I tried to find it on YouTube, but couldn’t, so I can’t embed it. That said, click over to Think Progress to check out this insane video of Sam Brownback during the debates.
Gesturing vaguely towards your midsection while talking about the “life inside” might just be a nervous habit, but carefully grabbing your belly—repeatedly—while waxing poetic about the womb and its angelic resident (so much more worthy than a depraved, fornicating bitch), well, it’s a tad creepy. Seriously, watch it. You start to get the impression that Brownback feels he does have uterus and not until abortion is banned will it be activated and finally, after all this time, the superior sex can have the babies.
There’s not much else to be said about this. Brownback shows all the familiar signs of advanced wingnutitis, but the fact that he’s anti-choice alone is evidence of that. But it’s always a nice wake-up call to see how little relationship there is between being opposed to abortion and being able to understand certain facts of life.
52 Responses to “Womb envy: The evidence mounts”
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If he wishes hard enough, maybe the Blue Fairy will give him a REAL uterus of his very own…
Actually, his stomach itched from the full-body waxing earlier in the day.
Maybe he’s PMSing.
I’m sure someone could arrange to get a uterus translated into him. Then we’ll make sure it’s occupied as much as possible. It’s obviously very important to him.
Oh, for fuck sakes! Just surgically transplant a(n) uterus–complete with an implanted embryo– into the bodies of all anti-choice/contraception men, so they can at last know the wonders of being a “preggo” in this culture, and with pro-Gilead politicians like him. Kind of reminds me of that essay, “If Men Could Menstruate,” and how different cultures and politics would be if that were the case…but it’s not. Sigh. Abortion (and contraception) would be sacrament indeed.
Any anthropologists out there?
I know that among some warrior tribes, which tend to be highly misogynist, the men will go so far as to create ways of “ceremonially menstruating.” I’m most familiar with Gil Herdt’s work among the “Sambia” and such techniques as ritual nasal bleeding.
Have there been any surveys of cultures and the status of women and male attitudes toward female bodies as reproductive functions?
Does that make any sense?
Quelle surprise. This is the dude who stood up in Congress and made an anti-stem cell argument that came straight from the mouth of an elementary-schooler, complete with crayon-drawn illustration.
I just threw up in my mouth.
Good Lord, Brownback can so easily divorce himself from the fact that there is a woman attached to the average uterus, because deep in his bizarre psyche, he knows his own womb is imaginary.
Goodness, no. Think of the children!
But if you must, don’t give them access to daycare, and dock $18,000 from their salaries when they get back to work.
Well he is from Kansas after all. Home of the WBC and formerly home of the state school board that disallowed the teaching of evolution so why shouldn’t he be on their level of stupidity?
Yeah, Riva. And make sure they read nothing but “opt-out revolution” articles from the NYTimes, so they’ll be good ‘n brainwashed (and shamed into domesticity and dependence).
I think you’re all grasping at straws here while the truth stares you in the face.
Brownback eats children.
“Brownback eats children.”
He doesn’t eat them. He just sort of…chews on them a little, before spitting them out. It’s totally not the same thing.
I think the problem comes down to not understanding the experiences of another. Even if there were a medical breakthrough and he did manage to resolve his uterus-envy problems by having one implanted, I would argue that he would still not understand what it is like to be born female. An expensive and much-sought-after male pregnancy would have little in common with a scared teenager or an overburdened married mother who had had birth control fail on her.
Of course, there are possible ways to approach an understanding of another’s perspective, to empathize, and in fact, I think it’s necessary for the success of a non-oppressive society. However, most of those skills tend to go along with habits like reading narrative literature, a genre that is uniformly the first on the fire under oppressive governments.
Perhaps he’s just hoping that one of his more electable rivals will appoint him Secretary of Labor.
Brownback eats children.
Don’t be silly - that would mean some slattern teenage mom would get off the hook years too early! For shame!
*rimshot*
That’s just the mysogyny lite part of their reading list, I think. They need to be shamed into making the decision to stay home; I mean, those Princetonian opt-out-revolutionaries actually thought they were entitled to a choice in the matter. I suggest a few women’s magazines, too, to tell them how obese and ugly they look if they don’t look good in a bathing suit again by six months, max, and make them feel insecure about whether their partner is still attracted to them anymore.
And people wonder why fanfic writers write MPreg … In his case, it would be *really bad* MPreg, than which there is almost nothing worse …
What an utter fucking asshole.
MAJeff, Stephen Ducat covers that in The Wimp Factor, and yes, the research shows that womb envy is tied pretty closely to sexism. There’s variations inside cultures. In America, the likelihood that a man has a sympathetic pregnancy when his wife is pregnant rises alongsides his negative attitudes towards women.
In America, the likelihood that a man has a sympathetic pregnancy when his wife is pregnant rises alongsides his negative attitudes towards women.
Really?
Kind of misnomer then, isn’t it?
500 quatloos to the first evil liberal femi-scientist who manages to knock-up Brownback. The Right to Choose will be written into the Constitution overnight!
And this is probably why there’s a Google ad for Free Baby Samples running alongside this thread.
I know I’ve posted it here once before, but this bit from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (which I happen to have just been watching) is even more appropriate and fitting this time:
US conservatives are crap and crazy, but do you think your definition of life is better?
Do you know that the “at any time for any reason” attitude about abortion dont exist at all outside the states? In liberal european countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark there are no third trimester abortion. Not for any reason.Never. Its totally outlawed. And not one single politician, not one single feministorganization even ASKS for “the right to choose” in the third trimester. I know better than you in this case, cause Ive lived in Scandinavia the past 10 years.
Noone cares about abortions, and almost everyone support the right to choose, but only up to 18 weeks gestation of course. If you came here with your “abortion up to birth” attitude even the feminists would think you were grouse,disgusting,unhuman and probably a psychopath.
Oh, for an IRB that would let me try this…Technically, there is one form of ectopic pregnancy (pregnancy outside the uterus) that can come to term safely and be delivered by c-section with a healthy mother and baby at the end: if the embryo implants on the intestinal lining, the placenta can grow safely there, with plenty of room to grow and a good blood supply. Now, men have intestinal linings, just as much as women. And a small endoscopic surgery could implant an embryo. They’d probably need to take hormones and immunosuppressants to avoid destroying the embryo, but that wouldn’t really be any riskier than what happens naturally to women. Think Brownback would be up for implantation of a snowflake baby?
I just want to say that I think that womb envy arises after patriarchy, and isn’t a primal cause of it.
That’s my theory anyway. I don’t understand why any man would envy women their pregnancies–until they get tangled up in guilt about hating on these same women.
But yeah, that’s one creepy correlation.
Anything connected to Brownback is inherently creepy anyway.
Phew, good thing that “abortion until birth attitude” is a strawman made up by anti-choicers in order to destroy the right to terminate pregnancies, no matter how early and also to strip women of the right to contraception.
Agreed, Mark. Reading that book, it seemed fairly clear that womb envy was a result of a process where a man grows to despise a woman and he can’t possibly fathom how such a lowly creature can go through such an important event and he wants all the credit for himself. That’s why I think the belief that “life begins at conception” is tied to misogyny—it’s a way of denying that pregnancy even exists as a process and laying claim to the idea that men make babies through the strenous act of ejaculation, and that all the important parts are over when he’s done.
In liberal european countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark there are no third trimester abortion. Not for any reason.Never. Its totally outlawed.
Not precisely. Sweden and Denmark, at least, allow abortion at any time during the pregnancy if the pregnancy poses a serious threat to the mother’s life or if the fetus is non-viable. (I couldn’t find anything on Norway.)
“…as a process.” Exactly.
My comment was not exactly on topic; but I have been reading more feminist theory lately, in a haphazard way, and it does seem that a number of theorists do postulate some kind of primal “womb envy” to explain why men would seek to degrade women systematically, thus launching us on our present course.
Whereas my own dabbling in anthropology as an undergrad, general reader, and postgrad history student suggests to me that gatherer-hunters were not generally hagridden with the sorts of fearful superstition we extrapolate back from other “primitive” peoples who however are already agricultural. And frankly I like to think that people are fundamentally rational and sensible and not mean, and so I look for systematic explanations for meanness and stupidity rather than attribute it to primeval ignorance. Since it is hard for me to visualize why sane, reasonable males would be burning up in envy over the power of pregnancy and birth, which comes at such a hideously high price for women, I suppose instead that actually the generic meanness and cruelty of dominator society arose first, from basically economic causes (causes having nothing to do with evolutionary psychology, since they would arise after the development of agriculture, as consequences of that economic advance) and then a wholistic social system, based on amplifying and exploiting gender polarization, developed to suit perpetuating it. Therefore “womb envy” is something that makes sense to men who have already committed to downgrading and brutalizing women (and themselves) and comes in in that latter phase–which was to be sure almost immediate, on the time scale of social evolution. But it doesn’t make sense to me to think that a bunch of stupid men with nothing better to do just decided one century to start terrorizing women and children just for the hell of it–at any rate, if that were all there were to it, I suspect that any healthy community would have fought them off until they sobered up.
One reason I cling to all this Starhawk stuff is that before I’d ever heard of her, I learned in a general history of the world (by, I think, the same McNeill who wrote Plagues and Peoples that indeed there was a general period when civilizations arose roughly simultaneously all over the Old World, and then, thousands of years later, a thousand-odd year long general Dark Age when all of these centers of civilization, from Egypt to China, all fell more or less at the same time into collapse. When these recovered, it was the beginning of history as most societies traditionally recorded it, with the prior phase lost in the mists of mythology, whereas there is a much clearer line of historical continuity since then, despite later dark ages.
It would be over-romantic to suggest that the first layer of civilization was a time of idyllic peace, prosperity, justice, and flowers, but actually when we look archeologically at those times, it is often surprising how little militarized they apparently were compared to the norm later, whereas when we look at the next layer the politics, as reflected both in legend and in the archeology of weapons, fortifications, class structure evident in buildings, and economic polarization evident in human remains, is all grimly familiar.
I conclude that the roughly egalitarian pragmatism still found in the ethos of the few modern surviving gatherer-hunter peoples persisted as a new economic base of cultivation took root and ramified, probably compromised by the economic logic of division of labor and human greed, and laid a foundation for a fairly high level of social development, forming what in retrospect was a metastable state subject to destabilization by the new patriarchial ethos, which took many human lifetimes to arrive at the possibility of sustainable development on its own harsh terms. But that the hostility of this new mindset to any alternatives contributed to the systematic erasure of more ancient mentalities–which however have nevertheless survived both out of sheer stubbornness and because the human spirit is simply not happy with patriarchy, so a more balanced way appeals even to people who have been steeped in patriarchial propaganda.
According to patriarchial propaganda, our ancestors were a crazed and superstitious, suspicious, fearful lot, and the goal of life is to accept that fear as the eternal norm and live in it. It seems important to me to suggest that maybe every bit of this is a lie.
But practically speaking it isn’t clear it matters whether chicken or egg came first at this point. The way my mind works, it kind of matters.
I know this is a little off topic, but i need some help
My friend started an abortion thread on his blog and wrote this:
ALso if a woman decides to have 3+ abortions it will take tolls on her mentally and physically. THere is no “copping out” They increase their chances of uteran failure, cancer, and mental illness as well.
I dont believe this is true, an someone help me disprove it??????
Sweden and Denmark, at least, allow abortion at any time during the pregnancy if the pregnancy poses a serious threat to the mother’s life or if the fetus is non-viable.
Yep. And the US isn’t exactly handing them out to late second and third trimester gestational mothers, either. You have to go to court.
Laurennthesnow, you can start by asking him to cite his sources - and make sure they are from reputable academic journals and/or NAS, IOM, etc. or foreign equivalents. Request an impact factor on all journal sources.
I know damn well he won’t be able to manage that.
IARC hasn’t classified abortion as a carcinogen, and many abortofascents are ANTIcarcinogenic to the point of being chemotherapeudic!
Mark Foxwell: interesting thesis, and it seems fairly compatible with what I know of extant gatherer-hunter societies. While such societies typically have very rigid gender roles, they don’t, as far as I know, suffer from the sort of mysogyny we see in other societies, including our own. I’m guessing this is because the “mens work” and “womens work” are percieved as more-or-less equally valuable - the men bring in the meat, but not enough to support the group. The women provide the staples, but they’re not as tasty or nutritious as meat.
I’ve also heard the argument that militarism developed from the need to secure prime agricultural land and irrigation water in agrarian societies, leading to the development of a priviledged warrior class whose sole responsibility was to secure these resources. How accurate that idea is, I don’t know…
Lauren: Ask him if he knows the toll that 3 completed pregnancies would take on a woman, mentally and physically.
Sam Brownback is a woman-hater — just like the other candidates in the GOP race. Quite frankly, I don’t even know why Columbia welcomed those misogynists to debate. They should be campaigning in Kabul or Theran or somewhere where people agree with their caveman views. Rest assured, the anti-choice position will be a losing position in 2008 — we at Pandagon (as well as other progressives) will go all out to give the voters the truth on where every last one of these wingnuts stand.
Go Sam Brownback! Another futile run for the presidency by a Kansas Republican is exactly what this country needs.
I’m a little disturbed by the equivalences made above between misogyny and womb envy, only because my husband is one of the most genuinely pro-feminist men I know and he openly admits to womb envy. Or more specifically, pregnancy envy.
I’m pregnant right now and he at least partially wishes he were. Actually, it would be more convenient for both of us if he carried this fetus, since I work outside the home and he does not.
If some women really enjoy pregnancy (and quite frankly, I don’t relate to those women right now through the nausea, vomiting, and exhaustion), why shouldn’t some men want to experience it?
Or maybe it’s repressed womb envy that’s correlated with treating women badly.
Sam Brownback wistfully contemplates his very own stretch marks, varicose veins, heartburn, and swollen ankles… gosh, it’d really make him happy to get an episiotomy. Will somebody volunteer to give him one?
Again the GOP has a slate of pre stone age candidates running for the top spot. I really think the Neanderthals were PHD’s compared to this slate of candidates. I only hope that there is enough Pro choice, pro womens rights people out there to make sure that one of these throwbacks does not nmake it to thge Whitehouse in 2008, the man there has already screwed up the country enough, we don’t need another 4 to 8 years of the same thing
Again the GOP has a slate of pre stone age candidates running for the top spot. I really think the Neanderthals were PHD’s compared to this slate of candidates. I only hope that there is enough Pro choice, pro womens rights people out there to make sure that one of these throwbacks does not nmake it to thge Whitehouse in 2008, the man there has already screwed up the country enough, we don’t need another 4 to 8 years of the same thing
Yeah. I want a womb like I want a ‘65 Corvair (convertible, emerald green). On the face of it, you’d think it would be awesome, right? But then again it requires a LOT of special maintenance, for which almost nobody has the correct tools. Just to get basic work done you probably have to go to a specialist or belong to a club. Don’t even get me started on spare parts.
And, for all that, every once in a while you could do something really incredible with it, but you also expect it to cause you plenty of trouble–and possibly kill you in a spectacular fashion–until you finally retire it.
Well, I guess references to cave men and Neanderthals helps justify my long digression on speculative origins of patriarchy as we know it.
Yep, by my thesis Neanderthals would indeed be geniuses compared to the self-blinded victims of a rigid and malicious ideology.
And let’s not slander the “cave men;” as far as we can tell the ones in Lascaux and places like that may or may not have been men, but men or women they were basically artists. But as with James Kirk and space, they only worked in caves–though the analogy breaks down when we realize those particular folks weren’t fromIowa but rather Southern France…sigh, how can I compete for nerd points with entire threads devoted to Spiderman when I can’t even work in a good Trek analogy in a borning disjointed treatise on speculative anthropology/grand social history narrative?
Dunc, I think the main reason anthropologists don’t report the sort of intergender violence we are used to is that people generally cooperate, and specifically GH people are known to intelligently enforce social norms of cooperation on individuals who stray too far in the direction of personal greed/aggrandizement. By analogy, I suppose a GH man who gets arrogant and violent with physically weaker people like wife or children gets criticized, shamed, ultimately shunned if he won’t change his ways. We get patriarchy if and only if a bunch of men agree not to restrain each other from abusing “their” women at the behest of the latter or the women collectively. It would be dysfunctional for GH people to do that since their best bet for survival is mutual trust.
I don’t think, for the reasons I listed above, that we drifted directly from GH conditions into militarism and patriarchy. Rather, I suppose the group norms against violence and engrossment individuals were extended for some time, even when it became a social strain, allowing a large surplus to be developed, before some socially mutant group discarded those norms and went over to plunder. That is, societies got into something like the supersaturated state a solution of salt or the like can get into, where there is more than enough to crystallize out, but it doesn’t until there is a shock. The shock is not really the “cause” of the sudden crystalization of a huge chunck of solid salt in such a collapsed metastable state, and I suppose the transition to patriarchy was a kind of chain reaction across societies that could have started for any goofy reason at all–who knows, maybe a cult of womb envy after all. But what enabled such a basically wasteful mode of living to prevail would have been that technologically, people knew how to make surpluses to waste already, and to do that I think that for some time they would have had to solve the basic problems of scarcity and bottlenecks in processes by other means than violence, or the higher-tech way of living would not have recommended itself. I suppose if GH populations faced severe Malthusian pressure, they might have been forced gradually into agriculture and increasing social thuggery, but this commonsense theory has not been borne out by evidence. Perhaps if we had not freely chosen to develop agriculture and other productive sedentary technologies, these would have been forced on us eventually by necessity, but in fact it seems that people chose to develop the arts of civilization without such guns to their heads.
Once we went over to higher-intensity modes of production like that, of course, population rose, and then we were trapped. This too may have been background for the transition to patriarchy.
Kate, Dianne
When a pregnancy becomes a serious threat to a womans life in the second or third trimester in Scandinavia, shes got the right to terminate it, thats true, but the doctors goal is always to save both her and the unborns life, even if the womans life of course is rated higher. Its not excatly an abortion with other words. Its true that you can have a later abortion if the fetus is nonviable and very disabled.
But that almost never happens.
The fetal dianostic and ultra scans are very safe, taxfounded and done early in the second trimester.
Btw: Over 50% of all abortions here are done with RU-486 or any other abortion pill.Women can choose between medical and surgical abortion in the first 9 weeks and most of them prefer the pill.
[…] See also: Thinkprogress, and Pandagon. […]
I honestly hope that someone exposes the connection between the HIGHLY CORRUPT ADOPTION INDUSTRY and the so-called pro-life movement.
I used to have a neighbor who for some reason assumed I was a con-job (maybe because I was staying with my con-job father at the time, who knows?), and this neighbor happened to be an adoption lawyer, or at least handled a lot of adoption cases.
He instructed me to go to law school and “get into the adoption arena” because of the under-the-table and unreported payments made between all the parties available in an adoption (he was working on his third or fourth summer property if I recall correctly). He said “all you have to do Laura is place your business card at some local churches who then guilt some local pregnant teenagers into having the kid and giving it away”. He said he kicked back some of the illegal payments by these desperate-to-adopt parents (some are willing to pay in the hundreds of thousands, though this is not what the “books” will say) to these churches in return for their “help” in bringing him some cheap baby-production facilities (iow, girls), in the form of “donations” to these corrupt churches.
It became obvious to me at that point that this “pro-life” movement is in on this with the adoption agencies (just look at who runs most adoption agencies–right-wing Christians–big $$$) and that their “sanctity of life” bullshit is all about money, as usual. Seriously, like anyone would believe the US was “for life” in any way–give me a break!
I then told my friendly advice-giving neighbor that I would be sure to tell everyone how this all works at my next volunteer shift at Planned Parenthood, and his head just about popped off. Seriously, I wish it had–one less mysogynist banking on the wombs of young girls under the guise of so-called “morals”.
The only “morals” these assholes care about are the ones that fit into their wallets.
“I’m a little disturbed by the equivalences made above between misogyny and womb envy, only because my husband is one of the most genuinely pro-feminist men I know and he openly admits to womb envy. Or more specifically, pregnancy envy.”
I think there’s a pretty decent divide between the womb-envy of men who have a very positive view of pregnancy and would love to experience that particular sort of physical closeness with their children and the womb-envy of men who resent needing women to have offspring of their very own and view them as some sort of interfering, competitive agent, without whom they’d have their children’s undivided attention, love, and worship. Most guys with the former would like to be able to carry children themselves. Most guys with the latter would be just fine with an artificial fetus-incubator seeded with a cloned embryo, tucked away in their closet, and set on a nine-month timer.
It became obvious to me at that point that this “pro-life� movement is in on this with the adoption agencies (just look at who runs most adoption agencies–right-wing Christians–big $$$) and that their “sanctity of life� bullshit is all about money, as usual. Seriously, like anyone would believe the US was “for life� in any way–give me a break!
Y’know, I used to wonder where the pro-lifers got all that stuff about the multi-million-dollar abortion industry, but now it’s starting to make sense.
It’s always projection with the wingers, isn’t it?
The reason is quite obvious. Scandinavian girls don’t require late abortions to fit in their prom dresses, since proms are not a common tradition here.
When a pregnancy becomes a serious threat to a womans life in the second or third trimester in Scandinavia, shes got the right to terminate it, thats true, but the doctors goal is always to save both her and the unborns life, even if the womans life of course is rated higher. Its not excatly an abortion with other words.
This is an EXTREMELY different statement from your previous claim that third trimester abortion was illegal under any circumstances in Scandinavia. Although I think that one can make a reasonable theoretical ethical case for abortion on demand up until the second stage of labor, based on either the unlikelihood of the fetus having any meaningful awareness or the lack of precedent for demanding that one person risk his or her health to save another in any other cirumstance (using the assumption that the fetus is a person with human rights)*, in practical terms I don’t see any problem with limiting third trimester abortion to cases of fetal non-viablity or risk to the mother’s life or health, as long as 1. there are no barriers, legal or de facto, to first trimester abortion and 2. the health and viability exceptions remain in place. In short, the Scandinavian laws sound fine to me. I particularly like the Danish one, with its requirement that women who have abortions be told about the availability of government help if she decides to have the baby instead. Seems like a likely way to cut down on the poverty-desperation abortion rate.
*Though, in fact, I would argue that, in the absence of barriers to abortion in the first and second trimester (exhorbitant cost, few or no clinics, illegality, etc), not having an abortion for 6 months is an implicit statement that the pregnant woman intends to bring the pregnancy to term and in the absence of new information (ie newly discovered problem with the fetus or the woman’s health) then a third trimester abortion violates her implicit contract with the fetus and is therefore unethical. But, as I said, this is pretty much a theoretical question, since women who would have a third trimester abortion when they were healthy, had a healthy fetus, and had not been forced or coerced into continuing the pregnancy thusfar must be extremely rare to non-existent.
[…] Finally, a little bit funny and a little bit sad: Sam Brownback thinks he has a uterus. Via Pandagon. […]