Courtney Martin talks about women realizing they’re feminists. Also, reality TV handles domestic violence responsibly, and the hand-wringing over abortion providers advertising that they provide abortion.

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Fighting women who choose to have children

 “What Would You Do” takes on domestic violence

Woman raped and murdered while witnesses do nothing

Marie Stopes

How to control your wife

On this episode of Reality Cast, Courtney Martin will be on to talk about her new anthology Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists.  Also, ABC tackles domestic violence intervention, and there’s panic in the streets because an abortion provider lets people know they provide abortions.

As you’re no doubt aware, Arizona has recently passed a law reminiscent of South African apartheid laws that would require the police to harass anyone they think looks “illegal” for their papers, and arrest them if they don’t have what the cops consider sufficient paperwork.  The man who introduced that law, state senator Russell Pearce, is now demanding that Arizona deport the natural born citizens who are children of immigrant women.  He went on Bill O’Reilly to explain his reasoning.

• pearce *

First of all, the state of Arizona doesn’t have the power to deport anyone.  Second of all, O’Reilly is minimizing the problem here.  It’s not just a federal law but a constitutional amendment. Pearce’s fantasies of getting around that are just that, fantasies.  But what should really alarm folks in the reproductive rights arena is that this is basically an attempt to criminalize child-bearing if some wingnut deems you not the right race or ethnicity to give birth.  Anti-choice is definitely the term for this thinking.

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Can trashy pop culture ever be good for something besides entertainment?  Well, and besides reinforcing sexism and racism and classism, which are all things that trashy pop culture does with style.  But I have to admit, I’m intrigued by ABC’s program “What Would You Do?”, which uses the techniques of trashy reality TV like sensationalism and hidden cameras to expose people’s tendency to go along with the flow, and expose how this tendency enables dangerous and unfair behavior. (http://abcnews.go.com/WhatWouldYouDo/) They recently decided to do an episode exploring what happens when people in a restaurant think they’re witnessing an act of domestic violence.  They had two couples, a white one and then later a black one, act out roughly the same script in two different locations.  In both cases, the actress has been made up to look like someone’s been beating on her recently.

• public 1 *

In the first scenario and in both situations, customers in the restaurant intervened. In the first case, it was another straight couple, and they went to work.  The husband tried to take the abusive boyfriend outside while the wife tried to intervene with the victim, in hopes perhaps to convince her to seek help.

• public 2 *

In the second scenario, it’s a couple of women.

• public 3 *

The women seem prepared to escalate the situation if need be, but the producers step in.  It’s very heartening. However, in these situations the fight that the people witnessed was mostly over the abuser berating the victim for no apparent reason, mostly just bossing her around and telling her that she’s stupid.  The show ran the same experiment, but this time they gave the man something to berate the woman over that’s more socially acceptable.  The actresses are dressed in low-cut shirts, and the actors are instructed to abuse them for dressing like sluts. 

• public 4 *

With both the white couple and black couple, people watch in horror for nearly half an hour, but no one does anything.  In the case of the black couple, some women even speculate that he’s a pimp and she’s a prostitute.  Worse, a man intervenes not on the woman’s behalf, but to tell the battterer to take it where it doesn’t bother other people.  It’s really hard to watch.  But what alarmed me was how even introducing a whiff of sex to the situation caused everyone to shut down immediately.  Why is this?  Is it that people think a woman who wears a tank top has it coming?  Is it that once we think of a woman in a sexual light, we stop thinking of her as a human being deserving of basic safety?  And if so, what does that mean in terms of finding ways to stop the culture of violence against women?

These aren’t idle questions.  I posted links to these videos on my personal blog Pandagon, and within seconds of putting them up, one of the commenters linked a video from a local news station in New York telling a story that’s sadly all too common. 

• public 5 *

She hung in for a week on life support, but succumbed to her injuries, and now the assailant will likely be charged with murder.  When things like this happen, the question is always why the people who saw the rape and murder didn’t do anything.  Sadly, I think that “What Would You Do?” got closer to the answer with the experiment showing that no one will protect a woman that’s being abused for what she’s wearing. 

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insert interview

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Once in a glorious while, something happens that really reveals what kind of nutty assumptions are percolating in people’s heads.  Like when Rachel Maddow had Rand Paul on her show and everyone was reminded that one reason libertarianism took off was they had a handy-dandy excuse for why the Civil Rights Act ought to be against the law. The undercurrent of racism in a our culture was revealed at that moment. And in a smaller way, I found the angry reaction to a new ad running on British TV from Marie Stopes International to be funny.  Here’s the ad:

• stopes 1 *

Oh no, you’re probably thinking.  It’s a crisis pregnancy center ad!  And then you realize that can’t be, because there was biologically accurate information in this ad, and crisis pregnancy centers tend to be hostile to anything that smacks too hard of honesty.  No, this ad is apparently the first of its kind in Britain, and we don’t have anything like it here.  Marie Stopes International provides abortion services amongst other things.  I went to their link for this ad and discovered, as you’d suspect, that this ad isn’t really for abortion per se.  It’s to direct women to options counseling whatever their choice.  And if they want an abortion, and many will, Marie Stopes provides that.  They have information on how to keep a baby, adopt a baby out, or have an abortion.  Naturally, this led to all sorts of outraged coverage on Fox News. 

• stopes 2 *

Don’t anyone tell them they let sexually active women eat peanut butter and drink sodas, or the protests will never let up.  The argument that this is being sold like a “consumer good” falls apart if you think about it for a millisecond, since it’s not like women are ever going to go around getting pregnant just so we can have that oh so fun experience of having an abortion.  This isn’t even a situation like when they’re advertising pharmaceutical drugs by making you think you had problems that you didn’t think you had.  I assure you that a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant doesn’t need someone else telling her that for her to know that.  The comment is unintentionally revealing, though.  There’s this unspoken but strong assumption in the anti-choice community that if they could just keep women ignorant enough about sex, we’d never figure out we like it.  And that restricting abortion or keeping women ignorant of it is somehow effective in keeping us from having sex.  Not really, of course, though I suppose you could make an argument that being a single mother by force sometimes cramps your ability to make time for dating.  I guess they’ll take it.  They may not be interested in measures that actually reduce the abortion rate, but any measure that reduces the orgasm rate will get their interest.

Fox News was really all over this story.

• stopes 3 *

I don’t know.  I think the way the anchor spit out the word “abortion” inclined me to think that she was trying to prejudice your opinion of the ad.  By the way, I think that you can really give yourself dissonance poisoning watching Fox News for too long.  There’s something about the constant stream of bleached blonde miniskirted anchors snarling about the evils of women and sex that gives me a headache.

• stopes 4 *

Well, obviously what would happen is she’d run out and have an orgy with the football team. Duh.  Now, remember, this ad is running in England, so when I say that she’d have an orgy with the football team, I’m talking about the guys who kick around the black and white ball, not the ones who toss around the brown oval-shaped one.  But either way, I think we all realize that the only reaction a young woman could have to discovering that you can get an abortion is to go right out and find a team of men who play your nation’s favorite sport, and have sexual relations with all of them until she get to experience one of those oh so fun abortions for herself.  And that the only cure is foaming at the mouth hysteria that someone acknowledged the existence of abortion in public without immediately shaming the one in three women who will get one in her life.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, and it all comes down to this edition.  Walter E. Williams was filling in for Rush Limbaugh, and he did a call-in segment about the importance of controlling your wife. 

• Williams *

Yep, they were openly talking about how to make women better, more submissive servants who clean up after you and then make you lunch.  I’m seriously counting down the days until a talk radio show host explains why wife beating is a good thing.