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Links in this episode:
Whole Woman's Health [17]
William Saletan and Steven Waldman on Bloggingheads [18]
Rush Limbaugh loosens his grip on reality [21]
On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing abortion provider Amy Hagstrom Miller about her work, particularly in the light of the recent assassination of Dr. George Tiller. Also, why Will Saletan and Steve Waldman talking abortion get it all wrong, and why pro-choicers should feel okay about the Governor Sanford spectacle.
Mary Roach fans rejoice! She's putting more video content out there. Here's her talking about how to have a better sex life.
- mary roach *
I'm currently reading her book "Stiff", which is about the various things that happen to corpses. The sex stuff is usually a little easier to read about.
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- jaws theme *
- uteruses 1 *
Jodi Jacobson wrote about it, but I can't help myself, I have to play some clips from this train wreck of a conversation between two men who will never be pregnant doing that thing they do, where they rotate between being mildly annoying to making me reach for a butter knife to pop out my eardrums rather than listen to their blather. I watched it so you don't have to, and you'll be privy to some of the more outrageous things that Saletan and Waldman said.
Waldman kicks off with a doozy of a statement.
- uteruses 2 *
I'm going to be charitable and chalk this up to wishful thinking instead of to outright deceit. Anti-choicers openly link contraception and abortion, and even though they claim their opposition to both has something to do with "life", it's clear that the more obvious connection is that both have to do with sex. Specifically, the problem is and always has been the fear that women who don't risk childbirth every time they have sex will have an opportunity to escape male control. Waldman's statement here shows why I think this common ground strategy is doomed to failure. If you can't accept the basic reality that the anti-abortion position is grounded in hostility to sexual liberation and women's rights, then you can't really have a productive conversation.
While Waldman shoots out more "are you kidding me?" statements than Saletan, Saletan does do a bang-up job of keeping up with the nonsense.
- uteruses 3 *
Okay, fine, I'm happy to use the word "morality". I think it's immoral for people with hang-ups about sex and fantasies of a 1950s patriarchy to advocate for immoral laws banning women's right to make their own moral choices about abortion and birth control. I think that it's immoral to use the word "morality" to mean "not being a slut". I think morality is about how you treat people and act in the world, not who you sleep with or whether or not you have a baby when some stranger thinks you should.
In fact, I think that women choose abortion and contraception for intensely moral reasons most of the time. Because it's moral to want to only have children when you're ready. It's moral to cherish your own health and well-being enough that you are responsible in your sexual behavior. It's moral to believe that women are human beings who deserve not just the right to bodily autonomy, but to finish their educations, marry who they want, and have the right to determine their own lives. I think it's immoral to stop them. I think it's morally suspect to obsess over the fear that some woman somewhere got away with unapproved sex. I think that people who scream at women trying to reproductive health care are not only not the moral standard, but have a distinct lack of morals and a sadistic streak. Is that enough moral talk, or should I apologize for having sex instead?
There's over 60 minutes of this kind of talk, and mostly it's not productive. They dwell on the idea that contraception is common ground, when in reality pro-choicers have always advocated it. Nothing new there. But I can't finish this off without exposing you to a quote from Waldman that really drives home to me that no matter how much he writes about this issue, he doesn't really think about it. He just reacts based on a bunch of reactionary feelings. This is his reaction to Saletan wisely pointing out that most women don't want to carry a baby for 9 months just to give it up for adoption.
- uteruses 4 *
And that's basically the entire tone of this discussion and many like it. There's all these noises being made of understanding what it must be like, and then "solutions" are offered that shows that they don't actually know or apparently care to know. How low your opinion must be of unmarried, pregnant women to say that they would be bought over with what amounts to 14 cents an hour for the work of making a baby.
Waldman admits that the push to get more women to give up babies is symbolic. But he should think harder about that, because it shows what symbolically matters to anti-choicers. Adoption symbolizes a return to the proper social order, where bad slutty women give up their babies to deserving married couples. If you think it's a crime when unmarried women have sex, this is the way for them to pay back their debt to society. The common ground discussion will be doomed to fail as long as the misogyny and sex-phobia that drives the anti-choice movement is pointedly ignored like this.
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insert interview
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The stories about hypocritical social conservatives who want to control your sex lives but can't even keep it in their pants are coming out so routinely lately that it seems almost pointless to cover them. But I'm going to do a segment on Governor Mark Sanford, in no small part because Senator John Ensign owes Sanford a thank you for upstaging him and his less dramatic affair. Sanford is really playing up the drama that has exploded in the wake of him running off to visit his mistress in Argentina without telling anyone where he was.
- Sanford 1 *
Mark Sanford, as he believes that gays don't deserve the right to love and women don't deserve the right to privacy, has forsaken his right to have either respected for himself. But even so, it was hard to watch the feeding frenzy explode, because it resulted in the exposure of his love letters to his mistress, and has put her on the spot. The few pictures available of her are being floated around, probably in no small part because Sanford relished describing her beauty in emails, and that makes people want to see that beauty for themselves. The saddest part of all this is that I doubt that being the object of such a massive exposure and have his love life become an object of ridicule for Sanford probably won't do a thing to convince him to be kinder to women or gays.
Of course, what it has done has given other hypocrites an opportunity to act self-righteous, their favorite thing to do. Bill O'Reilly loves playing martyr over this.
- Sanford 2 *
I like how he tries to pass off the impeachment of a President over a blow job as if it was the actions of a minor fringe. But let's make this clear to O'Reilly and everyone else who wants to play the victim over this. The supposed "hard left" are the people out there who actually believe in and respect people's right to a private love life. We support gay rights and reproductive rights. If you don't think people have this right, and Mark Sanford doesn't, then you invite this sort of nonsense.
Also, if you tout patriarchal marriage as the end-all, be-all, as conservatives like Sanford do, then you're basically asking for the kid to say that the emperor has no clothes. Today, I'll be that kid.
- Sanford 3 *
Boy, sounds like his marriage must have been boring and miserable that he was flirting with and carrying on at least emotional affairs with 6 and maybe more women. That doesn't do much for recommending the home life. What's that again about how traditional marriage is so great that we have to build our laws around pushing people into it?
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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the black President made me do it edition. Here's Rush Limbaugh, speculating on why Mark Sanford had an affair.
- Limbaugh *
There are many reasons this is a stupid thing to think. But let's go for the most obvious, which is the affair actually started before Obama was elected, and it's rumored that it was the reason that McCain picked Sarah Palin instead of Mark Sanford for a running mate.
Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte [22]