If you haven’t read this post by Jill at Feministe, do so. There’s not a lot I think I can add, but I’m blogging it because it’s an important insight into why feminists like she and I stalwartly insist the anti-choice activists are driven by misogyny and the notion that women are male property, not by some silly notion about the deep humanity of embryos and forlorn sperm looking for an egg that didn’t come because of hormonal contraception,* a humanity that overrides all others, especially that of those that actually exist on the planet.
Jill’s referring to a post praising serial killers and mobsters written by Jill Stanek. Jill’s blogging was a rich source of information about the Planned Parenthood protests in Aurora, IL, and like most anti-choicers, she’s also an endless source of entertainment, because of the internal struggle between toeing the official party line (WE LOVE BAAAAAYYYYYBEEEEZ) and unintentionally revealing a shocking amount of misogyny, homophobia, and other manifestations of her self-hating and delusion commitment to straight males uber alles. On my podcast, I covered how Jill made a ton of homophobic comments about the head of the Chicago Planned Parenthood, but when seeking a break from the endlessly painful treacly gospel music on most of the protest videos, she used “We Will Rock You” from Queen.
That really made my day. She was already getting vapors because she couldn’t believe that some queer guy had a ramrod back and nerves of steel against her and her sick crew, and to point out to her face that the singer of that sports-stomping, tough guy anthem was in a band named “Queen” for non-coincidence-related reasons would be a great joy.
But I digress, because if anything, her post praising wife-beating might be the greatest thing ever written. First, she praises Mr. Brooks for showing people that you can be a serial killer, but it’s all right with Jesus as long as you remember that bitches need to be put in their place.
In Mr. Brooks, the teenage daughter of serial killer Earl Brooks (Costner) turns up pregnant midway through her first semester of college. When Jane tells her parents, Earl emphatically states abortion is out of the question and offers to raise the baby. Jane is equally emphatically abortion minded until that moment, when she says she will reconsider. Typical. If a mother in a crisis pregnancy is offered love and support, she will most often choose life.
I won’t give away the end of Mr. Brooks except to say the prospect of his seeing future grandchild became Earl’s motivation for a life or death decision.
All of this is way twisted, I know. But similar to Godfather II, even a schizophrenic serial killer knows abortion is wrong, and similar to Godfather II, this became a redeeming quality of one who had no others.
I haven’t seen the movie, and really I have no urge to, but Auguste told me it was a horror-satire of that kind of authoritarian mindset that manifests itself in being anti-choice, amongst other things. One suspects that being “pro-life” was a redeeming quality in the same sense that Ted Bundy’s rage towards unruly females was a sign of his fundamental wholesomeness. But it gets so, so much better when she praises Michael Corleone’s behavior in Godfather II.
One of the best scenes in the Godfather movie trilogy was in “Godfather II,” when Kay Corleone (Diane Keaton) told her husband Michael (Al Pacino) she was taking their two children and leaving him. The dialogue:
Michael: Do you expect me to let you take my children from me?…. Don’t you know that’s an impossibility, that that could never happen, that I’d use all my power to keep something like that from ever happening?…. I know you blame me for losing the baby. Yes. I know what that meant to you. Kay. I swear I’ll make it up to you…. I’ll change. And you’ll forget about this miscarriage, and we’ll have another child, and we’ll go on, you and I, we’ll go on.
Kay: Oh - oh, Michael, Michael, you are blind. It wasn’t a miscarriage. It was an abortion, an abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage is an abortion, something that’s unholy and evil. I didn’t want your son, Michael! I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons into this world! It was an abortion, Michael. It was a son, a son, and I had it killed, because this must all end. I know now that it’s over. I knew it then. There would be no way, Michael, no way you could ever forgive me, not with this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for 2,000 years….
SLAP.
Michael: You won’t take my family!
And she doesn’t.That spontaneous slap was the reaction of a real man who a woman had just told she aborted his baby. Compare that to the modern day cowardly male response, “It’s your choice. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.” Or worse, his threat to abandon her if she does not abort.
It was this fierce devotion to family that strangely endeared us to the Corleone men despite their otherwise heinous behavior.
I can’t think of a better distilling of the anti-choice worldview: Women belong to men, and men should feel free to even go so as use violence to maintain women in a role of sex objects and breeding machines.
The American gangster movie genre is one that lends itself to wild interpretations and outright misinterpretations, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone completely and totally misread as badly as Jill Stanek has done here the device of hyper-patriarchal attitudes in the gangsters in these movies. To my mind, the most reasonable explanation for the continued fascination with cinematic gangsters (besides the titillation aspects) is that they give Americans a space for our ambiguous feelings about our capitalist society. The gangster is a hyper-capitalist, but what makes him compelling is that he’s a human being that we have sympathy for. You both know that he’s a bad guy and you know that he’s just a product of the culture he lives in, and so are we all, just in a less obvious way.
The misogyny aspect of gangster movies couldn’t be more obvious—like the killing and the drug-peddling, it’s part of the entire evil package. In these movies, the way women are traded and flaunted as objects and not as human beings, the way wives are supposed to be quiet and obedient and look the other way when mistresses come into the picture, all this reflects the internal logic of the hyper-capitalist gangster world, where even human beings are commodities. It’s not supposed to flatter you or your gangster stand-ins onscreen. But leave it to an anti-choice nut to watch a scene where a woman’s being treated like a commodity and say, “Well, he can’t be all bad, because he knows how to put a bitch in her place. And wow, did you check out that slapping technique? Most men need some kind of weapon to silence a bitch that fast.”
Of course, I’m paraphrasing, but you know, since we’re talking about gangster movies, I figured keeping the formula and tweaking it a little is okay.
Read Jill-at-Feministe’s entire post; she wades into the comments section at Jill Stanek’s post and finds even more fun praise for men who beat women, even those who do it in real life instead of just on the screen.
*Don’t feel too bad about the ones who perish in tissues. Those sperm were party-going confirmed bachelors, anyway.
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These people probably watch Pan’s Labyrinth and think that the part where the evil Capitan Vidal tells his wife’s doctor to “do whatever he has to do, just save the baby” really softens his character.
Oh, Christ, don’t remind me of Pan’s Labyrinth. Heh. Good point, though, I bet they do. “Aw, he just wants a male baby!”
You know who’s awesome at raising babies? Serial killers. That’s why I choose not to abort and instead give my baby to Jeffery Dalmer.
“Leave the fetus. Take the cannoli.”
Dear god,what a post. I love ganster movies but I never even thought someone could construe them in such a way to make their wife beating ways a positive. god.. at any rate, sounds like its time to go to the mattresses.
That spontaneous slap was the reaction of a real man who a woman had just told she aborted his baby. Compare that to the modern day cowardly male response, “It’s your choice. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.” Or worse, his threat to abandon her if she does not abort.
Or, you know, it made the viewer realize just how much of his humanity Michael Corleone had lost by giving himself over to his father’s way of life, a life his father had hoped he would avoid, by the way. It takes an odd sort of genius to laud Michael in that scene.
Color me unsurprised that the anti-choicers cream their pants at the idea of beating down disobedient women.
Jill Stanek’s blog is endlessly entertaining. Just yesterday, she let us all know how she really feels about women:
“Women are so, so stupid, gullible, and exploited.”
Oh, wow, trailer park, that’s an actual quote.
…That is to say, I thought you were doing a “shorter.”
I can’t even get started with her “point” in that post.
Wow. Just wow. Guy who kills people on a regular basis tells daughter what to do and daughter doesn’t go all out in opposition to his expressed wishes. How uplifting.
I can’t wait to read her approving take on honor killings.
“Don’t feel too bad about the ones who perish in tissues. Those sperm were party-going confirmed bachelors, anyway.”
You got a problem w/party-going confirmed bachelors? JK
Seriously though, I was amazed as well that someone could have misinterprated that scene from Godfather II where Kay is the real hero. I keep being amazed at how stupid some people are when I am old enough to know better.
And Senator Geary (G.D. Spradlin) can be the liberal establishment!
“I’ve never liked your kind of people. I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair and your pro-life viewpoints, and pass yourselves off as decent Americans. I’ll do business with you people, but I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself, yourself and your whole fucking morally upright family.”
Are you sure this woman has nothing to do with Landover Baptist Church? The Onion? Ed Anger?
I’m not.
The “gangster” genre represent one example of unrestrained manhood. A gangster doesn’t have to obey any laws, and is bound only by a “code”, which (as in Pirates of the Caribbean) is more like a set of “guidelines” anyway.
No wonder Reichwing Authoritarian Cultists see things like that and focus on exactly the wrong aspects.
In Godfather I we saw Michael transformed from a good kid who was unlikely to assume power into an agent of revenge against those who took his brother’s lives and shot his father, and then into a cold calculating leader of the family’s criminal organization. But there’s still some element of hope that Michael is not totally evil.
In Godfather II however, we see in Michael a living example of “All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Any sympathy we might have for Michael is completely drained by the end. Even his brother’s betrayal, which should make Michael look at least a little sympathetic, really just turns into another example of just how far over to the “dark side” he’s gone.
Kay is absolutely caught in a horrible situation and tries to make the best of it. The abortion may be shocking to a “family man” like Michael, but is completely understandable. (Remember, this is the movie where a woman is casually killed just to frame the racist senator so Michael can get a Nevada gambling license.) Kay finally wakes up (probably far too late) and decides to get out. Yay for her.
Ultimately though, characters like Michael Corleone, “Mr. Brooks” - and any other person (real or fictional) who might just happen to be against abortion - represent the worst in humanity. To consider them redeemed because of a single opinion that some other people also hold is incredibly short-sighted and intellectually unsupportable.
In other words, par for the course for the Reichwing…
Oh dear. Oh my. Wow. Speechless.
Stanek’s blog entry has sucked all reasonable logic from my head through osmosis. She minimizes the murders by serial killers to prove a self-righteous moral stand against aborting fetuses by equating it with murder. She’s arguing, “But yeah, they were bad men who killed people but they had a lapse of their usual bad judgment! Be nice to them; they’re not so bad after all because they had a good pro-family thought for just a minute.” Arrrgh….it burns…it burnsssss…
There’s an untapped opportunity for cashing in on Baby Herman pinup sales at the next wingnut pro-lifer cocktail weenie roast…
Wait - I’m a coward because I figure my significant other is the one who is going to be bearing the brunt of the risk of life and health, so I figure that she should get the veto on what is going to be a long, fairly painful, potentially deadly process? And that makes me a coward?
And the guy who smacks “his woman” around (I doubt that guy thinks of her as a “significant other”) because he’s threatened by the fact that she has a mind of her own - that guy ISN’T a coward?
Huh. Kind of a weird view on what makes one a coward.
While I’d disagree that this attitude would make someone WORSE than the guy who physically abuses his partner, I’d agree that guys like this are despicable. So I guess this sentence counts as the least crazy thing quoted.
“It was this fierce devotion to family that strangely endeared us to the Corleone men despite their otherwise heinous behavior.”
Ah yes that strong devotion to family. So eloquently expressed when Michael has his own brother killed and the end of the film.
These people are dangerously delusional.
I posted on Jill’s blog about how awesome and feminist fictional serial killer Dexter would be if his girlfriend got pregnant and wanted an abortion. An even better take is in Bradley Denton’s novel “Blackburn”–a chapter called “The Murderer Chooses Sterility.” In which serial killer Blackburn decides that someone who takes life is probably not a good candidate to bring it into the world as well, and goes to Planned Parenthood and gets himself snipped. Now there’s a redeeming moment.
Not to mention that there’s only so far he can go–child support kicks in (which is where the alliance between anti-choicers and MRAs comes in, I guess).
Jesus turned over tables but didn’t hit people.
Ahem. Jesus calls bullshit:
13When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”
The enemies of Christ used religion to make a personal profit while attacking faith.
Jesus didn’t just hit people, he whipped them.
Jesus didn’t just hit people, he hit fundies.
Can I just play captain obvious for a moment.
Michael Corleone is a “real man.” Um, actually he is a character.
And it’s fairly obvious that he’s not intended to be “real” at all but an embodiment of certain ideas.
No One, I think he’s only whipping the sheep and cattle. It’s ambiguous, though.
15So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”
I interpret this differently. He uses the whip to drive the animals; to the people he overturns tables and uses words. Besides, don’t encourage the fundies to think that Jesus actually participated in violence; they’d cream themselves at the opportunity to have New Testament validation for their violent revenge/punishment fantasies.
Jesus was actually being a bit of a drama queen in this passage. People were selling cattle, doves, and sheep because those are the animals you sacrifice. And they were exchanging money because Jews were coming from all over to celebrate Passover, and needed to be able to do that. No one was doing anything against Jewish law (which is fairly practical about economic realities) in the Temple. Jesus just got all pissy for reasons of his own. Kind of like the people who get all up in arms because people applauded in church after the choir sang, or the priest played a guitar, or the cantor didn’t sing “Lecha Dodi” to the same tune their cantor sang “Lecha Dodi” when they were growing up.
Are you sure this woman has nothing to do with Landover Baptist Church? The Onion? Ed Anger?
I’m not.
I don’t imagine the attempts to shut down Aurora’s Planned Parenthood were high level performance art. So no.
All I can say is, I’m glad Pauline Kael is dead, because she would have shit her pants if she’d had to read that. And Kael was no raging feminist, either, but she did say that after seeing GII, “you’d have to be insane…to think the Corleones live a wonderful life, one that you’d want to be part of.”
I may need a little Imodium myself, frankly. I haven’t seen such whacked-out wingnut misinterpretation of cinema since Michael Medved at his “peak.” I have always pointed people who don’t think Diane Keaton “can really act” at that very scene, because it more than proves otherwise. More to the point, it’s that scene that underlines exactly what Kael said, that Kay (Keaton) had the abortion — something she didn’t even believe in doing — specifically because “this [the family “business” and her passive participation in it] must all end.”
Just ask Francis Ford Coppola if he thought Kay got what was coming to her. I’d pay to hear the answer to that one.
That’s funny… The structure and day-to-day workings and loyalties of the Coreleone family didn’t endear them to me in the movie. They made me sick. When I try to place myself in any of their shoes–made men in the family, women, enforcers/troops–I get a very sick, claustrophobic feeling.
Their devotion to family above all else was one of their biggest problems, not an endearing trait.
To extend what somegirls wrote above…
It’s a movie. M-O-V-I-E.
There does seem to be a bedrock fascination with using cinema to justify all manner of odious goals in the contemporary conservative movement. I still get the giggles over all the
swaggering and stroking in reaction to the cartoon “300″.
Maybe this is all really this simple: The contemporary conservative movement is one big disjointed cliche of movie clips masquerading as coherent political philosophy.
I remember something very similar to this a long while back. Are you “reposting” or are their more crazies popping up that are incredibly unoriginal?
I posted it there, I’ll post it here:
SPOILER WARNING:
DO NOT READ THIS COMMENT IF YOU WANT TO SEE MR. BROOKS
LAST WARNING - THE POINT OF THE MOVIE WILL BE SPOILED
The huge irony about Mr. Brooks is this: His daughter had come home from college not because she was pregnant, but because she killed somebody. Yes. Brooks’ mental illness, or murderous proclivities, or whatever they were had been passed down to his daughter. The irony of the movie was that keeping the baby meant that, most likely, more people were going to be murdered. The fact that the baby was not aborted was the most chilling part of the movie - Brooks was, for whatever reason, ensuring an enduring legacy of death and pain for innocent people because of his own blindness to reality because he expected morality from other people, but not from himself or his family.
Stanek is proving the pro-choice point by making her pro-life point. Wonderful.
It’s funny, because I just watched Mr. Brooks the other day.
He’s not anti-abortion at all… he tells his daughter that they would help her raise it if she kept it, and he and her mother would not mind if she kept the baby. His daughter replies that she’ll think about it.
And that’s the end of that conversation. It’s shown that he personally would like for her to keep it, but he also backs off after saying so and will respect her choice.
So… not sure where the ‘Mr. Brooks is PRO LIFE!’ idea came from. Probably from where the rest of her crazy assumption are from.
I mean, it’s assumed she’ll keep it, I guess, but the question is never actually answered by her in the film. The only time after that first conversation about it that she is asked if she will have the baby, she says she ‘hasn’t decided yet’.
Jesus was actually being a bit of a drama queen in this passage. - MzDarwin
I always had the feeling that whatever Jesus may have done in the Temple, the Gospels kinda tried to play it down.
At the time Jesus must have lived, the High Priest was from the wrong line: i.e. not from the line of Zadok, but rather from the Hasmonean line that took control as described in the Hannukah story. This, together with the fact that the Hasmoneans weren’t real good at maintaining the normal Jewish ideal of separation of the High Priesthood from the organs of the State, really pissed a lot of Jews off.
The Pharisees took the attitude that so long as they maintained control of matters and ensured the High Priest performed the rituals correctly (as well as letting the Romans make sure the High Priest didn’t get too politically powerful), everything would be ok. However, many more radical Jewish elements considered the Temple rituals to be completely invalid. Some of these groups (the “Essenes”) withdrew to some degree from the larger Jewish society, but, AFAIK, some groups took whatever opportunity they could to sieze the organs of Jewish life.
Jesus most likely was associated with one of those groups (perhaps, indeed then, the hostility to the Pharisees pre-dates the split between Judaism and Christianity): some have suggested that he didn’t merely turn over a few tables and have a general hissy fit, but as a Messiah (i.e. an annointed, proclaimed by some, King of Israel) took over the Temple and tried to establish his reign (note, e.g., even why the Christian Bible says Jesus was executed … the Romans were not so known for sarcasm as the NT makes them out to be, though, were they?).
Of course, later Christians, trying to establish themselves in the Roman empire and distance themselves from the sectarian Jews of earlier eras, had to depoliticize Jesus’ message and thus turn his act of rebellion into a hissy fit.
My favorite is when conservatives blast pro-choicers but when it comes time to abort a child because might be too young to parent it, well then, reality all of the sudden kicks in. Politics and reality promote such a wonderful disconnect.
There have been some remarks that the money changer incident was just a distraction so Jesus and his followers could steal the money which would have been quite a considerable sum. It’s a routine used even to this day. One guy causes a scene and since most are looking to him the associates steal items, money leave without being detected.
There was nothing wrong with was occuring at the money changing. Most people who bring up the money changers part of the bible cannot say what the money changers were doing or why it would be objectionable.
I honestly wonder what some of these loonies would say about Luca Brasi who in the Godfather novel tossed his infant daughter into a furnance. People should really read the novels they tend to flesh out a lot of stuff including explaining a lot of what is going on. Such as the movie producer who got the horse head in his bed was a pedophile and that Alfredo was in the closet and suffering because of it.
More fun from the comments. Anyone notice a theme?
I’m only halfway down the page, but I think I’ve made my point.
There was nothing wrong with was occuring at the money changing. Most people who bring up the money changers part of the bible cannot say what the money changers were doing or why it would be objectionable.
You mean apart from corrupting religion into a means of making money, exploiting something that should be a positive force on behalf of lucre, the ancient equivalent of tele-evangelists?
Yeah, nothing wrong with that. That Jesus, he was *such* a drama queen.
Most people who bring up the money changers part of the bible cannot say what the money changers were doing or why it would be objectionable.
iirc, it was to do with a scam in which the birds sold to be sacrificed were sold more than once, and jaysis got righteous on behalf of the poor being cheated.
also, ur right on the godfather thing. The book goes into a lot more detail on the Fontane/Hollywood front, depicting a really ugly society in which trained healers use their surgical skills for narcissistic body sculpting and, yes, abortion.
My favorite whacko comment is the anti-adoption one. It’s not enough to simply carry the pregnancy for nine months, go through the birth and give the kid up for adoption any more. No, to be a “real” woman, you’ve got to spend the next 18 to 20 years raising the kid. Never mind if you know you’re not cut out for motherhood. Or you’re barely scraping by. Or your job doesn’t give you any child care. Or there’s nobody around to be “Daddy”. You better keep that kid, you selfish bitch, because sex is so OMG horrible that you need to be sentenced to 18 to life.
Actually, the Hollywood surgeon in The Godfather is one of the most admirable people in the book. He becomes disillusioned with trying to heal cancer patients, particularly women whom he warned to avoid pregnancy, yet “killed the rabbit” anyway, because “my husband and I are very strict Catholics”. He loves doing abortions because he could solve a woman’s problem quickly and neatly, and save her from the back alleys at the same time. Fredo was a big problem “because he was taking them to bed two at a time” and caused more abortions than anybody else at the casino.
The only body sculpting I recall was when he asked a surgeon friend of his to sugically shrink Lucy Mancini’s vagina, so she could have the same sexual pleasure as regular women. She was most appreciative.
John 2:
14(U)And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.
15And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables;
Translation: NASV. My greek is, ah, weak, so we’ll go with the mainstream. Jesus drove them all out “with” the sheep and the oxen.
He most certainly beat them.
That’s within character, given the offense. It’s also very interesting: the only people Jesus was ever violent to were the wealthy, while they blasphemed out of greed. That is undeniably telling.
And the people above, iirc, are right about the context.
Reading the comments Wayward quoted convinces me there must be at least as many self-hating closeted lesbians among the wingnut fundie/GOP crowd as there are self-hating closeted gay men.
If a person is gay, and for whatever reason that’s totally incompatible with their self-image, they will live as a hetero. And that person will not like sex, not even the idea of sex, because the only sex they allow themselves to have is with someone they’re not attracted to. Of course they’re going to insist, lously and from the rooftops, that sex is only for reproduction. That’s all it is to them; that’s all it can be to them.
And unless they’re dumb-to-the-bone,they’re going to realize, even if only down in their subconscious, that they didn’t have to make that choice. They could have been out. They could have found passion. Or, at the very least, they could have not married at all, and never put themselves in a relationship that requires a physical intimacy they dislike, resent, and soon hate.
A person in that position is going to hate people who enjoy sex. I’m not sure if they’ll hate gays or straights more, but they’re going to hate anyone who can enjoy sex - who can enjoy intimacy in general, in fact. They want what’s true for them to be true for everyone, because then they won’t feel so much like a starving orphan staring into a bakery they can never, by their own choice, enter.
I don’t know if the “sex for reproduction only” crowd are all self-hating closeted homosexuals, but they definitely have some issues when it comes to sex.
I am sure a lot of it comes from an idea that sex is sinful or somehow wrong and dirty. It’s the idea that “good girls” don’t like sex. They shouldn’t like sex, even if they actually do.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of them were in passionless marriages. Passion is seen as evil, and marriage is seen as the ultimate calling for women. They married because they felt that they should, but they know what they are missing.
Wanting to have frequent sex with your spouse is a sign that you have a healthy marriage. If this is missing, you’re marriage is not more “holy”, then something’s wrong.
Perhaps they are self-hating closeted heterosexuals?
Jesus and the money-changers:
I don’t know what the most reasonable interpretation of a properly translated text would be, but the conventional one emphasized by my Catholic school upbringing–which relied as much on Jesus Christ: Superstar, a big favorite of the nuns, as any other “text,” was indeed the emphasis on “profaning the Temple” not so much by violating this or that letter of the Law as by the intent and system of profiting off the true-believing rubes.
I believe that this motive is also emphasized in the Koran as being behind Mohammad’s hatred of the Mecca priesthood/merchant-prince establishment. The point is, that true religion is supposed to be the property of all people, and not marketed for all the traffic will bear.
Going to Catholic school in the South in the 1970s we also varied the liturgy with Protestant country songs like “Put Your Hand in the Hand…”
“When I look in the Holy Book I wanna tremble
When I read ’bout the time the Carpenter cleared the Temple,
‘Cause the buyers and the sellers weren’t any worse folks than I profess to be
And it pains me to know I’m not the way that I should be.”
Religion, like any other serious attempt to grapple with the human condition, is full of paradoxes. One can attempt to resolve them by putting the politics and so forth in context, but the reason these memes perpetuate and others don’t so much is that the very ambiguity speaks to opposing tendencies. Kind of like soap is basically molecules that are polar on one end and non-polar on the other, so they dissolve the surface-tension boundaries between the two types of liquids.
I really tend to identify with the populist-revolutionary aspects of these Semitic religions, which for whatever reason is the lesson I tended to pick up from my Catholic schooling, whereas the conservative-quietist parts that are just as deeply ingrained in them tend to leave me cold. I always hated that parable about the workers who were hired at successive hours of the day and then all got paid the same at the end–that the Master tells the ones who worked longest that they agreed to the pay so STFU that others got paid the same for less work has its valuable spiritual point I guess, but it reeked of an anti-labor attitude that offended me, long before I identified as any kind of leftist.
Well, I will spare Pandagonians my ensoulment trivia geekery, which is all questions and no answers anyway about a subject I don’t actually believe in; on the Feministeing thread it comes up but I am a stranger there and I imagine the thread is pretty much dying out.
But
Yep, that’s Christian doctrine as I gathered it.
Oh sure, I was trained post Vatican II, and for that matter the Papacy did a big about-face on human sexuality early in the 20th century. After going on 2 millenia (depending on when you start counting Christian “orthodoxy” being defined–to the orthodox in Constantine-approved tradition, of course the Church as organized by the Emperor had it all right and all those others who disagreed with this that or the other doctrine were wrong all along, so it would go back not just to the time of Christ but the Creation itself) of clearly anti-sex doctrine asserting that, whatever good sex may have been for unfallen humans, after the Fall it was so dangerously tainted with sin that a smart Christian would seek to avoid it–suddenly the Pope declared that enjoyable sex within marriage was perfectly OK and of course always had been. It was just silly to read Augustine or Jerome or Paul or any of that lot as meaning it was inherently an awful Satantic trap! Within marriage, providing no “unnatural” measures were taken (to avoid pregnancy or any other reason presumably…)
Well, I don’t mean to gainsay anyone, even literalist fundamentalists, whatever fun they have with sex. But Papal encyclicals or none, the Christian tradition definitely weighs in on the side of viewing sexuality itself as a dangerous gift at best with the bulk of tradition flat-out declaring it more trouble than it is worth for us. Kind of like Phyllis Schafly declared nuclear weapons to be a gift from a loving God–with gifts like these, what need is there for chastisement?
I never really “got” the reasons for Catholic restrictions on sex from actual Church teachings–C S Lewis was always a lot clearer, if nasty. His model for proper, unFallen sexuality seemed to be laid out most clearly with the Hnau of “Malacandra”–Mars–in Out of the Silent Planet. The Hnau proper–the otter-like dwellers in the deep canals, who lived a life of primitive virtue, were like the Protestant couple in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life–they generally had two children, and had sex twice. The other “hnau” of Malacandra (mortal intelligent beings as opposed to the angels who cluttered up the place)–the sorns, apparently kept their women in purdah (I forget if we ever met a female Sorn) and the dwarf-forms, the badger-like craftfolks whose name I can’t begin to spell, liked to whine about what tyrants their wives were, demanding all kinds of jewelry and stuff. Presumably so they could at some point or other have sex once, then perhaps twice.
If you take the position that heterosexual sex ought to be “fruitful” in intent every time, than yes, there isn’t much logical alternative to the idea that you should only do it a few times, otherwise one is looking at a massive death rate to offset the predictable massive birth rate.
Since queer sex or masturbation are supposed to be clean out, then one is faced with either concluding that perhaps sex has some other purpose entirely, or that it is a painful temptation just about all of the time.
Lewis’s Hnau weren’t “gifted” with being asexual most of the time either; they thought sex was a big deal. Twice.
I think there’s a theme here–the world is a place full of frustrations and traps. As my Dad put it, it is supposed to be a Vale of Tears; all that stuff about God pronouncing the Creation “Good” seemed pretty damn irrelevant. The focus is otherworldly, which accounts pretty well for why they treat this world so cavalierly. Why worry about what happens here if you are aiming for an Eternity of bliss elsewhere (however that’s supposed to work…)
But I still don’t think that that is just some arbitrary meme that got going for the sheer hell of it; what we have here is the social DNA of a dominator society, that sends us all to cultural boot camp in order to break us down and rebuild us as agents of a militarized society. At the same time, religion as much as any other aspect of human society is fought over by the contradictory elements of each individual person who protests this mistreatment of themselves and others and seeks to install a point of view that values life and each other and holds out real hope.
Hence the contradictory, oil-soap-water nature of the ideologies that societies actually subscribe to; those that have no room for such dialectical struggles within their frameworks get reworked until they do, or are tossed aside.
We were taught, although it may just have been standard white anti-semitic protestantism, that the money-changers and sellers of sacrifices were charging unconscionable markups, supported by the notion that being in the temple precincts made their businesses the right ones to patronize in the eyes of the lord (much like the televangelists in that respect).
Of course in the intervening centuries, “money-changer” has almost certainly become overlaid with the anti-semitic “money-lender”. (I’m reading the otherwise unremarkable Raffles books, and it’s mindboggling how vicious and thoroughly regularized the antisemitism is.)
Well, when Xianity forbade moneylending, nonXians did the moneylending. So…yeah.
Actually, when Christianity forbade lending money at interest, Christians “lent” money “at no interest” with “late fees” for not repaying it at once. Usury, legal fiction, potato, potahto. Monasteries were particularly adept at working this practice out.
So we’re supposed to admire the Corleones? I sure misunderstood those movies, huh?
I was just skimming through that post at Jill Stanek’s site on the new Pill news.
ugh. i’m crying. One voice of pro-choice thought is getting ripped apart by the crazies. (I posted an angry rant that I’m sure will have someone ripping me a new one today.)
How do these women live with themselves? Pure denial?
“Don’t have sex if you don’t want babies”? So… NONE of those women have EVER had sex in a non-hoping-to-get-knocked-up-scenario?? REALLY?!?!? …no wonder they hate Teh SEx
We were joking about the “don’t have sex if you don’t want babies” mentality last night.
(googly-voice): “Who’s mommy’s little consequence? You! Yes! You! You’re mommy’s little consequence!” (blow raspberry)
Good for you, HG. I checked and nobody ripped you a new one yet, (probably because they’re still tired after ripping apart TexasRed.)
Another thing I love is “I had a baby at eighteen, and I’m doing great! Every other teen mom can do great too, if she sets her mind to it.” or “Pregnancy was a breeze for me! Anyone who says it isn’t a breeze for her is just a liar or a malingerer!”
Yeah, and when I was seventeen, I ran three miles in 22:32. Doesn’t mean every 17 year old could do it, or that I could do it today. Circumstances change for everyone and everything, folks. It’s called reality.
Blue Jean- (I was going to use initials, but wasn’t sure how you’d feel about being called BJ)
I checked back too- found one progressive Potter fan who liked me yay! But of course the few other people either A) made fun of my moniker or B) challenged something i said by leaving out part of what I wrote so that my “logic” was all wrong. Hence why I don’t go to those evil cesspools of hate often.
Your analogy makes absolute sense and illustrates the difference between the pro- and anti-choice camps:
Anti: If it works for [insert some paragon of privilege and conservatism] then it can work for everyone. You’re just selfish/lazy.
Pro: Every person is different and has an individual experience. One size does not fit all, so don’t even try.
You know, I haven’t been a teenager for over 20 years, and even I remember the fun of spotting a prudish-looking person who was sneering at me and my friends and talking loudly about things that would be guaranteed to send that person running.
We usually chose period talk, but sex talk works, too.
Here are a couple of quotes from Jill’s Site:
They say that the prevention of an embryo is an “abortion”. They also site this from the American Life League:
Notice the centerpiece of this arguement: there is no abortion if there is no implantation, therefore, there is no medical necessity for abortion. After all, isn’t that precisely what an ectopic “pregnancy” is?
How do they manage to live with the cognitive dissonance?
They also rail against “moral relativity” at Jill’s to defend such positions that implantation prevention is “abortion”, even if there never was a pregnancy in the first place. What is this PrincipleOfDoubleEffect® anyway? Fact is: it’s “moral relativity” or “situational ethics”, and the Roman Catholic Church owns the patent. I bet the Vatican gets royalties every time anyone uses said arguement. If they aren’t, then they should.
Oh sweet irony!
I always hated that parable about the workers who were hired at successive hours of the day and then all got paid the same at the end–that the Master tells the ones who worked longest that they agreed to the pay so STFU that others got paid the same for less work has its valuable spiritual point I guess, but it reeked of an anti-labor attitude that offended me, long before I identified as any kind of leftist.
That passage is all about the spirit and not about labor policy. It deals with the very real theological problem that exists if salvation exists and it is achieved within space and time. Since salvation always has a “downside” (e.g., no more cheating on your wife with whores, no more ebezzling, etc.), the guy who manages a deathbed conversion got to have all the illicit nookie that a saved-from-age-9-onward saint missed out on.
I discussed that interpretation of the text with a bunch of people who were also progressives — we never took it as a labor policy. I mean, the shrewd steward parable, where a steward disobeys his master, is really bad business policy.
Oh, and fuck Constantine. He ruined it for everyone.
As my Dad put it, it is supposed to be a Vale of Tears; all that stuff about God pronouncing the Creation “Good” seemed pretty damn irrelevant.
I never read Lewis’ fiction, but his nonfiction makes his stance clear: the universe, not just Man, is Fallen. The big F. So it started off “good” but then came the First Fuckup. Downhill from there.
“And unless they’re dumb-to-the-bone,they’re going to realize, even if only down in their subconscious, that they didn’t have to make that choice. They could have been out. They could have found passion. Or, at the very least, they could have not married at all, and never put themselves in a relationship that requires a physical intimacy they dislike, resent, and soon hate.”
They are limited by how they define being “selfish”. Not getting married is selfish, and insisting on passion is selfish. Thus, they end up in the situation they are in.
“I am sure a lot of it comes from an idea that sex is sinful or somehow wrong and dirty. It’s the idea that “good girls” don’t like sex. They shouldn’t like sex, even if they actually do.”
For some it arises from the idea that punishment, alone and by itself, is a good thing. People don’t have to be guilty of any crime for punishment to be good. Mystics who whip themselves relentlessly clearly believe they need to be punished. Consider, when Jean-Charles de Menezes was shot to death by the London police, Ann Althouse was willing to defend the right of police to continue to execute innocent people. What she craves is a world where people are punished, it doesn’t matter much to her if they’ve done anything wrong. This is an important part of the emotional make up that leads to an authoritarian mind-set.
In Christian theology, the idea is justified by the thought that we have all sinned against God and so we all need to be punished. A lot.
I should add, my dad went to Catholic school and he says all the nuns were sadists. There are some nuns who believe it is more important to punish good kids, who’ve done nothing wrong,, than it is to punish bad kids. The risk with the good kids is that they’ll come to think of themselves as good, which would be prideful. They need to be punished to remind them that they’ve sinned against God and are always and forever deserving of punishment. This mindset was really quite widespread in the Catholic community when my dad was a kid in the 1930s.
Probably nobody is reading this thread anymore but I just have to point to one of my pet peeves. Fertilization does not equal conception. The word conception is the process of becoming pregnant. Different medical experts define the moment of becoming pregnant in different ways. Many people view implantation as the completion of the process of “conception.”
Ironically “Natural Family Planning” methods of BC approved by the Catholic Church probably result in as many fertilized zygotes being discarded as the pill does.
doh!! x-eleven already said that. i’ve been working too much…brain has turned to mush.