing and eating and drinking , the addicts; a sad product of the prevalence of advertising and pornography, women who have internalized the worst kind of male behaviour and make their lives a misery in consequence. And I was not speaking from telepathy, but from experience. I have argued this kind of thing a few times now, and I know what to expect.

Edited 2012-10-05 20:27 (UTC)

Thank you, gentlmen, both

fpb and

mindstalk, for prompting to think about my reaction to this eCard again. When I first saw it early last summer I dismissed it as disturbingly silly. It niggled at my thoughts a bit, but, like I said, I mostly dismissed it as not really worthy of my energy. The silly aspect won out in my brain. However, as you both, in your own ways, indicate, it - and the assumptions behind it - deserve more careful inspection.

First let me say that as a middle-aged American woman (I came of age in the late 80s/early 90s), familiar with (and perhaps somewhat jaded to) the random vintage images employeed by someecards and widely distributed on Facebook, I did not have the visceral reaction to the picture that

fpb did. I'm not sure I'd seen *that* particular one before, but it didn't strike as any odder than the ones from the 1890s or the 1970s. To read you assessment, sir, was somewhat eye-opening.

However, it was the words that impacted me, particularly the choice of phrase "lady bits". It's a rather childish phrase to employ in a discussion of this importance and that's probably the major reason I initially dismissed it. Furthermore, it seemed to me to be one more example of an all-or-nothing approach the question of women rights: either you agree with the self-appointed guardians of those right *completely* or you are obviously working to undermine them all. Seeing as the feminist movement itself is not united on everything, that's naive position to take, and yet it seems to be the standard position to take these days. The timing of this eCard made me assume it had to do with abortion/personhood question and it's always struck me a little ridiculous to make abortion the linchpin of the women's rights movement, or to use it as a litmus test of the quality of "women's health care", as if women have no other health concerns beside pregnancy. It's seems - ironically - just as reductionist and paternalistic as the position they claim to oppose.

The trouble is if you take the words at face value, you are confronted with a disturbing image - one that is really more truly disturbing than the almost comically macabre image

fpb came up (tearing out uteri from living women). Most women don't think of their uterus as their "privates" as it's fully internal. No, they think of the external elements. It's those parts which are, shall we say, "modified" in the practice that called "female circumcision" by those who embrace it and "female genital mutilation" by those who oppose it. Of course, that practice is mostly carried out in parts of Africa and the Middle East which are also predominately Muslim, so it's seen as "Muslim" practice by the west. That brings us to the second irony this eCard brings to my mind: the Muslim boogeyman of modern American imagination. I am constantly hearing from those who would vilify President Obama that he's "really" a Muslim and that he secretly wants to impose both socialism and Sharia (never mind that they are pretty incompatible). Yet here is the spectre of another practice considered to be Muslim being raised by "the other side" (never mind that the fundamentalism they fear is Christian, and has never practiced FGM). In both cases, facts be damned. It's the fear-factor that's important.

Edited 2012-10-06 00:11 (UTC)

I've been seeing this e-Card on Facebook for the past 6 months or so. I am surprised that it would show up on Obama's official website.

(BTW, it was generated from the website www.someecards.com If you choose "Create Your Own" and then under "Choose an Image" select the sub-category "women", this image comes up on page three. I think it was probably choose by whomever first designed the card because it is the only image of a woman with her arm up in the air -- a vaguely voting-like gesture. Well, there are two others raised arms, but in one the woman is clearly serving a tennis ball, and in the other the woman is beauty queen and the gesture is a clearly a wave.

I think this is vintage image, probably taken from a newspaper or magazine in the 1920s. I think was the woman is wearing is actually a bathing suit (note the river and the dock) which makes it an even more bizarre choice.)

EDIT: OK, not quite 6 months. I just looked it up on someecard. This one was apparently created by a user named "lisasubeck" on May 27, 2012.

Edited 2012-10-05 01:40 (UTC)

The thing that leaps to my eye, as a male, is that she has no bra. It is a highly sexual image, in a pseudo-innocent twenties style, with strong suggestions of the "dumb blonde" stereotype - altogether a curious choice, as you say. The mere fact that the author thought it a tolerable female image to use says all that needs be said, except that a lot of people today are so saturated with that particular notion of "women's" sexuality, so-called, that they would not see the difference unless their attention were called to it.

I think this is vintage image, probably taken from a newspaper or magazine in the 1920s. I think was the woman is wearing is actually a bathing suit (note the river and the dock) which makes it an even more bizarre choice.)

You're right! That's a bathing suit. The 1920's concept of a beautiful girl was a slim, somewhat boyish woman, usually with cropped hair and wearing a short skirt, often fringed, hence "flapper." The flappers were seen as a bit silly because they were young, convinced they knew it all, and usually a lot more innocent than they were pretending to be: hence they were as much figures of fun to the truly sophisticated as much as they were sexually-threatening to the prudish.

This is an odd choice for a pro-choice campaign, mostly because abortion was illegal in the 1920's. Not just in America, but pretty much everywhere in the Civilized World.

I find my point is not getting through. The point is that to select such an image sends its own message, namely that the "rights" for which women are supposed to fight is to be objects of male fantasy of that kind. The original flapper was a retreat from the earnestness of the pre-war years, the years of suffragism and social reform, into a deliberate childishness - that "boyishness" you comment about went with a deliberately brainless and falsely innocent dumb-blonde posture, which of course delighted men at large. To retrieve it today sends the same message. It is not a message I find respectful of women as persons and individuals.

I actually agree with you on that. Notice that a lot of the Obama appeal is to citizen-as-helpless-child.

Oh, I think your point is getting through. I still maintain, however, that image was probably selected from the limited choice on someecards (as opposed to all the possible images in the world, or a new drawing) solely because the woman has her arm raised. I highly doubt "lisasubeck" thought through it any farther than that. In and of itself, that lack of thought is a problem. As you say, it undermines any gravitas the author may have intended by sending a completely different one with the image.

Interetingly, I went to Obama's Tumblr last night and couldn't find this post. I think it's been removed.

Oh, it has all right. I think they soon realized what they had done.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. This has been essentially the tone and content of progressive rhetoric for the last six months. At this point, a significant portion of the population quite literally believes that the Republican party, as we speak, desperately wants to ban contraception, and is only prevented from doing so because they don't have enough power in government. They believe that conservatives, almost to a man, hate and are afraid of women and female sexuality, and are conspiring together in a "war on women" to bring society back into (and I quote) "the Dark Ages" of theocratic, chauvinistic, gay-hating superstition. Because of this imminent assault, they feel that they have to rally the troops now by any means necessary, and to frighten the prudish conservatives into silence they have to be as crude and openly sexual as they possibly can, at all times.

And this is not merely a desperate, out-of-touch political narrative foisted on the people by the political management--this is what is believed by the rank-and-file. This image was created and shared millions upon millions of times throughout the Internet before the Obama campaign even noticed it existed.

Thus is modern American politics. I hope for the love of God that Europe is not in this state.

Europe varies. I am fairly certain that when abortion becomes an issue (which it is at present only in a few Catholic countries, especially Italy and Ireland) this kind of reactions will develop, especially in the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia and probably England. Elsewhere there is more likely to be an understanding of the dubious nature of this kind of propaganda. However, the point is that because abortion in Europe was never unlimited - most countries stop at the third or sixth month - the European consciences have not been as constantly stimulated as the American, where such things as partial-birth abortion ended up on the newspapers and being vigorously debated. However, my view is that the day is coming. I know for a fact that even in Britain, which is a kind of one-party state where abortion is concerned, they are having trouble finding doctors interested in performing the "service". As someone said, you don't become a doctor with the idea of tearing human flesh and dropping torn human limbs down the drain.

I think the picture is actually from the 1920's, of a flapper (aka "Bright Young Thing") and they've cropped out the object at which she was waving. Your other points stand.

I have, elsewhere on this discussion space, mentioned that it was a pseudo-innocent twenties-style image. My point is about the selection of such a flagrant and dubious male fantasy image as the idea of women's rights being defended.

Agreed. Even before I began seeing it in specifically Catholic terms, I always thought that in this area women's "rights" and "liberation" was bought at the price of women's dignity, and that the price was too high.

What I think of that price now, I'm sure you can imagine.

The visual image struck me more, probably, than it would have done another person, because I have a moderately unusual fixation with female heroines - I could quote a few male authors who do, but most don't - and I am very sensitive to the idea of dignified and heroic female presence. To me, the graphics of this item spoke as much as the language.

Are you on Skype or Google Talk? I've disabled comments on my LiveJournal because these days it contains nothing but crossposts from Dreamwidth and I prefer to have all my comments in one place, but not everyone on LJ is willing to log into DW via OpenID. There's an issue I'd like to run by a Catholic male at some point (not today because there are too many disruptions happening here right now), and if possible I'd prefer a less public forum in which to do it.

Skype fabiopbarbieri. Call me some time this afternoon.

I'll try (disruptive workmen in the office permitting), but it'll be a text chat; I don't think my wifi is up to voice and I can't access the internet by any other means until the construction work is done. Thanks!

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A historic moment

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