Passing the Buck, Still Spreading Lies

We spend a lot of time pushing back on the wingnut message machine in all its various forms, from talk radio to blogs to Fox News, but one area of right wing messaging that often gets overlooked by the reality checkers out there is the prevalent email forward. Forwarding LOLcats, dirty jokes, and sentimental paeans to friendship is a plague that affects persons of every conceivable political stripe, but for some reason, communication of political ideas by email forward is a favorite past time of those who lean harder right than left.

It's probably because recipients of email forwards expressing odious political views are unlikely to argue with the sender, which differs from other situations where one expresses odious political views, such as blog comments or at a party. But most of us, when we receive the latest email forward about what the illegal immigrants are getting away with this time or how the abortionists are out to get your money, our first reaction is to just delete it. If we do email the sender back and argue, they usually hide behind non-authorship. "Jeez, I just thought it was interesting and sending it on. I didn't write it!"

The pass-the-buck nature of the email forward makes it the perfect device for dispensing misinformation, along with kitten pictures and joking emails about how "men drive like this and women drive like that." So much, in fact, that someone decided to set up a blog just for collecting some of the goofier ones, called My Right Wing Dad. At this blog, you can take in all sorts of right wing paranoia and misinformation, from paranoid theories about terrorists lurking around every corner and eject it in laughter to yuk yuks about how crazy Hillary Clinton is to run for President, what with the being a woman and the having a vagina and all to standard issue racist jokes. And of course plenty of whining about abortion rights, vile sexism and anxiety about gender roles, homophobia, and assorted grousing about how liberals just need to shut up.

But My Right Wing Dad is something of an upstart, and for the real treasure trove of email forwards that communicate the vast array of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and empty-headed nationalism out there that percolates under the more polite mainstream media surface, you must check out Snopes, where urban legends go to be debunked. Not only can you use Snopes to inform yourself about the wild world of urban legends and email forwards, you can use the site as a way to fight back against people who send this crap to you.

Valiant reader Gina did just that when she received this paranoid anti-contraception nonsense in her email box, about a young woman who died from a stroke related to taking the birth control pill. The message is that women who try to cheat nature--specifically trying to cheat nature out of exacting "the curse" from you once a month--will pay for it with their lives.

They said it interrupt's life's menstrual cycle, and although it is FDA approved.... shouldn't be - so the women in my address book - I ask you to boycott this product & deal with your period once a month so you can live the rest of the months that your life has in store for you.

Granted, the email is an attack just on period suppression pills like Seasonale, but those pills don't differ significantly from other birth control pills except that they don't have a week off once a month so that you experience a faux period. (You don't menstruate on the pill, regardless of your prescription. You bleed once a month because of the hormone withdrawal, but you are not actually having a post-ovulation shedding of menstrual lining.) Still, the email forward raised my hackles, because it feeds into the same set of myths that anti-choicers fall back on to discourage women from using the pill at all.

The argument in play here--that having periods is just women's lot in life, and that interfering with nature/god's plan for women's bodies will result in punishment, even death--doesn't restrict itself to arguments for mandatory menstruation. By the same argument you can, and anti-choicers happily do, argue that suppressing ovulation is unnatural and that women should simply submit their bodies and wills to the dictates of nature, no matter how unpleasant. This argument rarely extends to arguing that men should also submit to flagging erections or heart disease, because medical intervention is so "unnatural," an indication that there might be a bad faith motivation from the get-go on these arguments.

Natural isn't always better, as anyone who owes her life to medical intervention can tell you. No one is arguing that the birth control pill doesn't have risks, though it's worth noting that most of the risk is borne by women who are over 35 and smoke. An email warning of the dangers of smoking is far more accurate than one warning of the dangers of skipping periods.

When it comes to reducing the danger of having a stroke, the anti-choice movement's nature-based alternative of just getting pregnant a lot doesn't have much to recommend it. Hypertension and pre-eclampsia are common enough conditions in pregnant women, and often put women in grave danger of having terminal strokes. In fact, the much-vilified later term abortions are often performed to save the lives of women affected by pre-eclampsia. Natural simply doesn't mean "not risky" or anything close to it.

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